Green Fields (Book 7): Affliction

by Lecter, Adrienne

  Chapter 25

  The two soldiers who carried me back to that cozy glass cell were somewhat more gentle with me than those that had hauled me out, kicking and, if not screaming, croaking. Raynor came along, the soft whisper of her surgical booties barely audible over the stomp of the soldiers’ boots. I didn’t really pay attention. Every single cell of my body hurt, but they somehow managed to make it worse wherever they touched me. What remained of the paralytic was wearing off quickly now, but that just meant that the muscles I involuntarily contracted because of the agony I was in hurt even more.

  On the way out, I’d been rather apprehensive of the moment of my return, and not just because of all the pain I knew was in store for me. I felt none of that trepidation now. Physically, I was in so much pain that it wiped my mental slate perfectly clean. I didn’t give a flying fuck anymore about what had happened—and even less so how Nate might react to me, or I toward him.

  The moment that I heard the glass pane retract to open the cell, boots stomped on the tiled floor as several soldiers must have barreled inside. Ten agonizing, shuffling steps later, and they set me down onto the mattress, the softness of the material feeling as hard as concrete where it touched my body. I lay there, limp, panting as I tried to catch my breath as my body adjusted to the different yet equally agonizing position as before. I was starting to suspect that just existing was the part that made it worse, not actual muscle tension or contact. Too many nerves all through my body were misfiring, turning it all into an endless torrent of pain—

  “What the fuck did you do to her eyes!” I heard Nate shout, the anger in his voice such a relief that I would have smiled if my face hadn’t been swollen like a balloon. No question, that was all him, as he was supposed to be. One less thing to worry about.

  Raynor made that clucking sound again that I’d heard way too many times today for it not to give me nightmares. “Only what was necessary. She has massive retinal scarring, likely caused from the primary infection with the virus. There’s nothing we can do anything about. But what we could do was smooth the surface of her corneas. She will never regain perfect eyesight, but that should help with the hypersensitivity. Do you want a full scientific explanation? I’d rather not waste time better spent otherwise. We still have to analyze her blood and see how her body is reacting to the serum. We’ve had subjects before that got a primary viral infection before inoculation, but no one with such extensive decay yet. So if you will excuse me now, I’m still not done making sure your wife survives. I hope you understand.” Anyone else would have delivered that speech with biting sarcasm, but her level tone made it just… surreal. My favorite part was the mention of decay.

  No verbal answer came from Nate, but judging from the sounds of bodies moving, they must have had him pinned to the wall before and only let go after Raynor had exited the cell. The glass pane locked back into place, and silence fell, except for maybe a minute later when I heard a body hit the floor—Nate sitting down somewhat forcefully well away from me, I guessed.

  Eventually, I managed to roll myself into a ball, lying on my side, not that it helped much—but at least it kept the part of my back free and elevated that felt like one huge, open wound. I wondered if I still had anything left in there. Maybe they’d stuffed me with straw to keep my few remaining organs from bouncing around. Why I found that funny, I couldn’t say, but trying to laugh was not a good idea. It sounded more like a groan, anyway. I heard Nate move, but only for a second, not enough for him to get up. He was keeping his distance, and suddenly, that was worse than all the physical pain anyone could ever inflict on me, all taken together.

  Exhaling slowly to steel myself, I unfurled my right hand from where it had ended up somewhere in front of my stomach, blindly reaching for him. The mental image of how that must have looked—with only three fingers peeking out from the bandages, and so obviously not much left underneath—made my skin crawl, but there was nothing I could do about that now. Fact was, I needed him, and I needed him now.

  He was up and hunkering down next to me in a second, the warmth of his body like a brightly shining sun after spending eternity in the dark, dank cold of winter. I did my best not to tense and hiss as he tentatively touched my shoulder, but thankfully he intuitively understood that it was impossible to actually keep from hurting me. He was quick to gather me up in his arms and pull me close, wrapping himself around me like the best security blanket in the world. They’d dressed me in scrubs again before carrying me out of the OR, but I could feel the bandages and scrubs already soaking through with blood again—or, more likely, pus and lymph. He didn’t seem to care.

  Neither of us said a word, not that we needed to. Feeling him so close was all the comfort he could give me—and all that I really needed. And I could tell that the sentiment was mutual. So we stayed like that, both wide awake, incapable of truly getting any rest.

  Time passed. Lots and lots of time I had no way of measuring. They’d started taking me apart late afternoon, and I was sure that it had been well past morning again when they’d brought me back. It was likely night once more when I felt it, a strange sensation spreading through my body, alien—but at the same time, not. It had been there when the fever waned that should have killed me, back when my body had kicked the infection that billions had succumbed to. I’d lost it somewhere along the way since then, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly when. The only actual, physical sensation of the serum, I figured. I tried to rack my brain to remember if Nate had tried giving me a blood transfusion back then, but came up blank. Antibodies might have been strong enough to keep the virus in check, but not cause something like this. His blood might have transferred some of it to me—but no, I hadn’t felt a similar effect a few days ago when he’d done just that and gotten me moving just long enough to get there. But there was one other component that I knew for a fact had entered my blood, and with quite the punch—the booster shots that we’d gotten from the guys at the Silo. The very same—or only marginally modified—booster shots that we’d had with us when we’d started the assault on the base in Colorado. Huh.

  My brain really didn’t have the capacity left to go through this in an orderly fashion, but I was rational enough that I could cross out the most paranoid option—that, in fact, something in that booster had caused the secondary infection that had led to my body pretty much starting to decompose. That would have happened much faster had that been the case. But what about the alternative? Was it possible that the booster had contained at least some components of the serum itself? Just enough to give me an edge to stop the zombie virus infection halfway, and again delay the onsetting later stages of that for a few more months? Dosage could vary, of course, but if it had been about the same, the booster altogether had been about a tenth of the amount of liquid that had entered my bloodstream compared to what they’d shot me up with here.

  Who had developed that booster? Sunny? Or had he just been the one to hand it over to Nate? He’d been awfully quick to join Dom and my effort to find out what was wrong with me as we’d gotten to the Silo last time. And he’d been all up in my business about the miscarriage. Did I know anything about him, really? What he’d been up to before the shit had hit the fan? How he’d ended up at the Silo? Was it possible that he was a mole—or, like so many of the former military personnel who had ended up on our side as well, knowing what lurked in the underground bunkers but desperate not to end up there? Had he somehow learned about the trap—or anticipated it—and handed Nate the key to keep me alive through it, come what may?

  Or was I just grasping at random straws in my attempt not to think about the more immediate ramifications?

  There was no way to get an answer for those questions now, and eventually, all those thoughts fragmented and got swept up in the red haze of agony infusing every cell of my body.

  It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that I was still alive.

  Chapter 26

  I knew someone was coming befor
e I heard their steps outside. Nate didn’t move, but he tensed. He hadn’t done that all night, although he must have gotten cramps in his legs and back from staying immobile for so long. I tried to do a quick assessment of my current state, but nothing much had changed. Everything hurt. What didn’t hurt was stiff, and made me paranoid that they hadn’t gotten everything out and parts of me were still rotting away, like an apple that looked all red and shiny from the outside, until you cut it in half and found the entire core full of decay. I’d known this had been going on with me for weeks if I was honest with myself, but somehow I’d managed to ignore the ramifications. Only now that I was—hopefully—no longer a slowly degrading mind in a flesh suit that had overstayed its welcome, I was freaking out.

  Of course Nate felt my rising agitation, which only caused more tension in him. I could tell that he was gearing up for a fight, reading the cause for my anxiety wrong. Part of me was vaguely satisfied that he would blindly hurl himself at what he must know to be an overwhelming force just to make me feel… what, exactly, I didn’t know. Safe? Protected? The far overwhelming majority of me wanted to slap some sense into him instead. Grand gestures aside, it wasn’t worth it, and we had to play our cards right to come out ahead—and to have even anything left to play with. Only how to communicate that to him with my jaws feeling like granite, and my mind still struggling to form coherent thoughts?

  The glass panel slid aside, the signal that my time was up. Nate slowly eased me off him, gentle but with underlying urgency. I did the only thing I could think of and grabbed for the first part of him I could blindly reach—his arm—and squeezed. Pain exploded across my right hand—should have used the left—making me wince. He relaxed, his fingers briefly brushing across my knee as if to tell me that he’d understood. I hoped that was the case, or things would get ugly soon. Not that they were quite rosy to begin with.

  I forced myself to remain as relaxed as possible as I heard the different people come in. Most left heavy thuds in boots, but I could hear that soft whisper of the surgical booties again. My guess was that Raynor hadn’t bothered with getting any sleep—or changing clothes, although I sincerely hoped that she wasn’t still in anything that was covered in my blood and all the ghastly things she’d removed from my body. No, she’d never contaminate her workplace like that, even if I got the feeling that they’d mass-inoculated their entire staff, just to be sure.

  Made me wonder for a moment how many incidents with sudden conversion they’d had.

  I felt Nate move away from me, making me guess that Raynor had made a shooing motion in his direction, as no one had barked any threats yet. Someone in the back cleared his throat, and there was some rustling of clothes going on, but overall it sounded like a somber procession. I figured I would soon know when I felt deft, small hands grab my head to peel away the soaked cotton pads.

  The light was blinding through my closed lids, but nothing new there. I felt her wipe at the liquid that had leaked from my eyes before she slowly peeled first one, then the other lid back to check what lay underneath. The light was still harsh and stung, but nothing like before. Actually, the entire room had a different tint than I remembered from when we’d gotten here, the quality of the light warmer, the hues slightly changed. Everything was quite hazy, even Raynor’s face right in front of me, making it hard to recognize.

  “Looking good,” she observed, already coming at me with that damn eyedropper again. “Give it a few minutes, and you’ll actually be able to see. I will check on your bandages in the meantime.” Considering that I felt like a mummy, I hoped she meant literal minutes, because she could have easily spent hours if she wanted to do a thorough examination. Before she started, she fixed me up with an infusion, the murky liquid not very reassuring as it started disappearing into my vein.

  I expected her to make me strip again—that woman seemed to have no sense whatsoever for privacy where her victims were concerned—but she just had me hunch over so that she could pull the back of my shirt up to check there. I tried very hard not to groan as she started prodding me, hitting the worst spots every time. At least I only had the corner to glare at that slowly took on sharper edges as my eyesight normalized.

  “Antiseptic and scalpel,” Raynor barked, making someone scurry forward, likely one of the nurses. When she swabbed the area she was going to cut first, I felt like she could have just doused me from head to toes as well. The burn of the scalpel parting my freshly healed skin I might have managed to endure in silence, but when she started prodding and squeezing, there was no way around giving voice to the intensely sharp pain that caused. Raynor ignored me, instead talking to Nate. “Do you know how to do sutures?”

  There was a significant pause before he replied from somewhere close behind me, roughly next to her. I was surprised no one had dragged him further away. “If I need to, yes.”

  “You will,” Raynor stated, matter-of-fact. He must have given her the incredulous look that I felt appear on my face because she snorted. “I’m sure that you will be the only one who she’ll let touch her, so either you do it, or she’ll have to deal with prolonged complications from recurring sepsis for a while. Her body is healing well, her immune system obviously working at maximum capacity, but it was impossible for us to remove every single cell that needed to go. It was unnecessary as well, as her body can do a much better job than us, but that means that for the time being, someone will have to reopen the wounds that keep oozing pus. Just make sure to disinfect the scalpel and surrounding skin, drain the wound, clean it—like this.” I hissed loudly when the part she’d been working on, the previous pain finally dulling, flared up anew. “And then you stitch it back up and slap on a bandage. Everything that’s been closed up for over twenty-four hours and doesn’t require additional attention you can leave as it is.”

  That went on for the better part of twenty minutes—could have been twenty hours for all I knew, but the former sounded more realistic—until she had me roll over so she could work on my abdomen, and, after that, ditch my pants to get to my thigh. I tried very hard not to look at anything but the very interesting walls.

  “You know, you will eventually have to acknowledge what happened to you,” Raynor remarked conversationally while she kept scooping out pus from my leg.

  I stopped pretending like I could ignore that, fixing my gaze on her instead. “And I will, in good time. I’ve never been someone who avoids confrontation.”

  I knew that Bucky was standing there, right behind Raynor, but I suppressed the impulse to glare at him. Let him deceive himself into thinking me properly cowed. All the better if he’d never see me coming.

  “So they tell me,” Raynor remarked, reaching for the next sterile suture needle. There was half a tray of used ones piling up next to her already.

  Granting me a small mercy, she let me don the pants again before she descended on my toes. I looked away, staring at the tiles next to my knee instead. Same for my hands.

  When she was done, Raynor changed her latex gloves before she went for my face again, forcing my jaws apart to look at my teeth. With all the swelling still going strong, it was hard to say, but from what little light gnashing and testing I’d done, everything felt fine—if that was the applicable term. Raynor attested the same and moved on to my eyes, doing a good job blinding me once more with that little lamp. “Pupillary contractions are still a little slow but I’m sure they’ll normalize in a week or two. You will have some issues adapting at first, but I doubt it will be worse than what you’ve gotten used to. How are your other reflexes?”

  Out of the blue, her finger shot out, hitting me just under the ribs on my left side. I jerked slightly, wincing, but it came out somewhat differently with my throat still raw from yesterday. Raynor cocked her head to the side. “Did you just growl at me?”

  I knew that I shouldn’t do this, but with her leaning toward me, I just couldn’t resist. Exploding forward, I snapped my teeth shut inches from her face, making her recoil in earnest. The ro
om was suddenly loud with weapons being drawn, giving me the perfect soundtrack to sit back on my heels and laugh as I cocked my head to the side, ignoring everything except for the scared look on Raynor’s face. “What are a few bites between friends?”

  The next moment, I was flat on my face with three soldiers sitting on me, making sure I couldn’t move a muscle. It hurt like shit, but it had been so worth it. Even more so, it proved two things: one, my body might not have been looking like I was used to, and I was still in immense pain, but my muscles were working, my reflexes way better than before. If I’d tried that move a week ago, I wouldn’t have been able to time every motion with that kind of precision while keeping my balance perfectly.

  And, much more importantly, two: they were all afraid of me. That was something I could live with—easily.

  “Stand down,” a deep, male voice barked—Red was back, and not willing to let his men undo all the work Raynor and her team had accomplished. They obeyed, taking their sweet time to get off me again. I didn’t try to straighten, too many of my muscles complaining loudly enough that not screaming at the top of my lungs was the real feat.

  When I looked up at Raynor, I caught her with a bemused look crossing her expression, and she gave me a small nod. “Guess I deserved that one after you had to listen to my witticisms for hours on end. Glad to see that, unlike other things, your sense of humor is still intact.”

  As if I needed a reminder of that. I let a toothy grin be my only answer. One of the soldiers had smacked my face into the mattress, making my teeth split my lip, so it was likely a bloody grin. That suited me just fine.