I open my eyes at the tap of soft footsteps, then shut them at blinding light. I try again, lifting my lids slowly until the glare becomes a small, sun-filled room, where I lie in a twin bed with blankets pulled to my underarms. I raise myself an inch, then drop at a tearing sensation in my abdomen and stare at the white ceiling. Now that the pain has awakened along with me, even breathing hurts.
Footsteps move to my bedside. A nun peers down, her black and white habit framing a pleasant, lined face. “Hello, Eric,” she says. “How are you feeling?”
I twist my head. The room has cream walls and a large wood-framed window with built-in shutters. A wooden desk sits against one wall, a dresser on another, and the pope smiles down from the framed picture above. A crucifix decorates the wall over my head.
I must be in Annunciation Monastery. Home of Kearney. I recall his face above the woman’s shoulder, and my heart pumps wildly. “Help me get out of here,” I whisper, as much from pain as the need for quiet. She’s a nun—she has to help. “They’re going to kill me. Just get me to the door. Any door.”
She rests her hand on my arm. “No one’s going to hurt you. I’ll get someone.” Her steps retreat through the open door and echo in a hall.
If she won’t help, I’ll find the door myself. I start with my bottom half this time. My left leg is heavy. Encased in something. I rub my right foot against the rough, hard exterior. A cast, possibly. It extends over my knee, and it puts any attempt at escape in the good luck with that department rather than the it’s worth a shot department.
A glass of water sits on a nightstand beside the bed, next to a silver IV pole. Nothing has ever looked more enticing than this cylindrical container of clear liquid. Raging thirst demands I reach for it, though I promise myself it’ll be my reward for completing the colossal task of leaving this bed.
I lift my head, kicking off my blankets with my right leg. IV in my right arm, no shirt, and a rubber tube that runs from under the bandage over my ribs to connect with a small bag taped to my side. A medical drain of some sort. My left leg is bent at a slight angle and swathed in hardened plaster cloth. I wiggle the toes that stick out from the end of the cast. A little pain but nowhere near the agony that is my core. None of it resembles me, as though my brain has been transplanted into a stranger’s body—a weak, fragile stranger.
I disconnect the IV line in my arm from the bag on the pole and roll over in small spurts. Every contraction of my stomach muscles brings a spike of pain to my middle. By the time I sit on the edge of the bed, I’m drenched with more sweat than the glass has water. I need a drink before I attempt to stand. I pull the glass with the tips of my fingers until I get a grip. A bolt of pain flashes sudden as lightning, and I drop the glass to the floor, where it shatters in what might be the loudest crash in the history of the world.
I slide my cast-encased left leg to the side and bend toward the floor with a suppressed scream, then grab the largest glass shard in the puddle of water and straighten with a grunt. Against all common sense, I get to my feet—or foot—heart pumping fast. I’m too dizzy to make the door. What I thought was underwear is an adult diaper. I’m wearing a fucking diaper.
A Bible, an assortment of vials and syringes and medical things, and a small pile of folded clothes sit on the desk. My clothes. My left leg protests when I test stepping forward with my right. My abdomen wails. I make the five steps and lean a hand on the desk surface while I hold my innards with the other. Maybe they’re not going to fall out, but they sure as shit feel like they are.
Forget good luck with that. More like no chance in hell.
But I refuse to die in a diaper. I rip it off and pull my boxers from the clothes pile, then carefully lower to the desk chair and get my right foot in. Left foot requires I bend almost double, and the pain is sharp enough to see black. When my vision clears, I pull the boxers to my knees. Fabric tears as I yank them over the thigh area of my cast, until, finally, my ass is covered.
Fast-moving footsteps close in. I grab the glass shard from the desk and use the back of the chair to stand. The room tilts. I’m as ready as I can be.
But I’m not ready for who steps through the door beside the woman from the other day. He stops to look me over, his smile wide and his five o’clock shadow neat as ever. I last saw—heard—Guillermo in what I thought was Hell, and maybe I’m hallucinating again.
“Guillermo?” I whisper.
Guillermo’s laugh is loud. Real. “Yeah, man.” He comes forward to hug me. Though he’s gentle, I grit my teeth so as not to yelp.
“You should be in bed,” the woman says. Her long, dark hair is loose. She wears a college sweatshirt and a disapproving expression. “What are you doing?”
“This is Doctor Gupta. Everyone calls her Anaya.” Guillermo reaches for my hand, where I clench my forgotten piece of glass. “You don’t need this. It’s all good.”
I don’t doubt he tells the truth, though it doesn’t make it easier to believe. “But Kearney…” I cough on my words and grunt as my stomach muscles clench. My throat is as sore as the rest of me.
“Joe saved my life. Crazy, right?”
Joe Kearney saved Guillermo’s life. Maybe this is some version of Heaven. Purgatory. The room tilts a little more, and I lose my hold on the chair. Guillermo catches me under the armpits and helps me to the bed. By the time he pulls up the blankets, I only want to curl in a ball and sleep off this torture.
I wipe sweat from my face and find another tube taped to my cheek. I give it a tug. It pulls at my nose, makes me gag deep in my throat. Every part of my body has something foreign, something not right. I don’t want any of this. I don’t feel like myself, as though I did die on the water. I want it off me. Out of me.
The doctor—Anaya—rushes to take hold of my hands. “It’s a feeding tube. That’s all it is. Don’t pull. We’ll take it out as soon as we can.” She looks over her shoulder at Guillermo. “Hold down his hands.”
I shake my head, tears welling. Now that I know, I won’t pull at it, but I don’t have the energy, the voice, to explain.
“Sorry,” Guillermo whispers, pinning my arms while she moves away. The pity on his face is worse than the pain. At least until my chest hitches with a sob I don’t expect, and a fiery misery blazes beneath my ribs and spreads to ignite every nerve. I ride it out until it begins to subside. But the promise of more is right there, and I moan at the subsequent spike of pain. There’s no way to relieve it, nothing to do but lie here like a bug pinned through the middle while still alive.
I wish I had died.
Anaya returns and bends to the IV tubing. “I know it hurts,” she says. “This’ll help.”
The antidote to agony rushes up my arm and sweeps across my chest. It tackles my brain, wrestles the fear into submission. I let out the breath I’ve been holding. My tense muscles melt.
“Rest,” Anaya says, as if I could do anything else.
60
When I wake, Guillermo is seated in my desk chair. I try to moisten my mouth to speak, but there’s not a drop of moisture to be found. He leaps to his feet. “You want the doc?”
I shake my head. “Water?”
My voice is barely a whisper, but he produces a water bottle. I raise a shaky hand to my face to check for that tube. Gone, thank God, though the IV is still in my arm, and my middle still feels run over by a tank. Guillermo places the bottle in my hand. It slips through my fingers to the bed. He picks it up and waits until I have a solid grasp before he lets go. Raising my head a few inches hurts like hell, but I manage to swallow a gulp from the bottle’s spout before I have to lie back again.
“Here, let me get you another pillow.” He lifts one from the floor beside the bed and helps get it settled. I take another sip and nod my thanks, though what I really want to do is rage at my total frailty and dependence on him.
Guillermo sits in his chair with a smile. “We couldn’t believe it, man. We saw the flare and thought we should check it out. And there you w
ere. Joe and I brought you back here.”
I can’t wrap my head around the Kearney thing, so I stick to what I do understand. “We thought you were dead.”
“No one thought that more than me.” He claps his hands. “Came back to life, same as you. Anaya works miracles.”
“Rissa’s alive,” I say. “Or she was the last time I saw her, when Walt came to StuyTown the other day.”
Guillermo takes the news less enthusiastically than I thought he would. “Not the other day. You’ve been out for two weeks.”
My weariness lifts some at this news, in what might be as close to panic as my body can muster. “Two weeks?”
It’s been so long that if Walt planned to kill them, they’re dead and gone. Rissa could’ve made it out at some point, met up with Sylvie and the others, but I don’t know that anyone made it out. Guillermo’s glassy eyes are almost too much to take when my emotions feel as raw as the rest of me.
“You got sepsis. We’ve been dying to talk to you, but you were bugging out hard. Seeing spiders and shit.”
The spiders. Those were fun. After the web, I felt the presence of looming spiders. Always just out of sight, with only a flash of thick hairy black legs in the corner of my vision.
A high-pitched noise comes from outside the closed door, followed by a scratching sound. “All right, I’m coming,” Guillermo says, and rises to open the door. “Your buddy wants to see you.”
Bird strolls in. There’s no doubt it’s Bird with his messy black splotch and his big dark eyes. He trills out a meow and trots to my bed. A second later, he’s on the blankets and settling into the space between my left arm and side.
“He kept sitting on your chest,” Guillermo says. “Anaya made us lock him out. He sat there meowing all day, so we had to put him in the school with the kids.”
Bird was mainly Sylvie’s cat, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he purrs. I don’t care that it hurts—I lift my arm to scratch around his ears until his eyes narrow with pleasure. “Hey,” I say, my own eyes stinging. “How are you? We missed you.”
If Guillermo thinks it’s weird I’m talking to a cat, or barely holding back tears, he doesn’t let on. “He showed up about a week after Walt, like he knew we were here. All the kids love him.”
“Thanks for taking care of him.”
“I couldn’t let him die.” Guillermo leans across me and scratches under Bird’s chin in a practiced manner. “You believe he stayed with me the whole time I was healing? Wouldn’t leave my side, except to eat and take a crap on the lawn. I called him my therapy cat. Still funny looking, though, aren’t you?”
Bird purrs, and I smile because laughing might kill me.
Anaya enters wearing a different college sweatshirt and a ponytail, but her assessing gaze is every inch a doctor. “I had a mentor who used to call patients like you The Comeback Kid Cases. You’re a lucky guy.”
She holds out a hand, which I shake. “Thank you for all of this,” I say.
“Thank Joe and Guillermo. They got you here. And thank yourself—if you hadn’t been in such good shape, you wouldn’t have survived.” She turns to Guillermo. “Can you give us a minute? I want to examine him.”
“He can stay,” I say. I’m afraid that if he leaves, it’ll all be a dream and he’ll never return.
Anaya nods. “In case you forgot, I’m Anaya Gupta. I was an ER physician, if you’re wondering about my qualifications.”
“I think they speak for themselves.”
She smiles, though she’s all business as she pulls down the blankets. Bird leaves for the end of the bed, where he watches with his tail curved over his feet. Under the bandage on my chest, a mass of scar tissue is an angry-looking deep pink and bigger than I imagined. The tube jutting from my skin beside it makes me woozy. “It looks good,” she says. “We had to remove the badly infected skin, which is why the wound is larger. I think the tube can come out today. Do you want to do that now?”
“Sure,” I say.
She has me breathe deep several times and then proceeds to pull a good length of tube from the flesh by my ribs. It doesn’t hurt, but it does feel like she’s going to yank out my guts along with it. Guillermo groans. “I could do zombies all day, but that—no way.”
“You could barely handle your one wound, and it looked better than this.” Anaya presses all around my incision. Though she’s gentle, I wince at every touch. “The infection is gone, but you have injured muscles and fascia. My best guess is that the knife nicked your liver. It would account for the blood, and a small cut could’ve coagulated on its own. Exploratory surgery was out of the question, of course, so we gave you fluids and antibiotics, and we prayed.”
“Thank you,” I say again.
“No problem. Half an inch deeper, and you would’ve bled out before we could help you. Now, your leg. I’d guess you fractured your tibia. Without x-rays, it’s hard to say if it’s complete or incomplete. Either way, it’s nondisplaced, meaning the ends of the bones stayed together, which is a good thing. We have crutches you can use—no weight on that leg until I say so. You need to rest for a few weeks, at least, for both your injuries. A month or two would be better.”
My heart drops, though my head tells me I shouldn’t be surprised at this news. “I need to get back to the city.”
“You risk your liver bleeding again, or the incision opening up, as well as your bone not healing correctly.” She doesn’t say what we both know—that I can barely leave this bed, much less cross a bridge into Manhattan. “You can’t get there, anyway. You’re lucky you came when you did. They rescued you just in time.”
Guillermo nods, hand on his chin. “Mobs are back. We’re stuck.”
The nuns bring me soup while Guillermo and I talk. I’ve already given them a general overview of what happened to us, and Guillermo’s in the process of telling their story. Kearney is off to the side, perched on the desk, and I try to align this guy with the Kearney I know. Or thought I knew. In a day full of odd happenings and revelations, this is by far the oddest.
Walt played us off each other the entire time. Kearney was at the monastery when Walt attacked our convoy to JFK, after which Walt took Sacred Heart’s families hostage, then trapped Kearney and his few men in the monastery while he attacked Sunset Park.
“I knew there was something wrong with him,” Kearney says, “but I didn’t know how fucked in the head he was until then. Once we got past the guards, it was too late to warn you.”
“I hid in the lobby of that building, passing out from blood loss,” Guillermo says, lowering the waist of his pants to show me the bullet scar on his hip. “All I could think was at least the Lexers wouldn’t get me. Then Joe comes busting through the door, and I’m thinking I’m dead, but he got me back here with Dennis and Susan, and their boys.”
“Did you tell Susan about Emily?” I ask.
“Yeah. She’s going to come up later. Anaya said everyone had to chill out with bothering you.” I start to argue, and he waves a hand. “She has to say that, but she knows no one’s going to listen.”
I take a sip of broth as he continues, “Anyway, so they put me in a truck to come here, with Susan and Dennis. A while later Joe comes back, saying Sylvie shot him.”
I choke on my soup. “She didn’t know,” I say to Kearney. “You had your gun out.”
“I had it out so she wouldn’t shoot me. Thought it would buy me a minute to explain.” There might be a glint of amusement in Kearney’s eyes, though his lips are flat as ever beneath his mustache. “Good thing I had a vest on. Anaya dug one slug out of my armpit. The others were straight to the chest.”
I hide my smile. Sylvie would be proud. “Sorry about that.”
Kearney shrugs. I see he hasn’t taken up the art of conversation.
“You know those people you ran across in Queens?” Guillermo asks.
“The ones who shot at me?”
“Yeah. They joined up with Walt and whoever he brought from StuyTown.”
>
“By the time we met them, they were up to a hundred people,” Kearney says. “They disappeared right after Walt came to Sacred Heart, saying he left them because he was scared. Most of the people who came after that were his, but they pretended not to know each other. They planned it that way. Bided their time.”
Between Guillermo and Kearney, they paint a picture of a supplicant man eager to please, who was slowly turning people against Kearney without his knowledge. When Denise arrived at Sacred Heart, she told stories of how we worked the residents unfairly and of our plans to steal all the food in Brooklyn. People tend to believe the bad stories—we did the same.
Kearney disliked Walt, which only gave Walt’s act more credence. Late winter, Kearney planned to move people and food to the monastery if there was one last freeze. Walt figured it out and the rest of his plan went into action.
After Walt took over Sunset Park and the zombies thawed, they were unable to leave the monastery, except for a few brief forays on foot to search for survivors, until the day Walt attacked StuyTown. He likely moved the Lexers to reach the water, which motivated the mob here to briefly disperse and allowed Guillermo and Kearney to reach me. At the same time, Dennis and Susan checked and found our old Safe Zone still under guard.
“What about Emilio?” I ask. “I didn’t see him at StuyTown.”
Kearney shifts in place, expression darkening.
“We think he’s still here,” Guillermo says. “He’s as bad as Walt. Maybe worse. He’s—”
“He’s a piece of shit who abuses women,” Kearney interjects.
Sylvie, Grace, and Indy sensed something off with Emilio. They called it immediately upon meeting him at Sunset Park. I wanted to wipe that smirk off his face before; I wouldn’t mind shoving a knife into it now.
“We found where they moved the bodies a while ago.” Guillermo runs a hand down his cheeks to his chin. “Anaya said not to upset you, but you need to know. Some of them were shot, but we couldn’t tell if anything else was done to the women.”
The City Series (Book 3): Instauration Page 42
