Backwoods (19 page)

“I’ll hurry, I promise.” Dani leaned over and
stroked O’Malley’s close-cropped hair, speaking as much to him as
to Andrew, even though the young corporal was pretty much
incoherent now, oblivious to her.

Dani rushed from the room, leaving Andrew
standing beside the bed, uncertain. Semi-lucid, O’Malley moaned
weakly. Not only did his breathing sound strained, but Andrew
realized it sounded moist
,
sodden somehow, like maybe when
he’d vomited, he’d aspirated some of his own bile and now it
churned and frothed with every labored inhalation.

“It’s going to be okay,” Andrew told him,
feeling obliged to say something at least remotely comforting, if
only for his own benefit.

O’Malley turned his head weakly to one side.
As he did, a thin stream of frothy, pale foam dribbled out of his
mouth, down his cheek and onto the bedspread.

“Oh, hey,” Andrew said, eyes widening in
abrupt panic. He darted to the bathroom and grabbed the first towel
he found. Rushing back into the bedroom, he crammed it against
O’Malley’s mouth, trying to tuck it beneath his head without
getting any of the vomit on his hand.

O’Malley groaned. This turned into a low,
warbling croak, a nasty, visceral sort of belch, then he convulsed
sharply on the bed, spitting out a sudden, thick spray of bile all
over Andrew.

“Shit!” Andrew recoiled in disgust, holding
his arms out impotently in the air, watching as more of that
mucous-like emesis dripped from his now soaked sleeves. The front
of his shirt clung to his chest, sopping and stinking. “Shit.”

O’Malley uttered another of those throaty
cawing sounds, ending abruptly in a gulp as he spewed again, this
time splattering Andrew’s shoes.

“Jesus,” Andrew said, seizing a waste can
from across the room and shoving it unceremoniously beside the bed.
“Here, man. Get it in this.” He tried to get his arm around
O’Malley, the sour stink of stomach acid making his own gut roil.
He could feel more of those weird, knot-like growths on the
Corporal’s back through his shirt.
What the hell are those,
boils or something? Tumors?

“Lean over the side of the bed.” Grunting, he
tried to lug O’Malley closer to the edge of the mattress. It was
like trying to drag a fallen telephone pole out of the middle of
the road. “Help me out here.”

When O’Malley hurled again, this time he hit
the can, much to Andrew’s relief. He also seemed to emerge somewhat
from the haze of semi-consciousness into which he’d lapsed, and he
blinked up at Andrew, vomit hanging in dangling, thick strands from
his chin, his eyes glassy and dazed.

“Hurts,” he groaned, spitting weakly, trying
to dislodge those tenacious strings of phlegm.

“It’s alright.” Moved with sudden pity,
Andrew pulled the towel loose from beneath him and tried to wipe
his mouth. O’Malley’s skin felt like molten wax, blazing with heat,
sticky with sweat and spattered bile. “Hang on.”

Andrew left the bedside, hurrying to the
bathroom sink. Turning the cold tap open full blast, he stuffed the
towel into the basin, letting it soak up the water. Carrying it,
soaked and dripping between his hands, he returned to O’Malley,
mopping his face with it.

“What’s…wrong with me?” O’Malley
whimpered.

Andrew shook his head. “I don’t know.” He had
a sudden, horrifying flashback in his mind—his sister Beth, lying
in her hospital bed on the day she’d died. She’d had that same
glazed look in her eyes, that frightened, helpless, hopeless sort
of light.

Hey, Germ.

The door to Dani’s room flew open wide and
she rushed in, followed closely by Suzette.

“He threw up again,” Andrew said, stupid and
unnecessary, considering the smell was ripe and thick in the air,
and he was still pretty much soaked from the chest down with puke.
If he’d been expecting animosity from Suzette, he was surprised
when instead, she was the portrait of consummate professionalism.
Brushing past him without as much as a glance, she hurried to
O’Malley’s bedside, rolling the younger man onto his back.

“Can you hear me, Corporal?” Suzette asked,
leaning over. Using the pad of her thumb, she gently peeled back
O’Malley’s eyelids, looking down into his eyes. “How long has he
been unconscious?”

“Not long,” Dani said, shied near Andrew, her
eyes enormous and glossy with tears. “He was awake when we got him
out of the bathroom. He passed out right before we helped him into
the bed.”

“He woke up a little bit before you got
here,” Andrew said. “He told me he was hurting.”

“Look at his skin,” Dani said. “He’s got some
kind of rash all down the left side of him, those bumps.”

“
Erythema marginatum,”
Suzette said.
“It’s a type of skin inflammation, pretty characteristic of
rheumatic fever.”

“Rheumatic fever?” Dani asked.

“He had it as a child,” Suzette said. “I
talked to him earlier, when he first started feeling bad, and he
told me. It can recur throughout your life once you’ve had it, an
uncommon complication of a streptococcus infection. Strep
throat.”

Andrew cut Dani a surprised and dubious
glance.
That’s
caused by strep throat?
he
thought, staring back at the stricken Corporal. He hadn’t smelled
any alcohol on Suzette’s breath—surprising in and of itself—but he
wondered now if she wasn’t drunk after all, as crazy as her
diagnosis sounded.

“Once you’ve had it, you’re prone to
recurrences in adulthood,” Suzette said. “It’s rare, but it
happens. I’d suspected this was the cause and gave him some
antibiotics from the infirmary. I should have tried something more
aggressive, stronger.”

She awarded Andrew a brief once-over. “The
strain of streptococcus that can lead to rheumatic fever is
contagious. You might want to change your clothes, take a
shower.”

She said this with a brittle edge to her
voice, the sort that clearly imparted she’d just as soon have him
catch whatever ailment had affected O’Malley, if only so she could
enjoy letting it go untreated.

To Dani, she added in a far more amiable
tone, “Specialist Santoro, you’ll want to wash your hands, too, and
see me later on. I’ll get you started on some preventive
antibiotics, just in case.”

****

“I’m sorry,” Dani said to Andrew at the
doorway to her room. Suzette had gone to the infirmary long enough
to get a rolling stretcher, the sort carried in ambulances, and
return with it in tow. Andrew and Dani had both helped drag
O’Malley from the bed to the litter by grabbing handfuls of the
bedclothes beneath him and using them as a rudimentary sling.

“These will need to be burned anyway,”
Suzette had remarked of the sheets and comforter. “It’s all
contaminated now. You two go get cleaned up.”

“I need to let Major Prendick know what’s
going on,” Dani had said, but Suzette had shaken her head.

“I’ll take care of it. He’s still helping
Moore search the grounds for Alice. I can handle things from
here.”

“It’s alright.” In the corridor, Andrew
reached up to caress Dani’s cheek, brush her hair back behind her
ear, but realized he still had O’Malley’s vomit drying on his hand,
sticky on his sleeve. With a wince, he dropped his hand again,
moved to wipe it on his pants, realized these were soaked, too, and
grimaced.

“I can’t leave,” Dani said. “Not now, not
with Thomas so sick.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.” Her brows lifted. “I know what
you said about Dr. Moore, what he’s doing to Alice, but I just
can’t leave Thomas.”

“It’s alright,” he told her again.

“Let me see how he is in the morning,” she
said. “If he’s stable enough to transport somewhere, it could be
the excuse we need to smuggle Alice out of here.”

Andrew frowned, thoughtful. “I can’t keep her
in my room for too much longer. Moore thinks she’s in the lab.
Suzette said he’s tearing it apart looking for her. But sooner or
later, he’ll check the barracks. You know the compound better than
me. Is there someplace I can bring her for tonight? Someplace safe
where Moore won’t think to look?”

Dani shook her head, then her eyes widened.
“Wait a minute. There’s a bathroom in the back of the garage. It
doubles as a storage closet, so it’s pretty big.” She shoved her
hand into her pocket and he heard the jangle of metal on metal as
she pulled out a small key ring. “It’s one of the only doors in the
whole complex with a keyed lock.” With a wink, she added, “And I’ve
got the only key.”

She dangled them in the air and when he held
out his hand, she let them fall noisily into the basin of his
palm.

“God, I love you.” He said this with a laugh,
meaning it playfully, but the moment the words were out of his
mouth, his smile faltered. He hadn’t said
I love you
to
anyone since Lila. For some reason, though, instead of sounding
foreign and strange as they lingered in the air between Andrew and
Dani, they seemed right somehow.

But when she stared up at him, visibly
surprised, offering nothing in immediate reply—not the
I love
you, too,
which would have admittedly been nice, or even a
What the hell are you thinking?,
which would have admittedly
been called for—he found himself abashed and awkward. “I’m
sorry.”

“Get out of here,” she said with a smile.
“You smell like puke.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Andrew found Alice exactly as he’d left her,
curled up and sound asleep on his bed. Moving quietly around the
room so he wouldn’t disturb her, he’d pulled the last of the clean
clothing provisions from a bureau drawer, then stripped off his
soggy jeans and shirt for disposal. Then he stood under the heavy
shower spray and scrubbed his skin, Suzette’s words of admonition
still ringing in his ears.

The strain of streptococcus that can lead to
rheumatic fever is contagious.

Just the thought of possibly contracting the
same bacteria that had caused such debilitating and disfiguring
illness in O’Malley left him damn near wearing a groove into the
bar of soap as he rubbed it between his hands, lathering up again
and again.

He got out of the shower stall and mopped at
his head with a towel.
I can’t believe I said that.
With the
smell of vomit off of him, his mind had wandered to other concerns
besides potentially biohazardous contamination. Most specifically,
he thought about Dani and his unintentional slip of the tongue.

She smiled at me, though,
he thought,
wrapping the towel around his waist, tucking the corner in to
secure it loosely in place.
She didn’t kick me in the balls or
anything and she could have. She
should
have. So she couldn’t have been too pissed off about me saying
it. Right?

Raking his fingers through his wet hair to
comb it back from his face, he opened the bathroom door. At almost
the exact same moment, he heard a quiet series of beeps from his
doorway. It occurred to him dimly that someone was typing in a pass
code and then the door burst open as Edward Moore shoved his way
inside, Major Prendick less than a full step behind him.

“Where is she?” Moore demanded, his face
twisted with barely tamped fury, his fists clenched as he charged
forward.

Andrew backpedaled in surprise and alarm, but
the ironic realization that this was the second time in as many
days that Moore had barged into his room uninvited and caught him
in nothing but a bath towel was short-lived. Moore’s hand shot out,
clamping beneath the shelf of his chin, slamming him into the
bathroom doorframe, cutting his startled yelp breathlessly
short.

“Where is my daughter, you son of a bitch?”
Moore shouted, his face inches away from Andrew’s own, peppering
Andrew with spittle. “What have you done with her? Tell me right
goddamn now!”

Andrew pawed at his hand, trying to wedge his
fingers beneath Moore’s, to loosen that furious, powerful hold that
had crushed his windpipe, leaving him straining futilely for any
hint of air. “Let…go…!” he gasped.

“Dr. Moore.” Prendick clapped his hand on
Moore’s shoulder, but made no immediate move to haul the other man
away. “Let him go.”

“Please,” Andrew choked, pawing at Moore’s
hand, staring desperately at Prendick.
Help me,
he wanted to
cry, even though all he could manage to croak out was a feeble,
“Help.”
Get this crazy son of a bitch off of me!

“Moore.” Prendick’s voice sharpened. “Let him
go.”

After a long moment, Moore at last drew his
hand away. Andrew stumbled backwards, whooping for breath.

“You…” he gasped, staring at Moore. “You’re
crazy.”

Moore paid him no attention, instead turning
and stomping into Andrew’s bedroom. “Alice!” he shouted. “Alice,
answer me. It’s Daddy.”

What the hell is he yelling for?
Andrew thought, breathless and bewildered.
She’s not deaf, for
God’s sake.

Then he looked beyond the doorway into the
bedroom and realized Alice was no longer lying on the bed. “What
the…?” he whispered.

“Something wrong, Mister Braddock?” Prendick
asked as Andrew brushed past him and limped into the bedroom,
following Moore.

Where’d she go?
he wondered in rising
alarm, watching as Moore dropped onto his knees and flipped back
the bedspread, looking underneath the bed.

“I said…” Prendick’s hand fell heavily
against Andrew’s shoulder from behind. “Is something wrong?”

Andrew frowned, shrugging Prendick away.
“Yeah, I’d say something’s wrong. Moore just about killed me. And
you just about stood there and let him. What the hell’s your
problem?”

“Dr. Moore’s daughter is missing,” Prendick
said, seeming unfazed by Andrew’s hostile retort. “We were hoping
maybe you had some idea of her whereabouts.”

“No. Why would I?”