She interrupted me before I could get to the important part. “You mean, your buddy, the traitor.”
“I’m not convinced he is, but that’s besides the point. He beat around the bush, but I think what he was trying to tell me was that there’s a chance I can still get pregnant. The likeliest explanation is that they inserted an IUD while they were busy removing half the organs from my torso. It would explain the lack of periods but mean it’s reversible.”
Her forehead creased as she considered the possibility. “You were conscious the entire time during the operation, right? Remember them putting you into stirrups and asking you to shimmy your ass farther forward?” she joked. When she saw that her humor was lost on me, she turned to look at the shelves. “I know I saw a box of disposable speculums somewhere here, so there’s that. But if they didn’t insert an IUD the conventional way, there might not be strings going outside of your cervix. Or they could have used any other kind of hormonal contraceptive.”
“Richards hinted it was something that someone with medical knowledge could find. And if you’re just trying to be nice about it, yeah, I’m aware that if you have to pry my cervix open, I’m likely going to scream my head off. I’m almost at the point where I can say with full conviction that I’ve been there, done it, and didn’t even get a T-shirt.”
She still seemed reluctant but then went to search for what she’d probably need. In hindsight, we should have done this before she cut my back open and sewed it shut again, but I hadn’t considered the ramifications. Even before she slapped on a new pair of gloves, Sonia hesitated. “Are you sure that you really want to do this?” she asked, quickly raising her hands when I looked at her. “Just saying, your body is in a shitload of stress right now. If it’s just an IUD, it’s a quick five-minute procedure that can be done pretty much anywhere, anytime. You may want to have life-affirming, scream-in-the-face-of-possible-death sex soon enough. I’ve known you for only a little over a month, and I can blindly tell you that your chosen lifestyle isn’t exactly conducive to getting knocked up and waddling around for the last few months of it.”
Her words made my heart sink, but not because I hadn’t considered all that and she’d just given me a much-needed reality check. Sitting up again, I fixed her with a serious stare, dropping all the joking and posturing and shit. “Sonia, if you were me, what would you do? I know that I’m dying. Maybe not today, and hopefully not tomorrow, but Hamilton was right with a lot of the shit he flung in my face. The same, if not more so, is true for Nate. Sure, if we had the time I’d say we forget about all this for now and bring bloody, violent vengeance down on those that have wronged us, and after a nice holiday afterward we’d maybe talk about it and plan our future together. But I don’t have that luxury. I may not even have enough time to bring a possible pregnancy to term, even if I get knocked up this week—and, yeah, I don’t quite see that happening with all the shit we keep stirring up. But if I want that chance, I have to jump on it now. Does it make me want to shit my pants? Hell, yeah, but all that pales in comparison to the likely chance that neither us will be around to raise the kid. It breaks my heart, and it makes me feel like crap that I’m going to have to foist it at someone who’ll likely resent me for it—”
I had to close my eyes for the last part and didn’t manage to finish the sentence as my throat closed up with all the grief and frustration the very idea brought up inside of me. I’d been through so much, had suffered through more than I’d thought I could possibly survive, and now this? Now the only thing that had kept me alive would keep me from what should have been my right by nature? Angry tears sprang to my eyes, but somehow I managed to blink them away. When I could focus again, I found Sonia staring at me with a weird look on her face, something I hadn’t seen there before and didn’t know what to make of—
The next moment, she was hugging me, hard enough that a pained wheeze left my body. She quickly shifted her grip upward to my shoulders but kept on squeezing. When she let go, she only did so to have me at arm’s length, still holding on to my upper arms. “Bree, you can be one stupid twat for a woman with that level of intelligence, and I say that with all the love I can muster for one of my husband’s best friends.” She followed that up with a real, surprisingly warm grin. “You won’t be alone, whatever happens. And you will have lots and lots of people who will help you. Even if the worst happens, your child will be loved and grow up with legions of aunts and uncles ready to teach him or her whatever you would have, and a million things you’d rather they keep to themselves. That should be the least of your worries.” She smiled. “Now lay back and spread ‘em like you mean it.”
“What’s that even supposed to mean?” I harped, but didn’t get an answer.
For the first time in forever, something went better than expected. A cough and a quick if uncomfortable moment later, Sonia informed me that in this one aspect, Red hadn’t been a deceiving liar. I stared at the IUD for a second before I told her to get rid of it, quickly getting dressed once more when an old, deeply buried horror came knocking at the backdoor to my soul again. I was more than ready to leave, and Sonia didn’t look ready to protest but halted at the door when I called after her.
“Wait. One more question.” She eyed me askance, so I went for it. “Why do you hate me so much?” Considering what we’d just gotten up to, I felt like I could stick to the real deal without the cushioning.
She frowned, and for a moment I was afraid she’d give me the most useless answer in the world—either that I should know, or that she didn’t, which was technically two answers but really, the two sides of the same coin—but then her expression evened out. She didn’t try to smile, and the way she gave me a brief up-and-down left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable—and judged.
“Do you want the truth?” she asked, her voice carefully neutral. “You have earned some of my respect, so I offer it to you, if you think you can take it.”
Spreading my arms—carefully—I muttered, “Let me have it.”
“As you wish.” She thought about what to say for a moment. “Do you have any idea how weird it was getting accepted into the community that your people built at the coast?”
I noticed all too well that she didn’t refer to it as my community. It hurt, even though I knew it was the truth and I had no right to freely include myself, even though all of my friends had welcomed me back with open arms. “They can be a rough bunch sometimes, but—”
“No, no,” she was quick to correct me. “All it took for them to welcome me was Tom telling them that I was here to stay. They are good folks, and they went out of their way to make me feel at home. It wasn’t anything they did. It was what was missing.” I had a certain feeling where this was going but kept my trap shut to get this over with quickly. Sonia was only too happy to oblige, crossing her arms over her chest as she went on. “Every once in a while, someone would tell a story, funny or sad, and suddenly shut up, with all the others acting strange but alike. I’ve seen people avoid opening up old wounds often enough to guess that it was grief over lost loved ones. But it didn’t add up, you see. Like how Zilinsky kept refusing to officially assume leadership. Or that half the comments that made everyone shut up were about possible future events, not something already long over. It wasn’t exactly hard to get the stories they didn’t tell from elsewhere, and then I started to realize what was actually going on. It wasn’t that their friends and leaders had died, no. They were hiding somewhere for whatever fucked-up reason, leaving an entire community bleeding and hoping for an event that wasn’t likely to ever come, while at the same time dreading that, one day, they’d get the news that it had all been for naught and you’re fucking dead. You didn’t just forsake them—you left them hanging, incapable of finding resolution. And then, one day out of the blue, you come waltzing in, expecting to find everything just as you’ve left it. You prattle off your half-hearted excuses and expect everyone to just buy them and forgive you. And they do, because that’s who they are. But do yo
u thank them for it? No. You keep doing your thing and you keep all of them at a distance whenever possible. You didn’t even stick with our team on the way in but jumped at the chance to get chummy with your army buddies. And the marines. And the drugged-up assholes. You even became best friends with a random stranger who—surprise!—ends up almost killing you. And the worst thing about it is the way you’re staring at me now, as if this is the first time you’ve heard this or even considered it. So, hell, yeah I think you’re a cunt, and you don’t deserve the loyalty my people are showing you. You may have earned it once, but you have done nothing since to keep it. Maybe think about that sometime. But, sure, they’ll keep helping you, and if you have a kid, they will lovingly raise it with stories of your heroic deeds. Maybe consider how much of that you can take into the great beyond with you. But no, I don’t hate you. I just don’t see what all the buzz is about you.”
I was still standing there, dumbfounded and with my mouth hanging half open with the response that my brain refused to formulate, when the door swung shut behind her.
Fuck, but sometimes I really could be an idiotic piece of shit.
Chapter 19
“I’m taking the wheel.” Nate looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head. I glared right back at him, not budging an inch.
“You just bled through your bandage,” he told me, his voice tight, nerves obviously at the end of the rope.
I offered him a humorless grin. “Yes, and it hurts twice as much as you’d think. Which means I can’t concentrate, and I can’t aim or hit for shit. But I can mindlessly accelerate and brake in sync with the vehicle right in front of me. If our intel is bad and we need to exit the car, I’m dead, anyway. If we get overrun, we’ll do a quick switcheroo and you’ll drive us out into sweet, sweet freedom. Until that happens, I need something to do to keep my mind off the pain. I’m taking the wheel.”
Surprisingly, Nate gave up after that. I doubted that he’d let me drive past the first leg of the journey—or whenever we’d take a break—but right now I was happy to run with any victory I could get. Our car was the smallest one, which afforded us the luxury of being just the two of us, the spare room stuffed to the roof with things from the lab. Our gear was already stashed away, and there was nothing left to do but get in and wait for the others to signal that they were ready.
I felt a certain kind of satisfaction as I climbed into my seat, and a hell of a lot of discomfort. Sonia had packed me a small cooler filled with the ice packs she’d found that would likely last me through the tunnels at the very least, and maybe even until tonight. I very much looked forward to the mix of heat and agony that waited for me after that.
Nate was silent and somber as he strapped himself in, doing a quick weapons check as if he expected we’d need them any time soon. I sure as hell hoped not, but better safe than sorry. Even with all the ammo we’d needed to clear the complex, we were taking enough with us that I was glad we likely wouldn’t have to walk. Provided we found our cars still where we’d left them, we’d be able to keep this vehicle to ourselves, and there wasn’t much need to double up for the others. We might even need to take a few breaks so those driving alone in a car could catch their breath. The plan was to get on the radio as soon as we got a secure line and see if we could rendezvous early with the rest of our people, or maybe ask for some of them to hang back so we could catch up. Vehicles would come in handy whatever we’d do next, and we’d paid for them with a lot of blood.
Since it looked like the others would take a while longer, I fished out a bag of nuts and chewed them meditatively, belatedly remembering to offer Nate some. He stared at the offending nuts with a grimace. “You have to eat something if you don’t want to make their work even easier for them,” I offered. No need to explain who I was referring to.
He hesitated and pushed my hand away. “I’ve… taken care of that.”
My first impulse was to ask “Who?” but I managed to swallow that. He looked tense enough that it didn’t sound like the smartest idea to possibly set him off. My, wasn’t I being all mature and diplomatic today? Sonia’s talk still sat vividly in my mind, making it a little easier to keep my trap shut—for now. “Glad you did,” I said instead.
Nate gave me a look that was one third surprise and two thirds guarded hostility, as if he had geared up for a fight and was now disappointed I hadn’t offered him the opportunity. If I’d felt a little less like death warmed over, I might have changed course now but instead kept munching on my nuts.
“Aren’t you going to ask who ended up on the menu?” he asked acerbically, leaning close enough that I could smell the fresh mint on his breath. Toothpaste—one of the few staples of the apocalypse we were still not about to run out of, and likely not for the next hundred years considering that baking soda made a great alternative.
I pointedly ignored him while I chewed and swallowed, then slowly turned my head to face him. We stared at each other from up close, and I couldn’t help but smile. No, the world wasn’t all roses and sunshine, but we were still standing, and right now, that was enough.
Also, very boring, so I flashed him a grin and asked, “Was it a juicy bit of ham or did you go for organ meat, maybe sliced liver?”
He answered me with a heavy sigh that did nothing to hide his amusement. “You are insufferable.”
“And that’s why you love me,” I quipped. “So, who was it? One of the guards? They were the last to go down. Lots of relatively fresh meat.”
Nate paused, and I could tell that, joking aside, he wasn’t quite comfortable with the subject. “Actually, more like crispy chicken,” he offered. “That’s probably the best analogy, considering we used to douse them in chlorine, too.”
It took me a few moments to make sense of that, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the news. “You went back into the hot lab and ate Stone?”
He didn’t look at me as he replied, instead pretending to check on the progress of the other vehicles. “I needed to confirm that he was dead for good. Which he was, and no sign of reanimation. I figured, possible other contagion chance aside, that would be my best bet, except for eating one of ours—and unlike what you love to accuse me of, I have a moral code, and that’s outside of even my boundaries.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. “I just wish you hadn’t taken the risk of possibly infecting the others with some shit from inside the lab.”
I got a less perturbed shrug for that. “I left the body in the decontamination shower after washing and slicing it up in the bathroom by the changing room inside the lab. I made sure to cook the meat to well-done before I ate it, using one of the Bunsen burners from the other labs. It tasted like shit but must have been enough since I stopped wanting to tear into anyone who happened to cross my path. I’d hoped I’d manage to hold out until we were back in the wild and try with some freshly killed game, but I didn’t want to risk it.”
As gruesomely fascinating as the entire topic was, that last part made me frown. “When exactly did you do this?”
He paused before admitting, “Last night.” Which accounted for some of the time he hadn’t spent attentively doting on me.
“Smart move,” I said, more because I figured he’d need to hear it than actually believing it.
Silence fell and quickly turned uncomfortable, making it easier for me to start blabbing my mouth off. “I have something to tell you as well.”
Nate cast me a sidelong glance. “If you’d wanted a slice of asshole instigator, you’d only have needed to ask.”
“Eh, I’m holding out for a juicy one, thanks,” I retorted. “Stone was too skinny for me. Maybe we can fatten one up just for that?” And because my mind got weird fast these days, the very idea gave me the creeps—but not because of the cannibal angle. “No, it’s something else. It’s something I should probably have asked you about before making the decision, but then it’s kind of my problem, really, and you’re the one who can, mostly, avoid it, if it goes completely against your gr
ain.”
When I checked Nate’s face, I found him frowning at me, confused and not exactly happy about it. “I’m a little too strung out to play your bullshit games right now,” he said, and it came out somewhat as a warning. Something inside of me wanted to make the warning bells go off, but I quickly reminded myself that I wasn’t the only one who had a reason to be mentally past their breaking point.
“Aren’t you curious about what Hamilton meant about the falsified report?” Nate kept staring at me, the intensity of his gaze willing me to just spit it out, so that’s what I did. “Raynor did exactly what he said. She switched up the physical orientation of everything that hadn’t been damaged before, or so I think. That’s why Marleen managed to give me a good scare and some great new scars on top of scars, but surprisingly little damage. What Raynor left out was that they fixed me up with an IUD. Don’t ask me why—maybe to use it as an incentive for blackmail or some shit. Or, more likely, she had orders to sterilize me but her scientific soul couldn’t go through with it as the idea of us possibly procreating in the future was too tantalizing.”
“That woman doesn’t have a soul,” Nate muttered. I wasn’t surprised that was the detail he chose to respond to.
“Anyway, Richards hinted at it, and when I made a passing remark about me possibly reproducing, Hamilton gave a start, pretty much confirming my guess. And since Sonia already had to have her hands inside my body, I asked her about it, and, well. Surprise! Or, really not that much. No idea if anything can, or will, come of it,” I explained. “But, yeah. Because we have no other worries in our lives and I have all my priorities absolutely, perfectly lined up, there’s that possibility now that I can get pregnant. I kind of thought I’d freak out about it when I realized what Richards was trying to tell me, but just like with that damn serum killing us, I think I’m getting pretty relaxed about all that shit. Chances are I won’t make it into next month, so even if you did manage to knock me up before that, we’d never know. The upside of that is, even if you don’t, I’d likely not get my period before that, either, so that’s a bonus.”
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