Maggie turned. “Thank goodness, no. When we ran, Brenda cut herself on some old tin, and I’m afraid it’s become infected and she’s caught herself a bit of a fever. We’ve cleaned it as much as we could, but we don’t have any bandages or medicine. I don’t suppose you happen to have anything that can help her?”

After a moment, he took in a deep breath and grabbed our first aid kit. “I’ll take a look.”

“Oh, thank you,” Maggie said, clasping her hands together.

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously at him, but he didn’t make eye contact. He propped his rifle on his seat, unsnapped his holster, swung open the door, and stepped out with his cane in one hand and the kit in the other.

I put the Humvee in Park, grabbed my rifle and stepped out. I only took a few steps and propped my rifle on the hood so that I could get behind the wheel quickly while also keeping a clear view of Clutch and the refugees. I threw a quick glance at Jase to see he had the .30 cal leveled on the refugees.

As Maggie hobbled next to Clutch, she commented, “You don’t get around much better than I do.”

I smirked when Clutch grunted in response. He didn’t like his faults being pointed out. I could only imagine how much it annoyed him to be compared to a little old lady.

As Clutch approached the injured woman on the ground, he nodded toward the man near her who had the young girl pressed tight against his leg. “I need you to take a step back.”

The man didn’t move. “She’s my wife.”

“It’s all right, Don,” Maggie said. “He’s here to help Brenda. Let him help.”

Keeping a watchful eye on Clutch, Don took a tentative step back, holding who I assumed to be his daughter against him. Clutch went down on his knees before the woman. “I need to take a look. I’m going to have to lift your shirt.”

The woman—Brenda—was pale and sweaty. She was clearly in pain, every movement stiff. With a small nod, she let her hand fall to the side, giving Clutch access. Her husband stood tensely to the side, his eyes darting from Clutch to Maggie and back to Clutch.

Clutch gingerly lifted her stained shirt and then quickly dropped it, covering his nose. He winced at me before turning back to the woman.

He pulled out a small syringe from the first aid kit. “This will help with the pain,” he said just before injecting it into her thigh. After a moment, her features relaxed and she lay there limply. She looked almost peaceful.

He closed up the kit and pushed himself to his feet, using his cane for support, and faced Don. “I gave her some morphine for the pain.”

“Thank you,” Don replied.

As Clutch stepped away from the woman, Don’s eyes widened. He shoved his girl behind him and he grabbed Clutch’s arm. “What are you doing? You have to help her! She needs antibiotics!”

Clutch looked down at the hand on his arm and then pulled away. “There’s nothing I can do for your wife. And back the fuck off.”

The man glared for a moment before lowering his head. “But Brenda…she needs help.”

“I can’t help her,” Clutch said more softly this time. “It’s too late. She has gangrene, and it’s too far advanced for anything to help. The morphine will ease her pain for a bit, but there’s nothing else I can do. Any supplies we use would be wasted.”

“Wha-what?” Don asked, seemingly unable to process Clutch’s words.

Clutch said it more bluntly than I would’ve, but he’d never been one for beating around the bush. He gave me a hooded, tight look as he set the first aid kit back in the Humvee.

The man’s bottom lip quivered. The girl hugging him looked up and whimpered. “What’s he saying, Daddy?”

“There must be something that you can do,” Maggie said, wringing her hands. “It was only a cut.”

“Wait!” The man called out. “Maggie’s right. There’s got to be something you can do. You can’t leave her like this!”

His daughter started to cry. Big tears rolled down her cheeks as she clung to his leg.

Clutch grabbed his rifle and shook his head. “There isn’t.” He turned away. “I’m sorry.”

The second Humvee pulled up from the other side, and Griz jumped out.

“They’re with us,” I told Maggie, though it should’ve been obvious.

“You can’t leave us like this. You’ve got to help my wife, damn it!” Don cried out.

Clutch ignored Don’s pleas and curses, instead focusing on Maggie. “Tell me about what happened at the Dells.”

She frowned at the change in subject, watched Don and Brenda for another moment, and finally nodded and inhaled deeply. “I don’t understand where they’re coming from, but there’s so many of them, and they seem to be coming from everywhere. We were so well hidden, we were so far from any town, but they still found us. We lost so many.” Her gaze fell and she shook her head slowly from side to side. “Too many.”

Griz came walking over, holding his rifle.

Maggie lifted her head, looked at Griz funny, and then broke out into a wide smile. “My, I haven’t seen a black man in months, and such a fine-looking young man you are.”

Griz raised a brow in amusement.

Clutch spoke first. “How far behind you are the herds, Maggie?”

“Oh,” she stammered and fidgeted. “They’re not far. Not far at all.”

“Exactly how far is that?”

Maggie didn’t answer.

Griz motioned to Clutch. They walked around to my side of the Humvee.

“We don’t have time for this,” Griz said. “Did you find any diesel?”

Clutch shook his head. “Nothing we could get to. You?”

Griz scowled. “It’s going to get hard fast without any power on the boat.”

“You heard the lady,” Clutch said. “We can’t keep looking. The herds are nearly here.”

“I know,” Griz said. “We need to be below decks and silent by the time they show up. It’s getting risky staying out here.”

Clutch frowned. “What do we do about these folks? We have the room, but we don’t have the food. Not since the livestock was destroyed. We can’t leave them here. They’d get slaughtered.”

Griz pointed to the west. “There’s a farm a few miles straight west of here. We found a black SUV in the driveway that runs. You can’t miss it. I can take one of them to go get it. That’ll help them get some distance between them and the herds.”

“Until they run out of gas,” Clutch said. “If we don’t take them in, they’re zed bait.”

Griz gave him a knowing look. “They could distract the herds from us.”

My heart pounded. Even though my brain was telling me the same thing, my gut was screaming at me at how wrong this felt.

Clutch gave me a look and his features softened. “We take them with us. It’s only six—well, five—extra mouths to feed.”

Griz looked relieved but then frowned as he looked at the injured woman. “She bit?”

Clutch gave a slow shake of his head. “Gangrene.”

Griz grimaced. “We came across a vet clinic this morning. We have the supplies on board to give her peace. It’s the only thing we can offer her.”

“I’m not sure her husband and daughter would agree to that,” I chimed in. Without modern medicine, people often died horrible, painful deaths from infections. Euthanasia was one of the few things we could offer the doomed, and vet clinics offered plenty of the drug guaranteed to bring painless death.

“Then we give them the choice. They can either stay here with her or come with us,” Griz said. “Gangrene isn’t contagious, but we can’t risk bringing any new sources of infection onto the Aurora in case she’s got more than a case of gangrene. Not with how many are just recovering now.”

Clutch stiffened and snapped around as Don hurried toward the Humvee.

“Stand back,” he ordered Don.

Don kept walking toward us. “I heard what you said. You can’t leave Brenda behind. You don’t know her. She’s strong. She’ll recover.”

“She has gangrene,” Clutch said simply, as though that answered everything.

“She may also have contracted a secondary infection that could potentially spread. We can’t risk it,” Griz added. “Now, please step back.”