Frankly, all of those fine folks looked slightly tranquilized. Maybe Pete had passed them the good stuff.
I cleaned out the wound, paused, and wiggled something gray out of her cheekbone. I dropped the tooth into the pan, where it landed with a distinct rattle.
Everyone looked over.
“Tooth,” I said.
She blinked at me. “Did you just pull a tooth out of my face?”
“I did. They’re losing more and more of them.” How many teeth had I pulled out of bites since this all went down? And how were we not seeing more toothless zombies gumming at things?
“What the fuck?” one of the other soldiers whispered.
“I…” She sat there, looked down at her hands for a moment, and then looked at the tooth. “I don’t know why that’s shocking to me.”
“Well. It’s not something you’re used to. Teeth belong in mouths, not cheeks.” I wanted to get her cleaned up before infection could set in, but she didn’t seem quite ready to offer me her face again.
“Can I keep it?” she suddenly asked.
I saw no reason why she couldn’t. “Sure,” I said. “Gonna put it on a necklace?”
“I thought I’d burn it.”
That seemed like an even better idea. “Yeah, I’ll wash it up for you,” I said. “Just…here. Hold still, okay? I’m going to put some more numbing agent on, but facial wounds never feel good.”
“Neither do bites,” she muttered.
More stitching, less bitching. I cleaned out her cheek, then threaded my needle and began the slow, delicate process of closing the gash. I knew I had to work very, very carefully if I wanted to avoid nasty scarring—a little bit was inevitable, considering my prior experience and the whole need to get her patched together quickly. But I made sure my stitches were small and close together, and hoped she wouldn’t be too angry at me for not being a plastic surgeon.
Working on a face was an entirely new experience, and I was glad she didn’t look at me while I stitched. As long as I looked at it as something mechanical, like closing up a pillow, I did okay.
The instant I remembered I was sewing a living person, my stomach clenched. Mustn’t puke on the patient, Vibeke, I thought. I’d managed to retch all over several revenants during the course of this apocalypse, but I had so far avoided upchucking meals on the living. I hoped to keep that winning streak intact.
I stitched up her abdomen and arm next; both wounds were pretty deep in her flesh, and required more scraping than I would have liked. But we both got through it, and I pushed on to the next patient, a redheaded kid probably fresh out of boot camp when everything went down.
None of them seemed keen on talking about what happened. I was dying to know what the hell had gone down, but asking about it only drew frowns and shaking heads and whispers of it was so horrible.
Of course it’s horrible, I wanted to scream. It’s always horrible. Now tell me what happened.
I could only assume someone had told them not to talk in an effort to prevent panic. That might have worked back in the beginning, when no one knew what was really going on and everything was fucking scary no matter what way you looked at it, but now we all knew the dead were up and walking and longing for the sweet taste of human flesh. No sense in telling people it was nothing. The less the soldiers said to me, the more frightening possibilities my sick little mind conjured up.
It took me the better part of the morning to get through those people, and that was after sending three of them off to Lattimore to cope with bone-deep injuries that I should have noticed when they first got in. Rookie mistake, Vibby, Tony’s voice said in my head. Should’ve triaged better.
Triage. I hated triage.
More were trickling in, mumbling about a fence that still hadn’t been fixed.
Two more medics came in to relieve me. “Doc says you need to take lunch,” one of them said.
Oh, Praise Ezekiel. “I’m going,” I said, depositing my kit at the opposite end of the room for sanitizing and stumbling off to be sanitized myself. There weren’t enough hot showers in the world, but I needed to wash my hands, and my face, and maybe reapply some deodorant if I could find some.
I found Dax in the small, smoky tent that masqueraded as a break room. He had a crossword in front of him and a pen in one hand, but did not seem to be paying much attention to either.
“It’s bad,” I said.
“Yeah, I saw.” He handed me a bottle of water.
“Found another tooth,” I said.
He blanched. “How many is that, now? Five?”
I shook my head.
“I want to go see that field of theirs,” he said, returning his attention to the crossword. “They keep us up all night, the least we can do is see what’s going on there. Want to come with me after you eat?”
That probably meant he’d forgiven me for the whole blood-cleaning incident. I nodded, pulling my MRE from the cubby with my name on it. Pastrami again.
Goddammit.