Catharsis

by Adrienne Lecter

  Huh. The fact that they’d also told Burns about that was telling—and a lot more impactful than I’d imagined. “He could have been lying,” I pressed out between gritted teeth, trying to hold on just a little longer.

  “Convinced that you were about to die? What use would that have been to him?”

  I made a face but didn’t continue to protest. He had a point there. “So exactly how do they see me?” I asked, this time for real.

  “In short, a wild card,” Burns explained. “They all know you’re a super-smart scientist. They know Raynor wanted you up there, and the rumor is, so you can together tweak the serum to do away with the side effects we all so love.” He offered up a brief, mirthless chuckle. “Nobody is comfortable knowing that they’ll likely take a handful of their best friends with them if they die. A lot of them would give their lives to put an end to that, maybe even literally. That’s why none of them ever tried to kill you, if you were wondering. Not at the factory, and certainly not at the base. From what I hear, your name’s been in the VIP rosters of who to preserve pretty much since the shit hit the fan.”

  I didn’t know how to react to that, so I chose to ignore it. “Do they also know that it was Bucky’s idiocy that almost cost them that chance?”

  “That has come up a time or two, usually in hushed tones, and quickly denied when someone else came in. Certainly rubbed a few people the wrong way. But you’re here now, so no reason to keep complaining. Or ask for a black eye.”

  That vindicated me a little, but it was a very small victory compared to the ramifications. “What good that does me, really.”

  Burns didn’t see it quite that glum, stepping away so I could drop down from the bar. He pointedly ignored my wince as I slowly opened and closed my fists to let the pain dissipate more quickly.

  “It just might.” When he caught my confused look, he laughed. “For you it’s a shit change for your life, no kidding. But to them, it equalizes the playing field. You can’t work in a lab anymore, but now you’re one of them. There’s a certain level of bonding that comes with shared fates. That’s something they can understand, and commiserate with.”

  “And the fact that I led a bloodthirsty mob, out to kill them?”

  “Depends on who you ask.” He chuckled. “A few are holding a grudge. A few come close to understanding. Not everyone was happy with the kill order that went out last summer. Most don’t really give a shit. They heard a lot about you that’s too wild to believe, and they’d much rather see for themselves. Hint—this is where you need to change your attitude. A lot.”

  I had to admit, he might have a point there. “And how exactly should I accomplish that? And, just saying, them laughing at me whenever possible doesn’t make it easy on me.”

  “Ego, girl. Leave it where it belongs—at the very bottom of your bag of tricks.” He gave me a critical look. “You think you can hold on to a barbell?”

  “If you spot me, why not?” What’s the worst that could happen? A few more bruises that would heal in a day or two wouldn’t kill me.

  “Then how about we go over there and give it a try. And when Hill and Murdock start shooting the usual shit, don’t turn into a prissy princess. Pretend they’re Martinez and Romanoff. Or, better yet, Bates’s twins. They both knew him, and if memory serves me, they got along really well.” He would know, having been really tight with Bates himself.

  I hesitated, but then inclined my head in agreement. What could possibly go wrong?

  At first, nothing, which was bordering on anticlimactic. Burns secured one of the benches for us with a rack to put the bar on, then had me bench press that without any additional weights on to test my grip. It had been quite some time—since last winter, actually, in the bunker—since I’d done any weight training that didn’t involve anything except my own body weight, and like with the pull-up bar, I needed a little to adjust to the fact that my right hand simply couldn’t manage the same grip strength as my left. I’d never noticed just how much of that depended on the last two fingers of my hand, but it kind of made sense—now that I had the comparison punching me in the face, whatever I did.

  “Okay, got it,” I declared when I managed the second set of twenty without a hitch.

  “Great. How much do you want to go for? Ten?” Burns suggested.

  “And let you accuse me of lifting like a girl? Hit me with twenty,” I shot back, grinning up at him. While I waited for him to fetch the weights, I pulled my knees to my chest, rounding my back to get some of the discomfort out of my scars. Hanging on the bar had strained the muscles of my lower back more than I’d thought at first—and I was sure that I’d do pretty much the same to my obliques and abdomen now. I was almost looking forward to having zombies snap at my face again—at least they left me the choice of what parts of my body to annihilate. I casually glanced over to the soldiers who were still diligently pumping iron, and while they were very focused on that, I didn’t miss how they kept watching us just as I was watching them.

  As Burns lugged the black weight plates over—quite casually, I had to admit—he paused behind them, eyeing their form critically. “Hill, you’re an embarrassment to mankind, anyone tell you that lately? Next you’ll have a hard time holding your plate up at the mess hall.” Considering Hill was easily pressing dumbbells weighing more than I did—likely in addition to what I was working with—that statement made me snicker in earnest.

  “You’re one to laugh, zombie girl,” Hill called over without missing a rep. “Haven’t seen you fetch anything from the galley that you didn’t threaten someone’s life over.”

  I felt my cheeks heat up a little, but I didn’t need Burns’s warning glance to swallow the ire coming up inside of me. “Hell, I was hungry,” I shot back. “I could have vaulted over that bar and gone right for that idiot’s jugular, too, but then one of you pretty boys would have shit himself, and who’d want to clean up that mess?”

  “Might have been an improvement on what they make us eat,” the second soldier remarked dryly.

  “True,” Hill agreed.

  “You really are a bunch of pussies,” I pressed out as I took the—damn heavy—bar from Burns. He let go but kept his hands hovering right underneath it, ready to catch it should one of my hands or wrists flag. “We lived half the first summer off cat food. Anything that’s not mouse-gut flavored tastes like chocolate now.”

  Hill laughed, like I’d cracked a really good joke, but the other guy—Murdock, I reminded myself, thinking I’d better start remembering their names, seeing as we were stuck together for a while—nodded slowly. “Yeah, I heard someone mention that before. Still better than bugs.”

  “Hey, don’t knock beetles and centipedes,” Burns offered. “Like crunchy meatballs with spaghetti.”

  “Ugh, you’re disgusting!” I grumbled, doing my best to go for a seventh rep, but then gave up. The moment he saw me grimace, Burns grabbed the bar and heaved it onto the rack, relieving me of my burden. I remained lying there, panting heavily, then started massaging my wrists as soon as my hands stopped aching worse.

  Murdock chuckled. “I’ll drink to that!”

  Burns ignored him, instead raising his brows at me. “You ready to do some actual lifting, or is your back still too sore for that?” My grip wasn’t bad, but quite obviously, I’d have a much easier time working my arm and chest muscles doing push-ups.

  “Only one way to find out, right?” I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to do exercises that ended with me sticking my ass out, but then lying flat on my back, grunting like a madwoman, wasn’t much better. Burns snatched the bar right off the rack as if it weighed nothing and put it on the floor for me. I hesitated for a second, but then threw caution to the wind and bent down to grab it for some deadlifts. The scars on my back complained, but that wasn’t the reason why the bar slipped from my fingers on the fifth repetition. Cursing under my breath, I shook out my hands, biting the inside of my cheek not to cry out loud. Why pushing worked well but lifting not so mu
ch was beyond me, but there was definitively room for improvement.

  “Here, try these.” I looked up in surprise, finding Murdock standing next to me, holding out a pair of black wraps. “Wrist straps,” he explained. “I use them to take some of the tension off my wrists. You wrap them around your wrists and the bar; creates a better connection. Not sure if that will make it harder or easier in your case, but doesn’t hurt to try, right?”

  I nodded slowly, hesitantly accepting the straps. Murdock bent over, showing me how exactly to get them around my wrists and the bar, helping me with the second. I couldn’t quite keep from tensing as he touched me, but he kept it to a minimum, stepping away as soon as everything was in place. I tried again, this time making it to eight reps, and setting the barbell down with only somewhat of a “plunk.”

  “Works well enough,” I admitted. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, even going as far as offering a small smile. Gee, we were getting downright chummy here.

  “What happened to your wrists? They look fine to me. Repetitive stress injury from too much mission report write-ups?”

  That made him laugh wholeheartedly. “Yeah, something like that.” He hesitated, but then went on. “Got myself captured on an infiltration job. Turns out, they didn’t joke about the sadistic bad guys being just that. When I wouldn’t talk, they grabbed a hammer—you know the small ones that you use for really tiny nails? Doesn’t look like much. Well, turns out, they’re awesome for smashing all the bones of the hand into tiny bits as well.” I couldn’t help but wince, but he went right on, his left hand idly digging into the fleshy part of his right palm below the thumb. “Funny thing is, those healed up well enough, but the nerves went a little haywire. That’s why I use the straps for lifting. You can keep those, I have plenty more.” He paused, carefully studying my face for a moment. “It was your husband who got me out of there, and who was smart enough to tie compression bandages around my hands to keep everything together until they could get me to surgery. I won’t ever forget that, whatever else went down.”

  I took that with the nod of acknowledgment he was clearly waiting for. “He sometimes has his moments. Don’t worry, I won’t tattle on you. His ego’s already inflated enough.” Right then, I was sure that Nate could have done with some positive reinforcement of his previous actions, but what was a white lie between barely-acquaintances?

  “Thanks.” Murdock laughed, then cast a quick look in Hill’s direction, who was still busy working his tree-trunk arms. “Hey, I’ve noticed that your bunch are usually doing your sprints alone all through the day. Wanna race us? We do them at 2000 each evening. A little betting between friends never hurt anybody.”

  I was tempted to agree just to get the chance to annihilate some of them—I still wasn’t close to my previous speed, but how fast could a lumbering hulk like Hill get?—but left it at an uneasy shrug. “Thanks for the offer, but I have a certain feeling that might end with knocked-out teeth and someone bleeding out on the floor. But I’m happy to race both of you any time. Just ask Burns how great it feels when a tiny woman makes you eat the dirt cloud she kicks up in her wake.” I half-turned to grin at Burns, who shook his head at me.

  “Nice tat, by the way,” Murdock remarked, almost too casually. I couldn’t help but stiffen, the need to pull down my tank top so that my lower back would be covered strong, but there really was no sense in that. Instead, I tried my best at a casual shrug.

  “One of a kind. Well, one of twelve, really, but I’m the only one who got it down there.” Unless they were blind, they already knew that both Nate and Burns had theirs higher up on their spines, just underneath their three Xs.

  “Yeah, about that,” Murdock started, briefly glancing at Burns but then going on to me. “Why Thirteen? So much more you could have done with Twelve. Like Dozen.”

  Burns’s remark from back when he’d tortured me with the pull-up bar blazed red-hot across my mind, but I did my best not to appear too cautious as I gave a casual shrug. But why did this conversation have to slide into minefield territory like that? If that was even the case. I had a really hard time reading both Murdock and Hill, who’d stopped pretending to work out and was listening from his perch on the inclined weight bench next to Burns.

  “Well, first off, it wasn’t my idea,” I offered. “They marked up our very special nutcases first, and back then that excluded me. Only got to sign on the dotted line when I did my dramatic ‘thanks, but I’ll stick with my guys rather than take over your snazzy lab bunker’ stunt.” The memory made me smile, as usual. “But it made sense, to all of us. Bates might not have been alive anymore, but none of us would have ever thought of not considering him part of our team. And considering how much of a countdown that turned into, it really doesn’t matter in hindsight.” That last part came out a little bitter, but I tried to hide that behind a small smile. I had no idea where the two soldiers had been during either of the clashes we’d had with their side.

  Murdock gave a nod that was bordering on grave, making me wonder whether that was just about Bates, or the general loss of life—something I knew he had to be familiar with in that line of work.

  “How did that happen, anyway?” Hill asked when the moment threatened to turn a little too heavy. “Bates, I mean. He could be quite the idiot, but he was a careful fucker, most of the time.”

  “He literally wasn’t.” Burns chortled, but at my hard look shut up. Some things really didn’t need to be stressed—and better went forgotten if they weren’t aware yet who Sadie’s baby daddy was.

  “He was stupid, all right,” I said, trying to turn the conversation around. That part fit just as well to Burns’s slip, even though I hated to have to recount it now. “He and I, we were out together. We were scouting that cannibal compound over in Illinois. Our quadrant was supposed to be too far out for us to get into any danger, or else Miller wouldn’t have sent me with Bates. We were checking out a plateau below a ledge, and he must have heard something, because he left me there to go take a dump. When he didn’t come back, I tried to check on him, but by then the sneaky fuckers already had him. They were too dumb to find me, and I managed to alert the others. But by then they’d already started taking him apart limb from limb. We had to wait until he bled out and turned because we needed that distraction to overcome their superior numbers. We killed every last fucker down there, for all the good that it did him. It was my shotgun slug that took him out in the end. That was the least that I owed him for saving my life.”

  Hill looked a little skeptical while Murdock nodded. Burns, of course, couldn’t leave it at that. “You forgot the part where you hopped in the back of one of their trucks to get close enough for radio contact with us, jumped right off that when they got close to their compound, and did some damn fine sniping from a good distance when our distraction struck. My favorite part was when you went batshit crazy on the fuckers with your shotgun.”

  I couldn’t help but sneer at him. “Yeah, you would know. You covered my back and let me do all the actual shooting.” Burns’s only response was a shit-eating grin, making me roll my eyes at him. Turning to the soldiers, I did my best at a neutral shrug. “What can I say. Must have done something right, or else that gang of misfits wouldn’t have accepted me as their co-leader. Just if you were wondering, I didn’t get that job just because I’m screwing the boss.”

  “Actually, for some that was a black mark on your ledger,” Burns had to supply, chortling with mirth. “Cho was so fucking annoyed. I think it took him weeks to get over it.”

  That was news to me, and I didn’t do a thing to hide that. “He didn’t live much longer than a couple more weeks.”

  “Death’s great for giving up grudges,” Burns replied, his tone a little softer than before.

  “Why didn’t he ever say anything to me?” I had been wondering about their acceptance, of course, but seeing as leadership had always been an easily defined thing for us—Nate in all tactical situations, and the
rest was usually unanimous—I’d never openly questioned it.

  Burns huffed, then let out a soft laugh when I kept looking expectantly at him. “You’re serious? And get chewed out by you in front of everyone? I’d rather try telling Zilinsky that she’s a frail woman, and women can’t fight—and then try to survive the fallout. Come to think of it, same counts for you. I think I’d prefer her beating me up. She’s not such a damn resentful bitch.”

  I silently sneered at him for that, but left it uncommented. Turning back to Murdock, I tried myself at a casual shrug, but this time it was tense. We were kind of toeing a line there, and just because Burns had started it didn’t mean I wouldn’t get caught up in the fallout. Yet both Hill and Murdock took that statement with the stoic ignorance all of them had been showing me over the past week, for the most part.

  “So she really settled down?” Hill wanted to know, taking the easy way out. “Never thought that would happen.”

  Murdock laughed. “Yeah, you also bet a bottle of damn fine tequila that Miller would never lose his head to a set of nice tits and a juicy ass, and yet here she is.” He actually had the audacity to wink at me, so I didn’t tell him what I thought of that assessment. That statement really could have come from Bates.

  “Yeah, what can I say,” I offered. “I’m such a catch.” That made all three of them laugh, just as I’d intended—and nicely defused what was left of the residual tension. That sent our banter right into a lull, but it wasn’t really awkward like before. Turning back to my barbell, I picked up Murdock’s straps to get ready for another set. “Well, as much as I’d love to keep chatting, I have some actual work to do. Else, how will I keep juicy European shamblers from tearing off your pretty faces?” I got a round of chuckles for that, and both soldiers admitted that they were overdue to hit the showers. Burns sauntered over to me to give some more or less useful notes on my posture, but the slight smile on his face let me know that I’d done good.