Death and Biker Gangs (21 page)

Tony’s fist closed around my shirt, and he jerked me in close to him. “If I die, I’m going to come back and haunt your Norwegian ass until the end of time. So don’t fuck up, Vibby.”

I wasn’t sure I could stomach being haunted by Tony for all eternity. That might actually be worse than the present situation.

I went to the sink, but nothing happened when I turned the faucet. 
No more running water, dumbass. 
I held up my left hand, considering the bandage Blair’s gang had put on me, and decided it was clean enough. I rinsed my other hand with dish soap and some of our precious bottled water, then slathered everything with hand sanitizer. “Okay, I’m going to clean it up.”

“Dax,” Tony said, “you need to move the car.”

“No, he needs to hold your leg steady.”

“If those bikers show up—”

“Will you shut up so I can work? God, you’re worse than the pansies I had to suture up in the clinic.”

When all else failed, impugning his manliness tended to silence him. He sat back and scowled at the ceiling, occasionally making pained noises, but otherwise holding very still while I cleaned out the wound. I used the last of the antibiotic paste on him, then tossed the tube over my shoulder when it was empty. I applied two heavy pieces of gauze to each spot, then began the slow process of bandaging the whole thing up. It was crude, not as clean as it should have been, and probably would have sent Doctor Samuels through the roof, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.

My vision was getting blurry by time I finished, the last of my own adrenaline buzz slowly leaking out of my system. I dug out the ibuprofen bottle, shook out four pills, and handed them to Tony. “These’ll take the edge off. I cleaned it up as much as I can, but you should see a doctor, maybe get some proper antibiotics.”

The boys both looked at me with raised eyebrows, and I bit my tongue. 
You should see a doctor. 
Like it was so easy anymore. “Hastings has a doctor,” I said, trying to cover up my slip. “Probably bunches of them. That’s where Behrens Memorial…”

“We don’t even know if Hastings is there anymore,” Tony said. “Maybe they stopped transmitting because they got 
eaten
.”

Dax straightened up. “I’ll move the truck. Try to get the existentialist bullshit out of your system before I get back. Come on, Evie.”

He stalked out, the dog running after him.

I sat back on my heels and stared at Tony, unable to keep a reproachful look off my face. “Why?” I asked.

“I don’t want you two thinking we’re playing Candyland only to find out it’s actually Monopoly.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It does in my head.” He tossed back the ibuprofen, washing it down with a gulp of water. “We gotta be prepared.”

I wiped at my hands with a rag. “Prepared for what?” 

“Bad news. If Hastings is gone, we may have to...”  

It was probably better not to even let him think about that particular eventuality. “Why are we even going, if you don’t think it’s there?”

He fixed his gaze on me, and I had a sinking feeling I was going to be on the receiving end of one of his lectures. “You just love cross-examining me, but what would you rather we do, Vibeke? We don’t have anywhere else to go. I guess we could go wandering and see if we got lucky, but we’d probably just end up dead. Or undead. Maybe both.”

I didn’t want to look at him, but I was almost too scared to look away. “So you’re just going to take us to this base that might be overrun and hope for the best?”

“You have a better idea?”

“What’s the point of even risking it? Why even make the effort if—”

“I just got 
shot 
trying to save your ass! Are you 
really 
questioning my fucking motives?”

My throat knotted up, and my chest abruptly tightened. Hell, I was either having the mother of all asthma attacks or I was about to start crying out of sheer frustration. 
No. No crying. No crying. 
I couldn’t cry in front of Tony of all people. He’d never let me live it down.

Besides, he’d just gotten me out of a situation that would have undoubtedly ended very badly for me. Now wasn’t the time to start challenging him. I squashed down all my feelings and stared at my hands; they seemed the safest thing to look at. “I’m sorry.”

Tony’s voice softened ever so slightly. “What do you think’ll happen to us if we just wander? You think Dax is up to that? Are 
you?
 I don’t think I am.”

I shook my head, not trusting my voice.

“We need a purpose. And the people back in Elderwood need help.”

“Do you even give a damn about them?” My voice cracked.

“Not really. Doesn’t mean I want the bunch of them dead.” Now 
he 
gave me a reproachful look. “You know me better than that, Vibeke.”

I did, once. Or I should have. “I don’t know what I know anymore,” I mumbled, glad that I’d managed to beat down the tears for the time being. My self-control remained intact. “I’m not cut out for this shit. I hate the undead and I feel like a murderer and I miss Netflix.”

He sighed, pushing himself up into a sitting position. “One of those things is not like the others.”

He’s right. He usually is. I should be thanking him; he knows how to deal with this shit, or he’s damn good at faking it.

“That kid looked right at me before I shot him.” He let out a ragged breath, rubbing the side of his face with one of his bruised and battered hands. “If I hadn’t done something, he’d have shot me before I could get inside. If it’s us or them, it’s going to be us, and we need to…we need to make those decisions. But he still looked at me. They all did. You put out some dude’s kneecap. I killed all those poor fuckers. 
I 
feel like a murderer.” 

Oh, hell. I was getting damn good shoving my foot into my mouth. “Sorry,” I croaked, wiping my hand across my forehead and yelping when it left a wet streak. “What the—”

“Darlin’, if you wanted my DNA, all you had to do was ask.” Tony picked up one of the unused paper towels and started dabbing at the blood—
his 
blood—I’d just dragged across my temples. His other hand abruptly closed over mine, squeezing my fingers together. “Those men you killed downtown would’ve done exactly the same thing to me and Dax,” he breathed. “Then they would have had their fun with you. These aren’t decent sorts we’re dealing with, Vibeke. The decent sorts won’t make you dump a fucking magazine into them. You feed a gentle soul like Dax to a zombie, 
that’s 
murder. The ones you actually did in? You were just protecting yourself. Cleaning up the riffraff.” 

I nodded. It was a fine speech. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I probably would’ve believed it and moved on.

I miss karaoke, 
the biker had said right before he got munched. Hell, those were his last words. “I just…they were like us, once,” I offered lamely.

“So were the undead, but you don’t have a problem putting 
them 
down. Yeah, they were like us once, but they’re not anymore. Whatever order Hammond held down in Elderwood doesn’t apply out here. You can’t forget that, not even for a minute.”

I nodded again, too drained to say anything else, then jerked away when something flickered beside my face.

“Easy,” he muttered, his hand stopping in midair. “Just want to see this.” Rough fingers trailed across the spot where Blair had struck me. It hurt, but I managed not to flinch. 

Tony’s gaze gentled a bit, just enough for me to see a little past the veneer of badassery. “Bastard really got you there.”

“I feel like I’ve had the shit kicked out of me this week.”

“Well, you have.” His fingers grazed my chin, about the one spot on my face that 
didn’t 
feel like it’d been hit by a snowplow. My stomach twisted, then flopped around, reminding me I hadn’t fed it anything besides booze and Gatorade for quite some time. “
Illegitimi non carborundum
.”

I stared at him. “Say what?”

The front door opened, and Evie’s jangling tags announced Dax’s return. Tony flashed me a Cheshire cat smile. “I said you might feel better…if you make me a sandwich.”

***

There was no bread left, so we never did have sandwiches. We dined on canned soup and a few stale crackers, trying to conserve what we had left. Dax turned the radio on, moving the dial around until he found Gloria’s station.

“Good evening, Midlands Cluster!” Her voice all but roared out of the little speaker, and Dax hurriedly lowered the volume. “This is Gloria Fey, coming to you from my safe house…”

“We must be close to her,” I said. “She never sounds this good.”

“We heard some activity nearby,” Gloria went on, “so this will be a short report. Nothing’s come in from the eastern seaboard, but we 
did 
eavesdrop on some radio chatter from Hastings Military Base a few nights ago, and I feel it’s my duty as a reporter to pass it on to you.”

“She heard from Hastings.” Tony sounded mildly surprised. “I’ll be damned. Now was it a transmission or internal chatter?”

“What’s the difference?”

“If it was a transmission, it means their machinery didn’t break down at all. They were just ignoring Hammond’s calls.” He reached for the bottle of ibuprofen and shook more pills into his hand. “Passive-aggressive little shits.”

Gloria shushed someone in the background before continuing. “There’s two things I need to tell you. Number one, we’ve received scattered reports of low-grade nuclear weapons being utilized against the living dead. I can’t speak for how successful they’ve been, but in each case, it’s sounded like those in charge turned to nukes in a last-ditch effort to clear out infestations.”

Infestation? 
That was the terminology the exterminator had used when my roommate had discovered a nest of cockroaches out in the garage. It was kind of an apt comparison.

I wonder how the cockroaches are faring in all of this...

“So now we have nuclear fallout to worry about on top of everything else,” Dax said.

“Kid, we’re in so much shit already, a little traditional radiation isn’t gonna hurt us that much more.”

“Jesus.” I sat up so fast my back cracked, and my head spun again, reminding me I still had plenty of my own hurts to look after. “That’s what was wrong with Blair and those boys. Radiation burns...really bad ones.”

Tony rolled over to look at me. “When the hell have you seen radiation burns? We don’t have a nuke plant out here.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Not nuclear radiation. Not from a plant, anyway. It was cancer patients. We did a lot of patient transfers when we weren’t seeing to actual emergencies, and the radiation treatments could actually burn.” The burns had scared the shit out of me when I first saw them, but it was a fear I’d learned to conceal behind a chipper tone and bad jokes about the weather. We could never let the patient see how their condition affected us. Ever.

Those people were probably all dead now.

Or worse.

“I’m guessing those bikers weren’t cancer patients, though,” Dax said.

No, they were something else entirely. Maybe they’d gotten too close to an impact site and lived to tell the tale? I rolled that thought around in my head.

 “This second thing…” Gloria paused, and I dimly heard someone talking behind her. “…no, I think they should know. Wouldn’t you want to know?”

“Uh-uh,” her companion said.

“Well, they can turn off the radio, then. Folks, in the coming weeks, you’re going to hear a lot about how the world ended. You’ve probably already heard plenty of theories.”

“I know how the world ended. We got smacked around by meteors and then the dead got up and got hungry.” Tony gulped down what was left of his water.

“Sssh.”

Gloria spoke quietly: “Some of you have probably heard of the Osiris asteroid. It’s passed by us numerous times without any problems…”

Osiris. I heard something about Osiris, didn’t I?

“…on this particular pass, something knocked it off its trajectory…there’s still some discussion over how it happened. According to the chatter we’ve heard from Hastings, the chances of it actually striking us went up dramatically, although there was great disagreement even in NASA as to whether it posed an actual threat.”

Something clicked back on in my brain. Tony had said something about Osiris the day after it all happened, though no one had ever proven it one way or another. Not that we knew of, anyway.

Maybe Hammond knew. It certainly explained the perpetual sad face he’d wandered around with during the last few weeks. I’d just assumed it was because we were running out of food.

“A decision was made. Listeners, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it was the right one. A number of nations sent up missiles, hoping to bump it away from the planet.” Oh, hell, I saw where this explanation was headed. “It worked, to a point. It split Osiris into hundreds of fragments.”