He knew instantly that everything had changed. The problem wasn’t just zombies anymore.
Amy tried to remember how many of these people knew she wasn’t a doctor. The short, stocky guy in uniform was addressed as “Murdo” he was clearly in charge. Head like a fist, fringed with dense, black hair, balding in back to reveal an almost perfectly round cap of gleaming scalp.
These must be guys like the mercenaries Danny complained about dealing
with in Iraq—hotshots with fancy guns and no particular allegiance to the Geneva Conventions.
Murdo called the huge men that flanked him Reese and Boudreau. Boudreau had to be six-five, his nose broken more than once so it tapered the wrong way—getting broader and more prominent between his eyes, almost flat above his mouth. Reese had no fat on him, not a spare scrap of flesh: His anatomy showed through the skin like steel cables on an iron frame.
The wounded man’s name was Jones, because Murdo kept repeating that “Jones fucked us,” when he wasn’t shouting at people to get back or telling his men to secure their position.
Amy hadn’t intended to volunteer her medical services, but several of the civilians she’d been traveling with pointed her out to Murdo and said she was a doctor. Amy regretted that particular subterfuge. Troy wasn’t there to disagree, because he had been marched away along with Topper, Ernie, and a couple of other men who looked physically capable. Where they were now, Amy did not know. Their guard was Parker, a black man with a massive neck wider than his head.
She had never explained to these others that she was only a veterinarian. It wouldn’t be good for morale: hers or theirs. She still had an inferiority complex when it came to human doctors. Now she wished very much that she hadn’t let the matter slide.
Murdo pounded on the table. “You!” he barked at Amy. “Jones here needs some repairs. So let’s get going with it.”
Now was the time to come clean, Amy knew, before this went any further. If she messed up and lost this poor kid with the bullet in his leg, there would be heck to pay. If she told them all what she really was, they couldn’t possibly make her operate. Patrick knew her secret, as well; surely
he
would say something. Everyone was crowding in, the men with guns and the civilians both, pressing close, caught up in the panic. Jones was wailing with pain.
“Listen to me,” Amy said. “I’m not—”
A deafening noise threw everybody down on the floor except the men in uniform. The air went rank with cordite stink. Bent-nosed Boudreau had fired a bullet into the ceiling. The shell casing jingled on the linoleum.
“There’s no time for this shit,” Murdo said. “You all keep the fuck back and let the little lady do her thing.”
The others did what he said, wet-eyed and afraid.
Amy looked at Jones. His skin was pale, like beeswax. He was sweating.
His mouth was contorted with pain. Amy visualized a horse in the same situation. That didn’t work. A dog? More like it. This was not a man—it was a dog with very straight back legs. It had an injured limb, and Amy had to repair it. Same basic hydraulics, same structures. Different response to anesthetics, but she didn’t have any animal tranquilizers, so it was hard to go wrong there.
“Patrick, you’re my assistant. We need to wash up, and then let’s get to work.”
A minute later they were scrubbing their hands in the men’s room, hissing at each other in urgent whispers.
“I can’t do this—the sight of blood makes me faint,” Patrick said.
“Faint later,” Amy said. “We have to get this guy patched up and get them all out of here as fast as we can, because they’re psycho-birdies, in case you didn’t notice.”
“You think they’ll just shake our hands and leave?” Patrick snorted. “Duh. They’re gonna look around here and figure out they have it made, and they’ll sit out the situation with us as their servants. Trust me on this. I used to be a waiter. Them, you don’t want to wait on.”
“Either way, we have to do this. We don’t have a choice. It’s going to look really gross, so do what I say and don’t think about it.”
“Oh, yeah,
right
. Great advice.”
“You want great advice?” Amy whispered, trying not to shout. She was pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
“Yes, I want great advice.”
“Don’t puke in the wound.”
Even with all the horror Patrick had seen in the last fortnight or so, the sight of serious injuries still made him feel light-headed and ill. Amy lifted the sticky cloth away, strings of coagulated blood stretching and breaking. Pale flesh stained with red, the hairs glued down. Around the entry wound a puffed-up doughnut of skin. The crater itself, a purple-black orifice, didn’t look as bad as Patrick expected. Amy had him pass along fistfuls of gauze, the sterile water, and any kind of antiseptic wipes he could find in their medical kit duffel bag; Patrick was hopeful she was just going to clean the skin and wrap the thing up, job done.
“Look for liquid iodine or something,” Amy said. “There might be some peroxide in a brown bottle, that’ll work.” Patrick knew exactly what peroxide looked like. There was a full bottle in the duffel. He handed it over. Amy
sloshed the liquid liberally all over the leg injury. It foamed up, brown and fragrant, hissing. Jones screamed.
“Just what the
fuck
do you think you’re doing?” Murdo shouted.
“Just the fuck doing my
job
, Mr. Fucker Man,” Amy replied. As if to punctuate her response, she swabbed raw iodine on the wound, and Jones screamed again; Reese and Boudreau had to hold him down, Reese on the arms and Boudreau on the knees. By way of comfort they kept telling the writhing Jones not to be a fucking pussy.
In a level voice, Amy said, “Jones, how much do you weigh? One-eighty?”
The wounded man nodded, his teeth clenched so tight he couldn’t speak. Amy gestured with her chin: “Patrick, look for a box of little glass bottles labeled ‘Procaine Penicillin.’” He located the box and removed a couple of the bottles. “Now,” Amy continued, “look for a syringe. It will be in a paper packet.” Patrick handed bottles and syringe to Amy.
Patrick was absolutely going to pass out. No question.
Amy unwrapped the syringe and removed the plastic cap from the needle. She inserted the needle through the cap of a procaine bottle and drew the contents up into the syringe. She was about to press the needle into the ragged flesh at the edge of the wound when Patrick interrupted. He couldn’t help himself. Mostly, he was trying to postpone the moment when the needle entered the wound.
“Um—aren’t you supposed to squirt the bubbles out of the needle first?”
“You think there’s no air in there now?” Amy said, and sank the needle to the hilt right down inside the bullet hole.
Patrick made a croaking sound. Even Murdo took half a step back. But Jones didn’t seem to feel this additional outrage to his system. Amy picked up the second vial of procaine and injected that one, as well. Into the skin, rather than deep in the meat of the leg. Then she set the syringe aside.
“Don’t anybody touch that,” she said. “I’ll probably need it again. Tweezers, hemostat, scalpel, please.”
Before Patrick had a chance to overthink the situation, Amy was deep in the wound. She cut it open wider with the scalpel, had Patrick shine the flashlight down in the throat of the injury, and found what was looking for. Clamped it off with the hemostats. Then, with the long-nosed tweezers, she fished down to the depths, burrowing around for the bullet itself. The hemostats seemed to move of their own volition, like silvery wading birds with sharp beaks. While Amy worked, she began to talk.
“So how did he come by this?” Amy said. “Zombies can’t shoot.”
“Zeros,” Murdo said.
“Zeros who?”
“Zeros is what we call ’em. Not zombies.”
“Okay, a zero didn’t shoot him. Am I right?”
“Yeah,” said Reese. “He shot himself.”
“What caliber?”
“Nine millimeter,” Jones himself replied. His voice was tight. He was scared. “Pistol. I fucked up.”
“Got stuck with a tyro,” Murdo said. “Jones, lie still. If you bleed out, we’re gonna have to shoot you in the head. You want your momma should see you like that?”
“Nossir.” Jones was struggling, obviously feeling Amy’s exploration of the wound. He forced himself to lie still, but his face was rigid with the effort.
“We called for a chopper,” Murdo said. “No chopper. Lost contact with our main unit four days back. Supposed to rendezvous.”
“So, Jones, you shot yourself?” Amy said. “How long ago? A day?”
“Yesterday night,” he gasped.
“And since then you’ve been dealing with it?”
“Like a little baby girl,” Boudreau offered, renewing his grip on Jones’s knees. Patrick was acutely aware of how close he was to this huge, ugly man: all sour sweat, arm hair, and the whistle of breath through distorted nostrils. Not an appealing encounter. Patrick found he was staring at Boudreau to avoid seeing what Amy was doing. But he had to look, because she’d found something.
“No jacket,” Amy said. “Lead slug. You’re lucky this didn’t fragment too bad, but I think it hit the bone.”
Amy retrieved a piece of dark metal the size of a pencil eraser from Jones’s leg. Patrick felt an oily tide in the back of his throat, choked it down, and tried to breathe past the acid that surged behind his teeth. This squashed, bloody bit of metal had torn into this man’s leg at some huge speed and now Amy was pulling it out the way it came in. Almost too much to bear. He handed her wads of gauze and more of the iodine towelettes and tried to keep himself coherent.
Amy fished out another three or four bits of metal, then a pale sliver of bone that looked like a chewed-up toothpick.
“I don’t see anything else, but no warranty is express or implied,” Amy said, and then: “Needle and gut, please.”
A few minutes later, stitching complete, there was a sterile bandage over the whole thing. Amy released the tourniquet from around Jones’s leg, and nothing seemed to happen. The bandage did not turn red. It might have actually worked.
“Can you feel your toes?” Amy asked. But Jones was unconscious.
The Ping-Pong table was a mess of bloody gauze and orange iodine stain, the sheet was ruined, her shirt (and Patrick’s, he now observed) spattered with blood and disinfectant. The air had a hospital stink, but also reeked of armpits and fear. Empty first-aid wrappers and packets littered the floor. Jones was breathing fast but his body was limp. His companions let go of him and stepped back. Amy passed her arm across her forehead.
“No charge,” she said. “Don’t put any weight on that for a few days. Now put those guns away.”
Murdo looked at Jones’s face, and it was hard to say whether his expression was one of concern or irritation. He looked unsatisfied. Then he brought his eyes up, taking everybody in.
“This entire installation is under our control until further notice,” he announced. “Martial law, shoot to kill, you know the drill. Follow my orders, we’ll all get along. Fuck with us whatsoever and things will get ugly.”
“Under whose authority?” Amy asked. Patrick had his head between his knees. He was recovering from an intense desire to be sick.
“Smith and Wesson,” Murdo replied, and walked outside. Boudreau and Reese walked out behind him, and Parker and another man with a shaved head stepped inside the door and stood there with their guns across their chests, eyes as blank as buttons.
“No need to thank me,” Amy said.
Nobody slept well that night. They’d had so little time without danger staring them in the face, and now instead of the living dead it was assholes with guns.
By morning, Topper had gotten himself beaten to the ground in an altercation with the bald mercenary, whose name was Estevez. Estevez had an
illegible tattoo up under his right ear, and another of a teardrop under his left eye. Topper couldn’t properly fight back, because he was the one without a gun—and if he
won
the fight, he might still get shot. So he ended up humiliated and bleeding, curled in a ball on the floor of Hangar 2.
The two zombies that had been hanging around outside the fence had started lying on the ground for hours at a time, as if sleeping, until one of the living came close. The next time the zombies stood up, there was a Hawkstone man with a machine gun on the other side of the mesh. All the survivors rushed outside at the sound of gunfire. There wasn’t much to see. Just another couple of corpses now. Murdo selected a work party and sent them out to bury the bodies. He didn’t allow them a firearm in case there were more of the undead around. “Plenty of rocks out there,” he said. “Brain ’em.”
Maria was relieved of radio duty. That job fell to one of the paramilitary men, called Flamingo by the others; his face was pink, prematurely creased, and spattered with cancerous-looking freckles. The mercenaries weren’t inaccurate with nicknames: in addition to his complexion, Flamingo had enormous arms and skinny legs. There were two other members of the Hawkstone team, for a total of nine: black-haired, blue-eyed Ace, whose face was so immobile it appeared he suffered some kind of paralysis, and Molini. Molini had a single eyebrow identical to his mustache; these features bracketed a nose like an axe blade.
Murdo mostly ignored his civilian charges, preferring to order his men around. Amy thought that was a bad way to do things. It wasn’t Danny’s approach, that was for sure. But now that the zombies were buried, everybody was idle, sitting around in the rec room or the dormitories, talking in quiet voices. This irritated Molini and Boudreau, the guards at the door—they were sure the conversation was about them. In fact, people were primarily talking about what they would do after things settled down. Outside, the torn-up dirt where Topper and Ernie had undertaken the plumbing project remained as it was. There would be no further improvements. Topper’s right eye had puffed shut and his lower lip had split open like a grape; as a result of the fight, he and Ernie were currently confined to the rec room, where they glowered in the corner.
Amy did what she could to defuse the situation through Murdo, catching him as he passed through the terminal.