It was safe to assume napping was out of the question.
Durkee didn’t move from his bed, so we gathered chairs and cots and formed a rough semi-circle around him. He kept a set of worn, but carefully maintained combat boots in the little living area he had claimed as his own, a surprising contrast to the extremely cheerful purple and red striped socks that graced his feet. His big toe poked out of both of them.
“You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand on ceremony,” he said. “I don’t get a lot of visitors. Also, I don’t care.”
“Completely understandable,” Tony said. “We also do not care.”
Durkee sort of smirked. “So they talk now. Ah, shit. When did that happen?”
“About an hour ago,” I said. “Well. Maybe less. A girl died in the Plague Tent last night. I was trying to help her brother find her body…we found her.”
Alyssa’s colorless eyes appeared again in my mind’s eye.
“You found her,” Dax repeated. “And…she’s the talking zombie? Are you sure she’s dead?”
“She’s dead. She didn’t try to bite us or anything. She just seemed…” I paused, trying to conjure up the appropriate adjectives given my poor state of mind. “Confused, I guess. Almost like she was drugged.”
Gloria, Jay, and Dax stared at me, their mouths hanging open slightly. Durkee seemed interested, but not as shocked as I had expected, which troubled me on a deeper level. The dead weren’t just walking—they were talking. That was worth freaking out over.
Wasn’t it?
“Logan was screaming about the drug you gave her,” Tony said. “What was that?”
“Renati gave them a drug…I guess…apparently it was experimental…”
Durkee winced at that statement. “Renati? Renati from R&D?”
Apparently everyone but me realized that entrusting patients to a researcher might not have been the best idea. I ground my teeth and tried to hold onto the flare of anger that shot through me. “You know, you can sit there and look disapproving but what the hell were we supposed to do? Lattimore wouldn’t let us give them anything besides sedatives. They were dying right in front of us! We had to try something…but I guess that something…I…something in the drug changed the way the…the virus…”
My voice broke. Dax, horrified though he might have been, scooped up my hand and squeezed it.
Durkee took a breath, and then let it out. “All right. So Renati is working on patients…who’s in charge of R&D now?”
Tony and Dax looked at me. “Renati,” I said. “Such as it is. He doesn’t do a lot of research anymore. Lattimore has him treating patients.”
“What about Smith? Albee?”
I shook my head. “Those names don’t sound familiar. It seems to be just him.”
The captain ruminated over that for a few seconds, then sighed. “Well, that’s no good. Renati was pretty far down on the food chain there.”
“Renati’s the one who looks like he stuck his finger in an electric socket, right?” Dax asked. “He made the zombies talk?”
I sighed. “It was one zombie. And I don’t think he made it do anything. It just…happened.”
Durkee adjusted his cap again, his expression unchanged. “Renati. I remember him well enough. Still. The entire research team is just gone?”
“As far as we know.”
“No one’s said anything about them?”
I shook my head. “Unless Dax heard something.”
Dax also shook his head.
Gloria retreated to her bed for a few seconds. She reached underneath it and came up with a fistful of small items wrapped in plastic. “Granola bars, anyone?”
Those of us who had been subsisting on pastrami snatched them immediately. I tore off the wrapper and jammed half the thing into my mouth. It had melted together at some point, and the actual chocolate chips were probably a little stale, but my God, it wasn’t pastrami. It wasn’t pastrami.
Tony and Dax tore into their snacks with similar gusto. Durkee watched us, something vaguely resembling a smile touching his face. “Pastrami,” he said. “I knew we had too much of it. The whole city’s living off it?”
“It’s not even good pastrami,” I said.
“Bet the Navy got the good stuff. Food-thieving pirates.”
We snacked for a moment, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
Predictably, it was Tony who brought up the undead elephant in the room. “So why are you in here? What’d you do?”
“He didn’t do anything,” Gloria said. “His underling was a maniac.”
“No,” Durkee said. “I mean, yes. He was…troubled. But I’m not blameless.”