by Dana Fredsti
“Then why are you here?” she asked.
Luckily for me, Simone was there.
“We’re here to find a cure,” she said calmly.
“A cure for what?” The girl looked at Simone with those big haunted eyes. “Can you bring my dad back? He was eaten, you know.”
Simone knelt down in front of the girl.
“No, sweetheart, we can’t bring your father back,” she said softly. “I’m sorry—truly I am. But we can cure the disease that killed him.”
I looked at the girl’s mother.
“I know that’s not good enough,” I said. “But that’s all that we have right now.”
She was silent for a few moments, and it was impossible to read all of the emotions that passed across her face. Then she seemed to come to a decision.
“Okay.” She nodded. “Let us know what we can do to help.”
I held out my hand. “Ashley.”
She shook it. “Aimee. That’s A-I-M double E.”
I nodded. “One of those weird-ass spellings. I got it.”
Aimee grinned, just a little bit. Not a full-on smile, but enough for the moment. She patted the girl on the head.
“And this is Grace.”
“Amazing Grace, huh?” The girl gave me a shy tip of her head and ducked back behind her mother. “Glad to meet you both,” I said.
Aimee squeezed her daughter’s hand.
“Let’s go help Mr. Appel, doll,” she said, making an obvious effort to keep things together. “Okay?” They went over to Appel, and then the three of them went through the door at the far end of the room.
Simone pulled up a chair at the end of our table.
“Is there coffee?” I asked hopefully.
Simone nodded. “There will be. Appel… Eric, that is, said he’d get some.”
“And food?”
“Lots of freeze-dried things. MREs and such.”
I grimaced. “They really weren’t expecting to use this place, were they?”
She shook her head. “Not really. North Island and Cabrillo Point were both deemed more tactically important, so money and resources were funneled into them, leaving this place and its personnel to make do with scraps. Whoever facilitated the takeover of Cabrillo Point knew what they were doing. And that means there has to be someone from the DZN involved.”
“So why aren’t we at North Island then?” Lil sat up in her seat, looking as ornery as I’d ever seen her. “I mean, if they have all the stuff we need, why are we wasting our time here?”
Simone sighed heavily.
“Whoever burned the lab at Big Red and brought your helicopters down are no doubt privy to the benefits of North Island. It was the logical place for us to go from a tactical standpoint, to gather manpower and firearms. It’s geographically positioned to give us access to Cabrillo Point from the water.”
She paused, looked directly at Lil.
“And North Island is where the other helicopter was headed when it went down.”
Lil flinched, and some of the orneriness evaporated.
“That could have been us,” she said. Simone nodded, sorrow and sympathy in her expression as she continued.
“Now you all understand why we couldn’t go there, and why we had all of the cloak-and-dagger machinations with the helicopters. We don’t know who we can actually trust. Not in the organization, or in the military—not any more. So we’ve had to go elsewhere for help.”
Tony looked thoughtful.
“So if all of the resources are on North Island, then how are we gonna get what we need to deal with the assholes that snatched Gabriel?”
Simone smiled. “There are always options, Tony, if one knows where to find them, how to contact them, and has the wherewithal to pay the price.”
“Cryptic but upbeat.” Nathan appeared at the end of the table. “Very true to form, Simone.” He carried a tray of cups and, if my super sense of smell didn’t fail me, a carafe of coffee. I always knew I liked him for a good reason.
“I’ll take that as a compliment, Nathan,” Simone replied graciously as he set the tray down in the middle of the table. “Coffee? How kind.” She and I both reached for the carafe at the same time. I won, but made up for it by pouring a cup for her before filling one for myself. There was powdered creamer and packets of sugar. Not exactly honey and cream, but I wasn’t about to complain. I stirred in two packets of the sugar and one of the creamer, took a sip, and sighed with bliss.
Lil wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t much of a coffee drinker.
Nathan caught her expression and grinned.
“There’s also tea and hot chocolate on the way out, for those with more sensitive taste buds.”
Lil’s expression immediately brightened. Which by itself was a good thing, but her mercurial mood shifts were not. I needed to start getting her the meds before they got totally out of hand and—
“Maybe I should go help in the kitchen,” I said, pushing back my chair and getting to my feet.
“Um, or maybe you should consider your last ten or so hours, and give it a rest?” JT looked at me askance.
“No,” I said firmly. “I think some gentle movement might do me some good. Help keep the muscles from tightening up. Right?” I gave Simone a significant look, but she was too busy sipping her coffee in closed-eyed bliss to notice.
Nathan cocked his head to one side, glanced from me to Lil, who was thankfully oblivious to it all, and gave a small knowing nod.
“Definitely the best thing for you, Ash,” he said. “Just don’t overdo it.”
I smiled gratefully.
Jones raised his hand. “If you’re bringing cocoa, I’ll take one.”
Davis nodded. “Me, too.”
“You got it.” I grinned. Gotta love a couple of eagle-eyed killing machines who want their cups of cocoa. “You want marshmallows with that?” They grinned back.
Picking up my cup, I took a gulp of coffee before grabbing my knapsack from the pile of gear and heading into the kitchen. Another cement-walled room lit by stark bare bulbs in the ceiling, it boasted a stainless steel double-sided sink, an ancient six-burner stove-and-oven combo, and a large refrigerator and freezer unit that could hide a body or two. Storage cupboards and more boxes lined up along the walls. A closed metal door was dead-bolted shut on the other side of the room.
Aimee and Grace were bustling about, opening cans of soup and dumping them into a couple of mega-sized saucepans on the stove, while Appel pulled plastic bowls out of one of the cupboards and deposited them on the counter with as much clatter as possible.
“Can I help?” I said with as much perk as I could summon.
Appel gave me a sour look before ignoring me in favor of a drawer full of utensils. I shrugged and turned to Aimee.
“We have some requests for hot chocolate,” I said, “so I thought I’d help.”
She offered me the ghost of a smile.
“Boil up some water in the teakettle, and go to it.”
I filled a white enamel teakettle with water from the tap and put it on one of the burners to heat. While I waited for the water to boil, I snagged a few packets of powdered hot chocolate and emptied them into some white mugs lined up on the counter. Then I dug into my knapsack for the stuff Simone said would dissolve easily in liquid. Zocalo or something. How pharmacists and physicians remembered these names was beyond me.
Ah, there we go. Fazaclo.
The pills came in little individual blister packets. I figured one was enough to start, especially since I had no idea of what the side effects might be, and didn’t want to do anything that could hurt Lil. I felt guilty enough sneaking her the meds—totally not something I’d do under normal circumstances. But nothing was normal now, so I pushed one of the pills through the thin foil and dumped it into one of the mugs, on top of the powdered hot chocolate.
“Any spoons?” I asked as I put the meds back in my knapsack and zipped it up.
“Um. Yeah.” Aimee’s flat tone made m
e look up. She was staring at me as if she’d caught me giving her daughter drugs.
Er… okay, couldn’t quite blame her.
“Look,” I said, “I know what this looks like and—”
She cut me off.
“Is it one of your people?”
“I… well… Yes. It’s—”
“Then it’s none of my business.”
“But—”
Aimee held up a ‘talk to the hand’ hand.
“Seriously. Don’t bother. I really don’t want to know.” She turned away from me, the set of her shoulders managing to imply a door being slammed in my face. Grace continued to stir soup, happily unaware of the subtext in the air.
Well, crap. I mean, I knew it really didn’t matter what Aimee thought of me, given the big picture. Yet her disapproval still hurt, especially given the circumstances. Then again, she wasn’t interested in hearing my side of things. So, well…
Fuck it.
Tightening my jaw, I grabbed the teapot off the stove, topped off all the mugs with hot water and stirred, being careful to save Lil’s mug for last. I kept the spoon in it so I wouldn’t accidently slip the wrong person a shot of psychotropic meds.
Wouldn’t that be fun?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Griff had joined the rest of the team at our table, co-opting my chair. He was talking to Lil, that lazy smile on his face as he said something that made her laugh.
Uh-oh. I didn’t like the way this looked at all. Lil was too young and too naïve. All of her former distrust seemed to have vanished in the face of his undeniable charisma. I looked to the rest of the team for help.
Tony was too busy scowling at JT, while Gentry looked like he really needed a few hours of sleep. As for Nathan and Simone, they were caught up in staring—or possibly glaring—into each other’s eyes. So I’d just have to play it cool, and hand out hot chocolate.
Plastering a bright smile on my face, I set the mug in front of Lil, plucking the spoon out at the last moment.
“Here ya go!”
She smiled up at me.
“That looks good,” Griff said.
“Here, you can have this one!” Lil started to push her mug in front of him.
Really?
I immediately plucked another mug from the tray and plunked it down in front of Griff, sloshing a little bit of liquid on the table.
“Here ya go.” I nudged Lil’s mug back in front of her. She gave me a look that was half confusion and half irritation, but didn’t argue. I ignored the look and handed out the rest of the hot chocolate. Davis and Jones took theirs with as close to blissful expressions as I’d yet seen on their perpetually stoic faces.
I tried not to watch too obviously as Lil took the first sip of her hot chocolate. She didn’t seem to notice anything wrong—no wrinkle of the nose or anything to indicate it tasted funny. I felt my shoulders relax just a bit as she took a big swallow.
Dumping my knapsack by my feet, I took a seat at the end of the table, refilling my cup with more coffee. Sure, I needed sleep, but at this point the siren song of coffee sang louder than the dubious lullaby from the uncomfortable-looking cots across the room.
Aimee and Appel appeared from the kitchen bearing trays loaded with bowls and cutlery. I jumped to my feet to help, but Aimee shrugged me away when I tried to take the tray from her.
“I’ve got this,” she said.
Right.
Chastened, I sat back down. Appel plonked a bowl of soup in front of me, followed by a spoon and a napkin. I tried not to drool at the fragrance of Campbell’s very best chicken noodle soup.
“Thanks,” I said, not expecting any answer.
“You’re welcome.”
I nearly dropped my spoon, and looked up just in time to see him give me a cranky yet approving nod before he moved onto the next table. After Aimee’s palpable disapproval, it felt pretty good.
Polishing off the soup, I sipped my coffee and shut my eyes, listening to the gentle hum of voices and pretending just for a little while that I was at a coffee house, and that there were no zombies trying to eat us.
“So how did you become a wild card?”
The sudden question—coming from Tony of all people, and in a fairly aggressive tone of voice—cut through any other conversation at the table. I opened my eyes and saw him staring at Griff with an expression that matched his voice.
Griff raised an insolent eyebrow.
“Why does it matter?”
“You’re part of our team now, right?” Tony pressed.
“I’ve been fighting at your side,” Griff responded, and I thought I detected a crack in the veneer. “Fighting for the same things you are.”
“Well, when we formed our team, we had to tell each other how we got bit. How we became wild cards.” Tony paused, his jaw tightening. “I thought it was stupid when we did it.”
And indeed he had been a right little sullen asshat at the time.
“But it makes sense now,” he continued. “We shared our origin stories.” I hid a grin at that. “We all knew where everyone else came from. What we all went through.
“So if you’re part of this team, I wanna know how you got here.”
He was totally right. We’d started out with a team of strangers who shared one commonality—we’d all been through hell and survived. That common ground to start had made up for some major personality conflicts. Griff was a stranger, one we were expected to take on good faith in a world where that meant very little. Points to Tony for the adult insight.
Nathan and Simone both looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.
Griff leaned back in his chair, and then gave a small but decisive nod.
“I was in jail,” he said bluntly. “I was offered a choice between being a guinea pig for a new vaccine, or spending the better part of my glory days behind bars.” He shrugged, and gave me a sideways look. “Would’ve been a waste to have me off the market.”
I snorted.
“What were you in for?” JT gave Griff a guileless smile. “No, wait, let me guess. Sexual assault?”
“Please. Not my style.” Griff actually looked offended. Either he had incredibly selective memory or he was totally full of shit.
“What was it then?” I couldn’t resist jumping in, just to see if he showed any embarrassment.
“Assault and battery, with a little manslaughter tossed in.” Griff shrugged. “Accidents happen.”
JT looked as cynical as I’d ever seen him.
“Which was the accident? The assault, or the battery?”
Griff looked at him with dislike.
“The manslaughter.”
“Do tell.”
“Actually, I thought we were talking about my—” He nodded toward Tony. “—origin story.”
“Fair enough,” JT said. “Although personally I’d like to know if one of my teammates might ‘accidentally’ slaughter me.” A brief flash in Griff’s eyes said that it might be a possibility, but then he smiled and continued.
“Along with a half dozen other ‘volunteers,’ I was given different versions of what they called the Walker’s vaccine, one after the other. The last one made me sick—it felt like white-hot poison running through the veins. I felt my body rotting from the inside out.”
Everyone in the room was silent now, hanging on his every word. Not even JT had anything snarky to add at this point.
“I wanted to die—begged them to kill me.” He paused, then continued. “No such luck. They just kept pumping me full of electrolytes and whatever else was needed to keep my body from shutting down. What they wouldn’t give me was anything for the pain.” He took a long drink of hot chocolate as if it were a shot of whiskey. “I went through three days like that. And I was the lucky one.
“My fellow volunteers went through the same hell, and died, their internal organs liquefied and leaking out their bodies.” He gave a small smile. “And then they came back.
“So six of us went in to
be tested. Five died horribly, and then proved there’s life after death. I survived.” He finished his hot chocolate. “I’ll never be afraid of death again.”
Anyway, we delivered the bomb.
Tony broke the silence.
“So you never got bit, huh?”
Griff looked at him for a moment. “No. Is that what I need to join your special little club? Get a chunk of me ripped out by one of those things?”
Lil glared at Tony, and shook her head.
“No. You don’t,” she said. “You’re one of us now.”
I forced myself to keep my mouth shut.
Just drink your hot chocolate, I thought.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Gradually conversations started up again around the room, accompanied by the sound of utensils clinking on dishes.
The headache I’d felt in the bathroom made its presence known again. I rubbed my forehead and massaged my scalp, trying to ease the pressure.
“You too?” Gentry gave me a tired grin from across the table. “I’d kill for a couple of aspirin about now.” He rubbed his neck. “I think I pulled something out there.”
“How about some ibuprofen?”
He eyed me hopefully. “You carrying?”
“Oh, yeah, baby,” I cooed. “I’ve got the good stuff.” I pulled my knapsack out and rummaged around in it, pulling out several bottles and boxes and setting them on the table in search of some of the ibuprofen I’d snagged from Walgreen’s. How much crap did I have in there anyway?
Finally I located some painkillers. I pulled them out and set them down on the table in triumph.
“Here ya go!” Then I noticed the silence as everyone watched Lil examine one of the boxes, pulling out a foil packet with one pill missing. She looked at it, head cocked to one side.
Then she looked at me.
“You drugged my chocolate, didn’t you?” Her voice was eerily calm.
My face said it all.
“Lil—”
“I trusted you.” She picked up her mug, looked at it. “I trusted you!”
In a move so sudden no one could have predicted it, she threw the mug at me, the now lukewarm cocoa spraying me in the face right before the mug itself would have hit my nose, had I not gotten a hand up in time to block it.
