“Ziv.”
“What?” he grunted between puffs, trying to light the two hundred year old material.
“Nothing. Just … nothing.”
In front of me, one of the guys on the boat stared right at me, in that weird way people in paintings do. I’m sure my exhaustion didn’t help, and I swear he started talking to me.
“Go ahead, quit. We never did.”
“But I’m so goddamned tired!” I said aloud, and Ziv stared at me, shook his head, and went back to smoking his cigarette. The painting didn’t answer me, and even though I knew it wasn’t accurate, the hardships of those American soldiers, in the bitter, freezing cold, called out to me.
Duty, Honor, Country.
Maybe I wasn’t done.
Epilogue
I sat with Brit on the tenth floor of Upstate Medical Center, in the heart of Syracuse, the Advanced Prosthetic Development Lab. The APDL had been one of the first departments stood up after the Zombie Apocalypse, because, well, the standard treatment for a bite was amputation, and there were a lot of them. Myself included, and now Brit.
She was getting used to the new hand, and I was getting tired of her jokes.
“Look, I’m Furiosa!” she said when she first got it. “Will be my Mad Max?”
Now she took a metal canteen cup in her hand, and squeezed. The cup crumpled under her grip, leaving imprints of her metal fingers on it.
“This,” she said, brushing a stray red hair from her face, “is pretty fraking cool! Not only can I steal your soul, I can CRUSH IT!!!!!”
“Would you calm down?” I laughed.
“Listen here, Mister ‘Save the country’ Captain America, you have met your match, for I am now THE WINTER SOLDIER!” and she threw back her head, laughing hysterically.
She would be ok. Still batshit crazy, but OK.
The End
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Bad Company: Zombie Killers 8 Page 14
