by T. A. Sorsby
The soldier probably figured them for his last breaths, and at that moment, I wasn’t sure if they wouldn’t be. The weight of my guns filtered back through my foggy brain, Edgar’s old piece in my jacket and the Cobra, still in my hand, grip slick with sweat.
I found a chair, an uncomfortable thing meant for visitors, and parked my arse in it. Outside, I could still hear voices, but couldn’t tell what they were saying, even with most of the glass from the corridor windows spread across the floor. The closed door was just the illusion of privacy, but I still needed something to distance myself from what was happening outside.
Thoughts were racing about my head, jockeying for position, trying to decide which one I’d dwell on first. Would Damian be okay? Were we safe yet? What was I going to do with this guy?
People were handling Damian’s injury, as much as we could right now. Neville was looking out for them, making sure the last soldier didn’t come into play. That left me to handle one man, unarmed and incapacitated. Problem was, I didn’t know how.
‘Please,’ he begged, as if reading my mind, ‘don’t kill me. We were just trying to get by…’
I made some kind of grunting noise, my eyes unfocused. All that energy I’d felt, the anger, the pumped-up “let’s do this” vibe, had ebbed away.
‘At the store last night,’ he carried on, ‘Sorry it went down like that, that’s not how we wanted it - sure as hell not how I wanted it. Captain Ipsom, he was just paranoid, man.’
‘What?’ I barked, irritated. I’d heard his words but they didn’t mean much. I’d just wanted him to repeat them, but instead, he took this as an interrogation.
‘After we got this place secure, we let some people in. One of them turned. I had to put him down. Then he didn’t want to let anyone else in - if they had supplies, a couple times we took their stuff then kicked them out. But I didn’t want to! He was in charge, I just…didn’t want to be next.’
‘How?’ I asked, finding my voice, wrestling it back to normal from angered, ‘How did you get set up here?’
‘We were already packing our bags before the order came to fall back to Orphen, most of our base really. Couple people higher up than Ipsom tried to make us stay, but there was a fight, some people got shot. Most of the Territorials went to be with their families, some took off to join the CDC. We were the ones with no family nearby. We just wanted to survive.’
‘But the radio station, why here?’ I pressed.
‘Base had fallen to infighting, we weren’t staying with the people holed up there. Loyalists. Here, there was the fence, the broadcast equipment, we could wait out the worst of it, then we’d be able to call for help if the all-clear sounded. Ditch our uniforms of course, we weren’t going to survive this shitstorm then get tried for dereliction, not to save some southern politicians.’
‘So you come here. Sachs has already got something going, but you put yourselves in charge. This Ipsom, he rips people off, you do a bit of scavenging. That’s how you survived.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Then this group comes, trailing rotters. We end up under siege, day before your first visit. We burned through most of our ammo, end up mostly on sidearms before I figured out a way to draw the horde off. Stop shooting, then make a bigger noise.’
‘House alarms.’ I nodded.
‘You know it.’ He said with a tinge of pride, his face still red raw from the mace. ‘I climbed the fence and found a house with a working alarm. Had to make sure they were all gonna come so I stuck around long as I could, then got out through an upstairs window.’
Like Dani and Laurel. I nodded, thinking it over. This guy seemed pretty clever. That trick with the alarms was a good idea, and now he was cooperating, answering all my questions. He was brave too, brave enough to lead the horde off when he could have just waited behind the fence. I hoped that bravery wouldn’t mean he’d try something stupid if I dropped my guard.
‘Sachs, the intern, the older woman. Why’d Ipsom keep them?’
‘Couple of us spoke for the farmer, thought we might need her experience should the worst happen, and that pretty young thing, Ipsom had an interest in her, if you know what I mean. Sachs, he brought people in for us to take supplies from, or get our pick of any “experts” he called them, like Mary. Captain knew our meaning about Mary’s skills and took it to heart, started making plans. We nearly had a doctor, but his group got cold feet, probably smelled something off. I don’t blame them – I wouldn’t be here if I had another option.’
I wasn’t sure if his penitence was faked for my benefit, or if he really was sorry for everything he’d been a party to here - the old “I was just following orders” excuse. There was no way for me to be sure.
I remembered hearing a scream just before the shooting started. That suddenly seemed very important.
‘Your last man, where is he?’ I asked him, standing up. His eyes flicked to my gun.
‘Isolation. Bathroom. He got bit last night, getting back through the fence. I was bringing his last meal.’
‘Anyone with him? Where are the women?’ I pressed.
‘No, its isolation,’ he repeated, ‘But the women are in the back rooms probably, where you met with Sachs the other day. Are you going to let me go?’
‘No sudden moves, and we’ll see,’ I grunted, bending to retrieve my un-lit flare. ‘Stay put.’
I walked out into the corridor, a little clearer headed, more focused than before. Neville was nowhere to be seen - I assumed he’d gone to find the last soldier, the infected man. Even if he was turned now, Neville could handle it.
‘Is he going to make it?’ I heard Lucile ask, her voice rough, tears streaking down her face.
‘It’s possible to survive this sort of injury.’ Anita comforted her, sparing time for a reassuring look. She’d probably trained to treat gunshot wounds at some point. ‘One in his shoulder, that’s not a problem – but down here…He could have been hit in the bowel, bladder or kidney. All can be fixed with surgery…’ she muttered, ‘but we don’t have that luxury.’
Lucile’s face paled, and she hugged herself with blood-streaked hands, smearing red at the tops of her arms. She didn’t even notice. Even though she’d washed out at the sight of internal organs, she’d remember all this from her medical training. Poor girl was just too damn worried to do anything about it.
‘The main, immediate risks of being shot in the abdomen are blood loss or infection as the bowel contents run out…potentially causes some nasty stuff.’ Anita went on, readying items from her little kit, ‘Damian is bleeding badly, so that’s a good sign, believe it or not. He’s not likely been hit there, just a big blood vessel…’
‘So we stop the bleeding. Stich him up.’ Lucile shivered, taking deep, shaky breaths. ‘Let’s do it.’
I turned away and went right, away from Damian, towards the back. The glass in the door to the corner office hadn’t shattered, but two neat bullet holes had cracked through it. I stopped to look behind me, at where Damian lay, Anita and Lucile attending.
Going by eye, the bullets lined up. The auto-fire from that soldier, probably started low and bucked high, catching Damian’s gut, then up to his shoulder. When we shot him, his aim when higher still, over Damian and into the door. I looked up, and saw bullet-holes along the ceiling too. It was a good job Damian had been crouched, or he’d have taken more than a couple.
I could hear sobbing now, coming from the other side of the door, and Carl Sach’s smooth voice cooing that everything was going to be alright. I’d seen enough death now to know what to expect. I opened the door, and there it was.
Mary, the older woman with the empty shotgun from our earlier meeting, was dead; green and black checked shirt stained around her chest, up near the heart. She’d died quick. Beth, the radio station intern, was knelt crying beside her, Sachs to her side with an arm over her shoulders.
‘Alright there dear,’ the DJ mumbled, ‘you’re okay, we’re all going to get through this…’
The
y didn’t look up at the opening of the door, but I sensed my presence was noticed after I walked away, back towards my own wounded. My people needed taking care of first.
‘Where do you need me?’ I asked, taking off my jacket, throwing it towards the stairs, away from the blood and the remains of the dinner tray our surviving soldier had been carrying.
Without anaesthesia, or the painkiller of exhaustion that Anita had used when I patched her up, she set about stitching closed the two holes in Damian’s flesh - twice in, twice out, the needle and thread making two puckered little holes in his skin, pulling the little ring of damaged tissue together. One set of stitches for his shoulder and one for his belly, sterilising the needle first with my lighter, then wiping it clean and burning it again between. When she’d finished and cleaned it again, the needle’s tip was pretty blackened, but if the heat bothered her fingers, she didn’t show it.
Damian groaned and hissed and kicked his legs as the needle passed through his skin, and through her stream of calming, steady words, Anita asked me to sit across his legs. Despite writhing everywhere else, he had enough self-control to keep his chest fairly still while Anita did her brisk needlework, cleaning the worst off with sterile wipes and covering the sewn-holes with an antiseptic cream afterwards.
Judging by the few bullet-holes in the walls around us, one of those guns on full-auto wasn’t a recipe for accuracy, but in a narrow corridor you only had to get so lucky. I was snapped out of that thought when Sachs appeared above us, a satchel in his hands with a red cross on the front.
‘It was theirs,’ he explained, passing it to Anita, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had wounded, would have brought it to you sooner. I just…Mary. Take it, take whatever you need, if it’ll help.’
Anita opened the satchel, heavy canvas bound in leather, and inspected the contents. ‘Thank you, Mr Sachs,’ she gratefully said, ‘it’ll help.’
Sachs sheepishly shuffled back down the corridor, stopping for a moment to look into the room where the mace-eyed soldier lay. He said something to the downed man, but I couldn’t quite tell what. Sachs smiled gently, then walked away. I kept my gun close by on the floor, just in case.
We had to roll Damian onto his side, a pained moan escaping from his mouth. Then we threw Laurel’s bloodied, ruined shirt away. She’d left her jacket off, and goosebumps had broken out all over her skin, along with a cold sweat.
‘Same again big man,’ Anita said apologetically, readying a needle and thread from the medical bag this time, something presumably more military-grade. She certainly seemed to have an easier time of it.
I hate needles. I’d watched the first time because I was still in shock, still not thinking clearly. This time, with the dripping blood and the slippery skin, it was enough to make me gip. I fought it back down, and tried to distract myself.
‘Where’s Neville?’ I asked Lucile.
‘With the last soldier.’ She sniffed, meeting my gaze with watery eyes, ‘He’s been bitten, feverish, hasn’t got long left.’
Dani’s memory came to mind again, in the home she shared with Laurel and Katy. I shoved that away too, I had enough things to make me sick right now.
‘Laurel and Morgan know what’s gone on?’
‘Neville went to the window and shouted. They wanted to come over, but he told them to stay put - said the gunshots might draw more people, and they were to signal if they saw anyone.’
I nodded. We waited in silence then for Anita to finish her work. I stared over my shoulder, back down the corridor at the dead soldier with his little machine-gun. It might seem stupid to you, but I decided then and there that we wouldn’t be bringing that gun with us, no matter how desperate we were. Not just tactically - because it was loud, ammo-thirsty and looked prone to spray-and-pray…but because it’d shot my friend.
‘All done, bar the bandages.’ Anita said.
The wounds were now stitched, but there was still work to do, patching him over with bandages and antiseptic gels. Anita must have done this before, not just taken a few days on a course - she was calm and collected all the way through, which must have rubbed off on Lucile. She remembered her training, confidence building as they worked.
They put more bandages and padding on his front once the back was done. From the needles and the blood-loss, Damian was looking like hell, covered in drying blood and the odd smear of antiseptic paste from an errant finger here and there.
‘How I doin’?’ he asked, giving me a weak smile. I think he was drunk from the pain.
Damian had asked me maybe twenty minutes ago, if I was sure we were ready to take these guys on. I’d brought him in here. I’d stood in that corridor. I didn’t ask him to stand and fire next to me – I knew I wasn’t solely to blame for his injuries, but my hands felt far from clean.
‘Nothing a little hair of the dog won’t cure, we’ll go for beers when you’re out of recovery, yeah?’ I gallows-humoured, but the wheels were already turning in my head. I knew what we had to do, to give him the best shot at surviving.
‘Those bullets left nasty exits.’ Anita sighed, wiping her hands down with more of those little sterile towelettes. ‘I think we can manage the blood loss until you have time to heal. Infection is your biggest risk right now, probably not from the bowel, injury didn’t smell bad…but we need antibiotics.’
‘So, we can just sack a pharmacy, right?’ Lucile asked, hopeful. ‘We were going to do that anyway, for your bite.’
‘No…’ Anita said, a little too harshly, staring at the ground. She shook her head, as if dislodging a painful memory. ‘We need hospital grade antibiotics to be sure, meds from in IV, not just pills. It wouldn’t hurt to re-do his and my own stitching with real medical equipment either, or at least the stuff in the TA’s bag…We need to go to a hospital.’
‘You’re sure, dead sure?’ I asked. This was what I’d been thinking a moment ago, just about word for word. I didn’t know how I’d go about suggesting it to everyone else without making it sound like I was looking for Katy.
She nodded.
‘Zeds are out of the centre, pretty much, but if there are any hot-zones left, they’ll be the hospitals,’ I warned, ‘I’m on board, but it’s a risk.’
‘Mercy was the real epicentre of the outbreak,’ Anita reminded us, ‘so we have to go back to County. I told you how bad it was there. But at least it wasn’t Mercy.’
‘You comfortable going back?’ Lucile asked, concern wrinkling her face. ‘There must be somewhere else, somewhere safer. A local surgery, a vet, dentist’s…’
‘I’m not a doctor,’ Anita shook her head again, ‘maybe if Lucile or I had real, full medical training we could make do with less, but our best bet is a hospital. The sooner the better.’
‘Alright, we’ll-’ I said, taking a step back, scratching my head.
‘No,’ Damian intoned from the floor, his voice deep, ‘nobody going to risk anything for me. I won’t let you. I make it, I be fine.’
The three of us looked at each other, Anita, Lucile and I. Anita knew she didn’t have to go back to County General, but she also knew it was Damian’s best bet, maybe even her best bet. Lucile’s face was simply a mask of worry for Damian. I don’t know what mine said about me. Guilt over his injury? Another foolish hope to find my fiancée? We each shared a determined little nod.
‘You don’t get a vote.’ I told him.
*
Thirty Nine
The upstairs toilets of GCR were a little bigger than the one downstairs, a simple closet with a lock. Upstairs were the stalls, four in a line down the left side of the room, sinks on the right. The walls and floor all tiled in the same beige squares, with safety-glass windows breaking up the monotony on the far wall.
Despite the windows, the room was as gloomy as the corridor outside. They must only use the generator to power the transmitter, wasting no power on lighting - though I hadn’t noticed a chill in the building, so assumed the heating must still be working, somehow.
/>
The door to the end stall was open, Neville standing a ways back from it, talking to somebody in a low voice.
‘He used the house alarms, huh?’ he muttered in response to something, before turning his head to me. ‘How’s Damian?’
The look of concern on his face suggested he wasn’t just asking about our Islander friend, but everybody.
‘Anita thinks he’ll live,’ I said, giving a thumbs-up for my own condition, ‘but we need hospital antibiotics to be sure.’ I walked towards Neville and the last stall, footsteps echoing around the acoustically-endowed radio station toilets.
The soldier in the end stall was sat atop the closed toilet, and had been relieved of his weapons and tactical vest, as well as most of his blood if his skin colour was anything to go by - white as a sheet, hair soaked with sweat, just like Dani. The infection was burning away the human, and would soon leave him a husk.
‘Postman’s here,’ he groaned, scratching at the edges of an improvised towel bandage that covered his left arm – guess they didn’t waste real medical supplies on the dying. ‘Do I have to sign for anything?’
If he remembered me from last night, and had the capacity to joke, I guess he had more of his wits left than Dani had by the end.
‘He wants to check out early.’ Neville explained, ‘But the rest of his squad wanted to wait until after.’
‘Why?’ I asked the soldier.
‘Not enough-’ he broke off to cough, a deep, smoker’s hack, like he was trying to clear something off his chest that just wouldn’t budge. ‘Can’t afford the bullets…’ he eventually croaked.
‘We won’t find much of a resupply here,’ Neville went on, ‘they came under siege and used most of their ammo. Those SMGs and assault rifles will be more trouble than their worth, without the bullets to feed them.’