There was a weak cheer; it was as good as she could expect under the circumstances. “Wayne! Unless you’re still doing the spy’s bidding, I want a full muster in two hours. I mean I want everyone. Got it?” She spat more orders, and for a few minutes people were going in every direction. The wounded were not forgotten. Wheelchairs from the clinic were raced down to the harbor and someone ran to find the one ex-nurse on the island.
She came into the clinic, sweat on her upper lip. Her eyes popped wide at the sight of Gunner, and she quickly turned to Zophie Williams. One look at the terrible belly wound and she shrank in on herself, making a noise in her throat.
While her mom was hurrying about trying to rouse the population, Emily stayed with the wounded. One of the things she had been taught was the basics of triage. Troy wasn’t going to pass away anytime soon, while Gunner and Zophie were both terribly pale.
“We’ll give you both an IV,” she stated with far more confidence than she felt. She had never placed an IV before and hadn’t been trained to, either. Her only experience was watching Jillybean do it once to a zombie and it looked easy as pie. Of course, it wasn’t. There were so many tubes! And four different kinds of fluid, and five needle sizes.
Gunner watched her through his glazed-over eyes. “Not that needle,” he wheezed. “It’s too small. Go with the big ones, as big as you can.” He talked her through the entire procedure, which to a child was a big deal. Even with his bulging veins, it took her three tries. “You know, I taught Jillybean how to do that,” he said, slipping up. “Gunner” had never taught Jillybean anything.
“I know,” she answered, forgetting herself as well. Neither of them noticed. She ran the IV fluid into him as fast as it would go. She went to Zophie next. Without any real hope, the ex-slave held out an arm. Her veins were tiny to begin with and with the lack of blood, they were the same size and consistency as ramen noodles. Four tries were all Zophie would allow.
She asked for the nurse; however, the nurse was doing her best not to hear. “It doesn’t matter anyways,” Zophie said, without any emotion. “I’m not letting you cut me open.”
“How ‘bout something for the pain?” Emily asked. “Jillybean has some medicine for that around here.” She rushed about, opening drawers and cabinets until she found the little vials. “What should I give and how much?” she asked the nurse. The woman was in her element where drugs were concerned, and soon all three were feeling their effects.
Troy was eager to get up. Against orders, he strapped on his armor and took up his spear, pausing only long enough to wipe the mud and blood off of it. He hesitated at the doorway. “I’m claiming the Harbinger for the Guardians, if that’s okay with you two.”
“It’s my mom who you’ll have to convince,” Emily stated. “She doesn’t listen to me when it comes to the island’s business, which is okay. I’m a kid.” And I’m home, she thought. I don’t need to do any of this anymore. There should be a grown up here. Even with her father within arm’s reach, she wanted an adult, a real doctor, to be there, gravely shooing her out the door so he could save him.
And the doctor would, too. Knowing this, she would be free to run and play and find her friends and tell them of her grand adventure. But there was no doctor and she was going to be a child for only a little while longer. She glanced down past the torn pants; her scratches were scabbed over. Not wanting to think about that, she asked the nurse to look at Gunner’s wound.
“I-I just have to check on something first. My, my house. Right, I left the fire going.” A second later, she was gone, leaving Emily alone with two dying people. “What do I do?” she asked her father.
“You’re going to put a chest tube in me.”
“Okay.”
Some of Zophie’s despair had crept into Emily’s veins. Gunner picked up on it right away. “No. This is a real procedure. You can go into it afraid, or nervous, or confident, just don’t go into it with apathy. Do you know what that word means?”
Instead of being cowed by his sudden anger, she had to fight off a smile. This was her dad acting like a real dad. She didn’t realize how much she had wanted exactly this until that moment. “Jillybean half raised me. Trust me, I know every big word ever invented. Or, like, most of them.”
He beamed at this—again, the wrong attitude for a gruesome creature named Gunner—and again, neither of them noticed. With his guidance, she cleaned an area beneath one of his over-sized pectoral muscles, shot his pale flesh full of a xylocaine substitute to act as a local anesthesia, slit him open between two of his ribs and slid in the tube.
There were more steps, minor ones in her mind, but these were the ones that were impressed on her memory. That and the ugly red and black gunk that slimed its way down the tube. Her stomach rebelled at the sight and she pulled her eyes from it. With a gasp, she asked, “Do you think that’ll fix you?”
The truth, that he was forever broken and that this last bullet was likely the coup de grace which would finally drag him down into the abyss, could never be said to his daughter. “I feel better already.” As proof, he dragged in a deeper lungful of air than was possible ten minutes before. It was like drawing in a lungful of fire. “See? You did great. I couldn’t be more prou…I mean you did a good job. I could use some antibiotics and that transfusion you talked about.”
“You can have some of mine if…” Her sleeve was halfway up her arm before she remembered the scratches. “Uh, if I’m allowed to. I’m sure my mom would give some of hers. I’ll go ask.” She sprinted out of the room at top speed.
Gunner was filled with sudden dread at the prospect of Deanna seeing him like this. He tried to sit up and failed. His strength was failing him at last. His wound, the drugs, and the days without sleep dragged his lids down and he fell into a deep slumber.
Trying to organize a reluctant citizenry to fight an unpopular battle had Deanna busy flying around the island, feeling the need to be in twenty places at once. Emily kept missing her mother by minutes only catching up to her by listening for the latest problem: three cases of batteries that had been set aside for use by the landing force were all corroded—Emily dashed for the east side of the island where the replacements were kept.
Seeing her hyper, over-tired daughter, Deanna turned over the list of problems to Veronica and Andrea.
“Mom! I need you to help Gunner. He needs a transfusion…”
“Gunner?”
Emily sucked in her breath. “I mean Joe. He needs a transfusion and I, I, I didn’t think you’d let me give him blood, so I said you would.”
“Is that so?” Deanna had heard a lie in her daughter’s voice and now she transfixed Emily with her sharp, intelligent blue eyes.
The look on her mother’s face was one of the main reasons that Emily never lied to her, and now she had spat out three lies in those two brief sentences. She had to admit to at least one of them. “His name is not Joe, it’s Gunner. He says he knew you.”
“Gunner? No, the only Gunner I ever heard of was a slaver that Neil and Jillybean ran into down south. Is that really him?” Her disgust cleared away her inquisitor’s look.
“He’s changed, I promise. You’d love him. He saved me a hundred times and never asked for anything in return. And Jillybean trusted him enough to make him her chief general. You can ask Uncle Neil.”
“Oh, I plan to. We’ll ask him together, and, while we’re there you have some things you need to do.” Against her will, Emily was sent marching home to bathe, eat and sleep. She mounted a vigorous protest, which evaporated against Deanna’s wall of motherhood. “I will check on your friend, Gunner. If he can talk you through an IV, I’m sure he can do the same for a transfusion. It can’t be that hard.”
At the governor’s mansion, Emily found Neil Martin being forced to eat an immense feast by the very same tyrant.
He had been so thoroughly scrubbed that his grey flesh had taken on the luster of a diseased pearl. Clean clothes had been fetched from his house and now he was
in a new sweater vest, khakis and a pair of black Crocs—his “Church going Crocs” as he called them. He was being watched over by Deanna’s assistant, Shelley Deuso. To hide the ugly flap of hair being held on by two safety pins now, he wore her gardening hat. It was a pale blue with a pink satin ribbon.
“Shower, eat, sleep, in that order,” Deanna commanded, sending Emily away. The girl took in a big breath to argue, only the breath morphed into a cavernous yawn and she was suddenly crushed by exhaustion. Slowly, she stumbled from the room. The second she did, the governor turned her ice-blue eyes on Neil.
He gulped down a monstrous bite before saying, “What?”
“You know what. Joe is really Gunner? I remember your stories. They didn’t paint a very flattering picture. In fact, wasn’t he going to put you into the arena to fight? And didn’t he kidnap Sadie? Come on, Neil? How can you trust a man like that?”
As she had been talking, Neil had loaded up a serving spoon with a chunk of carrot, a fist-sized portion of rabbit, most of a halibut and a red potato. It all went into his mouth. He had never felt so hungry in his life. “You can trust him.” Spoken around the food, this came out sounding like a foreign language. “I promise. He’s a changed man. You’d love him.” He found this humorous and laughed hard enough that a piece of carrot the size of his thumb popped out of his mouth and bounced to the floor. Without a thought, he picked it back up and shoved it back into his maw.
“Yes, Jillybean trusted him,” she said.
“Exactly,” he answered, losing the carrot again.
This was about all she could take of Neil just then. “Don’t let Emily out. She needs to sleep and so do you.” He began to answer and she used Gunner as an excuse and left as quickly as possible. With the Corsairs going back and forth on the Sound, she didn’t have time to babysit a dying man. But he had selflessly saved her daughter and for her, that earned him a pass concerning many of his previous misdeeds. But not all of them; she would never fully trust a slaver no matter what, and she had to wonder why Jillybean would.
He was still sleeping when she tiptoed into the operating room. The first thing she thought was that he was out of place. He didn’t fit in, not on the island and certainly not in the sterile operating room. His filth and blood clashed against the stark white of the room. Worst of all, his mask had fallen away sometime in the last two hours. She could see the bone of his jaw, the roots of two teeth, the hole in the side of his head where his ear had once been, and the dreadful mottled flesh. A fire had turned him into something not altogether human.
“But he saved Emily,” she told herself.
That little whisper was enough to wake him. He was like Jillybean in that he woke without moving a muscle. His eyes cracked open and he surveyed her, taking in every lovely inch of her. It had been ten years since he saw her last and he was smitten in the very same way he had been the first time he had seen her. Unlike him, she had changed very little. Deanna was one of those lucky women who had grown in beauty as she aged. She had matured in the best possible definition of the word, going from a pretty young thing to a lady, refined, self-confident and powerful.
He was nothing but a monster. With a quick move, he hid himself again, putting his mask in place and pulling up his blanket. “Hello,” he said to her when the silence between them became uncomfortable.
She took a deep breath, fixed her smile in place and returned the greeting, adding, “Thank you for saving my daughter.”
“You are welcome.” More silence and again it became painfully uncomfortable. He had no idea what to say to her and clearly she didn’t know what to say to him. They were strangers, separated by his lie. It was a lie that he could not undo. Too much time had passed, and his face…no, he could never admit the truth. So, he lay there in pain from more than just his torn-up insides.
A wasted minute went by before she glanced at her watch. Panic flared inside him. She was going to make an excuse, thank him a second time and leave.
“Emily, uh, your daughter, she’s beautiful,” he blurted out. The ham-fisted compliment produced suspicion in Deanna. Her smile dimmed and her eyes, which had been guarded turned flinty. “I-I mean beautiful in a kid way, not in the, uh the other way. And she’s kind and strong and courageous.”
“I agree completely.”
“No, you’re just saying that as a mother. I mean she really is all that in real life, where it counts. She left off half her story, because she knew it would make you worry.”
A cold wave swept Deanna. “Did…did something happen to her out there? You know? Something…wrong? Something bad?”
Many bad things had happened to Emily, starting with her kidnapping. It took him a second to catch her meaning. “Oh, that. No way. I wouldn’t let it.” She gave him a sharp disbelieving look. He grinned behind his mask. “Don’t let the face fool you, I’m a nice guy beneath the scars.”
“It’s not the face I worry about, it’s the name.” He froze, a flash of pain arcing through his insides. “Ah, I see you weren’t expecting that, Gunner. I know all about you. Slavers don’t just become good guys like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I don’t know how you fooled Neil, but I won’t stand for you being so close to my daughter. If we can fix you then great, but you won’t stay on the island a minute longer than necessary.”
The rebuke was harsh enough for a deep ebony sadness to threaten to swallow him in one gulp. It was a feeling he knew well. It had crept over him so often during his long convalescence a decade before. Thankfully he had Jillybean to nurse him through those times and he clung to her image in his mind.
“Do you also think I fooled Jillybean?”
A shrug. “How do we know it was even her? Maybe it was Eve running the show. Did that thought ever occur to you?”
“Eve? Would she trade herself for Emily? No. Never. Jillybean would and she did it twice. It was her. I think I know Jillybean better than you. She was the one who saved me, years and years ago when this happened.” He pointed his stump at his face. “We’ve been close ever since. You know, many, many times I wondered why I bothered trying to live and maybe it was because I needed to live for this moment. I mean, uh, so I could be there for Emily.”
Deanna opened her mouth to make another comment; however it hadn’t quite formed in her mind and she bit back the next accusation that was hovering somewhere just out of reach. It wouldn’t come because Gunner was right, Eve would never sacrifice herself for anyone. And Sadie hated Gunner for what he had done to her, and Ipes was so afraid of his own shadow, he would’ve run Jillybean away at the first sight of the man. No, only Jillybean could’ve saved Gunner and she was the only one who could trust him.
“Jillybean really saved you? When? What happened?”
He dodged the question, letting out a sigh and a groan. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
She gazed at him for some time, noting that his IV had long ago run out. Having had a number of IVs in her time, she knew how to change out the bag for a new one. As she did, she mulled over the idea that Jillybean had chosen this man to lead her armies for a reason. “Our situation here, what would you do about it? If you were healthy, that is.”
His arm went cold from the IV. “You need to move the bulk of your forces off the island as soon as possible. Once they’re bottled up, they’ll be stuck. It’ll render you tactically blind and strategically impotent. And you can’t…” He groaned as a sharp pain ran along his spine and for a moment, his cold arm went altogether numb. Wiggling his fingers, he went on. “You can’t half-ass it. The force has to be large enough to have a legitimate shot at winning a battle.”
Deanna looked out the window, wondering if they had any chance of fighting a real battle. She was close enough that he could smell her perfume. It made him dizzy.
“How would you go about winning a battle with the Corsairs?” she asked, not noticing how pale he’d become. “I was in a battle once and they came in blind and stupid. I don’t think the Black Captain is g
oing to do that.”
“No, he won’t. He’ll starve you out. He won’t risk another loss. While we have to risk everything to inflict that loss on him.”
She shot him a look; it was getting easier to overlook his deformities, especially when he kept his mask on. “We? Can you help in some way? Because we need someone to lead us in battle. I’m a politician, not a soldier, and our only real soldiers have become somewhat timid.”
“I might be able to help for a little while.” The tube helped, the IV was great and the drugs were a godsend—regardless, he knew he was probably still going to die. Without surgery, clots would form. Some would lodge in his lungs, some would travel to his heart and it was likely that at least one would head north and lodge in his brain, all were killers. If a clot didn’t get him, pneumonia was practically a guarantee. Then again, he could just bleed out.
“You need a transfusion!” Deanna remembered. She was O+, the closest thing to a universal donor there was, and she volunteered just as Emily said she would. He talked her through what was basically an IV in reverse. The only difficult part was that she had to stick herself, something that made many people squeamish; she was a trooper and went for a vein on her ankle and got it on her first try.
While they waited for the blood to trickle into the sterile bag, she chatted amiably, surprised at how easily the words flowed. It was his eyes, she decided. He had kind eyes and she found herself ignoring the repelling nature of everything around those eyes.
Soon even this small pleasure was interrupted by a stream of people.
The first was Troy Holt, who dragged a reluctant Deberha Perkins to the clinic. “Governor? About what we talked about earlier,” he said, standing as straight as his spear. Other than a yellow tinge to his face and dark circles under his eyes, he appeared not to be suffering from his gunshot wound.
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 24