“And I think you should leave me the fuck alone,” I rasped out, then bit my chapped lips. “Sorry. It’s just—“
“All too much right now?” he guessed.
I nodded. “Yeah.” The scratching in my throat got worse. Tea was likely a good idea, even if it tasted like tepid water. “Or not.”
Nate allowed himself a small smile as he let go of my hand. “Wanna try sitting up? Not that I mind changing the sheets, but it’s so much easier if I don’t have to.”
I was too tired to feel embarrassed, and after a moment’s hesitation told him to go ahead. Any mortification I might have felt at needing help to drag myself up into a somewhat more upright position was wiped straight from my mind when pain exploded through my body. This time my leg was worst, but my lungs also hurt, and I generally felt tender—or rather, tenderized. I was still wincing as Nate handed me a steaming cup. I drank a few sips, wondering what was in that shit that it made my tongue and lips tingle. When I was done, Nate took the cup back, cursing as he almost dropped it back onto the nightstand.
“Shit, that’s hot.” He gave me a weird look. “Wasn’t that too hot to drink?”
I held his gaze for a moment, then stared at the cup. Moving slowly, I dipped my left index finger into the liquid. Nothing. Well, it felt wet, but not like something that made my skin darken immediately. Looking from my finger back to him, I couldn’t help but snort. “Huh.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” he said, frowning. “Exactly how do you feel right now?”
“Like death warmed over,” I replied, not quite joking. “Please tell me I’m not decomposing already.”
He snorted. “Not as far as I know. But I’ve already suspected that the virus screwed up your pain sensation.”
“How? Did you suspect that, I mean.”
“When I accidentally banged your head against a door and you barely gave a grunt?” When I narrowed my eyes at him, he gifted me with a self-deprecating smile, although it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It wasn’t that much of a bang. More of a slight bump rather than a full-on slam.”
“When did that happen?”
“Last time I changed rooms.” At my bewildered look, he explained. “I don’t know how much you remember…”
“More than enough.” I groaned.
“Anyway. This is the fifth room. We have about twenty more for spares, if you don’t like this one, but there’s not much chance for improvement.”
“It’s okay.” That was not the part I was worried about. Fumbling for the blanket, I tried to pull it away, but my fingers were too weak to get a good grip on it. Holding the cup had all but exhausted me. Nate laid his hand over mine, stilling my motion. At my glare, he squeezed my fingers again.
“Give it a few more days,” he advised.
“Off. Now,” I commanded. He hesitated but then relented, pushing the blankets away. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but there was a thick bandage covering my leg from my hip down to my knee. The fact that there was still a complete left leg was a good sign, though. I started fumbling with the bandage, and after a few moments of watching me fail, Nate brushed my hand away and gently removed the tape that held the gauze in place. What lay underneath wasn’t pretty, but looked nothing like it had… about a week ago. There was scar tissue—a lot of it—but it was all healed over, if still that angry red of recent wounds. No scabs, certainly no pus, and not even any swelling left. It looked more like a month rather than a few days had passed since the factory.
“Just how long was I out?” I asked, gingerly running a fingertip along the very middle of the main scar. It was easily as thick across as my thumb.
“Today is the seventh day that we’ve been here,” Nate replied. At my doubtful look, he shrugged. “Guess we’re even now. You patched me up once, now I got to repay the favor. Sorry that it’s not exactly a dainty scar but I did the best I could with what I had to work with. As great as the glue is for keeping you from bleeding to death, it’s not gentle to the surrounding tissue.” He must have realized that he was stalling, and finally skipped to the important part. “The first day you were comatose, your injuries were still getting worse. There was no wound healing, and I must have drained about ten ounces of pus. I stopped checking on it when you stopped breathing for minutes at a time, figuring that if, deep down, you could still feel pain, I should just leave you be in those last moments. On the second day I decided to carry you on to the next room because…” He paused, but there was no need to sugar-coat anything. “Your intestines were still working so I figured you weren’t quite done dying yet. When I cleaned you up, I also changed the bandage. The wound had started to heal. And when hours later you were still not dead, I decided to bite the bullet and cut the wound open to clean it and stitch you back together. Two days later, the last of the scabs flaked off. You should keep it well-moisturized for the next couple of months so that the scar tissue remains elastic, but that’s about it.” He snorted as something else occurred to him. “Two of the bullets were still in there, too. I removed them. You’re welcome.”
“Gee, thanks,” I murmured, too bewildered by his explanation to react otherwise. “So what does that make me? Half a zombie?” The hesitation in his answer was enough to make me deflate. “Shit.”
“It’s not quite that bad,” Nate remarked, grinning at the face I made. “You heal, and as far as we know, they don’t. Actually, I’d even go as far as saying you heal just as well as I do. But your pain sensitivity is much lower than mine.”
I let my next breath escape me slowly, trying to make sense of all this. “I still feel like shit. And that’s definitely not just discomfort from not moving for a few days.”
His ambivalent shrug could have meant anything. “I still feel exhaustion even if I don’t feel sharp muscle pain from overexertion. Bruises and sprained joints, too. Maybe the guys at the Silo have a better explanation. Brandon Stone likely does. Question is, how much do you need to know? I’ve always been quite content with accepting the benefits and ignoring the rest. You just have to get used to paying a little more attention to what you do to your body.”
Massive neural damage sounded a lot better than not being entirely alive anymore. “I think I’ll manage.”
“Sure you will. Tomorrow things will look a little better than today.”
That I doubted. As it was, I felt dead inside, and I doubted that would change any time soon. Glancing away from him, my gaze fell on the windows again.
“Can you draw the blinds? All that light is making my eyes hurt.”
Rather than get up and do so, Nate frowned, looking from me to the window and back. “The light… is too bright for you,” he said, as if that needed confirmation.
“Do you really need an extensive explanation of how sunlight can affect the photoreceptors in your eyes?” I snarked back.
He flashed me another quick grin, clearly relieved at me being able to offer barbs like that once more, but didn’t stop acting weird.
“Bree, I hate to break this to you, but the sun’s not shining.”
“So it’s a little overcast,” I murmured. “Whatever. It’s bright.”
Another pause followed, and before he answered he checked his watch. “It’s three in the morning. That’s not the sun shining out there. And it’s not even a particularly bright night. We’re ten days past the full moon.”
Ah. That changed things.
“Shit,” was all I was able to offer in response to that. “Guess that explains why the fuckers turned nocturnal.”
“Exactly how well do you see?” Nate asked, reaching for the book that lay discarded on the floor by the chair. The book that he’d been reading to me from, I vaguely remembered.
Casting around, I tried to come up with a good answer. “Good, I guess? I can see colors but they are dull and muted.”
He held out the book to me. “Read that line.”
I squinted, but mostly because I had trouble focusing in general. “‘Theirs not to rea
son why, theirs but to do and die,’” I read. “I could have remembered that from yesterday,” I reminded him.
Nate glanced at the book but closed it after a second. “Might come in handy. Don’t worry about it now.” He finally got up to pull the flimsy blinds down. It didn’t get much darker, which unnerved me quite some. But he was right. That was the least of my worries right now.
Nate returned to his perch on the chair. “Why don’t you sleep a bit? We have all the time in the world to explore just how much of a freak you’ve turned into tomorrow.”
I huffed, but he was right. And while I wasn’t exactly physically tired enough to sleep, my head was hurting enough that letting my lids droop closed was a small blessing. And it wasn’t like I had a world of things to think about.
I was just about to doze off when I heard the chair creak as Nate got up again. When I glanced up, I found him looking down at me, watching me with an unreadable look on my face. “Mind if I crawl under the blankets with you? Promise, I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
That teasing statement hurt rather than made me smile, as I figured he’d intended. “If you have to,” I replied, my voice cracking again. “You’re normally not that much of a cuddler.”
How that hit rather than glanced off him I had no idea, but we were both clearly not in a good place right now. He hesitated but then crawled onto the bed, yet kept the thick blanket between us. I suddenly couldn’t stand that weird look in his eyes so I rolled over, moving very gingerly. Yet as soon as my back was turned to him, he slung his arm over my middle—high up, over my ribs—and scooted close, his face ending up at my neck. I felt myself relax even before I could make myself. His arm tightened around me, but he didn’t say anything. It was just as well. Some things didn’t need to be explained. It was enough that they just were.
Chapter 4
As quick as my physical decline had been, getting back on my feet, even unsteadily, took a lot longer. It probably would have helped if I’d had any incentive to ingest food, but my body didn’t seem to think it needed any. I gingerly ate a few morsels Nate tried to feed to me, but after chewing on the same piece of jerky for a full five minutes without feeling inclined to swallow, I gave up. Nate, proving that just because I’d almost bit the dust didn’t change anything, offered to go out and find some delicious brains for me to chomp down on. He got his stupid book thrown after him for that. Weak I might still have been, but not weak enough not to express my ire in a physical manner. The important fact was that I was getting better, even if it took me a few more days until I could get up on my own and chance staggering toward the bathroom. That was one creature comfort I was intent on getting the most of as long as we were staying here.
The sunlight—when it eventually did blaze through the gaps in the blinds—proved to be a problem, though. I woke up as soon as the first rays tickled the ceiling, consequently hiding under the blankets until Nate had finished boarding up the windows except for a small gap on the opposite end from the bed. The industrial strength flashlight wasn’t much more bearable. It got a little better by the time I was able to start moving around on my own, but the hours between dusk and dawn were definitely easier on my eyes than the other half of the day.
It was in the early hours of day five, after my first successful solo trip to the bathroom, that I finally asked the question that had been plaguing me since I’d woken up the first time but had been too chickenshit to ask. “What did you do with… it?”
The pain in Nate’s eyes let me know that no explanation was required. “I burned everything,” he replied, his voice low. “Also your clothes, the towels. I buried the ashes by the tree in the backyard.”
I didn’t ask for details. I didn’t need to know.
But what I did need to do was to get out there and see it for myself, even though I rationally knew that there was nothing to see. I tried quenching that impulse, but by late afternoon I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Nate watched me mutely as I tried to pull on a fresh pair of pants, and for once didn’t lift a finger to help. It was only when I grabbed for the gun on the nightstand that he spoke up.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
Raising my head, I stared at him, wheezing from the effort of getting dressed. “Visiting the grave of my child.”
He didn’t protest, but plucked the Glock right out of my hand as soon as I’d lifted it, my fingers barely managing to retain the grip on it. “Gimme that,” he murmured as he slung his other arm across the small of my back. “Patching you up once was enough for this month. The last thing I need now is for you to accidentally shoot yourself in the foot.”
“If you don’t shut up I will not-accidentally shoot you in the face,” I grumbled, but was quite happy to lean into him.
It took us a small eternity to leave the room and get down the stairs to the ground floor. Nate had fetched me the darkest pair of sunglasses that I’d collected along the way, but even they didn’t keep my eyes from streaming tears nonstop down my cheeks. The sun was beating down on us hard enough to make me break out in sweat all over within seconds, but at least it didn’t instantly scorch my skin. Walking actually helped, but I still felt weak as a child as we rounded the corner of the building and moved on to the back. At least the added exhaustion helped push back the dread rising inside of me with every subsequent shuffled step.
The tree Nate had mentioned turned out to be a surprisingly large oak, its branches almost reaching to the ground. There was a patch of turned earth to the left of it, with stones stacked above in a small cairn. Seeing it, I felt my heart seize up, my throat tighten. I knew that it was stupid to get this sentimental over what was barely more than the bunch of cells, but I couldn’t change it. It was potential wasted, an impossible chance gone. It was everything I had never dreamed about, now lost. Buried there lay the child I’d never have. Decades worth of knowledge and logic did nothing to dull the pain.
As driven as I’d been to see it, now that I was here, hovering at the edge of the building, I was hesitant to come any closer. My survival instinct came alive, screaming at me to scan the area, set up a perimeter, make sure that nothing was lurking in a ditch to come right at us should we get too close—but those thoughts barely skimmed across my mind. I just couldn’t find it in me to care. Part of that certainly came from my trust in Nate—he would never let me walk into the open jaws of danger, I knew that. But I couldn’t have said for sure that had a bunch of zombies come for me right now I would have tried to defend myself. I felt dead inside, barely more than a lifeless husk. It was as if the virus hadn’t just leached my physical strength from my bones, but also my very soul.
Nate’s hand, soft on my upper arm, finally got me to tear my gaze away from that heap of stones to look up at him. “We can come back tomorrow,” he suggested, his voice hoarse with emotion. “You don’t have to do this today.”
But that was where he was wrong. I had to. I knew that if I waited, I wouldn’t find the courage to return tomorrow, or any other day after that. It was now or never. So rather than reply, I forced my limbs to move and carry me across the patch of heat-scorched grass and over to the shade the oak tree threw.
It was a relief to be out of the sunshine that had been piercing my eyes even through the heavily tinted glasses, but that was about it. I couldn’t say what I had expected; how standing mere feet away from the grave would change anything. I’d kind of anticipated tears, or at least some internal tormented wailing, but the reality was much more bleak: nothing.
A good five minutes passed in which Nate and I just stood there, silent, side by side. I really didn’t feel like saying anything, and was grateful that the same seemed to be true for him. But I also didn’t find it in me to just turn around and leave. On some level I knew that this was my one chance. My one chance to say goodbye. My one chance to acknowledge what had happened—and then find the drive to move on.
What I did instead was just stare, my mind blank, my will to do anything all but nonexist
ent.
That was, until Nate opened his mouth and shoved me right out of my dull state of indifference.
“Marry me?”
For a second, I considered the possibility that my fever had surged once more and I was having auditory hallucinations. But when I turned my head and looked at him, I saw him watch me with tense anticipation—not quite dread—that made it obvious that he was waiting for my reaction.
A million answers zoomed through my head, but what I finally settled on saying was, “You seriously have the worst timing ever.” What a tale to tell the children that we would never have.
A hint of a frown made it onto his features, but he reined his ire in before it could set his eyes ablaze. “I watched you die. I spent days filled with regret of all the things I never said, never did, never would get a chance to say or do. But you didn’t die. Today is the first day where you seem moderately lucid—“
He cut off at the sudden shake of my head.
“You could have waited, you know?” I suggested. “For when we’re not standing over…”
Now it was my turn to not want to finish the damn sentence, but he obviously got what I meant. Only a complete and utter idiot wouldn’t. And while Nate was lacking a certain number of finer qualities, sense wasn’t one of them. Rather than turn this into one of our endless bickering bouts, he wrapped his hand around my shoulder and pressed me against him, forcing my body to turn around so that all I could see was the motel at his back. I didn’t raise my arms to wrap myself around him, but feeling his body so close was comfort in and of itself. Comfort that I hadn’t realized I’d been wanting, but suddenly needed with all I was worth. I knew that I should have started to cry then, but the tears wouldn’t come. There was only that deep, dark hole at the very bottom of my soul that felt as if it would never go away again. But what I did manage was a low, murmured, “Okay.”
Yeah, we definitely deserved each other.
We remained standing there for an undefined amount of time. The sun finally set, but I could tell that neither of us cared about the vivid colors of the sky, nor the refreshing cool of evening setting in. My body still ached. Eventually, just remaining upright was starting to become a battle of will versus fatigue, and when Nate realized that I was about to keel over, he loosened his grip around me and steered me back toward the front of the motel. I tried to protest when at the bottom of the stairs he made as if to pick me up, but he would have none of it. So much for me being back on my feet.
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 3
