I did not like the sound of that. “What doctor?”
He pointed at his right leg—the same leg I had treated after some crazed biker had shot him through it during a rescue effort. “The doctor who took care of me thought you did a good job, considering the situation. When she heard Keller had you in jail she just about shat a brick and demanded your release. I guess they need medics.”
Of course they needed medics. Everyone needs medics after the zombie apocalypse. If you don’t fall apart under pressure and you can stitch up a wound without making it gangrenous, then your career value shoots upward once big giant rocks fall out of the sky and dead men stick their hands out of the earth. I spent years slogging away at a tiring, underpaid position at Rock Weekly before things went bad, with no real upward prospects and nowhere to go if the magazine tanked. But now? Well, I was still underpaid—actually, I wasn’t getting paid at all—but my prospects looked pretty good. Steady employment no matter where I went, and maybe some insulation from the shit show that tended to surround local governments.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “So I’m going to be working at the medical facility again.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Dax started singing. I couldn’t quite understand him through the walls and the sound of the pipes, but it was probably something his old band, the Blood Nuts, had composed.
Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. “God, he sucks. I thought he was in a band?”
“He didn’t sing. Not that the actual singer was much better.” The Blood Nuts had wasted my last evening on the old earth, and I was still a little pissed about that.
Tony perched on the edge of the counter and continued to study me.
“And how are things here?” I asked, hoping I managed to load my tone without enough meaning for him to get the real question. “Have they dealt with…you know…”
“With everyone’s favorite religious whack job?” Tony glanced around the kitchen, as if gauging how much he should tell me. We hadn’t thought much of Malachi after we first ran into him right after things went to hell—he seemed like your regular weirdo, made even weirder by the endtimes. Unfortunately, we’d discovered that weirdo had managed to cobble together some power over the next few months, and even the people of Hastings, safe behind a very impressive new wall, knew who he was.
Tony shrugged. “Keller talks about him like he’s some sort of military faction, but it sounds like he just lords over the brigands now. I think we inadvertently did a lot of damage to his cause when we took out his buddies.”
I was pretty sure I’d reviewed an album called Lord of the Brigands at some point, and had maybe not enjoyed it.
“I haven’t pried much out of Keller otherwise,” Tony said. He chuckled. “He doesn’t trust me.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
All this talk of Keller and Malachi highlighted a growing fear that I had, up to now, been reluctant to acknowledge. The living dead were one thing; they were scary and stinky and they ate people, but aside from a terrifying handful, most seemed outright stupid, running on some primal instinct rather than thought. People could think. Could plan. Could turn against you and throw you in jail, or much worse. Maybe we’d been paying too much attention to the dead and not enough to the living.
I shuddered, then locked the thought away. “So what else do I need to know about this place?” I asked.
“About thirty thousand people are still here. The eastern side of the city is overrun; the revenants seem to keep to themselves as long as they don’t see people wandering around near that area. Keller runs a tight enough ship. I haven’t seen a whole lot of problems.” He paused, his gaze again wandering to the turquoise paint job. “They haven’t heard from Elderwood at all.”
That was bad.
That was very bad.
“But,” I said, “they weren’t really answering Elderwood before, were they? Are they trying? Is the radio broken?”
Tony rolled his eyes. “I don’t know.” He sounded dubious. “Could be a busted radio. Again, Keller won’t say much to me. But it’s more likely Hammond and everyone else got gobbled up after we left.”
Ah, there was the good-natured pessimist we all knew and loved. If you want your good news soured, it’s always a good bet to let Tony deliver it. He could make a child’s birthday seem like a catastrophic event.
I hadn’t expected good news from Elderwood, either, though I’d thought if anyone could keep shit together after a seemingly joint assault by the undead and biker gangs, it was General Hammond. The man had appeared damn unstoppable during our time with him, making Elderwood one of two strongholds left in the Midlands Cluster. I inwardly ran through the list of nearby cities whose fates I knew of: Franklin had fallen several weeks before we left camp, followed shortly thereafter by Muldoon. Harkin had suffered several direct hits in the meteor shower and never stood a chance. Astra had burned shortly afterward.