by Isla Jones
Perched on the foot of the bed, I eyed the wound as a knock thudded at the door. I frowned and let my sweater fall back into place. It had to be late, sometime past midnight. But then, I thought, it could have been Summer.
I lurched for the door—but it wouldn’t budge. It was still locked.
The voice on the other side seeped through the cracks. “Ms Miles?” It was the same from the speaker. “Might I come in?”
My face fell and I stepped back. “Yeah, come in.”
The door opened and an older woman with a tight bun of grey hair and stern eyes stood in the threshold. Her smile wrinkled and was as unconvincing as the one I threw back at her. I was exhausted, hurt, and impatient to see Summer. I could barely muster up a ‘hello’ for the stranger.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms Miles. I’m the primary medical doctor of this facility,” she said. “You may call me Dr Wong. I’m here to assess your injuries.”
She gestured to the corridor, where the soldier who escorted me earlier stood, a gun strapped over his torso. Mason.
“Would you come with me, please?” said Dr Wong.
In answer, I whistled to summon Cleo.
Together, we slipped by the doctor and into the corridor. The same two soldier-guards from before still flanked the hallway. I wondered if we—the group—were all stuffed into the rooms around me.
“This way.” Dr Wong strode down the way I’d entered earlier. I hurried after her, Cleo at my feet, Mason at the rear. “Dr Miles will be excited to hear of your arrival,” she said after we took a turn onto a door-less corridor. “She speaks of you sometimes. You lived in Los Angeles, yes? Were you there when the outbreak occurred?”
“Yeah.” My voice was a muttered grunt. “Why hasn’t she come found me yet? I’ve been here a while already.”
A few hours was hardly ‘a while’, but when it came to being reunited with a sister in the apocalypse where most were dead, it was too long.
Dr Wong tucked the corner of her lips into her cheeks and hummed shortly. “I am afraid Dr Miles is unreachable at the present. Since the outbreak, we have experienced some technical issues. Namely, our communications systems.”
Confused, my lips bunched and I studied her out the corner of my eye. “So? What does that have to do with Winter?”
Dr Wong did not like me one bit. The short glare she almost threw my way betrayed her. Spine stiffened, she veered us down another corridor—I would easily get lost in here, I thought—and spoke in a voice as clipped as her heels on the hard floor; “Dr Miles is on base, further underground. The lower levels operate under minimal power supply, given the failures we have suffered to some of our power sources.”
Fleetingly, I thought of the solar panels on the roof of the brownstone. If those were connected to the CDC, they wouldn’t work too well with all the snow packed on top of them. Not to mention, winter was a sunless time of the year.
Yes, I see the irony, thank you.
Dr Wong took me to a surgical room.
Not necessarily a surgery, but more like a doctor’s consulting room at a clinic. At her orders, I took off my sweater and lay flat on the examination chair. Cleo tried to stand on her hind legs to see me, earning a smile from my tightly set mouth.
“This will sting.”
I cut a glare to the doctor.
She held a giant syringe in her hand, with a needle double the length of my middle finger. I winced, but she was faster than I’d thought.
One moment, the syringe was upright and she was tugging back the hem of my tank top—the next, the syringe was in my stomach, jabbed into the bruising, and a hollow cry tore through me.
“See?” She pulled out the syringe and set it on her table of torture tools. “A mere sting. That should numb the area.”
I could’ve killed her in that moment.
Instead, I inhaled so deeply my chest rose, and I shut my eyes. If I’d watched her pick and pull at me, I knew I would’ve flown off the chair. I tried to clear my mind of what was happening down on my stomach—though, I didn’t feel a thing.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the pain of a needle must come before numbness, and even still, I hear everything she does. I hear the tug of the pliers, the snap of the staples. There was a wet, mushy sound that I guessed was Dr Wong cleaning out my wound (the inside).
I needed a distraction.
Through clenched teeth, I asked, “The low power supply—how does that stop you from contacting Summer?”
Whatever she paused to do, was on her tools table. The clang of metal against metal rattled my bones. It’s an awful sound, like nails on a chalkboard.
“Only Dr Miles can decide when to divert power to internal communications,” she explained. “Until she deems it necessary to contact us in the higher levels, she and her assistants will remain quiet.”
Dr Wong pulled my tank top back down, then slid the shoulder strap to the side. The bullet wound there had healed over. It ached most of the time, especially in the colder of days, but it was manageable. She seemed to agree, and I heard the wheels of her stool roll away from me.
Wong slipped off my sock and assessed my twisted ankle. “This is healing nicely,” she said, prodding her fingers from my heel to the start of my calf. “Swelling is minimal, bruising faded. How long ago did you sprain it?”
“A while back,” I said, eyes still shut. “I think … Maybe a month and a bit?”
Even with a diary, time was hard to track. Days slipped into nights, night melted into days, and soon, a week had passed and I’d lost track. The weather helped with keeping time. Underground, I wouldn’t have that to fall back on.
“Corporal Hill implied a more severe state.”
My eyes snapped open and I looked down my body at her. “Castle? You’ve seen him?”
In response, she offered me a tight smile and wrangled my sock back on. “Corporal Hill interrupted his debriefing to alert me to your injuries.”
I sank back into the chair and stared at the wall.
Above, the grate of a vent stared back at me.
Debriefs. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t thought that he, Leo and Adam would be swept up in meetings, mission-detailing and reports since we arrived.
I couldn’t imagine how tired they would all be. I was so tired that for the next near-hour in that chair, I drifted off a few times before jolting myself awake.
Dr Wong performed all sorts of tests on me. Blood, x-rays, ultrasounds, and took a few swabs of my saliva. She probed around a bit, too. After the invasive check-up, she handed me a packet of pills. They were in a plain white box with a medical name scribbled onto it that I didn’t understand. “Take one each morning after breakfast, and one each night after dinner.”
I tucked the box into the pocket of my sweatpants. “What are they?”
“Antibiotics.” Dr Wong rolled on her stool to the desk at the far wall. Her back stayed to me as she added, “You may return to your assigned room.”
Mason—the statue-ghost that he was—moved for the first time since we got to the surgical room. He pulled the door opened and waited for me to limp over. When I reached him, I spotted what was in his free hand. A crutch. He handed it to me, then led me back through the maze to my room.
Mason was a patient soldier.
Cleo and I trailed behind him, the call of sleep luring us too soon. Not once did he show irritation. In fact, I thought he was too intrigued by us for much else. Not intrigued just by Cleo and me, but the whole group.
Though, if I’d been trapped in an underground fortress for the whole seven months of the apocalypse, then a bunch of survivors showed up at my top-secret brownstone with a rotter and an immune, I might’ve been curious too.
My door was already unlocked and ajar. Before I went inside and gave into the pull of sleep for the rest of the night, I turned to Mason.
“Who’s in the room next to me?” I asked, gesturing to Room 10.
Confusion passed over his crinkled forehead a moment.
“Corporal Hill, ma’am.”
My gaze drifted down to the floor.
He’d knocked on the wall, knowing it was me—checking that I was all right. He’d told Dr Wong about my injures to make sure I was seen to.
I’m not sure how I felt about that.
Though, even with the muddled thoughts in my tangled brain, I found sleep easily that night. Cleo and I slept more soundly than we ever had before in any version of the world.
We slept all through the night and more.
IN SLEEP’S CLUTCHES
ENTRY FOURTEEN
There were no windows in the room. The lights were off, and we were blanketed in complete darkness. I liked it. Somehow, it comforted me. If I couldn’t see the turn of the days outside, did that mean that time wasn’t moving?
I didn’t want time to move. I wanted to stay where I was in that bed and sleep my life away.
Lazily, I watched Cleo dig her way under the blankets.
My eyes drifted shut and sleep took us both once more.
THE DINING HALL
ENTRY FIFTEEN
I woke to a sense of frustration. Someone shook my shoulders and whispered my name over and over, like a re-enactment of a passage found in the Book of Most Annoying Things.
“Winter.” The voice followed with another rattle of my shoulders. “Get up. We’re allowed out.”
I groaned and hit out at whoever broke into my sleep. Grogginess grappled at me, losing its hold. I fought with it, to stay with it forever.
“Don’t hit me.” This time, there was a sudden sharpness to the voice. I batted it away again and an—ouch! “I told you not to hit me.”
My left eye peered open; the other covered by my arm, bent at an odd angle.
“Vicki?”
Through the blurriness of my sight, her features sharpened and those diamond-blue eyes of hers cut right through me. Sitting on the edge of my bed, she cradled Cleo to her lap and glowered down at me.
“Get up, lazy.”
It all seeped into my mind, like the vapour from the glass room—sucked back into the vents it came from.
“What—” My words cut off with a grunt as I flopped onto my back. Above me, was a sterile ceiling with a single vent. I wondered if the vents wound all around the CDC, connecting levels and sealed areas.
The CDC.
We were there, safe. My sister was close. And yet, I wasn’t happy.
A flood of relief should have washed over me. Instead, I rubbed my fists against my eyes and choked on another morning moan. Summer wasn’t the one to wake me up. She hadn’t come to me since I was last locked in the room. But once I saw her, I would be at peace. Content. Summer would fix everything.
I pushed myself up and leaned against the wall.
Eyes on Vicki’s stern face, I croaked, “What time is it?”
That question was a common one before the CDC. In the world outside, we still asked it on occasion. We weren’t really asking for the time in minutes and hours. It was more a question that needed a general time of day—morning, midday, evening. Was it time to stop for a toilet break? Was it time to get back on the road?
Most importantly, was it ration time?
“Time for you get out of this bed,” she said. Her nose crinkled and she ran her gaze over my sheets as though they wore the stains of a thousand lovers. “How long have you been sleeping here?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “How long have we been here?”
Vicki didn’t hesitate. “Two days.”
“Then that’s how long I’ve been sleeping.”
Vicki huffed and turned her gaze on the rest of the room. “You know Cleo has pissed everywhere, right?”
Half my face scrunched up and I traced her roaming gaze. “Oh.”
“Oh,” she echoed, bland as water.
A moment passed in which she just stared at me, hard. Then, she put Cleo on the floor and stripped the duvet from my sweaty body—the horrid kind of sweat, cold and sticky.
“Get up,” she ordered. “You’re having a shower, then we’re going to have some breakfast.”
Vicki, I decided, was a tad scary in the CDC. Did the thick metal walls of the underground facility wipe away her fear of the rotters? If so, I was faced with what was left under that fear.
As I showered and washed my hair, Vicki cleaned up Cleo’s mess in my room.
Apparently, there’d been a lot of mess made. Every time she wiped up wet patches, or picked up small poops, she made it her business to mutter—loud mutters, so that I would hear her under the stream of water—and to bang her hand on a piece of furniture.
When I climbed out of the shower and towel-rubbed my hair, I shouted out to her; “When were you let out?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “They invited us to lunch.”
I dropped the damp towel to the floor and stared at my distorted reflection in the wobbly mirror. “Us?”
“Us,” she repeated. “Our group, minus … you know.”
I did know. The deltas. Leo, Castle, Adam and Mac.
“Mason said he came to invite you but you were sleeping, so we left you to rest.”
A twist tore through my insides.
There had been a soldier in my room while I slept? And I’d slept so deeply that I hadn’t even noticed … I didn’t like that, not one bit. Next time, I might have to shove a chair under the doorknob just to be sure.
I squeezed toothpaste onto the brush. “How’s Mac?”
For a while, there was silence. Not even the sounds of her scrubbing the floorboards or the rustle of paper-towels crept through the ajar door.
“Vicki?” I called out. “Did you hear me?”
A heaved breath came from her before she answered, “He’s in intensive care. Dr Wong is doing all she can.”
All she can…
That didn’t sound good. But to admit that to Vicki would be to address a truth she wasn’t ready to face.
I rinsed out my mouth. “With a doctor good enough to work here, he’s got a great shot. And they have all this fancy equipment.” I paused to gurgle. “They’ll fix him up, no problem.”
Vicki slipped through the door and eyed me.
“It’s a wonder those two believed you when you took the fall for me.”
Frowning, I turned my gaze on her. “What’re you talking about?”
“Castle and Leo. How could they believe that you had a pregnancy scare?” She shook her head. “You’re a terrible liar, Winter.”
My lips dug into my face. There was no bother trying to smooth over the lies I’d told her. Vicki knew Mac’s chances were as good as they could be, but still—they mightn’t be good enough.
I turned off the tap before I ran a comb through my hair.
Vicki’s gaze stayed on my profile.
Finally, she spoke; “We haven’t seen much of the deltas since we got here. They’ve been really busy. But Castle came by dinner last night.” She paused, the burn of her stare itching my cheek. “He didn’t say so, but I think he was there to check on you.”
The comb paused halfway down my hair. After a moment, I ran it the rest of the way through.
“They haven’t been to any of the meals, except that one. Leo came in with Castle … He asked how you were. I told him you were tired.”
Through the distorted mirror, I watched Cleo hop into the shower and sniff the dregs of water left at the bottom.
“I don’t want to talk about them.” I drew away from the sink and met her stiff gaze. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I want nothing to do with them. Just because we’re here now doesn’t mean they haven’t done the things they’ve done. All those betrayals and lies and…” Times they’ve broken me. “None of it gets a free pass or just washed away because we made it here.”
Vicki’s face betrayed nothing. She stayed leaning against the wall, her arms folded, and gave a steady nod. “Ok.”
With that one short response, the tightness in my jaw unwound and the tension in my arms smoothed out.
“Ok,” I said and forced a smile.
Her smile was just as forced. Not because we didn’t want to smile at each other, or that we didn’t agree on my decision—but because, while we’d made it to the CDC, our battles weren’t over yet. Those problems we’d all wanted to run from had followed us down here.
Now, they lived with us.
I’d expected a mess hall. A room with a canteen and rows of metal tables and chairs. I hadn’t expected the magnificence of the circular room Vicki took me to.
There were no doors to the dining hall. The entrance was a wide, wall-to-wall archway … Only, the archway wasn’t curved, and I think it was called something else. I’d have to ask Summer, because I have no idea. To me, it was a rectangular archway.
Beyond the entrance, a round table triple the size of my room sat in the middle, surrounded by people. Soldiers—soldiers everywhere. There were some dotted white coats among the troops, but cammo and all-black uniforms swarmed the round table. And in the middle of them all was a spread of food that had drool flooding my mouth and even leaking a little.
Fresh vegetables, roasted chicken, fries, boiled potatoes, fried eggs and—oh, help me—bacon strips. There were bowls of salads, ripe and colourful, and a giant cheesecake on a glass cake stand.
Dazed, I turned to Vicki and mouthed three words at her; ‘What the fuck?’
Underground facility or not, I couldn’t fathom how any of these foods were sitting on a table right in front of me. Even with a fridge, how could those foods be stored without rotting? Maybe they were all frozen foods. They sure didn’t look it, but months living off of instant noodles and undercooked beans could have warped my sense of food judgement.
Vicki took my hand and helped me to the nearest seat. Cleo was balanced on her other arm, and I used the crutch to support my weight to the table. As we neared, some of the soldiers looked up. Most of them stared outright.
“What are they looking at?” I muttered under my breath.