Oh, this was a familiar mantra. Was Lattimore going to dress him down, too?
She glanced at me, the same thought no doubt going through her mind.
Renati grasped her arm, stopping her from any immediate action. “They are turning faster. Vibeke, help me get him to my lab.”
No one directly countermanded him, so I moved over past the shaking orderly and picked up the zombie’s left arm. To be fair, he wasn’t really a zombie anymore; now he was just a proper corpse, one of the dearly departed who had shaken off this mortal coil and could now sit back and laugh while the rest of us scrambled around in a panic.
Renati took the other arm, and together we dragged the dead man out of the tent.
“I warned her,” he said. “Yesterday.”
“Glad she listened.” We dragged the dead man to Renati’s lab and heaved him onto the nearest counter, knocking aside a microscope and probably a lot of important paperwork. I looked for something to wipe my hands on, and settled for the dead man’s bloodied white shirt.
Renati fumbled around, came up with a pan of needles, and moved swiftly to the other side of the bed. He selected one of the needles and then peered into the eyeball I had just ruined. Before I could look away he had jammed the needle into the squashed mass.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Drawing out some blood,” he said. “If I can get it on a slide I might be able to see what’s happening there.”
I had to give him points for persistence. “Do you think you can stop them?”
“That’s a rather large step away from what I can do.” He paused. “I don’t know if I can do anything. But I’d rather not fly blind into this—whatever’s happening.”
He was right.
I hated it, but he was right.
It made no sense. None of this made sense.
I decided I didn’t care.
“Well, have fun with him,” I said. More than ever, I wanted to be back in Elderwood, with Hammond’s reassuring speeches and Samuels awkwardly teaching me how to stitch people up. I didn’t want hordes of damaged, sick beings surrounding me. Didn’t want to put scalpels through eyes or watch people I gave a shit about die horribly.
That’s what’s going to happen to Alyssa.
I put that thought away, and headed back to work.
I spent a little too much time in the break room, frantically trying to scrub blood and glop off my hands and face. I kept scrubbing long after the splatters were gone, until my hands, face, and neck were rubbed raw. I grasped the edge of the sink, clenching it until my knuckles turned white.
It hurt.
It was good to hurt. To feel something real, something physical, besides the constant sense of bewilderment that had dogged me since we arrived here.
I heard footsteps behind me. They paused. Dax, no doubt. He was the only one who would stand there waiting for me to do something.
“Hi,” I said to the sink.
“Hey.” He paused. “Lattimore’s laying into the guards for not coming in when they heard the screaming. But she says she needs you back out there.”
I relaxed my grip slightly. “I should shower. I’ve got his germs all over me.”
“She says that doesn’t matter in the Plague Tent.”
So she had given up on them, too.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
He didn’t push it, and left me alone. I stood there another few seconds, trying to summon what remained of my energy. I was so tired now…tired of all this. Of fighting off the dead, of sparring with the living, of waiting to become the next person on a shit list or a menu.
I had to get out of here. Out of the tent. Out of Hastings. Out of the apocalypse.
There was one thing I might be able to do.
The mess had been cleaned up by the time I got back into the tent. Everyone was more or less in their beds, though I felt what I thought might be some admiring stares.
Alyssa was back in bed, her hands folded atop several layers of thin blankets. She smiled at me when I sat down on the edge of the bed next to her, though her face seemed even paler than it had been just a half-hour prior.
I checked her temperature. Nice and cool. Cold, even.
“Hail the conquering heroine,” she said. “Undead men troubling you? Call upon…Bedpan Girl.”
Of all the nicknames I could hope to obtain throughout the zombie apocalypse, Bedpan Girl might be the least appealing. “Tell me that’s not the best one you came up with. You know my prison name was Bone Crusher, right?”
She thought that over, then shook her head. “Bedpan Girl suits you better.”
If stories of me got passed down and I was remembered as Bedpan Girl, I was going to be mighty pissed off. But I pushed the thought of eternal embarrassment from my mind and focused instead on my patient.
My patient, and the only possible route I had to maybe eventually getting out of here. “How are you, Alyssa?”
She cleared her throat. “I’m not feeling too good,” she said. “Vibeke, I feel weak. I feel so weak…”
I took her hand and squeezed it.
“What’s wrong with me?”