“Wait a minute,” Reggie cries. “What about the Players out the—
“They’re still out there,” Micah says, gritting his teeth at the sight of the bite marks on Kelly’s arms and chest. He swears under his breath. “These are going to leave some nasty scars.”
“Just keep the noise level down,” Sister Jane warns. “It gets them riled up and makes them harder to manage.”
“Gets them riled up?” Reggie yells. “What the fu—”
“Reggie! Shut up!”
Reggie stumbles backward, a look of utter dismay on his face. He holds his hands out, as if to ward Sister Jane away, but she slips beneath them and bends down by Micah’s side. There’s a pouch slung over her shoulder and now she swings it in front of her and opens it and reaches in. She pulls something out and hands it over. “Hold this,” she tells Micah.
“Is that what I think it is?” Reggie asks, stepping forward again. His face twists with emotion, confusion and anger and cautious hope. “Is that the treatment? It looks like the treatment.”
They both nod grimly. Micah pushes him away. “I told you to stay out of the way.”
“Reggie, why don’t you watch the door,” I suggest.
“No need for that,” Micah barks. “It’s all under control out there. Just stay in here. Stand still.”
Sister Jane gestures at Kelly. “Pull his knees up and hold them tight.” When Micah does, she reaches over and quickly pours a brownish liquid over his lower spine and smears it around. It puddles onto the floor and paints her fingers. A smell of antiseptic fills the room, partially masking the stench of rotting flesh that wafts off of Kelly’s skin and clothes. She glances up and catches my eye. “Meningitis,” she mutters. “Or staph. Or any number of nasty bugs. Won’t do us any good if we kill him trying to save him.”
I think about the water and the mud I was swimming in earlier. The needles I’d carried with me, the ones that Ben and Casey had gotten, were almost certainly contaminated with it. Casey’s dead, so no worries there. Ben… well, he can go to hell for all I care. But what about Jake?
Brother Matthew’s syringe didn’t get a mud bath.
Still…
“What happens if he gets meningitis?” I ask.
“First, it’ll put him in terrible agony,” Sister Jane replies. “Then it’ll kill him. We don’t have antibiotics to treat meningitis anymore, not here.” She takes the syringe from Micah, bends over and, with quick, precise movements, positions the tip of the needle between two slight bumps on Kelly’s back. Then she pushes it in. I watch as she aspirates to check for blood. There isn’t any. “Okay, I’m in. You take over,” she tells Micah. “My hands are too weak.”
I notice her knuckles are swollen with arthritis.
The syringe just suspends there when she lets it go, quivering like an arrow embedded in a tree. Micah reaches over and carefully takes hold of it.
“Okay, now push it in. Slowly,” Jane instructs, and Micah does what she says, straining against the thickness of the fluid. “Don’t force it in too hard or the needle will pop off.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“What about the pressure in his spine?”
“We want some pressure. It creates leaks in the blood-brain barrier and allows some of the prion to pass through and enter the bloodstream. He’ll have one hell of a headache when he wakes up, but it should be gone by tomorrow.”
“What’s prion?” Reggie asks.
But Jane addresses me, finally answering my question. “If he dies from meningitis and reanimates, he’ll be worse than the others. Nothing more bad-tempered than one of the Child with a bad headache.”
I frown, confused, not sure I’ve heard her right or whether she’s serious.
She shrugs. “They have personalities, too. Some are worse than others, some…better.”
Micah finishes and pulls the needle out of Kelly’s back and tosses it aside. A drop or two of slightly pinkish fluid leaks from the tiny hole. He doesn’t bother to wipe it away before plastering a bandage over it. Finally he lowers Kelly’s shirt. “He should be fine now. Just keep him still for a little while.”
“Is that what happened to Jake?” Reggie asks. “Did we give him meningitis?”
Now Sister Jane turns, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“We gave Jake the injection, but we didn’t have that brown stuff, that…disinfectant stuff.”
“He might be okay.” But she doesn’t look at Reggie when she says this.
“Brother Matthew never told us to clean the site,” I whisper.
“He attacked Jessie,” Reggie says. “He bit her!”
Micah looks up, startled. Then he turns to me. “You’re bitten, too? Where? Show me where!”
I pull my shirt up and he takes in a sharp breath. “Christ.” He turns away, but not before I see the pain in his eyes, and this confuses me. “Fuck!” he cries.
“Hey, it’s cool, Micah. Just chill,” Reggie says. “I mean, you have more of that stuff, right? Just give Jessie a shot, okay?”
Sister Jane reaches up and instinctively I flinch away, but she holds her hands out in a non-threatening way and says, “I’m not going to hurt you.” Her fingers comb into the tangles of hair falling over my face. She pushes it back behind my ear. “So young and so much suffering.”
Reggie steps over and pulls her arm away. “Please tell me you have more of those syringes.”
“Two more,” she answers. She nods to Micah and reaches into her pouch.
I shake my head. “Brother Matthew said it won’t work on me. He said it had something to do with the medicine I was taking. Depro…something.”
She shakes her head and prepares a second syringe. “I don’t know anything about that.” She sighs and turns to Reggie. “She’ll be fine. She should be fine. We’ll give her the injection. Were you bitten?” she asks him. “No? Good.” She turns back to me and tells me to lie down.
“But I thought—”
“I’m not arguing, young lady. Lie down.”
Micah nods.
“Left side. Pull your legs up. Give her something to bite down on.” She bends over until her mouth is close to my ear. “It’s going to hurt something fierce, honey, and I’m sorry, but we don’t have any anesthetic.”
It hurts all right. The needle going in isn’t so bad, but when they inject the blood into me, the pain is a horrible, terrible thing, and more than once I wonder if maybe I’ve made a mistake trusting her like this.
What’s she doing with Micah? Why is he free?
And why, when Brother Matthew seemed so sure the treatment wouldn’t work, is she so willing to give it to me? Wouldn’t she know what he knew?
But it’s too late. I feel her pull the needle out and the bandage applied.
My head wants to explode, but when I try to sit up, it’s ten times worse. I want to be sick. I want to tear my head off. I feel like all my joints are being yanked by some mechanical torture device.
Sister Jane checks the bandage on my side. I can feel it starting to slide off. “This needs some attention,” she says. “I have supplies outside. I’ll go get them.”
I don’t care. I just want to curl up and die.
No, I don’t want to die. As bad as it hurts, I find that it’s nothing like the pain inside me I’d felt before, the pain of having lost hope.
That pain is gone. Amazing what a tiny bit of hope can do.
“You’ll get worse before you get better,” Jane warns me, as she stands up. “But you will get better.” Then she heads out, leaving the four of us alone.
Reggie gawps after her for a moment, unable to speak. Then he turns and glares at Micah, who returns the look with an infuriating shrug of his shoulders. Same old Micah. It makes me want to scream. Reggie’s face reddens and for a moment I’m sure he’s going to wig out and attack him, but instead he slowly turns and says, “You damn well better get better, Jessie, or I’m going to kill me a certain Texas boy.”
> I see him turn to Micah then. “Kelly better be good, too.”
Chapter 22
“I don’t trust him,” Reggie whispers to me, after Micah leaves us with orders to stay put. “I don’t like that he’s telling us what to do. I don’t like that they just waltzed right in here through those Players like that. What the hell is that about? It’s not natural. It’s not—”
“I get it!” I say, weakly, trying to make him shut up.
But Reggie’s on a roll. “And where the fuck did they go anyway? Come in here and then leave like that.” He tries to look out through the door. “Why are we supposed to stay in here while they go traipsing around—”
“Reggie, please.” I squeeze my head in my hands, not sure if it’ll keep the pieces of my skull from suddenly flying apart. The noise of his voice is like someone rattling gravel in a can inside of my head. Sister Jane said my infection would get worse before it gets better, and though I want to trust her, warning bells are ringing too loudly inside of me. How can I trust her? Why should I?
I manage to get myself sitting up, though the pain in my back feels like somebody implanted a meat grinder inside me and switched it on. It’s now chewing its way out through my spine. Still, it’s better than lying down. I feel too vulnerable down there on the floor. I don’t even want to sit, but I don’t think I could stand right now. So I sit hunched down over my lap and try to breathe in long, deep breaths. The nausea comes in waves, a strange dull, burning ache that doesn’t make me want to throw up breakfast as much as it makes me want to tear out my intestines.
Kelly just lies there, not sleeping, but not waking, either. I wonder if he’s aware of what’s happening. A piece of me wishes I could be in his place, oblivious to all of this.
I think about Brother Matthew telling me the treatment wouldn’t work for me. Why didn’t I ask him to explain? I should’ve asked him. I should have asked Grandpa and the doctors about my inhaler. All my life, I’ve been too complacent.
It’s a blocking agent. That’s what they’d said, down in Brookhaven. They said there was something inside of it, some chemical, depro-something, something that blocked…what? I don’t know. What is it? Some kind of experimental medicine? A secret antidote?
Why would they only give it to me? Why would they even give it to someone like me? After all my father had done, after what Grandpa did, you’d think the last person they’d give it to would be a Daniels. We don’t deserve it. We deserve to all be made into Undead and to serve everyone else.
I wonder why my grandfather was always so insistent that I take it. What did he know? What was his connection with Arc? Did they steal this from Halliwell? Or did my father make this before Halliwell killed him? And then, did Grandpa have to make some kind of deal with Arc so I could get it? Maybe that’s what happened to his career. Did he give it up for me?
That seems a little far-fetched.
And then it hits me: maybe Eric is getting this stuff, too. I never saw him using an inhaler, but something like that would be easy to hide.
But if there’s already a treatment, this depro-stuff, then why is Father Heall’s blood so important to Arc and the SSC?
I think about this, too, and it troubles me. Competition, maybe. The stuff in my inhaler could be worth billions, but not if there’s a treatment. Heall’s blood would render it useless.
So, you didn’t really need the injection.
I don’t know.
Sister Jane returns with fresh bandages and a freshly prepared bowl of the same poultice Brother Nicholas had slathered onto Jake’s neck yesterday. She bends over me and gently pries the old pad off, wincing with every whimper and sharp breath that comes out of my mouth. Some of the blood has dried and it sticks to my skin and pulls it away.
“You should be lying down.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Look,” Reggie says, coming up and standing behind her, “I think it’s time to we got a few answers.”
“That will have to wait a moment.”
“You get to decide what’s good for Jessie, but I don’t?”
“That’s right. Now sit down before I knock you down.” She gives me a wink.
“The hell I will.”
“Reggie,” I tell him, alternately panting and grunting from the pain. “Not now. Please. Just…go sit down over there.”
I hear him grumble unhappily, but he backs up a couple steps. He keeps his thoughts to himself.
“This is a deep bite, honey. Luckily it’s mostly just muscle here, no organs.”
“More like fat,” I say through my clenched teeth. “That’s all right. I needed to lose a few pounds, anyway.”
She gives me an appreciative look. “You’re too skinny.”
“Just wish he’d bitten me in the ass. It’s too big.”
She chuckles. “We’ll call it the Forbidden Zone Diet.”
“Everyone’s dying to try it.”
“You’re not going to die,” she gently chastises. “Not just yet, anyway.”
“Not yet?” I ask, alarm bells ringing again.
She shakes her head. “Everyone dies someday. You’ve got many more years ahead of you. Trust me.”
I don’t know what triggers the change, but suddenly I do trust her. I still don’t understand how she and Micah came to be here—together—and I do plan on getting that information from her soon, but for now I’m content enough with her gentleness and the kindness she showed me last night that I can allow myself to relax my guard a little.
She finally manages to get the bandage fully off and drops it to the floor to one side. It lies there, thick and bloody and looking like mutilated roadkill. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I can make more.”
“You’re going to have to.”
She pours cold water on me and it scalds, feels like fire. I hiss, but then it quickly starts to numb.
“There’s some extract in it,” she tells me. “Helps a little with the pain.”
“Feels good.”
Next she starts packing in the poultice and soon the numbness begins to spread, infusing my whole body. The relief isn’t complete—I can still feel the pain—but it somehow feels more like a memory than the real thing.
“That’s better,” I tell her. Even the gnawing in my stomach feels different. It feels…less.
“The anesthetic is only temporary. But if things go as they should, you won’t need it for long.”
“If? You don’t sound very confident.”
“The treatment isn’t foolproof. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say anything.” I wait and she sighs and shakes her head. “I’ve seen it fail, once. We don’t know why it happened, but even a single failure means we can’t say it always works.”
“Brother Matthew said something about side effects.”
“Mostly from injecting it wrong. Mostly.” She doesn’t elaborate. “We need to get you to Father Heall.”
Reggie groans. “We need to get her home.”
Sister Jane turns her head and looks up at him. “That’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
“I already explained why to him,” I tell her. “About the repeated injections. He’s just stressed.”
“Damn right I’m stressed.”
Sister Jane nods. “Well, then I won’t have to explain it to him. Now, let’s have a look at this one.”
She waddles over to Kelly and begins to cut away his shirt. She sucks in her breath repeatedly, every time she uncovers another wound. “Could be worse, I suppose.”
“Where did Micah get to?” Reggie asks. “Who’s watching him?”
A shadow flickers over Sister Jane’s face. She doesn’t answer.
But I recognize that look. “You don’t trust him, do you?”
The line of her jaw tightens, but all she says is, “It was Father Heall’s decision to send him out here.”
“Here, to the hill?”
She shakes her head. “No, coming here to you was my decision to make.”
/>
“Then where?”
“To retrieve his son’s body. To bring it back.”
“Stephen?”
“Enoch Bloch.”
“Bloch?”
“His mother’s maiden name.”
It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. I let it go and instead watch her attend to Kelly. “So…Father Heall wanted Micah to bring Enoch’s body back. He trusted him to do that. But you don’t trust him.”
She stops a moment but doesn’t look at me. “No.”
“Why not?”
No answer.
“How did you know we needed help? How did you know to come here? And how did you control those Players out there?”
“Too many questions.”
“You promised to answer my questions last night.”
She sighs. “We found the washed out road, traces of blood on it, broken glass, one of the brother’s shoes. Then we found the car partially submerged in mud downstream. No bodies, but that doesn’t mean anything, as you must know by now.”
I nod. We could’ve walked away on our own, as I did, or walked away infected but still alive, as Brother Matthew did, or we all could have been carried away and eaten.
“Then there was the break in the wall,” she continues. “We found the house where you stopped. More blood, and this.” She reaches into her breast pocket and pulls something out and hands it over to me. It’s the photo of the little girl, Cassandra, the photo I’d found in the house just inside the Gameland wall. Shinji’s girl.
“Micah recognized your pants. He knew you were in trouble. He used that phone-thing and tried to call you.”
“His Link?”
She nods. “But he couldn’t get through. We were on our way here when you called him.”
“Pinged him.”
She frowns.
“It’s called pinging. Calling is like when someone’s standing across the room and you say his name.”
She smirks, like she knows better. But things have changed since she was a part of the world. “Pinging. Linking,” she says. “Anyway, we started heading for here. After you two linked or pinged or whatever you call it, I got worried. He was angry at being left behind, but also very worried. Then the connection got cut off and he couldn’t connect again.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 100
