Regeneration (Mad Swine Book 3) (12 page)

“Oh I got this, brother,” Brian said,
a bit too enthusiastically. He grabbed the bowl with the water and
turned to Phil. “You have the stomach for this?”

Phil’s eyes shifted to me a moment,
then back to Brian. He took the bowl of water from Brian’s hands.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get Kat back. Don’t worry about
me.”

I saw truth in his eyes and I
believed him. And with that, I left them to get down to their
business. Besides, I had my own matters to attend and time was
slipping.

* * *

When Ravi came out of the tent, she
removed her makeshift facemask and bloody gloves. She threw them
into a plastic bag just outside the entrance.

“Please excuse me if I don’t hug you,
Matthew,” she said, indicating the blood on her smock with the
sweep of her hand. “But I am sure happy to see you.”

“Forget that,” I said and pulled Ravi
in close and hugged her. Her face was warm against my neck. “I
missed you something fierce.”

“You come to take us home now?” she
raised an eyebrow.

“Not yet. You heard about Kat?”

“Yes. You’re going to get her back,
right?”

“I will.”

“What can I do?”

“The woman they brought in, can she
talk?”

Ravi nodded her head. “She’s in lots
of pain but she can talk. Does she know something about Kat?”

“I think she does.”

She considered this for a second and
then said, “She’s in the first area on the left.”

“I’ll try to be quick, but—”

Ravi raised a hand and said, “If she
has information that leads us to Kat, get it from her. I don’t care
how long it takes or what you have to do to make her talk. You get
Kat and you take us home.”

She left me alone then, quite shocked
by her comment. This was a very different, darker version of the
woman who refused to be in charge of our medical section when I
first offered her the position six months ago. This was definitely
not the same Ravi who only three months ago refused to leave
Randall Oaks because someone needed to tend the ailing. I wasn’t
sure if I liked the new Ravi, but I had been spared an argument
that would have wasted precious time, so I wasn’t going to dwell on
it.

I grabbed one of the folding chairs
and sat next to the injured woman. She flinched at the sound of the
chair as it scrapped against the floor. Her head shot up and she
looked at me with her unbandaged eye.

“I need to ask you some questions,” I
said.

“Where’s the doctor? Why do you have
me here like this? I’m hurting real bad.”

“I know you are. As soon as you
answer my questions, the doctor will take care of you.”

“Please, just give me something for
the pain.”

“Not right now.”

“
Please
,” she said. Her brow dripped sweat
into her good eye and she blinked madly at the stinging. “I’ve been
shot and I’m dying here. I need the god damn doctor!”

“You will die if we don’t patch you
up soon,” I said. I squirmed a bit against the cold metal chair,
trying to get comfortable. “So I suggest you let me ask my
questions.”

“
Asshole
,” the woman said and spat at me.
Her mouth must have been dry, however, because nothing but her hot,
rank breath came out. She slumped against the bonds that held her
to the chair and started to weep.

“What’s your name?”

She said nothing and continued to
weep.

“What is your name?” I asked
again.

The woman again did not answer.
Instead, she hung her head and cried tears from her good eye.

Taking a deep breath to steel myself
for what needed to come next, I reached out and placed my
fingertips on the bandage that covered her wounded abdomen and
applied a quick jab of pressure. The woman’s reaction was
immediate. She screamed—”Mother fucker!”—and tried to push away
from my probing hand.

Leaning in closer, my fingers eased
up on her wound, I said, “If you don’t answer my questions I will
let you die here. But I promise you I will make what little life
you have left very painful and soon you’ll be begging me to just
kill you.”

Sobbing now, tears running down her
right cheek and mucous running from her nostrils, the woman starred
at me with her brown eye with a mix of hatred and fear. She said,
“Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

“That’s up to you,” I said. I sat
back in my chair and lay my hand against her thigh, close enough so
that I could reach out and tweak her again if she did not
cooperate. “Now, let’s start again. What is your name?”

“
Rose
,” she hissed. “My name is Rosemary
Anderson. Can I have some water, please?”

“Not now, Rose. Why did you attack
us?”

She looked down a moment, then back
at me. Her throat made a clicking sound when she swallowed. “Food
and supplies,” she said.

“You attacked us to take our food and
supplies?”

She nodded her head.

“What do you call yourselves?” Rose
seemed thrown by the question, so I rephrased the question. “What
is the name of your gang, Rose?”

Her nose wrinkled and she squinted as
she swallowed again. “He calls us the Raiders sometimes. I suppose
that’s our name. Please, I really need water.”

I considered her request for a
moment, then got up from my chair and retrieved my messenger bag.
From it, I pulled out a plastic pint bottle of water that was
half-full. Uncapping it, I put the mouth of the bottle to her lips
and slowly poured. Rose greedily gulped at the water and I pulled
it away.

“Where is your gang located?”

“More please,” Rose croaked. She
licked her lips and swallowed again.

“First give me a location.”

She shook her head. “We have camps
everywhere. I don’t know them all. No one knows them all.”

“So, what, do you go around killing
like this?”

Rose looked at me with her brown eye,
her eyebrow raised defiantly. “Yes. We do what we need to do to
survive.”

For a moment, I struggled to keep
from digging my hand into her wound and tearing it open. The
nonchalant way that people described their heinous actions simply
as doing what needed to be done to survive disgusted me.

Letting my anger simmer, I asked,
“What about the infected? How did they get them to be part of the
attack? How do they…control them?”

“Water, please.”

I gave her another few swallows of
water then put the cap on the bottle and set it at my feet. I put
my hand on her thigh again, waiting for her to continue.

“I don’t know exactly how they do it,
because I never watched them. But basically they corral them into
the trucks and then they drive the trucks into the kill zone. They
release the infected, you know, as a diversion to draw the
attention of the people, and then the Raiders come in behind
killing the infected and the other people. Then they take their
stuff and move on.”

She kept saying they, as though she
was not part of the act. My fingers twitched and again I had to
keep myself from tweaking the bitch.

“They got nothing from here, though.
I’m sure they saw the walls out there. They must have known this
would be hard. So why attack?”

“They were testing your defenses. And
they wanted the woman.”

That surprised me. I sat straight,
knocking the bottle of water aside with my foot. “Wait, what woman
did they want?”

“The blonde girl,” she said. “The one
in charge.”

“Who wanted her?”

“
He
wanted her.”

“
Who is
he
? Start making
sense.”

“The leader. I don’t know his name; I
only know what they call him.”

“So tell me what they call him.”

“They call him Road King or King
Harley because he rides that big motorcycle.”

“Why did he want the blond girl?”

Now she stared at me, anger
behind her one brown eye. “
How the
hell would I know
? He doesn’t tell me his
plans. He doesn’t even know I exist. I never met him face to
face.”

I took a deep breath and sighed.
“Okay, where did they take the blond girl? Don’t tell me you don’t
know.”

“They took her to our camp.”

“Damn it, be specific,” I said. I
squeezed her thigh firmly, enough to bruise her flesh. “Where is
your camp?”

She didn’t respond other than to make
a slight hissing sound when I squeezed. When I reached for her
abdomen, she cringed and tried to slap at my hands, then cried out
in pain from her own actions.

“Tell me where your camp is now or I
will fucking hurt you bad. I’m not playing games, Rose.”

She was crying again. She sniffled
and fixed her right eye on me again. “Please don’t make me do this.
He’ll kill me if I talk.”

“I won’t let him get to you, Rose.
Just tell me where my friend is and I’ll protect you. Please, Rose,
tell me where the camp is.”

She shook her head. “You can’t
protect me from him. He’ll kill me. He’ll feed me to the
monsters!”

Before I realized what I was doing, I
grabbed Rose’s hair in my left hand and pulled it backwards. She
yelped in surprise, but the ear-piercing scream came when I slammed
my fist into her wound and pushed hard.

With my face close to her, our noses
almost touching, I shouted, “If you don’t tell me what I want, I
kill you, Rose. I’ll feed you to the damn monsters, too.”

Suddenly, I kicked my chair away and
got behind her. I grabbed her chair, tilted it back onto the two
rear legs and started to drag the chair toward the doorway of the
tent. “Get ready, Rose. I’m going to feed you to the monsters a
piece at a time while you watch.”

“Stop it, God please, stop it. I’ll
tell you where the camp is!”

I stopped dragging the chair and let
it fall back on to all four legs. Back in front of Rose, I said,
“Don’t fuck with me, Rose. This is your last chance. Where is the
camp?”

“We have a camp at the Wal-Mart on 59
and 20 but they probably won’t go there, not right away. They’ll go
to the outpost instead to wait for reinforcements.”

“Don’t make me ask, Rose.”

“The outpost is down the road, some
shit diner called Kappy’s.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“How many people are there at the
outpost?”

“I don’t know,” Rose said. Then
swiftly before I could cause her more pain, she blurted, “I don’t
know how many of us you killed. There were fifteen of us
before.”

I was quiet a moment, mulling over
the information. Kappy’s wasn’t far, that was good. Their group
numbered fifteen before the attack. We must have taken out a few of
them, how many I couldn’t know. Maybe Phil could help by policing
the dead and counting those he did not recognize.

“
Can I please have something
for the pain, now?
Please.
I cooperated.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll send the doctor
with something.”

Ravi was waiting just outside the
tent. Her scrubs were stained with blood and other dark material I
couldn’t figure. She asked, “Did she give you what you needed?”

I nodded. “What’s her condition?”

Ravi looked into the tent for a
moment and then back at me. “The bullet is still in her abdomen.
She’ll need exploratory surgery to determine the extent of internal
damage and stop the bleeding. I don’t have the equipment or the
expertise. Even if we had a surgeon, she would most likely die on
the table.”

“What are her chances, then?”

Ravi shook her head. “Frankly,
Matthew, the woman is dead, she just doesn’t know it yet.”

“What do you suggest we do with
her?”

“There are two choices. We can give
her enough morphine to take her pain so that she passes in her
sleep. Or we can treat her pain for as long as it takes for her to
pass from her wounds. The latter for which I would not waste my
time or our resources.”

“Sounds like there is only really one
choice, then,” I said. Ravi shrugged her shoulders and stared at
me, waiting for my answer.

“Put her to sleep,” I said. Ravi
nodded and without hesitation, she was off to do the deed.

* * *

Phil sat on the wooden step just
outside of the trailer where he and Brian kept the other raider
they found wounded in the aftermath. He dragged on a cigarette and
I noticed his hands were scratched and dotted with patches of dried
blood.

“Everything okay here?” I asked.

Taking a last drag on the cigarette,
he stood up and crushed the rest of the smoke beneath his boot. He
blew out smoke, shook his head and said, “We didn’t get much. Your
brother’s having one more go at him. I just…needed some air.”

I had no idea what my brother had
done, but I knew Phil was thinking about Comedian. In retrospect, I
should have considered that before leaving Brian and Phil together.
Hopefully, this wouldn’t open the wound between these two even
further now that Phil got a first-hand look at my brother’s
handiwork.

Squeezing his shoulder, I said,
“Well, I got what we need, so let me stop this. Why don’t you send
someone down to move this guy to triage and meet me back here. We
need a plan and we need to move quickly before we lose any more
time.

“I’m on it,” Phil said and jogged off
in the direction of the triage tent.

I knocked on the door, opened it, and
stuck my head inside. “I need you,” I said, and then ducked back
outside.

Brian exited a few seconds later.
Winded, he said, “What, dude? I’m still working on him.”

“We’re done here. I got what we need
and we’re going to move out soon.”

“What about this guy?”

“Leave him. Phil is sending some
folks to take him to triage.”