DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 8, SECTION 3

By now I'd gotten used to living with my unusual case of TGV. Months had passed at stage three, and I still wasn't showing any of the symptoms associated even with stage two. I seemed to be firmly entrenched in a state that resembled nothing but stage one. I had occasional spikes of energy, usually related to adrenaline rushes, it seemed, and I was much less shy and cautious than I used to be in my old life. When waves of desire overtook me, often at really inappropriate times, I was ready for them. I'd learned to place my thoughts on something other than physical desire until the wave passed.

Up the trail, Chris threw his arms up in frustration.

"Ashley! Come. The. Hell. On!"

"Chris," I replied, more softly. "Shut. The. Hell. Up! Seriously, keep it down. Shhhh."

He shook his head and kicked his horse with his heels. Chris was wearing a novelty fur cowboy hat that he'd found left over behind a game booth at the fair grounds. His lab coat, which he insisted on constantly wearing, was much less white than it used to be. But I had to admit that it provided better camouflage in the snow than the blue parka I'd scrounged from one of the donation boxes that Ed had collected for us.

We must have made at least ten supply runs like this by now. Ed had kept us mostly stocked up with heavy coats and blankets. The dwellings had been designed to conceal cooking fires, and a lot of the time we had nothing better to do than gather firewood, so we'd been able to keep warm enough, even on the coldest nights. There were twenty-six of us now, and though we still had plenty of rooms to spare in the extensive cliff-dwelling complex, we had to make the food last. We never quite knew what Ed would have waiting for us when we arrived for supplies. Sometimes he'd have bags of dried goods like oats or rice, which was ideal because it went a long way and we had plenty of water from the spring to cook it in. Other times he'd have bins of jerky and nuts from what looked like a Wal-Mart raid. Every once in while, though, he'd only be able to find little more than boxes of ramen, and we'd really have to ration meals. If we were lucky, though, sometimes he got us coffee. Once he even got us a bottle of decent whiskey, which almost made me cry out of sheer joy.

We still had enough antibiotics to go around, for now. Though of course no one could be "cured", the good news was that everyone's TGV was keeping stable. But we hadn't gotten any more antibiotics since our raid on the pharmacy in the fall, and we didn't have enough to last the whole winter. Lately, Chris and I had been pretty preoccupied trying to devise a plan for getting back into the pharmacy somehow. But, so far, we hadn't come up with anything.

I gave Kaypay a couple of brusque heel-taps and made her trot to catch up with Chris and the three mares he was trailing. If there was anything that was sure to get my mind off of rolling around in the snow with some hot heroic stranger, it was Ed's barbequed steak and a fresh pot of coffee. Without fail, Ed had made us breakfast every time we stopped in for supplies. The last two days on the trail I'd been living on cold instant oats, but I knew that in less than an hour I'd be eating a freshly-cooked breakfast with my feet kicked up by a warm fire.

I sensed something was wrong, though, even before Ed's house came fully into view. . .

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