“As you see, we are not defenseless,” he said, his voice pressed and raspy. “Just so you don’t get any funky ideas.”
Nate took a step forward, still moving with slow, deliberate motions, his body language open and friendly.
“Noticed, sir. Thank you for talking to us.”
The man looked from Nate to the rest of us, his gaze briefly stopping on Pia—but in no world would she have appeared as a noncombatant, even if she’d been wearing a pink tutu—until it zoomed to me. I tried to smile but my facial muscles just wouldn’t respond. With Skip and Steve ready to fall over next to me, we must have made quite the picture in between the more grim soldier-y types around us.
“That all of you, or you got more hiding in the woods?”
Nate shook his head. “It’s just us.” And those few words said a lot more than just that.
The man hesitated for another moment, but then eased up, bringing the rifle down to his side. He was still conflicted, but then I heard a female voice call out behind him.
“Gerry, stop acting like this. Let these poor people in!”
Gerry looked actually chagrined for a moment, but Nate managed to smile at him quite charmingly.
“We understand, don’t worry. And we don’t want to drag any dirt into your house, ma’am. Do you maybe have something for us to clean up with? A garden hose, or a tub where we can pull water from the creek?”
“Just use the water from the rainwater barrel,” she advised, still from behind Gerry. “But you can clean up inside. We don’t have any hot water because the power’s been out and Gerry won’t waste the generator on that, but we can heat some up on the stove.”
Nate kept smiling, but it lost some of its warmth.
“That is very generous of you, but the rainwater’s fine.” Belatedly, I realized that he hadn’t meant sweat and usual grime when he’d asked about the water. That just made me feel even more gross, and kind of grossed out. If I’d still had energy to give a shit, that was.
With that settled, we started unloading our gear—and wiping off blood, gore, and other undefinable dirt from packs, jackets, pants, and boots. Pia snapped at the guys to field-strip and clean their weapons, while everyone who wasn’t up to that—mainly just Skip, Steve, and me—were tasked with getting all the cleaned-up gear inside. I hesitated before pulling off my shoes, but—who would have thought?—kicking zombies in the face left traces, and once I realized what had dried in the profile of the sole, I couldn’t hop out of the second boot fast enough. Gerry already had a stack of blankets and old carpets ready where we could put our gear to dry in the foyer, helping me stack the heavy backpacks as soon as his hands were free.
Once inside, it also became obvious why Maude—his wife—hadn’t followed him to the door. She sat in a wheelchair—complete with a knit afghan across her lap—just beyond the door to the living room, watching us curiously. The blisters on my feet hurt so much that I didn’t dare peel off my socks, so I kept shuffling around like that, but as soon as I’d stashed away the last pack—and most were way heavier than my own, making me grunt just to heave them up from where Skip handed them inside—Maude made a clucking sound at me.
“That will have to be cleaned and bandaged, my dear,” she told me. When I opened my mouth to—I don’t know what, protest wasn’t really on my mind—she added, “Don’t even start. Once a nurse, always a nurse, and I won’t let anyone play tough boy or girl just because the world has gone to shit.”
I couldn’t help but start laughing at such a sweet, old lady cursing like that, and she gave me quite the chiding look.
“I may know to mind my manners, young lady, but I’ve been a nurse in Korea and Vietnam. I didn’t get through all that without picking up my share of colorful expressions.”
She turned her chair around and rolled deeper into the house, clearly expecting to be followed. With nothing else to do, I did, trying not to limp too obviously.
In short order, Maude had me plant my butt on the couch where an entire stack of first-aid stuff was readied, ordering me to sit still and let her work. It was only when she started rubbing down my upper arm—feeling heavenly now that I was out of the sweat-soaked jacket in just a T-shirt—when I realized that it wasn’t just the bruises Smith had left there that were the cause for the infrequent twinges. There was a scabbed-over, angry-red streak there, the flesh around slightly swollen—and I had no idea how it had gotten there.
“The elevator shaft, remember?” Nate supplied from behind me, making me look up in alarm but fall back into the cushions as soon as my mind realized that he wasn’t one of the undead. “You were shot.”
Right. Compared to what else had happened since then—including the entire building coming down on us—I felt a little less stupid about forgetting about that.
“Barely more than a scratch,” Maude assured me, not blinking at hearing how I’d obtained the wound. After she was done, she also had me take off my socks and checked my feet, but told me not to be a baby and tough it out. There was already a line forming behind me so I forced myself to get to my feet and hobble over to the loveseat next to the couch.
As soon as my head hit the cushions, I felt myself drifting away.
Respite was short, but not because of what I thought at first—the house getting overrun by zombies, their screams still echoing in my ears from my nightmare—but because Martinez was nudging my shoulder, a conflicted look on his face. I blinked stupidly up at him, more than ready to try to ignore him.
“I’ve only been asleep for, what…”
“Maybe half an hour,” he supplied.
“Why are you waking me up?” It felt like a personal affront, really.
“Because I need your help,” he whispered.
Rubbing my bleary eyes, I looked up, realizing that all over the room people had unrolled their sleeping bags or were using old blankets and cushions for beds. I felt immediately loath to vacate my much more comfortable sleeping place, but the worry in Martinez’s eyes got me focusing on him again. “What’s wrong?”
Exhaling slowly, he looked at the guy sleeping by my feet, before he jerked his chin toward the kitchen. “I’ll tell you in a minute.”
Groaning, I let him pull me to my feet and followed him, stepping gingerly. It was a little weird to see Martinez out of his gear, as he’d barely taken off his helmet twice when we’d stopped, not even for sleeping. His hair was army regulations short, and judging from the clean scent coming off him, he’d already used the opportunity to at least wash up, if not shower. That made me wonder if I should have done that, too, but just wiping off my pants had taken too much effort for more. I was sure that the white sweat stains on the dark fabric of my shirt were looking quite sexy.
The kitchen was empty except for us, and I accepted the bowl of steaming soup from Martinez as he handed it to me. It was just thin soup with barely any noodles in it, but it was hot and came with a spoon, and that was enough to turn it into a gourmet meal. I more slurped than spooned it, glancing around to make sure that Maude wasn’t watching.
“You didn’t wake me up for this, right?” I asked between sips, intent to enjoy my meal until the very last drop.
“It’s about Nate.”
That was enough to make me swallow twice even though the last of the soup went down on the first try.
“What about him?” I really didn’t like where this was going.
Martinez gave me a look that told me that I should already have known, but I just stared right back at him, letting some of my residual anger and fright heat my gaze up.
“You didn’t really think he’d just get up and walk away from being speared by an iron bar just like that?” he asked, his tone still hushed as he leaned close.
I kind of had, but I was the first to admit that it had come with a whole lot of wishful thinking.
“What do you need me to do?” I skipped right to the chase. He hadn’t looked too bad when I’d last seen him, while Maude was patching up my arm. The na
sty voice in the back of my mind whispered that they wouldn’t have needed me to shoot him if he’d started to turn.
“I need you to help me cut out the glue that I’ve filled the hole up with, drain the pus, and clean out the wound, before we glue him up again.”
I just blinked, horror and irritation both making it impossible for me to come up with a reply for several seconds straight.
“He doesn’t look sick,” I finally offered.
“And he won’t, until he falls over, dead,” Martinez deadpanned. “So, are you in or not?”
“Why do you need me for this?” I asked. “You’re a medic, right? Do your work.”
From the way he gnashed his teeth, I could tell that I’d landed a harder hit than I’d gone for.
“First, it’s not exactly a one-man job,” he ground out. “And second, I know how to sew someone up or what to slap on their wounds, but that’s it.”
“You do realize that my PhD is in virology, not medicine?”
He shrugged.
“You worked in a highest-security lab, right? You have steady hands and you’re used to working with fine motor control?”
“Duh.”
“Then you’re the perfect woman for the job.” He paused, and with an ironic smile added, “Plus, you have small hands. You’ll get way farther in with the scalpel than I would.”
The very idea made my gorge rise.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” I was saying that a lot, I realized, but didn’t care right then.
“He’s not,” a voice said from behind us. When I looked up, I saw Nate leaning against the doorjamb, already stripped down to his waist, the bandages across his chest visibly stained—more than in the morning.
Part of me still wanted to balk, but I knew that I couldn’t just walk away from this. I might want to, but I couldn’t.
“Remind me again when I signed up for this shit?”
He gave a noncommittal shrug and pushed away from the door, and I could clearly see now that every motion was hurting him. Moving over to the kitchen table—suspiciously cleared up already with just a white sheet on it instead of a more traditional cover—he winced as he made it there, the fingers of his hand spasming as he tried to keep them from forming a fist.
“I don’t know. Likely somewhere between destroying what was in that vault and shoving your middle finger in Bucky’s face?”
That made no sense at all, but I didn’t comment on that. Behind Nate, I saw Pia, Andrej, and Burns come into the room, closing the door behind them. Martinez had already shut the one leading into the living room. That looked ominous enough that I couldn’t help but get a bad feeling about this.
“Doesn’t help morale if the men know that their leader is standing with one foot in the grave,” Andrej supplied helpfully.
Frowning, I stared at the bandages.
“How bad is it?”
“Bad,” Nate said, starting to unwind the yards of gauze around his middle. The moment the last layer came away, I couldn’t help but wince. Yup, that looked mighty inflamed, angry red and darker bruises spreading from where I could clearly see the initial wound. “Bad,” was a rather accurate description.
“So how are we going to do this?” I asked, more to distract myself than because I actually wanted to know.
“Easy. Just cut everything out that looks bad and plug everything back up again,” Nate replied.
Stepping closer, I reached for his skin, but stopped inches from touching it. The back looked even worse, the bruising so deep there that it was more vivid than the tattoos. And the wound didn’t smell particularly well, either.
“Just like that, huh?”
“Exactly,” he agreed, moving onto the table. Martinez brought over a steel pan holding surgical tools, stinking of rubbing alcohol.
“You do the cutting, I’ll put him back together once you’re done,” he supplied as he put the pan onto a small side table.
“This is so fucking unreal,” I said as I leaned down to the bucket full of steaming water to wash my hands, then put on latex gloves when I’d dried them on a clean cloth. Then I waited, but with all eyes on me, I couldn’t help but feel more dread climb up my throat.
“Let me guess—we’re fresh out of anesthetics?” And considering that him bleeding out under me was already a likely option, I didn’t even suggest blood-thinning alcohol.
“Maude doesn’t have anything stronger than aspirin here, and I used up the last of Martinez’s morphine before we ran into the mob that chased us down to the Interstate.”
For a moment the idea to cut into him without anything to dull the pain made me want to balk, but then the real message behind that sank in. Staring at Nate, I got a rather stupid grin from him back in return—kind of fitting.
“Are you insane? You were high the entire time?!”
He shrugged, the resulting painful wince only dimming that fucking smile a little.
“How do they say it? As a kite.”
I didn’t know who I was more furious at—him or the others who had clearly been in the know, judging from their calm faces now.
“At least that explains why you think it was a good idea to run straight through a horde of zombies with some weirdos driving by and shooting at everything that moves!”
“It worked,” he protested.
“We lost four people!”
“Would have likely lost eight if we’d stayed,” Nate replied, his eyes never leaving my face. “There was a third group honing in on our position, following the one we’ve run in on the road. If we’d waited another twenty minutes, they would have had us surrounded. Besides, the morphine was losing its kick. I was almost sober by then.”
All I could do was stare back as the horror his revelation caused sunk in, but after a few seconds I forced myself to shake out of it. There was no sense to dwelling on that now. But it might have taken off the edge of the very idea of cutting into him while he was feeling every little thing I did.
“I’ll probably pass out somewhere in the middle of it, anyway,” Nate supplied as I picked up the scalpel, just waiting for Martinez to be done swabbing pretty much Nate’s entire torso down with iodine solution.
“That’s so much relief to me,” I grunted, feeling my throat close down with a different kind of fear. Not just fear of messing this up—but fear of losing him.
Nate’s gaze softened, and finally that smile was all but gone. Reaching up, he wrapped his fingers around my lower arm just below my elbow, seeing as I was already wearing the gloves and holding the scalpel that shook ever so slightly in my grasp.
“Remember when I asked you to trust me?” I nodded, unable to give a verbal reply. “Well, that goes both ways,” he told me. “I trust you.”
He gave me a little squeeze before he relaxed on the table and stretched out, the other three stepping in—Burns leaning across his legs while Pia and Andrej each took care of an arm and Nate’s upper torso, after Pia stuffed a wad of folded cloth between his teeth. Closing my eyes, I sank my own teeth into my bottom lip until the pain almost made me gasp. I couldn’t do this. This was just insane! I couldn’t—
But I had to, and I would.
When I opened my eyes, my hand was steady as I splayed it across Nate’s torso, just above the wound. And so was the other.
Chapter 9
After the last two—no, three—days that I’d had, I should have slept through the next twenty hours straight, but I woke up shortly after sunrise. Every inch of my body hurt—a feeling that should have become familiar by now, but wasn’t. I tried to go back to sleep, but as with the morning before, it wasn’t the snoring all around me that woke me up. Martinez was still soundly asleep where he’d curled up in front of my loveseat, and considering I wouldn’t need it anymore, I reached down to nudge him awake, silently indicating the much more comfortable cushions above him. He groggily crawled up and was out cold again before I’d made it across the room. Like doctors, soldiers seemed to be able to fall asleep anywh
ere, in whatever position.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get there.
Maude was already up, stirring a huge pot of what turned out to be oatmeal on the propane-powered stove. She greeted me silently with a smile and nodded at the pot of coffee next to her. I hesitated, stupidly suspicious about the last two times I’d gotten close to caffeine. When she saw me hesitate, she pointed at a smaller pot still on the stove, and the teabags stacked up neatly in the cupboard above. Nodding, I fetched a mug and made myself some camomile tea instead.
Glancing around the kitchen, I couldn’t help but shudder when my gaze skipped over the table. Everything was cleaned up and neat now, but I would never forget the soaking wet, red-stained sheet when Martinez had dragged it off the table while I’d been sick in the bucket that had held the once-hot water. Not wanting to remain in the room any longer than possible, I went through the other door on into the hallway.
The soft cadence of Gerry’s words drew me on into what turned out to be a small office just below the stairs that led to the upper floor. It made sense that he had one—after all, this was supposed to be a radio station—and as my mind skipped along those details, it didn’t surprise me to find him behind the microphone.
“Remember, folks. Stay indoors if you can,” he was just saying, his voice sounding more relaxed than I would have been able to pitch mine, considering the obvious topic at hand. “People have been calling in, reporting that refrigerated food and preserves are safe. If you can, grab fresh produce before it wilts. And if your climate allows it, it’s not too late to dig out that vegetable patch you’ve been thinking about for years.”
The very idea of gardening in the zombie apocalypse was so absurd that it made me smile into my tea cup, but his next words did away with that immediately.
“We still don’t know for sure what made people sick, but if you stay away from fast food, you should be safe.”
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 37
