Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 (16 page)

And then it was my turn. My hair was already up, so all I had to do was sit down sideways on the cot and wait for Terrance to finish cleaning and join me. I couldn’t really say if the scratching sensation of the needles shooting ink into my skin was any lighter than the last two times. For the first mark, in Aurora, I’d been so worked up that my anxiety because of the whole ordeal had pretty much made me forget everything except for that feeling of freedom once we were all safely out of the gates. My memory of the tat low on my back was sketchy at best, even if I’d never admit that. It didn’t really sting much now, but I couldn’t say if that was due to the neural damage the virus had caused, or it simply paled in comparison to all the shit I’d been through of late.

Terrance was done before I could find an answer to all that. I could tell that he was hesitating after he finished cleaning up my neck, making me smile.

“Just how well can you draw?” I asked, questioning my sanity just a little bit. “Probably a really stupid question, considering that you used to earn a living with your skills, but…”

“I’m not really good with portraits,” he offered. “But except for that, I’d say pretty decent. Why?”

Glancing back over my shoulder, I couldn’t help but smirk at him. “Guess.”

“What do you want?” he asked, smiling with anticipation.

Exhaling slowly, I forced myself to overthink this again, but there really was no sense in backing down now. Nate was right. Life could be oh so fleeting these days, and there was no room left for regrets.

“Can you draw an anatomically correct heart, maybe a little stylized, with one of those curly banners over the bottom, spelling his name? Apparently, we are that kind of people.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Nate bite his lip, trying to stifle a laugh, while Terrance looked a tad bit doubtful.

“I can do that, no problem. But I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there’s a woman who had kind of a similar design—“

I cut him off right there, grinning brightly. “I know. I watch porn. And I’m not a princess, so you might as well slap on his name there.”

Ever the professional, Terrance didn’t laugh, but when he fetched his sketchpad he gave Nate a look that clearly spelled out that he thought Nate was one lucky guy. For once in his life, Nate proved that he could at least pretend to be decent and he kept his mouth shut, but I was sure that further down the lane I would get to hear a piece of his mind.
 

And so it came that I spent another hour lying on that cot, with my shirt shoved up to the middle of my back and my pants down to my knees. Terrance must have noticed my “13” tat above my tailbone but didn’t comment on it, so I was spared to recount the ridiculous story of why mine was down there while Nate’s was just inches below his neck marks. Admittedly, I’d had more free space there than he did. Still.
 

Then we were done, and Terrance unlocked the door for us so we could duck outside to get fresh clothes from the Rover. I stayed inside and let Nate play fetch, seeing as the sun was still up and I had no intention to fry my eyes if I didn’t have to. The fluorescent light in here wasn’t exactly balmy, but it was still preferable to the glare outside.

Nate returned and we got dressed. If I moved a little gingerly while pulling on my pants, it was pure coincidence. I couldn’t help it; I had to step up to the mirror by the showers and turn around so I could see first one, then the other black mark, the skin around it slightly swollen and red. I knew that in a few days it would look just like the one in the middle. I didn’t really know how to feel about it. It signified something that wasn’t true for me, but at the same time so much more than six lines ever could.

“Are you okay?” Nate murmured as he stepped up to me, his breath warm on the side of my neck. I caught his gaze in the mirror, taking a moment to think about his prompt. Was I okay? No. Out there, starving but not feeling hungry, feeling exhausted without moving that much because it wasn’t overexertion that leached the very strength from my muscles, it had been easy to ignore what was going on inside of me. Or easier. I’d done enough wallowing as it was, feeling sorry for myself. But now I had to face the fact that I wasn’t an island. What little Dom had divulged had been a lot more than I’d wanted to hear, and I was sure that it was just the start of it. If I really was infected, I needed to know. I needed to hear all this. I needed to face the music and deal with the consequences. But I really didn’t want to.

But even less I wanted to let Nate down, and force him to carry that load for me. There had to be enough on his mind as it was. We had lost two people, and if we were lucky no one else in the weeks since. The country was in unrest, and keeping everyone safe at the Silo and over at Dispatch was a good solution for now, but not in the long run. The last thing Nate needed was to have to worry whether the occasional suicidal thought of mine would lead me to do something stupid—or, even worse, brand me as undependable. So I put on a brave face and smiled, even if it was a somewhat lopsided one.

“I have your name on my ass for fucking forever,” I replied. “I don’t think that makes me anything even close to ‘okay.’”

He laughed, wrapping his arms around me for a moment to pick me up and squeeze me against him.

“I think that makes you very okay,” he observed, rubbing his—freshly shaved—cheek against mine.

“You would say that,” I snarked, digging my fingers into his arms until he let go. Turning toward the elevator, I couldn’t help but slap his ass, making sure to hit the tender side. “Come on, let’s go. I have a certain feeling that people are waiting for us.”

He nodded and joined me without a comment, but I didn’t miss the look of worry crossing his face.

As soon as we stepped out of the elevator and into the Silo proper, I knew that our quiet time together was over. For one, Commander Wilkes and his other aide, Meeks, were waiting for us, with Sunny and Dom hovering behind them. For another, it took Andrej all of five seconds to envelope me in a bone-brushing hug that made me squeeze right back. The Ice Queen patiently waited her turn, but all her usual reservations aside, she also embraced me, if let go after a polite three seconds. They were the only ones of our people who’d reached the Silo yet, but Pia informed us that the others would likely get here before nightfall. Wilkes shook our hands, but I was sure that it wasn’t my imagination that he let go of mine rather quickly. He looked tense, a definite difference to our welcome here last time, but then things had changed since then.

“I apologize for complicating things like this for you,” he explained after all pleasantries had been exchanged. “I hope you understand.”

The way he said that didn’t exactly leave much room for protestations, but I had no intention to offer any. My nod he took for what it was—acceptance rather than agreement—and he was all too happy when Sunny barged in, perfectly vibrating with excitement.

“I’m sure you will want to see the results?” he said, way too enthusiastic for his own good. I hadn’t forgotten about his… fumble earlier, and I was still hoping that something—anything, really, zombie attacks included—would need our attention first, but that sadly wasn’t the case.

“What you have so far, please,” I lied. “I presume you’ll take a few more days to get it all done?”

“More like months,” Sunny enthused, leading the way toward the command center rather than the labs. Nate, Pia, and Andrej fell into step behind us, with Dom a silent presence next to Nate, while Wilkes and Meeks brought up the rear. “We’re still busy doing chromatography to clear your blood of anything but the virus. It’s highly fascinating that we still haven’t managed to produce antibodies so we can do the reverse, but it’s only a matter of time—“

I tuned him right out, instead studying the way people reacted to us passing by. A lot of them ignored us, or only took passing interest to greet their Commander. But there were a lot of non-Silo personnel down here today, and almost all of them checked us out, trying to gauge who we were, and, more importantly, how far up the pecking order we ranked. That wasn’t new, but what was different was that now I didn’t drop out of their focus the second they saw that the sides of my neck were unmarked. And from my neck their gazes usually dropped to the weapons strapped to my thighs, the way I moved, or how I studied them in turn. I could only hope that most of them would miss the slight hitch in my gait every few steps when my left thigh gave a twinge. Staying still for how many hours I’d slept had made my muscles lock up somewhat, but already I felt the stiffness ease up a little. A few sprints and I would be as good as new.

What they didn’t look at me as was a half-zombie, ready to tear out their throats at a moment’s notice, and that was something I was insanely grateful for. Some did regard me as a juiced-up lunatic about ready to run amok, but that I could deal with. After that intermezzo with the traders and soldiers I wasn’t sure if that wasn’t warranted.

Sunny kept droning on until we reached the command center. Last time half the workstations there had been abandoned, but now they were manned to the last one. On several of the screens that we passed I could see air surveillance videos, making it obvious where the drones we’d seen were piloted from. The video wall was showing a huge map of the country, a lot of the main thoroughfares marked red. I remembered that last time they had been green—all the roads that had been reported as at least passable and clear of larger groups of zombies. The Silo and Dispatch were both marked as green, and several of the settlements were blue, making me guess that meant neutral. Our base back in Wyoming was one of them, I was somewhat happy to see. Aurora and Harristown were red, and neither came as much of a surprise. I would have loved to inquire about that, but Sunny went over to one of the smaller workstations at the back, shooing away the guy who’d been stealthily playing a computer game in the midst of all the productivity going on. A few clicks and he had that presentation pulled up that Dom had been hinting at. I figured it was a small mercy that it didn’t have a title page, and seemed to consist mostly of scanned images of the different assays they had run already.

“This is really quite fascinating,” Sunny said, not giving anyone a chance to contradict him. “We have been waiting for over a year to see the virus mutate, but definitely didn’t expect it to recombine. Dominic told you that theory already? Of course it will be another week until I can confirm this completely, but if you look at the first blots that we did—“

There were way too many lanes on that SDS-PAGE gel and western blot that Sunny was raving about, making me tense up before my mind was even able to sift through the details. None of the lanes were signed with anything but numbers, but I’d seen the results of way too many time progression experiments in my time not to make sense of this. Although, time progression was not the applicable term.

My throat closed up and my stomach dropped out from underneath me. It was impossible for me to tear my gaze away from the screen, and I didn’t hear a word of what Sunny kept going on about. When I finally managed to shake myself out of it, I reached over and pulled the stack of papers from his hands that he used to explain what exactly which blotch on the screen signified. I didn’t care about the diagrams and jotted notes, but kept rifling through the pages until I found the sheet that held the sample order for those first assays that Sunny had shown me. It was all abbreviations, of course, because scientists were lazy fuckers through and through, but it wasn’t hard to decipher them and match them up to what I knew they had to be. Right there it was, black on white, that harmless-looking “P” and “E”—short for “placenta” and “embryo.”

Air left my lungs in one explosive burst and I felt the sheets slip through my suddenly slack fingers, tumbling all over the floor. My heart seized up inside my chest, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. My mind ground to a halt, trains of thought clashing against one another without affecting anything.
 

This couldn’t be happening. Of all the things that had gone down, not this.

But it had happened, because there was the data. And didn’t it make so much more sense that Nate would shush Sunny to shut him up before he could blab about inconveniences, rather than to spare me another deluge of grief? Because what was going on inside of me had never mattered to him as much as virtually anything else.

Anger came hot on the heels of denial dropping away, anger so hot and deep-seated that it made me see red. I felt my ragged fingernails bite into my palms as my hands curled into fists. I needed an outlet for that anger, and I knew that if I didn’t leave here, right fucking now, it would be someone’s face rather than an unlucky inanimate object.

Turning around slowly, I stared at Nate. At least he didn’t have the audacity to ignore me. And, oh, he knew that he’d screwed up. I could see it in the guilt on his face, the anguish in his eyes. But he stood tall and defiant as ever, not giving an inch when he should have been groveling in front of me.

I held his gaze until I couldn't stand to look at him anymore—and then I left.

You know you’re in trouble when all of a sudden a corridor that is wide enough for five cars to drive through side by side is closing in on you.

That was exactly how I was feeling as I stormed out of the command center and flew blindly down the hallway. My only instinct was to get out, but with my mind all but scrambled I took the wrong turns, and rather than reach the hangar, I ended up stepping into the converted gym. There were a few people in there, training on the mats across the room, but I didn’t even really see them. My eyes fell on the punching bag suspended from the metal rafters overhead, and suddenly I had an outlet for all the anguish that was tearing me apart right now. Screaming, I exploded toward the bag, first hitting it with my fists, and when that did nothing, I pivoted on my bad leg and kicked the bag as hard as I could. Leather ripped, the bag slamming into the wall as it tore off its suspension hook, and it fell down in a heap on the floor, sand escaping through the tear at the top. I stared at it, panting, trying to make sense of what had just happened.