“She wasn’t bitten,” the other medic said. Did he look smug? Whatever expression he wore on his face was pretty fucking smug. “You need to get bitten to die.”
Lattimore’s grim expression briefly cracked, revealing a mixture of exhaustion and resignation. “No, Gerald,” she said with a sigh, “you don’t. An untreated bite certainly speeds things along, but anyone who dies eventually comes back. Perhaps you aren’t paying much attention, either.”
Gerald the medic gaped at her. So did I. Once Samuels had figured out for sure that people reanimated regardless of a zombie love nip, he had done his best to ensure word spread quickly. Granted, Elderwood had come under attack almost immediately afterward, so I had no idea how successful his campaign had been.
I wondered how long had it taken Hastings to figure this out. The medical complex was swarming with the sick and the injured, and I’d simply assumed they just had people regularly dying. But if their own medical staff didn’t realize that everyone came back…
Yep. We’re in Crazy Town. Or at least Terrible Communication Town.
“The real question is why Orvik wasn’t doing her job,” Lattimore said.
Oh, so we were back to taking potshots at me. I swung around to stare at Logan, who looked remarkably unrepentant in all of this. “How about we ask where the fuck your guard dog was, and why a medic had to do the dirty work?”
Keller clenched his hand into a fist and came toward me. I braced myself to duck, fully expecting him to finally take a swing at me.
Instead, he stopped a few inches away. “Get out.”
I didn’t move.
“I said get the fuck out!”
His voice could have knocked the tent over. Alyssa pulled her blanket over her head.
Let it not be said that I don’t know when it’s time to vacate a situation. I booked it out of there like Indiana Jones fleeing the giant boulder.
As far as I know, they never did find out who the arm belonged to.
I had scarcely gotten into the back courtyard when two hands seized my upper arm and gave me a yank.
I opened my mouth to yelp, and one of the hands released me long enough to clamp over my mouth. Okay, not a revenant, than. I turned my head and saw Renati standing there, his shaggy brows lifted in something resembling a plea.
I nodded.
He released me and jerked his head toward his lab. I glanced over my shoulder, but no one seemed to be following me out of the Mystery Ward, so I trailed after him.
He only flicked on the lights when the door closed. “I prefer to work in darkness,” he explained. “Keeps the rest of them from trying to talk to me too much.”
Yeah, I could see why. Microscopes were placed at seemingly random intervals along counters and islands. Laptop computers, most of which looked dead, were set up next to most of them. Renati had an assortment of X-rays and other printouts taped to the walls, and pieces of paper seemingly stuck to the floors. In the light, it was a hoarder’s paradise. In the dark…well, I wouldn’t want to try navigating it in the dark, much less talking to the man who had cultivated it.
“It adds to my mystique,” he said, upon noticing me looking around. “Want a granola bar?”
He reached for something on one of the countertops. I had taken them for a stack of disks of some sort, but they were in fact snack bars, and he tossed one to me. I caught it out of reflex and stuck it in my pocket.
“How’d you get granola bars?” I asked.
“I have my methods.”
Oh, great. More mysteriousness.
He found two stools and removed stacks of paper from both, then gestured to one. I drifted over, but did not sit. He shrugged and plunked himself down on the other anyway. “Welcome to R&D, for what it’s worth,” he said. “This is where I cultivate my creepy persona.”
I sort of smiled. He still seemed more normal than he had the last time we talked. Maybe he kept the granola bars around to regulate his blood sugar.
“I heard Lattimore and our dear captain giving you the rundown in there,” he said.
“Then you also heard me quoting you.”
“I did.”
Maybe he had dragged me here so he could yell at me, too. “Are you going to get into trouble?”
He shrugged and pressed a foot against the ground, spinning the stool around in slow circles. “It’s nothing I haven’t tried to tell everyone at this damned facility at one point or another. You’re just the first one to listen.” He paused in his spinning to smile at me. “And the first to parrot it back to them. They couldn’t have liked that.”
Oh. He’d probably brought me over here because he wanted someone to actually listen to him. Marvelous. “Doctor, I think maybe—”
“In the beginning, it took them some time to wake up after they…ah…expired,” he said. “At least, that we know of. Those close to impact sites were generally immolated immediately. But those outside…I do wonder if they got up earlier, and it just took them longer to reach us.”
“Does it matter? They’re here.”