Catharsis

by Adrienne Lecter

  He got a flat stare back for that. “You’re her husband.”

  “But not her keeper. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  I was sure I heard someone snicker in the background—Burns, probably—and Parker did some bona fide squirming as he explained. “If anyone’s seen her naked, that would be you. When, you know…”

  I wouldn’t have put it past Nate to make him finish that sentence, but his sigh of exasperation let me know that he was worried for real rather than just annoyed. “Really? When exactly would we have been getting it on when we’re all practically living on top of each other, it’s freezing cold even when the sun is out, oh, and let’s not forget that the entire continent is teeming with the undead. And even if we didn’t give a shit about all that, I sure as hell wouldn’t let her strip naked if all we needed was to peel away the layers from a very limited area.” He chuckled at Parker’s abashed look. “You’re just as bad as she is, sometimes.”

  I would have snorted if my throat would have let me.

  Nate’s gaze dropped to my eyes. The hint of a smile crossed his features as he looked back up to Red. “She’s definitely lucid.”

  “How can you tell?” Red peered into my face, puzzled.

  “Because that was the look in her eyes that she gets when she’s ribbing me.” He focused on Parker. “Give her something to break the coma’s lock on her. Then you can ask her yourself.”

  Red nodded, but Parker was still hesitating. “You know what happens if I pump her full of adrenaline. I can’t just put her under again once she’s back in control of her body. It looks like she has an infection, and that means I’ll have to cut into her. You don’t want her fully responsive for that.”

  Anything was better than this hell. I sure wasn’t the only one thinking that, as before I could even try to relate that thought to Nate, he was already voicing it. “Without knowing where the infection might be coming from, it’s not like you have any choice. Besides, you don’t get it. You’ve never been in that state. I have. Get that adrenaline shot. I’ll take full responsibility.”

  “Do it,” Red affirmed, drawing a hostile stare from Nate for that.

  I would have laughed, but just then Parker rammed a needle into the side of my neck, and ten increasingly less sluggish heartbeats later, I sat up with a loud gasp, first feeling alive, then like my heart was coming right out of my chest.

  “Easy there,” Parker crooned, pushing at my shoulder, but I was so not going to lie back down.

  “Lie down,” Nate insisted, a lot less gentle than Parker as he shoved my other shoulder backward. Looked like I was going to lie back down after all. My pulse was still galloping as I stared at the ceiling above me, the dancing shadows of the fire nearby twisting my mind this way and that. Or maybe that was the adrenaline continuing to mess with me.

  “What the—“ I panted, barely finding the energy to speak. Roused I might be, but not quite over that shit.

  Before I could do more, Nate was leaning in, making it impossible for Parker to do the same. “You heard all that? Just nod, that’s quicker.” I gave a light jerk with my head. “Good. Your take on that? Falling into that half-coma can be a sign of exhaustion as well, but today wasn’t that bad, and you’ve been eating enough. Enough extra to put on some weight. Do you agree with me on that?”

  I nodded.

  “Any injuries you’re aware of?”

  That was much harder to answer, and it took me a good ten seconds to order the thought fragments zipping through my mind to form a coherent sentence. “I’m a little banged up, but nothing serious.” But that wasn’t true. Breathing out slowly—which really was a series of shallow pants—I did my best to steel myself. “My left middle finger’s acting up. I think Raynor was a little too optimistic about just clipping off the very top and removing the nail.”

  Nate glanced at Parker, but the medic shook his head. “Might become an issue if it turns color, but not enough to cause a fever that high. With the serum working full-strength for weeks, her entire hand would have had to rot away to cause sepsis on a level to kickstart a systemic response.”

  And right there we had the likely cause. Talking was hard enough that I waited for them to figure it out. They were smart guys. Eventually, they would.

  Red was the one to go for it first. “You think she still has a latent infection from before?”

  Parker shrugged but didn’t look doubtful at all. “It makes the most sense.”

  “But why now?” Nate interjected. “I’ve spent the better part of a week cleaning her wounds until not a single one was swollen or warm, with no pus leaking out for more than a day.”

  “Something deeper,” I croaked out, drawing their attention back to me. Easily ignored I wouldn’t be, even though I could so have done without all this. “Raynor said she expected my immune system to take care of it all. Must have missed something. Had weeks to fester and spread.” And my, wasn’t that a lovely thought. Suddenly, lying still was getting increasingly harder, my fingers itching to grab the next available knife and cut into myself until I could get it all out!

  Nate’s fingers wrapped around my left hand, partly hidden from view by how our bodies were aligned toward each other, and squeezed. It wasn’t much—and made me all the more aware that I wasn’t feeling part of my middle finger anymore—but it helped a lot to center and calm me down. Breathe. I just needed to breathe, and it would be all right.

  “Anything still sore?” Parker asked, rather unhelpfully. “If it’s infected enough to cause fever, you should be feeling it, at least as a diffuse ache.”

  I stared at him as if he’d gone mad. “Want to ask me the scale question?” He frowned, so I explained. “On a scale from one to ten, how much I hurt? Twenty, on a good day. Thirty, in the mornings. After an entire day of running, hiding, and fighting? Fifty going on infinity. But if I had to take a guess, somewhere on my right side, likely toward the back. That’s where the worst of the damage was.” I swallowed thickly. “Maybe my left thigh, but while that’s flaring up several times a day, it’s not a constant, diffuse ache, as you so succinctly put it.”

  Red snorted while Parker was hard-pressed to decide between being pissed off or just plain taken aback. Annoyed with their continuing inaction, I started peeling myself first out of the sleeping bag, then the layers on my upper body until I was in just the thick thermal that I could push up to my shoulders as I hunched over. “Take your pick.”

  Parker needed exactly five seconds and two prods to make me howl with agony. Bingo. “There’s some light subcutaneous bruising,” he noted as he squinted at my skin. I wondered if bruises could even show with all the scar tissue present around there. He had me lie back and prodded the side of my abdomen next. If before it had been bad, this was so much worse.

  “Liver or kidney,” Parker mused as he pulled back.

  “Don’t have a kidney there anymore, and half my liver’s gone. I think,” I helpfully supplied between clenched teeth.

  Red sounded surprisingly chipper when he surmised, “Only one way to find out.” He got a hostile glare from me for that, but he met it with an even one. “Or do you have a better idea?”

  I shook my head.

  When I looked at him, I found Parker chewing his bottom lip, clearly apprehensive. “I’m not a trained surgeon,” he offered when the guys noticed his hesitation as well. “Not that it matters much. The way your body works now, you either die, or whatever I do is, at best, helping just a little. And there’s only so much I can do in the first place.”

  Nate’s smirk wasn’t a friendly one. “Let me guess. The part that has you all twisted up isn’t that you’re afraid of not being able to do the job, but doing it without anesthetics, painkillers, or even a good old paralytic.”

  This just kept getting better and better. Parker shrugged. “I don’t have anything strong enough to knock her out. And Hamilton has the only two doses of paralytic. I presume you don’t want to go over and ask him for it?”


  I was sure that it was a waste of time, so before they could continue to hedge around, I put a stop to this. “Just do it. I don’t care. Either it’s something you can fix now, or I’ll likely be dead tomorrow.” That realization didn’t even shock me anymore. Everything becomes normal when it happens often enough. And it wasn’t like I’d said anything that everyone present hadn’t been thinking.

  “Where?” Nate asked Parker, briefly casting around. We were in the barn, out of sight of the others, who were bunking inside the farm house. It was as far from sterile as anything could get, barring me rolling in animal feces.

  Parker seemed to come to the same conclusion. “Over there. Spread a tarp over the packed dirt. If that keeps her from splitting her skull open as she thrashes, all the better. I’m not keen on spending the entire night on this.”

  Nate uttered a sound low in his throat that came close to a growl, but rather than go after Parker, he helped me get up. I didn’t expect a pep talk from him—after over a year and a half together, I knew him well enough to be aware that he didn’t believe in postponing the inevitable—but as I was half-standing, half-hanging on him, he pulled me closer, his lips briefly touching my temple. “You’ll get through this,” he whispered, low enough that only I could hear him. “It will be hell, but a long shot from everything you’ve already been through. Don’t forget that.”

  I was hard-pressed not to laugh in his face—maybe it was for the better that he didn’t do pep talks more often—but my throat closed up with emotion… and something else. So all I did was nod. By the time I lay down on the tarp, my middle bared, the skin from my ribs down to the partly covered crease of my hip smeared with iodine solution, the warm, fuzzy feeling was gone, leaving only fear. Parker did a last round of prodding, also to make sure that no other parts of me drew the same level of reaction, thankfully coming up blank.

  “How do you want to do this?” Red asked Nate, surprising me a little that he seemed ready to defer rather than insist on knowing better. Burns and Tanner were waiting nearby, none of them looking very excited but trying hard to hide it. Nate considered, weighing his options—probably literally.

  “Burns, you take her thighs and hips where you don’t get in Parker’s way. Those are her strongest muscles, and you have the most mass to keep her down. Richards and I will try to keep her head and upper torso down. Tanner, take her lower legs.” His gaze skipped to Parker, then back up my body, still calculating. “Stay sharp.” When he caught my curious look, he shrugged. “Depending on how exhausted your body is, it might not happen, but I give you a fifty percent chance that you’ll kick into overdrive, and then it will take the four of us everything we got to hold you down. Welcome to the joys of doing field surgery on the invincible.”

  I didn’t feel very invincible right then, but did my best to relax as I gave Parker the go-ahead. Nate put his left forearm across my upper chest, his fingers grabbing one shoulder while he leaned on the other, making it hard to breathe for a second. He also kept me from seeing anything except him or the rafters above. His other hand wrapped around the fingers of my left, waiting for me to squeeze back. It took them a little to get ready, and when Parker simply poked the marked part of my anatomy, making agony flare up and me, consequently, buck, it proved to be more than necessary to do some coordinating. Parker’s remarks about me smashing my own skull open echoed through my mind, the folded sleeping bag underneath my head suddenly feeling way too thin to cushion any impacts. Exhaling, I closed my eyes, waiting as my heart raced inside my chest. Trying to prep myself once for something like this had been bad enough. A second time? Impossible.

  Something touched my free hand—Burns, I realized, belatedly. If he wanted me to try to crush his fingers, I was only too happy to oblige him.

  “Let’s do this,” Parker muttered—and a second later, I felt the sharp bite of his scalpel. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep a whimper from escaping me. Everyone froze, including Parker, my panting the only sound.

  “Keep your hand over her mouth,” Nate told Richards. “If she bites off one of your fingers, you’re doing it wrong.”

  “Har har,” Red remarked, but did as he was told. I might have appreciated that under different circumstances, but Parker resuming made that pretty much impossible.

  I’d hated that paralytic that had turned me into a dead slab of meat on Raynor’s operating table with the kind of vengeance only reserved for very few people and even fewer things, but now I missed it. Enough that, less than a minute in, I was ready to plead with them to go ask Hamilton. Even if I had to crawl on my hands and knees myself to get it, that would be okay. But I couldn’t, because not only did Red’s iron grip on my jaw make sure that only very muffled sounds escaped me, no. It was impossible for me to plead with anyone or anything.

  So all I could do was try to push through the pain, and draw the next, inadequate breath through my nose. Breathe. Just breathe.

  Parker was quick, taking less than thirty minutes, which, all things considered, was bordering on a miracle. That was still a billion minutes too many for me. It was probably my saving grace that my heartbeat remained strong enough to keep me in a state of constant panic rather than drop and send me into shock or cardiac arrest, but it didn’t feel like that. Twice, I bucked hard enough that I almost threw Burns off, and Nate’s grip would have slipped had Red not pushed hard into both of us; but somehow, they managed to keep me mostly restrained. Parker’s near constant cursing told me that it wasn’t easy on him, but I had a certain feeling that he wasn’t quite the stranger to such circumstances. He’d sure been quick enough to switch to impersonal pronouns when he’d thought I’d already died.

  The pain didn’t lessen once the sutures were done and a bandage applied. It might even have increased as they let go of me, stepping away so I could curl up into a ball, trying but failing to lessen the strain on my abdomen and everything right through my body to my very spine. Shit, but that hurt. So. Fucking. Much.

  “Uh, what the fuck is going on here?” I heard Hill’s voice from somewhere near the barn door. “Guys, don’t give me a reason to beat you up. You know what the LT said…” He trailed off there as he stepped inside where he could see more. “LT? What are you doing in here?” Everyone was staring at Hill, motionless, except for Parker, who was busy pulling off the surgical gown and gloves, both appropriately bloody.

  If I hadn’t been one giant mass of agony, I would have started to laugh. Oh, the irony. Hill of all people, coming to my rescue.

  Nate and Red traded glances, the warning on Nate’s face clear. Richards looked down at me once more, likely to make sure that I was, after all, going to make it, before he turned to Hill. “Some post-surgery complications. You know how it is. Would be much obliged if you didn’t go around camp, telling everyone about this.”

  “Telling everyone about what?” Hill stammered, still reeling a little.

  “Exactly,” Nate answered for Red.

  Hill’s gaze dropped to me but I couldn’t read his expression, upside down and with my vision blurry with tears. “She going to make it?”

  Parker, finally done, nodded. “As things are, she was lucky. The infection was mostly in the interstitial space, no previously unaffected organ directly affected. Her liver’s somewhat inflamed but should be okay in a few days, now that there’s no necrotic tissue covering parts of it. She was right. It was likely some residual bacterial necrosis from the initial infection. It’s a surprise Raynor and her team managed to clean her up as much as they did. Lucky you.”

  Lucky wasn’t what I was feeling right then. Quite the opposite, really. As if almost rotting away once wasn’t enough. No, it had to come in stages. Rationally, I knew that this was likely the last I’d ever see of that, but with my body still hurting all over with every breath I took, it was hard to fight down the paranoia and panic. Although, right now, not having someone cut me up was already a huge improvement. Then again, I hadn’t really felt that lucky after Bates had died, cut to pieces by
the cannibals, and we’d officially given our merry band of misfits a name—the Lucky Thirteen. I hadn’t been sure whether Nate had meant that in a sarcastic way or not. The same was still true now. Lucky me, indeed.

  Hill disappeared after making a zipping motion over his mouth. Everyone else seemed ready to give me some space, but Nate remained by my side, conflicted. I could read that pinched look on his face even with serious distraction.

  “If that’s all—“ Parker started, but Nate held him back immediately.

  “Check her hand.”

  Ah, right. Part of me wished he hadn’t snatched up that tidbit, but I only put up minimal protest when Nate reached for my left arm and pulled it away from my stomach. Parker scrutinized it for a moment before he started touching the affected finger, first prodding, then getting out a fresh, sealed scalpel and lightly nicking the pad.

  “Not feeling anything there, huh?” he murmured more to himself than me. I shook my head. He did a few more nicks toward the knuckle, until I flinched. He continued to consider, turning my hand this way and that under his flashlight. “Might just be some residual bruising,” he offered eventually. “I lack the skill and knowledge. You felt your other fingers go numb before. You can probably better tell what’s going on than I ever could.”

  He didn’t need to tell me this. I also didn’t need a recount of what might happen if I ignored it for too long. Maybe.

  “Cut it off. Right to where the nerve damage has progressed. Still got the middle finger on my other hand to flip you morons off.” I didn’t even care anymore that my voice was shaking so hard I was surprised anyone could understand.

  Parker hesitated, but then got a fresh pair of gloves and wiped off the blade and my finger. “I could be wrong—“

  “Do it!” I screamed, way too loud for our damn undercover operation, making everyone jerk. Outside, I heard a flock of birds take flight, adding extra drama that I so didn’t need. Exhaling shakily, I caught Parker’s gaze, making sure that there was no doubt left on my face, even if my gut felt like it was sinking right into the ground underneath me. “Do it,” I repeated, calmer and more measured now. “I don’t have time to keep screwing with this. My body needs to heal, and it can’t heal if it has to fight infection over infection over infection. The loss of sensation is recent. I remember bumping the scars at the tip while training in the hangar, and it still hurt like hell. That was maybe two weeks ago. Now I can’t feel anything past the middle part. As much as I hate losing even a quarter of an inch from that finger, that’s still better than the entire finger, or more. Don’t make this any harder on me than it already is. Please.”