“Wait here,” he said.
He vanished for a moment. I gripped the tops of my knees. The stillness of the room helped me focus ever so slightly, and a little bit of my brain came back online. Had I really just been eating Evie’s food? What the hell was wrong with me?
You need more sleep, dudette.
Tony reappeared, Dax at his shoulder. A bottle of water was shoved into my hands. “Drink this,” he commanded. “All of it. Then you’re going to have a little bit of canned soup. Shit. We’re all having soup!” He clapped his hands together, as if trying to summon up some enthusiasm. “And I’m going to find you some vitamins.”
“We have soup?” I asked. I could barely keep my hands clenched around the water bottle.
“I have a couple cans of stuff. For emergencies.”
I squinted up at him. “But…but this isn’t—”
“Honey,” Dax said, “you’re stealing food from the dog. I think that qualifies as an emergency.”
Tony darted back to the kitchen. Dax sat down beside me and slung an arm around my shoulder. He felt thinner than I remembered. Thinner, but warm. And alive. And not a total jackass, unlike so many of the people I was encountering here.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“For what?”
For being weak. For fucking up. For getting us caught. For thinking we could do this. For being born.
“Everything.”
He gave me a gentle squeeze.
“Don’t be,” he said. “We had a shitty day. Now drink some water.”
Mom’s doorbell rang rather loudly.
Did you just get that changed? I asked her.
Yeah, makes it easier to tell the living from the dead. She sounded pretty good—and here I’d thought our cell phones would never work again! I have to get going, though. Your father’s gardening and there’s a revenant trying to eat the roses. We miss you, sweetie.
Miss you too, I said. I’ll see if I can find a working car.
The damn chiming continued, and my eyes snapped open, adjusting to the inky darkness of my room in Hastings. The dream faded immediately; I didn’t entirely recall the context, aside from the fact that the apocalypse had been more of an inconvenience than an actual problem.
That, and I missed my mother’s voice.
Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
Holy shit, someone needed to find their chill.
I rolled out of bed and stumbled across the bedroom, yanking the door open and trying to simultaneously wipe the sleep from my eyes. Tony was already out there, and Dax had just opened his bedroom door. Evie sprinted past him, galloped down the stairs ahead of us, and stood in front of the front door, whining.
The three humans stood there watching.
“She’s wagging her tail,” Dax said. “Probably not a revenant.”
“That’s not always the case,” I said. “They’re rung doorbells before.”
“You keep saying that, and I don’t believe it.”
Tony shrugged into a plaid bathrobe. “Is one of you going to get that?”
“You’re the one dressed for it,” Dax said.
I started walking down the stairs, still trying to clear my head. My stomach growled; the thinned-out soup Tony had made for us had gone down well enough, but now I was hungry again, and my body was letting me know it. Each step made the world spin a little more until I reached the ground floor, where things stabilized a bit.
I nudged Evie aside and looked through the peephole. A bedraggled Logan Andrews stood out there, his fist lifted and primed to slam against the door.
“It’s Logan,” I said.
“I know you’re there, Vibeke! Open the fucking door!”
“What’d you do?” Tony asked, coming down the stairs behind me.
I opened the door. Logan barged inside, followed by two people in pajamas and bathrobes.
Maybe this was some sort of singing telegram gone wrong.
“What the hell?” Tony demanded. “Get out of my house.”
Logan opened his mouth.
“Commander McKnight,” the man in pajamas said, holding up a hand and rather efficiently cutting Logan off, “I must ask you not to have guests over so late! You’re disturbing the entire neighborhood!”
“Who’re you?” I asked.
“Your neighbors,” he spat. “And you cannot have soldiers banging on the door at all hours!”
The woman—his wife?—had flung a silk bathrobe on over her sleep clothes, and shivered even in the comparative warmth of our entryway. “Yes, I really must insist. My children need their rest.”
“For what?” I asked. Hastings was pretty safe, at least for now. It wasn’t like they needed to be on alert for anything.
She turned her sharp gaze on me. “For school, Miss…?”
“Vibeke. Medic Vibeke Orvik.”
My rank didn’t seem to impress her at all. “Well, I don’t know what you medics do during the day, but my children need to sleep so they can pass their tests—”
“Tests?” I couldn’t help but laugh. “You guys realize the world fucking ended, right? The only test they need to pass is whether they can outrun a zombie.”