Evelyn Ford thought Quincy was joking, but he had actually carved three large words into the cave wall: ’Quincy was here,’ and had even used charcoal to darken them.
"You’re just as bad as those classless tourists who deface attractions."
Quincy retorted, "How is this the same? This isn’t a tourist attraction."
"It’s been almost half a month. How come there’s still no sign of life from the others?"
"Everyone in a coma will wake up on their own. There’s no use in us worrying. Today when I went to the bathroom, I heard the wind howling outside the cave and it creeped me out. It was like a malevolent spirit from a horror movie was on the prowl. So scary."
"With the weather so harsh now, I’m afraid many animals and plants are going to go extinct."
"I wonder where we even are. I have a feeling we’re in Oakhaven."
"Who cares where we are? We’re safe hiding in here. I wonder how the other refugees are doing."
...
Evelyn Ford and Ronan Kendrick planned to move their wooden cabin into the cave. The cabin was small. If they didn’t take it apart, four people could carry it, one at each corner. A heated kang bed had been left in each of the smaller caves. Although the main cave could shield them from wind and rain, it couldn’t block out the cold fronts and freezing temperatures.
Miles Vaughn and Ethan Dawson went out with Ronan Kendrick every three days to chop wood. With so many people, they needed a lot of wood for the fires.
Evelyn Ford carried a few logs to the vegetable patch. Once the frost on the logs melted, she took out some rotten wood she had previously collected on the road from her space. She then transplanted the mycelium from the rotten wood onto the new logs.
Mushrooms could be cultivated. Evelyn still had plenty of the winter mushrooms she had picked at the farm left in her space. At the time, she had also dug up a lot of the soil, which still contained mycelium. As long as it was kept in a damp place, it could still grow more winter mushrooms.
If the conditions weren’t right, you had to create them. Besides, plants and animals were growing rapidly now. Evelyn had a hunch that the mushrooms she was cultivating would definitely grow.
Besides cultivating mushrooms, Evelyn also tilled a patch of land and sowed some tomato and eggplant seeds.
In the middle of the night, while she and Ronan Kendrick were busy working in the space, a sound suddenly came from outside.
’Could someone else be waking up?’
Ronan Kendrick stayed in the space while Evelyn Ford took off her protective suit and hurried out of the lab.
"What’s wrong?"
Opening the door to her cave, Evelyn saw Officer Graham from the next cave had also come out.
"That was Ethan Dawson’s voice. Someone must be waking up."
Evelyn Ford and Officer Graham went over to check. It turned out that Christina Thorne and Chet Lawrence were showing signs of waking. Neither of them vomited blood; they just twitched a finger and then began to convulse. Ethan Dawson and the others didn’t know what to do and only felt relieved to see Evelyn arrive, as if they finally had someone who knew what to do.
"Hold them down first. We need to prevent them from moving violently and pulling a muscle."
Just as Evelyn was about to check on them, Chet Lawrence suddenly vomited blood. Quincy, with his quick reflexes, caught it in a wooden bucket, preventing it from spraying onto Evelyn.
"Chet Lawrence looks like he’s in a lot of pain."
"I think I saw Wyatt Vaughn’s and Claudia Schultz’s fingers twitch too," Officer Graham said suddenly.
"What?" Hearing this, Quincy could no longer remain calm.
"They really moved. Evelyn, I think they might all be waking up."
Three months had passed since the first wave of cold air arrived. They had been in a coma for three months.
Just as Officer Graham had said, over the next few hours, the others began to wake up one by one.
"Don’t panic. It’s normal to be unable to see or speak when you first wake up. Your cases are more severe, so it might take you ten days to half a month to recover."
The last ones to wake up not only had blood blisters in their throats, but also in their nasal cavities and on their mouths. It looked like a case of chickenpox, which was quite frightening.
But just waking up was a blessing. After some rest and some anti-inflammatory medicine, the blood blisters would naturally go away.
Because everyone else had woken up, Evelyn Ford consulted with Taylor Vance and decided to give everyone a three-day break.
A week later, Wyatt Vaughn, Nathan Xavier, and Drako were the first to regain their sight and ability to speak. They were shocked to see the vegetables and pumpkins everyone had planted.
"We were actually in a coma for that long."
"Yeah. If you hadn’t woken up soon, we really wouldn’t have known what to do." Quincy then told them everything that had happened over the past three months.
"So, we can’t go outside anymore?"
"We can, but you have to be in excellent shape and be extremely resistant to the cold. If we didn’t go out, how would we get water to drink or wood to burn?"
Nathan Xavier and Drako both felt a little guilty. "We’ve troubled everyone during this time. From now on, leave the wood chopping to us."
They knew they had followed the right person. Not only had she predicted the arrival of the cold air and found a cave to hide in, but they also hadn’t been abandoned during their three-month coma.
"Evelyn will assign the tasks. Everyone has a job. Even our Zoe has to raise chickens and grow vegetables."
Besides, they had just woken up. Their limbs were still stiff, and they couldn’t possibly do any work.
The others were in even worse shape and couldn’t even get out of bed. Ian Yates and Raymond Shepherd were younger and recovered relatively quickly, but the two young women, Penelope Parker and Claire Moss, were in more serious condition.
Evelyn also discovered something else: after waking up, all the women not only vomited blood, but their periods also came back with a vengeance. They had been in a coma for three months, and the amount of bleeding this time was equivalent to three months’ worth combined.
Evelyn was also a woman; she understood this kind of pain, so she prepared an extra nourishing herbal soup for them.
"If there’s a next life, I’m never being a woman again," Wyatt Vaughn wailed, lying on the kang bed and clutching her stomach.
"Evelyn, you guys have worked so hard during this time. I heard from Quincy that you and Ronan Kendrick woke up first, set up this large communal sleeping platform for everyone, and kept the kang beds heated every day so we didn’t all freeze to death."
"As long as you’ve woken up, that’s what matters."
"But waking up is so painful too! Right now, it feels like a thousand needles are stabbing my stomach. Evelyn, is there any way to induce menopause? I really don’t want to be a woman anymore. It’s too painful. Every time I move, it’s like I have diarrhea; I can’t control it at all."
"Leuprorelin and gestrinone can do that, but I don’t have any of the finished medicine on hand. I do have some medicinal herbs, though. I can see if I can formulate something."
"Then just forget it. Don’t waste the medicinal herbs."
Wyatt Vaughn wiped the sweat from her forehead. "I’ll just endure it, and it’ll pass. I had Quincy get me a bottle of hot water to press against my abdomen, which helps ease the pain a bit."
Evelyn returned to her cabin and searched through her space. She looked through all her pharmaceuticals but couldn’t find either of those two drugs. It seemed she would have to formulate it herself.
The next day, Evelyn emerged with dark circles under her eyes. Wendy came running over, holding two eggs in her hands.
"Miss Ford, the hen laid eggs! Two of them! Look, they’re still warm."
Evelyn touched them. They really were warm.
"Zoe said the eggs were coming, but I didn’t believe her. She spent all day staring at the chicken’s butt, and she actually called it."
Zoe stood to the side, giggling foolishly. "Laid eggs."