DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 9, SECTION 8

It took us three full days to reach the cliff dwellings. With the cattle and twenty-eight new refugees, some of them elderly, the going had been painfully slow.

But despite the refugees' grief and hardship, there was a moment of awe when they removed their blindfolds and saw, for the first time, the beautiful, ancient city built beneath the cliffs. Some of the buildings were four stories high, and each room had a window overlooking the ravine below. Narrow passages and tunnels all lead to a small central square, where we kept a fire burning almost constantly. At first arrival, there was always an aura of sadness for the people who had built this cliffside palace long ago and who were now gone, but also a deep, unspoken gratitude; without the dwellings, we would have had nowhere else to hide.

Some of the walls had crumbled over time, but most of the stone rooms were still intact. Once Chris and I found enough habitable spaces for all of the new arrivals, and my dad had volunteered to butcher a steer in time for dinner that night, I slipped away into the my own small room, drew the heavy blanket I'd hung cross the narrow door, and collapsed on the donated sleeping bag that I'd laid out on the stone floor.

I was exhausted. I'd been so busy on the trail between keeping the cattle herded in the right direction and finding enough spring water that I'd barely had a moment to think about Shawn's sudden presence, or his transformation. Let alone the fact that he was, apparently, going to be living here at the dwellings with us as part of the Underground.

Without a word, he'd taken a tiny room of his own at the far end of the complex. He seemed to understand that I hadn't forgiven him for everything that he'd done. I was pretty sure he hadn't forgiven me for cheating on him, either, and didn't expect him to. Still, we had a lot to talk about. I had no idea why he'd left the Home Guard, or what had caused his change of heart. And there was a ton that he still didn't know about me. Most pressingly, he still didn't know that despite my appearances, I had full-blown TGV, and that I'd almost certainly contracted it from Bryce Tripp before he'd died. 

Honestly, I wasn't sure whether I was okay with Shawn being here at all. I'd thought I was never going to see him again. I didn't even really think of us as being married any more, and I wasn't sure that he did either. And yet when I'd set eyes on him for the first time that night on the trail, I'd seen some part of the old Shawn that I'd forgotten had even existed.

I lay on my sleeping bag. I closed my eyes and drifted off.

I actually managed to get a few hours of much-needed sleep through the afternoon and into the late evening. When I woke up, I lit a fire in the small fire pit beside the window and boiled some water in one of the tin camp pots that Ed had donated. I hadn't washed myself in days. Even my hair was crusted with mud after driving the cattle for so long. Beyond even my general filthiness, though, I felt an inexplicable need to bathe. I had one bar of soap that I'd been rationing. Now, I dropped it in the warm water and lathered my hands. I took off my filthy clothes and tossed them into the corner, planning to wash them later in the stream. As I rinsed the warm water over my bare body and scrubbed my tired limbs, I could smell dinner roasting over the fire. Outside the window, the evening's first stars were beginning to appear.

A knock came at my doorway.

"Ashley?"

It was Shawn.

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