“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked in a small voice.
Gloria shrugged. “I’ve been asking the guards that since they locked us up. No one says anything. Keller asked me some questions the first day in here, but he hasn’t come back. Maybe he forgot about us.”
Or he was too busy sussing out whether Hammond was actually going to send a fighting force out after the so-called Commander McKnight. That had probably kept him occupied for a good while.
“Really,” Durkee said, his gaze flickering over all of us. “Get some rest. It’s the only way to make time pass in here.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Shuffling dead soldier?”
Dax lay a square of paper with a stick figure holding a surprisingly well-drawn rifle scrawled on it in front of Gloria. “Here.”
She studied her own squares, which no doubt contained similarly imaginative drawings. “Um…bloodied carcass?”
“Go fish.” Dax paused. “I mean, go shamble.”
The background was simple enough. Before Gloria and Jay joined him, Captain Durkee spent a lot of time in solitary with just a pack of markers and a deck of notecards. Rather than slit his wrists with the paper stock, he created the world’s first game of Go Shamble.
And now he finally had people to play it with.
I guess prison really does change a man.
I didn’t join in. Instead, I lay on my cot and pulled a scratchy blanket over my head, trying to slip back into the dream I’d just had. I had been back at my parents’ house, in my old room. Dad had redecorated it in a vague effort to turn it into an office, so it must have been after college. Mom kept calling me, telling me breakfast was on. The smell of coffee—good stuff, not the sludge I’d been drinking—filled the house.
If I kept my eyes shut, if I could just get back to that point…
“Glasses zombie?” Jay asked.
“Those aren’t glasses, those are goggles,” Durkee said. “He’s a scientist.”
Jay sighed. “Goggles zombie?”
“Go shamble.”
There was no going home. Not in real life and not in my dreams. I was still trapped here in Hastings with a deposed military commander, an ex-coworker, and Gloria fucking Fey, and I had unwittingly participated in killing a good person and then bringing her back as a talking revenant.
This sucks, I thought.
“Hey.”
Tony must have been standing right next to me. I peeked out from under the blankets, one eyebrow arched.
“You know you’re not very good at that,” he said. He was indeed looking down at me, vague concern splashed across his face. “Both your brows go up.”
“Your mom,” I said, because I apparently regress to the insult level of a twelve-year-old when I’m upset.
“That’s not even remotely—”
“Tony, please.” I shut my eyes, hoping he’d go away. “I can’t nap with you staring at me and them playing that thing.”
Instead, he sat down next to my bed. I felt his back pressing against the edge of the cot, and when I opened my eyes again the outline of his jacket was right there in front of me.
So much for solitude.
“We’ll get out of here,” he said. “We’ve been through worse.”
He really did pick the most inappropriate moments to be comforting.
“We’re going to rot here,” I said. “Or the city will eventually get overrun and we’ll be eaten.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
He shifted around a little bit to look at me. “Hammond will come after us.”
“Hammond is not going to waste firepower to extract three people who aren’t really that important.”
“He’s a softie.”
“You’re a softie.”
He chuckled. “You know what? Ezekiel dealt with worse than this.”
“Ezekiel is a Mennonite superhero. We are sadly normal.” My stomach made another gurgling noise, and this time I couldn’t quite tell what it was upset about. “Ezekiel is also fictional.”
Clicking sounds filled the room. I sat up. Someone was opening the door. They’d come in earlier that morning to dump food and some extra toilet paper on us. Dax had asked them to feed Evie. They had laughed at him. Then they had gone.
Now they were back.
The soldiers scanned the room, then pointed at me. “Medic. Come on.”
“Why do you need her?” Tony demanded. He sprung to his feet pretty fast, considering that leg injury that seemed to dog him.
One of them came toward me, his boots clomping noisily over the polished floor. “The outbreak’s getting worse. We need all medical personnel on duty. Even traitors.”
Oh, so now I was a traitor. That was lovely.
The soldier stared down at me. “Get up.”
I bit back my initial response, which was to tell them to tell Lattimore, Renati, and the entire medical staff to go straight to hell.
Maybe he could read the sentiment in my expression. He reached down, seized my arm, and yanked me right out of bed. I yelped, my shoulder making a popping sound as it strained.
“You’re not in a position to be refusing anything,” he informed me. “We need all medical staff present.”
Get sent to jail, go die in a plague. That sounded about right.