My first day of work in Hastings ended on a sour note.
Toward the end of the day, a patient coughed up half her lung as I tried to get a sedative into her. Lattimore found me standing there, dripping with blood and bits of her insides, and promptly kicked me out.
I never did find out what happened to that poor woman, but when you’re that sick during the endtimes, it’s a good bet you aren’t recovering anytime soon.
I left my MEDIC shirt in the front room to be laundered or destroyed—I didn’t care which—and took a fresh one to put on the next day. Then I joined Dax outside.
“Hey,” I said.
Dax shook his head.
“Oh. Are we not talking?”
Tony came limping up to the medical facility just as the sky shifted from light gray to dark gray, a sign that the sun had started to set somewhere behind the cloud cover. He started to greet us, and then paused, taking in my scowl and Dax’s baleful expression. “Hey, kids,” he said. “How’d it go?”
“I hate hospitals,” Dax said. “I have always hated hospitals. Don’t make me work here anymore.”
“At least you didn’t have to look at zombie bites all day,” I said. “And your boss seems mellow.”
“Of course he’s mellow. He’s high all the time!” Dax slouched down, affecting the posture I’d seen Pete schlepping around with. “‘Yo, Dax, go clean that bedpan while I roll another joint.’ The fucker is stoned out of his mind.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Tony said. He canted his head to the side and started walking away from the medical center, but not toward our home—he seemed to be pointing us to the downtown area. We followed him. “Some good weed might make this all easier to deal with.”
I mostly agreed with him.
Dax clearly did not. “You don’t get high when you have to be around sick people,” he hissed. “Can you imagine Lattimore performing surgery when she’s high as a kite?”
At this point, I could picture pretty much anything, but I wasn’t about to share that with Dax. Apparently he was sensitive about such things.
“Can you get me another posting?” he asked. “Please. I hate being around sick people. I liked being in processing at Elderwood. Just…put me somewhere without all the…all the needles.”
Tony grunted his displeasure. “You know, I’m not a headhunter. I pulled strings to get you out of the brig, and those strings run directly back to the medical facility. I don’t know if I can just go in there and demand a new posting for you. Especially considering your…prior occupation.”
“What does that mean?” Dax asked.
“It means Keller thinks you’re a devil-worshipper.”
Dax stopped walking. “What?”
I stopped walking, too. “You’re joking, right?” There’s some guys that just can’t handle evil, and Dax is one of them. Any self-respecting devil-worshipper would run far, far away from his purity.
Tony let out a sound that was part snort, part laugh. “Apparently Evan Keller is one of a handful of people who heard the debut record of your band, the Blood Nuts, and Dax, he thinks you are a very, very naughty boy.” I still couldn’t quite tell whether he was joking or not—it was exactly the sort of story he might make up, but Keller seemed just off his rocker enough to panic about it. “I told him you needed the money.”
“We didn’t make any money,” Dax said. “Shit, we lost money on that CD.”
“And maybe that should have told you something,” I said.
We resumed our pace. “So…he wanted to keep me locked up because he didn’t like my band?”
“It’s not a matter of not liking your band. He thinks you’re Satan’s little personal assistant. That’s why I had to get Lattimore involved on your behalf. Keller would’ve been happy to let you rot in that cell with what’s-his-face—”
“Horace,” I supplied. “Er, Alfred.”
“—until the cows came home. So really, you’re pretty lucky you’re out. I’m not sure I’d push it.”
Dax sputtered for a few seconds, then squawked, “I’m not a devil worshipper!”
A few people glanced our way.
“Shut up, will you?” Tony asked. “I don’t know what kind of place Hastings was before things went down, but they all seem to have developed a pretty healthy fear of God lately. Just keep your mouth closed and clean out the fucking bedpans. It could be a lot worse.”
A few minutes later, we hooked a left and found ourselves in one of the city plazas. The grassy areas had turned brown and everything had taken on the same decidedly gloomy cast as the rest of the world, but rows of brightly-colored food trucks stood out in stark contrast to the neutral shades that now doused the world. Neat lines of people stretched out from each truck, mostly warmly-dressed civilians. A handful of uniformed soldiers walked around, presumably to keep order.