She nodded.
A quick scan of our supply station indicated that the other medic hadn’t lied: we were about out of the old antibiotic, and painkillers were nowhere to be seen. I assumed the doctor had the drugs, so I headed for the back of the tent. If I had the layout memorized correctly, it would lead to some kind of courtyard and Renati’s lab. The courtyard had probably been a playground at one point, as a jungle gym and a slide were still off to the left, abandoned and forgotten. There was a portable building set up to my right, and a generator hummed outside it. That must have been the lab.
Two soldiers were loitering around, sharing a cigarette. As I got closer, I realized one of them was Logan.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked instead of actually greeting them.
“Can’t serve food with a bite,” he said. “Might infect everyone else.”
So they’d posted him on guard duty. Maybe that was a better use of his purported sniping skills.
He held out the cigarette to me. I shook my head and pushed it away. What was with all the smoking lately? I hadn’t seen much of it in Elderwood, but Hastings felt like one big cigar lounge.
“Do you guys know where Renati is?” I asked. “I need painkillers.”
“Don’t we all,” Logan said. He pointed at the portable building. “Probably in there.”
He handed the cigarette to his comrade and stepped closer to me. “How’s Alyssa?”
He must have asked for this posting. It was probably the only way he could check on her with any level of frequency.
I didn’t immediately answer him, and that in itself was answer enough. His face just fell, and he nodded, turning away from me. “Gotcha,” he said.
“We’re working on it,” I said.
Lies. All fucking lies. We couldn’t effectively treat it if we didn’t know what it was.
I left the two soldiers standing around and walked myself up to Renati’s lab. He didn’t immediately respond to a knock on the door, so I tried the handle.
The door swung open. “Doctor?” I called out to the dimly lit room within. I could see some computer screens and a flash of white moving around. The white thing snapped to attention and moved rapidly toward me.
I took a step back, fervently hoping it wasn’t a ghoul.
Renati stopped a couple feet away from me. “Yes?” he asked. “What is it?”
At least he’d changed into a cleaner lab coat.
“Where are the painkillers?” I asked. “I need to dose people…we’re out…”
He blinked at me. “Painkillers,” he said.
“Painkillers,” I repeated. I talked a little slower. “For the people in the tent…you know…the one you’re in charge of?”
He brightened as his frenzied little brain made the connection. “Of course. I’m sorry; I’ve been buried in my work…wait here.”
He scuttled away, his shoes squishing softly against the floor. Squish-squish-squish. Must’ve been soft-soled. He gathered up a couple of boxes, came back, and shoved them at me. “Here. Painkillers top. Sedatives bottom.”
“We’re low on antibiotics, too.”
He frowned, his face screwing up slightly as if he didn’t remember what the term antibiotic meant. “Strepto,” he finally said. “Strepto?”
“Yeah—”
“By medicine, life may be prolonged.”
Lovely. He quoted Shakespeare on the fly. I nodded. “Yes. So if you’ve got medicine, maybe hand it over, so we can prolong their lives?”
He shook his head at me, but a slight smile tugged at his lips. “I’ll go in the back and see if there’s any more stored. But there likely isn’t. I have some other stuff we can give them if necessary. Not FDA-approved yet, but what can you do?”
Not FDA-approved? Why would he have non-FDA-approved medications lying around?
Wait. Alyssa said Renati had been in R&D. Of course he had random drugs on offer. He probably had all kinds of fun crap in his closet.
“I think just the strepto for now,” I said.
“Of course, of course.” He turned around, paused, and then turned back to me. “Vibeke, about the undead that you saw outside…”
Oh, shit. We were back to this.
“Yes?” I asked, if only because there seemed to be no escape.
He cleared his throat. “Did you…when you were out there. On The Outside. Did you ever…when someone dies, how fast do they come back?”
His voice quivered ever so slightly. I couldn’t decide whether he was on the verge of tears or was maybe about to faint from low blood sugar.
I had to think for a few seconds, trying to imagine the ghouls I had seen while running around in Elderwood and Muldoon. “I haven’t really seen any wake up,” I said. “I mean, back at camp I saw one dude get up, but that was under controlled circumstances. Usually they’re already undead and chasing me by the time I see them.”
He nodded, and pushed his shaggy mane back behind his ears.