“Think. Think,” she whispered to herself as she drove in search of a hospital. “How do you do this? I need light, so that means I need electricity. Okay, I need a generator. I’ll also need electrician’s tape, some tools, some portable lights…” She had a mental list going in her head when she saw the first hardware store. It was too small, just a mom and pop. She left it behind, knowing there’d be another.
“They’re a dime a dozen,” she told Sadie. “And that’s what means there’s lots of them, I think.” She wasn’t quite sure what dimes had to do with dozens. What she did know was that there were always a ton more hardware stores compared to hospitals.
Thankfully, she quickly found both. Sadie was fading by the time Jillybean got everything set up. The generator was turning out in the hall, powered by the gas siphoned from the SUV. In the operating room above the table were four work lights, the kind normally found in auto repair shops. Across from Jillybean were the three machines she had jerry-rigged to the generator.
The first was the ventilator that would breathe for Sadie during the surgery, an electrosurgical unit that would cauterize the many tiny bleeders, and the monitor which showed her Sadie’s pulse, blood pressure and O2 saturation rate.
“You can do this,” Sadie said, so breathy and quiet that it was hard to make out. “I trust you.”
Jillybean tried to smile as she said, “Thanks,” in a whisper that matched her sister’s. The little girl certainly didn’t trust herself. Cracking open a chest was magnitudes more difficult than stitching up a hunk of muscle or taking out an appendix, something the body didn’t really need anyway. Lungs were vital and peculiar and in truth, somewhat of a mystery.
With shaking hands, she stabbed the needle of Propofol into Sadie’s IV port. “Smile,” Sadie said. “I want to see you smile before I go under.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Jillybean said, forcing a smile that she didn’t feel. Going under had a cemetery feel that made her stomach want to heave.
Chapter 33
Jillybean
With its beeps and unnerving alarms, the monitor proved a useless distraction. She didn’t need it to keep an eye on Sadie’s heart. Her heart throbbed just inches from the razor edge of the scalpel.
That heart was much bigger than Jillybean expected. It was stronger, too and its rhythm was steady and so captivating that Jillybean found herself staring at times during the three-hour long surgery. It was a heart that refused to quit.
Like an infinite metronome, it beat and beat as Jillybean plucked out the bullet and the tiny pieces of rib. Sadie had needed a miracle and she found it. The bullet had banged off a rib, spun north traveling across the lung as opposed to going deep into it. This made for a hell of a lot of tiny sutures, but it also meant that the lung had stayed basically intact.
It could have been a thousand times worse. She stitched and stitched, yawning behind the way too big surgical mask. Nearly an hour and a half went by before she got the lung whole again. Then came the moment of truth when she took off the clamp holding the air flow back from the left main bronchus.
A grin swept her as the lung filled. “I did it,” she said, amazed. “Sadie, I did…never mind. I’ll tell you when you wake up.” The surgery was far from over. The pleura had to be sutured back together, save for a tiny spot around the drainage tube. It was weird to her that all her books called for a chest tube to remain in place for the first few weeks, but then again, there was a lot weird when it came to the human body.
There was really only one part of the surgery that perplexed Jillybean. The rib that had been shot had a ragged notch in it. She had absolutely no idea what to do about it and she didn’t have time to do any research or experiments on monsters. For a good five minutes after releasing the stainless steel rib spreader she stared at the notch. She was afraid to do something and more afraid to do nothing.
Would the rib become infected? Would it snap off if Sadie coughed too hard? Would it just grow back whole in a few months?
“Oh, for all darn it,” Jillybean mumbled. In the end, weariness decided things. She was too tired to try “something” and so she ended up leaving the rib untouched. Her exhaustion was such that even she thought her closing sutures were sloppy.
“That’s gonna leave a big scar.” She groaned and snipped out half of them. There had been a surgical staple gun among the other sterilized items in the prep room. Stapling someone shut had seemed too weird before. Now, she was all for it. In minutes the wound was closed better than she could have imagined. She held up the stapler. “This is my kind of a gun.” She almost couldn’t wait to get another monster strapped to a table to really give the instrument a whirl.
Almost. She yawned and began cleaning Sadie, her eyes constantly on the girl’s bare torso checking to see whether the chest was rising evenly, or if there was any bulging or bleeding or anything. Sadie only slept. But she wouldn’t for long. Jillybean took her off the anesthesia meds and put her on a combination of morphine and fentanyl.
Then came another anxious wait and more anxious questions: would Sadie even wake up? Had she got enough oxygen during the long surgery or would she be a vegetable? Would all the stitches fail and her lung just empty its gelatinous self out into her insides? There were a lot of these types of crazy questions running through Jillybean’s mind.
Sadie slept for an hour and then without stirring anything but her eyelids, she looked at Jillybean. “Are you okay? Does it hurt? Can you breathe?” Of course, Sadie couldn’t answer any of these questions; she still had the ventilator down her throat. “Once for yes, twice for no,” Jillybean said. “Blinking, I mean. Are you in pain?”
One big blink. It staggered Jillybean, who feared that it meant that Sadie was dying. “Is it bad? Do you want some more meds? It’s just morphine, but I can get you something else. Anything you want.”
Sadie blinked four times in a row. “What?” Jillybean asked. “What does four…Oh, I asked to many questions, didn’t I?” One blink. “Do you want me to give you more pain meds?” Sadie closed her eyes and shook her head slightly. “Oh, you can move. Can you feel all your toes and whatever?” A tiny nod. “Hmm, that’s good. Really, everything looks pretty good.” She pointed at the monitor which was quieter now that the surgery was over. It booped every few seconds in a reassuring robotic voice.
“Can I get you anything?” A nod and then Sadie’s right hand began rubbing her stomach. “Are you hungry? No? Are you gonna get sick? No? Good cuz that would be gross. Are you…oh, are you cold?”
A nod without energy. Jillybean ran for a stack of blankets and proceeded to swaddle Sadie up like a newborn. She was asleep again before Jillybean was finished. Now came more anxiety on Jillybean’s part. She had a thousand things left to do. She needed to get to the Camry. It had cameras and food, monitors and dynamite, ANFO and the recipe to make big bombs out of it.
They were vulnerable in the hospital. The operating room was windowless, which was good, but the generator had a rumble to it that could be mistaken for nothing else.
But Jillybean couldn’t leave. If the generator conked out while she was gone, Sadie would die and if bad guys came looking for their friends and found Sadie, there was no telling what they would do to her.
The best Jillybean could do about the generator was to shut every door on that wing and pile boxes around it, creating a small igloo. This she draped with blankets until she realized that it restricted airflow; a certain way to kill the engine. She made two air flow holes in the mound of boxes and set a fan in front of one.
Next, she used what she had on hand to create tripwire alarms. Her first weapon was the glock she had picked up from one of the men she had killed. In half an hour, she had three Molotov cocktails and two preset flame traps. There was a surprising amount of flammable materials in the hospital including oxygen tanks which she was secretly dying to use as unguided rockets—but she was just too tired.
With the last of her energy, she pulled a second gurne
y into the operating room and slept next to her sister.
The next day she removed the ventilator, turned off the generator and moved them both into a birthing room on the fourth floor of the hospital.
The room was light and airy with a beautiful view of the sound. They spent two days there as Sadie recuperated. As always, Jillybean kept busy. When she wasn’t reading or exploring the hospital, she fetched the Camry, hid the SUV, built more bombs, scrounged for gas, went back after the guns that had been left behind in her gunfight with the bad guys and finally, she buried Spot.
She cried nonstop as she dug his grave and sniffled as she said the one prayer she knew, and when she turned back to the hospital a large part of her feelings for the man remained behind. There were some deaths that she couldn’t cling to. Spot had been a friend and a great companion and had died to save her and Sadie. She would remember him with a smile and not a tear.
“He was a good boy,” Jillybean said as she checked Sadie’s wound for the last time before they took off. The wound was a seven inch line of angry red, the sutures were puffy and there was a pinkish fluid coming from the chest tube. All of this was normal, even healthy under the circumstances. She had Sadie on some heavy duty antibiotics, infection wasn’t likely.
But that didn’t mean it was smart for her to travel. “There are some hospitals on Bainbridge. I know they just have an EMT and a fireman guy, but they won’t have to do much. Your body will do most of the work. Healing, I mean.”
“I can heal in the car,” Sadie said, her voice a husky whisper. “You need me. Even like this. Somebody has to run the drone.”
“What about Colton?” Jillybean asked, trying to sound light instead of anxious. “They have a real doctor there. Amember Doctor April? She’s a for real doctor, not like me. You could stay there safe and sound for a few weeks and we would swing by and pick you up on the way back.”
Sadie snorted. “Doctor April is only like a general, average doctor. She’s not a surgeon and I got to say that if there’s a problem, I wouldn’t trust her to open me up. At least not as much as I trust you. You’ve done it before. Besides, I told you that we are a team. Where you go, I go.”
Medically speaking, a road trip was a bad idea. There could be complications. There could be a risk to how well she healed, or so Jillybean assumed. There could be bandits and car chases and explosions, none of which were good for a person recovering from a gunshot wound. On the other hand, she would have her sister with her and that was worth all sorts of risks. “Okay, you can come, but I want to at least swing by Colton so that Doctor April can take a look at you.”
“It’ll be out of our way,” Sadie said with a shallow sigh. Every breath of hers was shallow. “Remember we’re supposed to be finding a safe way through and we know there are bandits near Colton. We should be steering clear. I think cutting south would be best.”
“We’ll be going to Colton,” Jillybean insisted. “Now, do you want the chair, or do you want to walk?” The answer was preordained. Sadie would walk as far as she could and then collapse into the chair, sweating and trembling. She made it forty feet this time.
It took them twenty-two minutes to get to the armored Camry and the sun was just setting behind the clouds as they began to let loose once again. It had rained every day, sometimes for hours at a time and sometimes for minutes. There were times when the rain was a curtain that couldn’t be seen through, and times when Jillybean thought she would drown just breathing.
For Jillybean it had been a dreary few days and she was glad to get moving again.
With Agnes the drone flying above them, they left the city of concrete and steel behind. It was slow going. The rain played havoc with the front camera if they went too fast, streaking it so badly that she would be forced to stop and clean it off. A steady twelve miles an hour was the best they could do as long as it lasted.
“Stupid rain,” Jillybean grumbled when she got back in the car after the fifth time she had been out to wipe off the lens. In the brief minute she had been out, she was soaked through to the bone.
“You’ll be missing it soon enough, I bet,” Sadie told her. “I love all this greenery, all these fantastic trees. It’s what I never liked about Colorado. So little grows there.”
Jillybean had to agree. The mountains of Colorado were covered in dull forests of dusty pine that all seemed to level off at the same height. The stale uniformity was boring, while the forests around Seattle were like something out of fairytale. As they drove through them, she kept expecting to see elves or sprites poking out from beneath the broad leaves of ferns or reclining on beds of velvet moss, or walking on branches that jutted out hundreds of feet in the air.
Even in the dark the forests were impressive and fantastic, and whenever they stopped and the rain wasn’t more than a drizzle, Jillybean would get out of the Camry and creep about. She wasn’t looking for elves; she had a pretty good idea that those were only make believe. She liked to walk under the heavy canopy because it made her feel whole and at peace. One with nature.
The Camry, a piece of machinery that she had helped to craft, was unnaturally dark and depressing. It was a man-made cave on wheels that smelled of fuel and dynamite. Sometimes in the glow of the monitors, it felt haunted.
The second and more powerful reason didn’t come to her until late that night when they were high up in the Cascades. They had stopped again. Sadie was slumped over, her eyes closed and her lips parted slightly. The combination of her body’s need to heal, the pain medicine she was on and the uneventful ride had knocked her out.
Jillybean took the drone controls from her slack hands and guided Agnes back down onto the roof hold, settling her down onto the weather protected stacks of dynamite and ANFO bombs. They kept only two of each inside of the Camry. Somehow, even sealed they had a sharp odor.
They had stopped near what looked like a path in the woods but what was actually a deer trail, complete with deer on it. Jillybean was just stepping over a puddle when she spied the tracks: one set big, and another little. Mommy and baby, she thought. They were fresh. The rain was only just then degrading them. Jillybean’s head snapped up and there in the dark, not forty paces away were the two deer just as she had imagined them: a beautiful wide-eyed doe and a speckled fawn
Without hesitation, the little girl sprinted right for them. It wasn’t an instinctual act, it was what Sadie would have done. With a laugh, she would have tested her speed against the best of nature.
Luckily for Jillybean, they turned and fled. In seconds, they had disappeared into the rain and the only evidence that they had ever existed at all was the pounding of their hooves and the tracks they left behind. For a full thirty seconds, the tiny girl sprinted after those tracks. She ran until her lungs were on fire.
Unlike Sadie would have, Jillybean didn’t smile as her feet slowed. She stopped next to some giant of a tree that had such a thick canopy that it acted the part of an umbrella keeping the rain from her already wet shoulders. Glancing back towards the road and the Camry, she estimated the distance. “Two hundred yards. That’s what means pathetic. I think I need a stopwatch.”
She blamed herself for what had happened to Sadie. She’d been too slow and she had lacked the stamina to escape.
Ever since she had made it back to Estes, she had let her physical training lapse. It had been a mistake and one that Sadie had paid for. “Not again,” Jillybean said before taking a deep breath and racing off further into the forest, pushing herself to her limit for another half minute.
With short breaks in between sprints, she ran a total of half a mile. Knowing that she couldn’t accomplish her goals in a day, she walked back to the car to find Sadie awake and watching for her. “You couldn’t wait for a bathroom?” Sadie asked, her smile back in place. “Speaking of which, I’m going to need a full service forest here pretty soon.” Within an hour, the joke became reality.
Jillybean ran twice more that night and when they eased down the eastern slope of th
e Cascades with a new sunrise putting a hard glare on the front camera, and the zombie-infested town of Wenatchee at their feet, she didn’t search for a place to sleep right away. Instead she looked for a sporting goods store. She didn’t find one and had to settle on another trip into Walmart, where she picked up kid-sized running shoes, a soft sweatsuit and a stopwatch.
She also got a surprise for Sadie: stretchy black jeans, a black t-shirt with a death’s head emblazoned on the front, a short leather jacket, black as well, and finally black Converse high-tops, size seven. Sadie was bleary-eyed and exhausted but still managed to smile. “Nice Chucks,” she whispered and then coughed without strength.
Alarmed, Jillybean pulled the stethoscope from the useless rearview mirror and listened to Sadie’s lungs. There was a little more fluid buildup, but it wasn’t bad. “These aren’t Chuck’s, they’re Converse sneakers like you wear. And these are for because you don’t have to wear hospital clothes anymore. Unless you want to. If you do, we can pick up some fresh ones in a few minutes.”
Jillybean planned on staying at The Central Washington Hospital for the day. It wouldn’t be as comfortable as the Econolodge, but it had everything she would need in case there was a medical emergency. Sadie was too tired to argue. After a last sweep of the zombie-filled streets, she landed Agnes and proceeded to slump over.
The hospital was small and the beds not particularly comfortable and yet, they both slept for so long that the sun was once again on the edge of the horizon, this time to the west, before they were ready to leave. Jillybean actually took longer than Sadie since she wanted to get in some wind-sprints before they left.
Using the mostly empty parking lot, she marked off a hundred yard stretch and proceeded to race back and forth, her little legs pumping for all they were worth. A few monsters saw her and joined in the chase. Like so many of them, they were huge, tremendous fiends. They made the short runs far more interesting.
The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World (The Undead World Series Book 10) Page 35