Green Fields (Book 2): Outbreak (13 page)

“I need you to help me cut out the glue that I’ve filled the hole up with, drain the pus, and clean out the wound, before we glue him up again.”

I just blinked, horror and irritation both making it impossible for me to come up with a reply for several seconds straight.

“He doesn’t look sick,” I finally offered.

“And he won’t, until he falls over, dead,” Martinez deadpanned. “So, are you in or not?”

“Why do you need me for this?” I asked. “You’re a medic, right? Do your work.”

From the way he gnashed his teeth, I could tell that I’d landed a harder hit than I’d gone for.

“First, it’s not exactly a one-man job,” he ground out. “And second, I know how to sew someone up or what to slap on their wounds, but that’s it.”

“You do realize that my PhD is in virology, not medicine?”

He shrugged.

“You worked in a highest-security lab, right? You have steady hands and you’re used to working with fine motor control?”

“Duh.”

“Then you’re the perfect woman for the job.” He paused, and with an ironic smile added, “Plus, you have small hands. You’ll get way farther in with the scalpel than I would.”

The very idea made my gorge rise.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” I was saying that a lot, I realized, but didn’t care right then.

“He’s not,” a voice said from behind us. When I looked up, I saw Nate leaning against the doorjamb, already stripped down to his waist, the bandages across his chest visibly stained—more than in the morning.

Part of me still wanted to balk, but I knew that I couldn’t just walk away from this. I might want to, but I couldn’t.

“Remind me again when I signed up for this shit?”

He gave a noncommittal shrug and pushed away from the door, and I could clearly see now that every motion was hurting him. Moving over to the kitchen table—suspiciously cleared up already with just a white sheet on it instead of a more traditional cover—he winced as he made it there, the fingers of his hand spasming as he tried to keep them from forming a fist.

“I don’t know. Likely somewhere between destroying what was in that vault and shoving your middle finger in Bucky’s face?”

That made no sense at all, but I didn’t comment on that. Behind Nate, I saw Pia, Andrej, and Burns come into the room, closing the door behind them. Martinez had already shut the one leading into the living room. That looked ominous enough that I couldn’t help but get a bad feeling about this.

“Doesn’t help morale if the men know that their leader is standing with one foot in the grave,” Andrej supplied helpfully.

Frowning, I stared at the bandages.

“How bad is it?”

“Bad,” Nate said, starting to unwind the yards of gauze around his middle. The moment the last layer came away, I couldn’t help but wince. Yup, that looked mighty inflamed, angry red and darker bruises spreading from where I could clearly see the initial wound. “Bad,” was a rather accurate description.

“So how are we going to do this?” I asked, more to distract myself than because I actually wanted to know.

“Easy. Just cut everything out that looks bad and plug everything back up again,” Nate replied.
 

Stepping closer, I reached for his skin, but stopped inches from touching it. The back looked even worse, the bruising so deep there that it was more vivid than the tattoos. And the wound didn’t smell particularly well, either.

“Just like that, huh?”

“Exactly,” he agreed, moving onto the table. Martinez brought over a steel pan holding surgical tools, stinking of rubbing alcohol.

“You do the cutting, I’ll put him back together once you’re done,” he supplied as he put the pan onto a small side table.

“This is so fucking unreal,” I said as I leaned down to the bucket full of steaming water to wash my hands, then put on latex gloves when I’d dried them on a clean cloth. Then I waited, but with all eyes on me, I couldn’t help but feel more dread climb up my throat.

“Let me guess—we’re fresh out of anesthetics?” And considering that him bleeding out under me was already a likely option, I didn’t even suggest blood-thinning alcohol.

“Maude doesn’t have anything stronger than aspirin here, and I used up the last of Martinez’s morphine before we ran into the mob that chased us down to the Interstate.”

For a moment the idea to cut into him without anything to dull the pain made me want to balk, but then the real message behind that sank in. Staring at Nate, I got a rather stupid grin from him back in return—kind of fitting.

“Are you insane? You were high the entire time?!”

He shrugged, the resulting painful wince only dimming that fucking smile a little.

“How do they say it? As a kite.”

I didn’t know who I was more furious at—him or the others who had clearly been in the know, judging from their calm faces now.

“At least that explains why you think it was a good idea to run straight through a horde of zombies with some weirdos driving by and shooting at everything that moves!”

“It worked,” he protested.

“We lost four people!”

“Would have likely lost eight if we’d stayed,” Nate replied, his eyes never leaving my face. “There was a third group honing in on our position, following the one we’ve run in on the road. If we’d waited another twenty minutes, they would have had us surrounded. Besides, the morphine was losing its kick. I was almost sober by then.”

All I could do was stare back as the horror his revelation caused sunk in, but after a few seconds I forced myself to shake out of it. There was no sense to dwelling on that now. But it might have taken off the edge of the very idea of cutting into him while he was feeling every little thing I did.

“I’ll probably pass out somewhere in the middle of it, anyway,” Nate supplied as I picked up the scalpel, just waiting for Martinez to be done swabbing pretty much Nate’s entire torso down with iodine solution.

“That’s so much relief to me,” I grunted, feeling my throat close down with a different kind of fear. Not just fear of messing this up—but fear of losing him.

Nate’s gaze softened, and finally that smile was all but gone. Reaching up, he wrapped his fingers around my lower arm just below my elbow, seeing as I was already wearing the gloves and holding the scalpel that shook ever so slightly in my grasp.

“Remember when I asked you to trust me?” I nodded, unable to give a verbal reply. “Well, that goes both ways,” he told me. “I trust you.”

He gave me a little squeeze before he relaxed on the table and stretched out, the other three stepping in—Burns leaning across his legs while Pia and Andrej each took care of an arm and Nate’s upper torso, after Pia stuffed a wad of folded cloth between his teeth. Closing my eyes, I sank my own teeth into my bottom lip until the pain almost made me gasp. I couldn’t do this. This was just insane! I couldn’t—

But I had to, and I would.

When I opened my eyes, my hand was steady as I splayed it across Nate’s torso, just above the wound. And so was the other.

Chapter 9

After the last two—no, three—days that I’d had, I should have slept through the next twenty hours straight, but I woke up shortly after sunrise. Every inch of my body hurt—a feeling that should have become familiar by now, but wasn’t. I tried to go back to sleep, but as with the morning before, it wasn’t the snoring all around me that woke me up. Martinez was still soundly asleep where he’d curled up in front of my loveseat, and considering I wouldn’t need it anymore, I reached down to nudge him awake, silently indicating the much more comfortable cushions above him. He groggily crawled up and was out cold again before I’d made it across the room. Like doctors, soldiers seemed to be able to fall asleep anywhere, in whatever position.
 

I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get there.

Maude was already up, stirring a huge pot of what turned out to be oatmeal on the propane-powered stove. She greeted me silently with a smile and nodded at the pot of coffee next to her. I hesitated, stupidly suspicious about the last two times I’d gotten close to caffeine. When she saw me hesitate, she pointed at a smaller pot still on the stove, and the teabags stacked up neatly in the cupboard above. Nodding, I fetched a mug and made myself some camomile tea instead.
 

Glancing around the kitchen, I couldn’t help but shudder when my gaze skipped over the table. Everything was cleaned up and neat now, but I would never forget the soaking wet, red-stained sheet when Martinez had dragged it off the table while I’d been sick in the bucket that had held the once-hot water. Not wanting to remain in the room any longer than possible, I went through the other door on into the hallway.

The soft cadence of Gerry’s words drew me on into what turned out to be a small office just below the stairs that led to the upper floor. It made sense that he had one—after all, this was supposed to be a radio station—and as my mind skipped along those details, it didn’t surprise me to find him behind the microphone.

“Remember, folks. Stay indoors if you can,” he was just saying, his voice sounding more relaxed than I would have been able to pitch mine, considering the obvious topic at hand. “People have been calling in, reporting that refrigerated food and preserves are safe. If you can, grab fresh produce before it wilts. And if your climate allows it, it’s not too late to dig out that vegetable patch you’ve been thinking about for years.”

The very idea of gardening in the zombie apocalypse was so absurd that it made me smile into my tea cup, but his next words did away with that immediately.

“We still don’t know for sure what made people sick, but if you stay away from fast food, you should be safe.”

“It’s in the sugar,” I heard myself say before the thought had even formed in my mind. Gerry looked up, motioning me over to join him. With a little reluctance, I did, sinking into the chair beside his while he turned back to the mic.

“Not sure whether you heard that, folks, but I have Dr. Brianna Lewis with me here, and she says that it’s in the sugar.”

I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d suddenly drawn a gun on me—no, scratch that, I would have been more prepared for the gun—and when he saw my startled look, Gerry pressed a button on the mix board in front of him that made the red light on the mic go out.

“We all saw the video,” he explained, then winked. “Or those of us who still had energy to run the TV and computers did.”

He was referring to the video that I’d narrated, back when I’d still thought that all this was just about some possible bioweapon stored away in the vault of the Green Fields Biotech labs. I hadn’t realized that they’d even managed to upload it, let alone that people had drawn the—surprisingly right—conclusions, if he was suddenly thinking of me as an expert.

“That wasn’t even about—“ I started, but then shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Got a few minutes to talk to my listeners?” he asked, winking at me again.

I was about to reply that I doubted anyone was actually listening, when the speakers cracked loudly as someone cooed into his microphone. The reception was bad, but I could still make out the words.

“I knew it was the sugar! I told you all so! Tell that sucker Jim that I knew it first!”

“Is that you, Dave?” Gerry asked, smiling.

“Nah, Dave’s out cold after pulling the last shift. It’s Kevin,” replied the voice. “But Dave called it, too. Right after that guy went ballistic over his ice cream.” He paused, then whistled. “Hey, doc. You’re a legend. Just saying, if you haven’t gotten a chance to check up on the ‘net. Your video hit just over three million views on YouTube before the servers went out.”

“Gee, thanks,” I offered, not really knowing how to feel about that.

“Can you confirm your claim? ‘It’s in the sugar’ doesn’t sound very scientific,” a different male voice rasped over the radio, this one with a southern twang.

“Well, I can confirm two cases of instant conversion after ingestion of a chocolate bar and some syrup in a coffee shop,” I bit out, somewhat annoyed. “And we had someone get ill after drinking ice tea. Make of that what you will, but from what… Kevin and Dave, right?”

“Yup.”

“Kevin and Dave said, and what our medic told me, highly processed foods seem to be problematic.” Pausing, I cleared my throat. “Remember when a couple of years ago some health nuts started complaining that high fructose corn syrup is in everything now? Looks like they were right, and it’s killing us off one after the other right now.”

Silence fell, until another voice—this one female—spoke up.

“Shit.”

“That about sums it up, yeah,” I replied.

“You said your medic?” Southern guy asked. “You with the military?”

I didn’t know what to reply, and I didn’t miss the interested glance that Gerry shot my way.

“I’m not sure if we even still have a military,” I finally settled on saying. “But I’m with some guys who know how to handle themselves in a tight spot.”

“So you got away clean from the city?” Kevin again.

“We lost…” I stopped, counting in my head but coming up blank. “I don’t know. Ten people? I didn’t even know all their names.” I did remember Thompson and Brad, though. Considering that almost a day had passed since we had left them behind, it was a safe bet that they were either dead now, or didn’t remember themselves anymore. Or so I presumed. The zombies didn’t look like they had much sense of their former selves left.

“We lost eleven,” a hoarse voice replied behind me. Looking up, I saw Nate make his way across the room until he stopped behind my chair. I made as if to get up, but he shook his head, biting off a wince as he leaned into the chair back to support himself. He was pale but no longer as deathly white as when Martinez had finished bandaging him, but his lips still held a slightly blue tint.

“Who’s that?” the nosy Southern guy wanted to know.

“Who I am isn’t important anymore,” Nate replied, the hint of a smile playing around his lips. “But the name’s Nate Miller. And I do remember all of their names.”

That vague feeling of guilt that came and went was back, depending on how much else demanded my attention, but the quick squeeze of his fingers on my shoulder made me shake it off again. In more ways than one I got that the gesture meant for me to move on, not just when we were running through throngs of undead.