The Last War Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 5-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  At the time he remembered thinking he could have pulled the scab off for free. Dumped a crap ton of hydrogen peroxide in it and went about his life. He looked at his mother; she looked at him. His expression was like, what the hell?

  She flashed him a warning look to behave.

  He hated that look.

  So the doctor put a little numbing cream over the infected area, waited the appropriate time, then tore off the scab and squeezed out all that milky-white pus. His mother stepped sideways, wobbled a bit then passed out from watching this.

  Fortunately there was a nurse there to catch her.

  “This should take away the pain and the pressure,” the doctor said, checking first on his mother, then returning to Gunderson. He wore a look of satisfaction on his face. Like he’d saved Gunderson’s life. This guy, Gunderson remembered him being an uppity white doctor. A guy with a freshly shaven face, dark blue eyes and eyebrows he’d penciled in because they were thinning on the ends. There was something artificial about his face that still, to this day, bothered Gunderson. It was that same feeling you got when you were around someone with slimy secrets, or perhaps a dark past that threatened to slowly creep into the light.

  “I appreciate your scab management skills,” Gunderson had said before his mother could come to. “They were spot on.”

  “I’m sure you do,” the doctor brazenly remarked, also realizing Gunderson’s mother was still not conscious enough to witness the exchange.

  His congenial look slipped.

  “I’ll get you a prescription for some pain pills,” he grumbled, not so amazed anymore.

  “Don’t bother. Pain is for sissies.”

  The doctor laughed, but wrote out a prescription anyway, handed it to the nurse who was now helping Gunderson’s mother sit up.

  “What did I miss?” she said, a bit woozy.

  “The big show,” Gunderson quipped.

  Deep down, he didn’t want the pain pills. There was something sharp and warm in the pain, a hot needling that enveloped his foot with sensation. He didn’t tell the doctor this, and he’d never tell his mother this, but after that day, Gunderson acquired a taste for pain.

  It meant he wasn’t normal. That he wasn’t like other kids. He was tougher. More willing to do what others wouldn’t. That’s why he got into so many fights, to just get hit a few times, just to juice himself with that feeling.

  But now here he was, an adult in a world gone to all hell, looking at a scab, thinking about that day the doctor said, “The cure to all your problems is me ripping that thing off.”

  Okay, he didn’t say that, but hadn’t that been the answer?

  Looking away from the long cut on the side of his bicep, he scanned the Spartan room for something to stop the blood that would come when he did what he was about to do.

  He found a clean sock, inspected the fabric. The white tube sock was worn enough to be free of all the loose fibers you find in new socks—all those little bits of fabric he knew not to press into an open cut—and clean enough not to dirty the already infected wound he was about to peel open.

  Eyes back on the scab. He ran his thumb over the ridged surface, found an edge. He worked it a bit, giving it gentle little pulls here and there, and then he got a fingernail under it and slowly got to work.

  The purplish-red discoloration around it was painful to the touch, and there was an unusual heat to it, like a really pissed off rash. He broke the skin with a little rip and pull, and that got the blood flowing. A crimson bead boiled to the surface, then rolled down his arm. He dabbed it with the sock, the white material blotting red.

  Not smart, he told himself.

  No sock in the history of mankind ever disinfected an infected wound. A sock wasn’t a Band-Aid. It wasn’t gauze. Or antibiotics.

  “Dammit,” he mumbled, pressing the sock against his arm as he left his quarters and wandered down the hallway toward the infirmary. There were people in the hallways. Survivors. Five, ten, fifteen of them. Their eyes caught his, but they refused to hold his gaze.

  Even for a second.

  He was the new guy, but he also had tattoos snaking up his neck, brilliant “Day of the Dead” style tattoos trailing down his arms all the way to his knuckles, and a small tattoo of an anvil just under his left eye. His was the unintentional, but unkempt neo-Nazi looking version of yesterday’s enforcers.

  Naturally, everyone who first encountered him treated him with the same caution they’d treat someone like say, Charles Manson, if he entered the proverbial hen house.

  “I’m trying to find the infirmary,” he finally said to one woman who didn’t act afraid of him.

  “You’re headed in the right direction,” she said. “She’s just a few more doors down. Sarah’s her name. Cute little brunette, super sweet. Do you know Rider?”

  “I do,” he said, thinking of the older, fit guy with the spirit of a damn attack bear. “And I remember Sarah. I saw her when I first arrived.”

  “Well, Sarah’s his girlfriend,” she said with a smile, one that held a little extra something. A warning, perhaps.

  “I understand,” he said, cutting through the pretense. He felt his face go flat, but this was to be expected.

  “Well good luck,” she said, looking down at the tube sock Band-Aid.

  He thanked her, continued past an open room with a bunch of kids circled around a board game, then found the door to what looked like a makeshift infirmary. Inside was a stunning brunette. She appeared young enough to be Gunderson’s daughter’s age, but responsible and mature enough to garner the ex-enforcer’s respect.

  “Uh oh,” she said with a smile and kind, green eyes.

  She spoke and he couldn’t help watching her mouth, how her laugh lines seemed to frame the kind of lips his wife was always talking about. Hers were thin lips, but this girl—Sarah—her lips were plump, naturally alluring.

  Rider must be so protective of her, he thought. Anyone who didn’t find this girl attractive was an absolute fool.

  “Yeah,” he said, sort of chicken-winging his upper arm toward her and removing the sock. “I was going to pull it off, squeeze out the infection, but thought maybe I should leave that to a professional.”

  “I’m glad you did,” she said, stepping closer, having a look at it.

  He stood half a foot taller than her. As she examined the upper side of his left arm, he looked down on her, the scent of her permeating through the air. She smelled clean, like fresh skin and just-washed hair. His eyes dipped down to the side of her face, how her long brown hair was tucked behind one ear. He looked at the ridges of the ear, the small mole just below her cheekbone, the way her nose made her look younger and more adorable that her age might warrant.

  For a second, he thought he might be obsessed with her. With the texture of her skin, with her youth, with her implied competence. Is this why men his age liked women her age? The idea of being with her, though—her being almost half his age, him being…who he was—it would never work. He couldn’t do it. She was too close to his daughter’s age.

  He let go of the breath he’d been holding. The tension seemed to melt from his body and he pulled out of this little bubble of two that he’d created for them in his mind. Looking around the room, he saw a bed, an exam table, IV drips, a long shelf of medical supplies and several books on medicine and mental health.

  “You did good here,” he said.

  She glanced up, saw him appraising the room, her supplies, the non-electric equipment she had. Leaning back, he exuded an air of indifference toward her obvious beauty and instead focused only on what she needed to do to knock out the infection.

  Eyes back down on his arm, she said, “It’s definitely infected.” Then she stopped. Like her brain was rolling along at sixty miles an hour, then just drove head first into a four foot concrete wall having never touched the brakes.

  She looked straight up at him and he knew. It took a second to sink in, for his brain to stumble through his own set of gears
. The wavy black snake. The words The Ophidian Horde tattooed below.

  She smiled at him, but now it was not an easy smile. Now it was a cautious smile. Like she was biding her time to let someone know they had a fox in the hen house.

  He wanted to say something to diffuse…whatever this was, but he couldn’t find the words. Tattoo ink was permanent. But the human heart, like the savage hunger, could change directions, sometimes on a dime. Some guys going straight, or finding Jesus, or just wanting to make that change…they could be different if they tried. They could navigate the same straight road for years if they kept at it, and some of them could do it until the end of time.

  He was committed to being a better person, but perhaps one did too many bad things in their life to be considered redeemable.

  But how do you explain this to a group who holds a girl like Indigo in such high regard? The girl carved up his soldier’s body in the elementary school firefight a few months back. She and her crew massacred some pretty decent soldiers. Men he didn’t care about today, men he cared for even less considering the wet work they made of the people in the school. Still, what Indigo did…how was he any different?

  One attacked. One defended.

  He was an attacker.

  Would they see him the same way they’d seen these men who slaughtered so many innocents? Like animals that needed putting down? Probably.

  Most likely.

  The tattoo. It was that damned tattoo. He never wanted to get it, but it was a show of loyalty when all the local gangs were falling. When you go into these types of things, you don’t plan on going out, except by way of a bullet or a life sentence. He’d had his fair share of bullets, but he found a way to stay insulated from the cops.

  Bribes, payoffs, threats.

  “Where exactly did you come from?” Sarah asked him.

  “Your friends found me up by the park. I got jumped by a few guys who didn’t like my look. Or maybe they just wanted my gun. I don’t know. I’ve got that look people either can’t or don’t want to trust, you know? It’s a look most people hate.”

  She smiled, but didn’t give an answer.

  He’d admitted this to her like the weight of this admission was a thousand pounds resting right on his soul. Like he was Atlas and the world he carried on his shoulders was his ever growing mound of problems given to him and created by him and his looks. In that single glance, she saw this. By the tension he sensed bleeding from her body, he knew she understood. But he also knew he was right about her: she was scared.

  Then she said, “Your past only matters if you keep it in play. But here, you can change all that. Be a part of something bigger, something better than you were.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m running from people who can no longer chase me. Maybe I’m running from the past, even though the past has no legs and it isn’t out to get you.”

  “I think I understand,” she said, loosening up by the minute, but not enough to let him know she was dismissing him as a threat. She wasn’t.

  “It’s like you want to relax, but you can’t,” he continued. “You won’t let yourself.”

  “This is going to hurt,” she said, her Hippocratic oath kicking in. She took the edge of the scab, looked under it, then said, “Roll up the front of your shirt, put the wad of it in your mouth, so you can bite down. This is going to hurt.”

  “I’m no stranger to pain, Doc. You just do your thing. I’ll be okay.”

  She gave him the kind of look that said, don’t say I didn’t warn you, but she did.

  “Here we go,” she said, and then she ripped it clean off and pressed a square of gauze into the long, open wound.

  He felt his teeth clench so hard he feared he might crack something, but then the pain endorphins came flooding in and he let go of a tempered smile.

  “You like this?” she asked, looking up at him, her eyes bright but not curious.

  “I learned a long time ago how to understand pain. It’s just a feeling, like anything else. You have a loved one die—like many of us have—it’s a feeling we expect to be the most awful thing ever. And it is. But it doesn’t have to be.”

  “Was it that way for you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Go on,” she said, spritzing the open wound with hydrogen peroxide, then dabbing it with gauze as it bubbled and frothed. The sharp sting of having the scab torn off was euphoric, but the secondary burn of having the wound drenched in hydrogen peroxide was like that second shot of tequila. The way it settled his nerves, he felt something in him slowly unwinding.

  “You want me to describe my process in understanding pain?”

  “I’m curious,” she said, dabbing the cut dry.

  “When my family died, it was like a sunburn on my heart and on my brain,” he said, pacifying her. “It’s like, well there’s this prickle of emotion that starts out strong and stays on the gas. Having your loved ones die definitely works you over. This is where most people try to run from their emotions. This is where they get it all wrong. You have to let yourself get down in that pain, really feel it, you know? If you examine it from a clinical perspective, from a detached point of view, you realize that if you can pull it apart, and circumscribe it, then it holds less sway over you. That’s how I get around the pain. By keeping it front and center.”

  “Tell me that when you catch a bullet,” she says half heartedly.

  “Where do you think I learned this from?” he asked. She smiled, then glanced back up at him and realized he was being serious.

  “Really?”

  “Three slugs in the back. At first it was like getting kicked by a mule. Then the adrenaline wore off and the exit wounds started to burn. Like they were on fire. The recovery was long and brutal, and it made me bitter, but strong. I’d stopped taking my antibiotics at the time. I didn’t think I needed them, and I hated how irritable they made me feel, but then infection set it and they had to do what you’re doing now. They had to go after the infection both internally and externally.”

  “That sounds horrible,” she said.

  “The second round of antibiotics drained me, made me even more irritable. This time I didn’t have enough energy to actually vent properly, so I just sat there day after day, incapacitated, my skin lit with this nasty, nasty fire. And that’s when I learned the value of meditation and moving into a problem as opposed to away from it.”

  “That’s very brave,” she said.

  “I wasn’t brave,” he said with laughter in his voice. “Basically I had no choice.”

  “Well I don’t know if I could do it.”

  “In this world, you can’t help doing anything but that. Everything about our lives has now changed. Our friends are dead, our families gone, all measure of purpose and pleasure ripped free of us leaving this huge gaping hole in our lives where we have to reinvent family, friends, happiness, safety and pleasure. We’re doing that because we cannot lay down and die, we flat out refuse to.”

  She listened intently, then appeared to give it some thought as she took out a large bandage, put some antibiotic on the treated strip and affixed it to his arm.

  “This will bleed through pretty quickly,” she said, unwinding some gauze. Slowly, methodically, she wrapped his arm, then finished the bandage and said, “See me if it gets too wet.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  “Well I’m not a real doctor, and I don’t know if I did the right thing or not, but we’ve got a limited supply of solutions here. So no blood test, no x-rays or CT scans, no wound cultures to test the infection. Here at the City College of San Francisco, we just rip it off, hose it down and bandage it up. If it hurts, throw a little dirt on it.”

  She said this then she laughed. They both did. It was a lighthearted moment he needed, followed by an unwelcome return to seriousness.

  “So you’ve got some experience in getting shot,” she said, cautiously, “but you don’t look like a cop and you don’t carry yourself like ex-military—”

&nb
sp; “I was an enforcer for one of the SoMo gangs. Not a pretty life. Lots of regrets, including the total loss of my family and friends. What my former life didn’t take from me, this war on mankind did.”

  “Were you good at it? Your job in the gangs?” she asked, clearly uncomfortable with the conversation, but driven by curiosity and a false sense of safety. She tried not to look afraid, but she was. He could smell it on her. The fear was practically wafting off her skin.

  She didn’t smell so clean anymore.

  “Well, like you say, the past is in our rear view mirror and we’ve got a new life ahead of us, one that demands we shed our old ways. Our old skin. It’s time we build something new, something lasting this time.”

  “If I don’t see you later today,” she finally said, cleaning up, “then stop by in the morning and we’ll change the bandage.”

  “Sure thing,” he said. At the door, before leaving, he turned and said, “I’m not used to people being good to me, and truth be told, I probably don’t deserve it, but—for what it’s worth—I will do everything in my power to be a good part of this community because you were kind enough to take me in and I refuse to violate that trust.”

  “I appreciate you saying so,” she said, but by the look in her eyes, she was clearly pacifying him.

  So yeah...

  He was sure she was going to say something.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Further up the hallway, in the residential wing of the school not too far from where Sarah was taking care of Gunderson, many of the adult members of the community were deep into discussions surrounding the attacks on the school.

  When Sarah finally finished up with Gunderson, when she was certain he’d had enough time to get back to his room, she went to find Rider, all the energy crackling in the ends of her fingertips and down her spine. She could hardly breathe she was so rattled.

  She tracked Rider down in the newly christened “War Room,” a place where a lot of people regularly gathered to discuss the future of the college.