He then went back to trying to rouse me, but to no avail. I managed to keep myself from slipping further so I could at least retain my ability to think and handle what sensory input my useless body managed to receive, but that was about the extent of it. Nate dropped to one knee beside me a few minutes later, his eyes skipping from Burns to me. “She’s unresponsive?” he guessed even before he checked my temperature.
“I think she’s right in there, but she can’t move,” Burns explained.
“Shit,” Nate muttered, perfectly in agreement with me for once. After confirming that I was hot as a pizza oven, his eyes skipped over my entire body, as if he’d suddenly gotten X-ray vision and could see through the sleeping bag and my gear. He and Burns looked at each other without exchanging words. When Burns didn’t bring up anything, Nate exhaled slowly, coming to a decision. “Tanner, go fetch Parker and Richards. Don’t tell them what’s going on. For now, we’re keeping this on the down-low. The last thing we need is Hamilton getting nosy. If we can keep this quiet and between as few outside people as possible, the better. I know you can bullshit your way through this.”
Tanner cleared his throat. “Easy, seeing as I have no fucking clue what’s going on.” He paused, likely looking my way. I couldn’t tell, he was standing too far away. “I’ll be right back. Gimme five.”
Nate looked after him for a moment, then his gaze dropped to my face. “Don’t worry. We got this.”
Worry wasn’t exactly what was tightening around my heart like an iron fist. Worry was wondering whether I’d get hot tea in the morning, or whether a sudden incursion of shamblers would force us to break camp before anyone could get tea started. This? This was way beyond that. The fact that my body didn’t respond to the abject horror that I was feeling made it so much worse. The few times I’d fallen into this state on the destroyer hadn’t been that bad, more like an absence of top-level consciousness while some of my senses had still been working, with my mind tuned down to basic function. This now? This felt exactly like it had been on that operating table, only that my mind was sluggish rather than focused on all that pain. And more pain. And still more…
I realized that I was losing myself in chasing that memory, but it was hard to focus on anything else instead. Nate and Burns were talking in hushed tones, but it was all just noise to me. Trying to take stock of my body was definitely the wrong thing to do as it seemed like the fast-track to crazy town.
Silence fell as Tanner returned, Red and Parker in tow. Parker was muttering under his breath about needing sleep or else, but shut up as soon as he saw me lying there. “Ah, hell, no,” he muttered. “I’m not getting close enough to that so it can chew my face off.”
It was a token of how concerned all of them were that nobody laughed at his assessment. It took me a moment to realize that he thought they’d called him in to verify that I was dead.
“She’s just paralyzed,” Nate explained. “Lucid, at least to a point, but we can’t rouse her completely. I think she was about to fall asleep when her body shut down. And she’s running a high fever.”
Red hunkered down next to me but didn’t make a move to verify that last bit. “Since when?”
“No clue,” Nate admitted. “I didn’t know anything was wrong until they got me from my watch shift. She did hers without mentioning anything.”
Burns grunted. “She was sluggish this afternoon, when that undead fucker came for us in the greenhouse. I thought she was just clumsy because, you know. Probably wasn’t.”
Nate grimaced but nodded reluctantly. “She’s been quiet since we left that conservatory. That’s not her usual MO.”
Oh, the nice things people say about you when you can’t defend yourself.
Parker listened to it all, then took a knee opposite Red and reached for my forehead, then checked the lymph nodes at the side of my neck. My eyes and throat were next, twice as unnerving as usual as I couldn’t even squint against the glare of the flashlight. “Any new injuries? Not just superficial cuts. It would have to be something deep enough to reach a blood vessel for her to get an infection from it. Or some serious deep tissue bruising perhaps? Any broken bones?”
Nate’s eyes had been watching my face carefully while the medic assessed me, but at that they zoomed up to Parker’s. “Do I look like I’m psychic?”
He got a flat stare back for that. “You’re her husband.”
“But not her keeper. What’s that got to do with anything?”
I was sure I heard someone snicker in the background—Burns, probably—and Parker did some bona fide squirming as he explained. “If anyone’s seen her naked, that would be you. When, you know…”
I wouldn’t have put it past Nate to make him finish that sentence, but his sigh of exasperation let me know that he was worried for real rather than just annoyed. “Really? When exactly would we have been getting it on when we’re all practically living on top of each other, it’s freezing cold even when the sun is out, oh, and let’s not forget that the entire continent is teeming with the undead. And even if we didn’t give a shit about all that, I sure as hell wouldn’t let her strip naked if all we needed was to peel away the layers from a very limited area.” He chuckled at Parker’s abashed look. “You’re just as bad as she is, sometimes.”
I would have snorted if my throat would have let me.
Nate’s gaze dropped to my eyes. The hint of a smile crossed his features as he looked back up to Red. “She’s definitely lucid.”
“How can you tell?” Red peered into my face, puzzled.
“Because that was the look in her eyes that she gets when she’s ribbing me.” He focused on Parker. “Give her something to break the coma’s lock on her. Then you can ask her yourself.”
Red nodded, but Parker was still hesitating. “You know what happens if I pump her full of adrenaline. I can’t just put her under again once she’s back in control of her body. It looks like she has an infection, and that means I’ll have to cut into her. You don’t want her fully responsive for that.”
Anything was better than this hell. I sure wasn’t the only one thinking that, as before I could even try to relate that thought to Nate, he was already voicing it. “Without knowing where the infection might be coming from, it’s not like you have any choice. Besides, you don’t get it. You’ve never been in that state. I have. Get that adrenaline shot. I’ll take full responsibility.”
“Do it,” Red affirmed, drawing a hostile stare from Nate for that.
I would have laughed, but just then Parker rammed a needle into the side of my neck, and ten increasingly less sluggish heartbeats later, I sat up with a loud gasp, first feeling alive, then like my heart was coming right out of my chest.
“Easy there,” Parker crooned, pushing at my shoulder, but I was so not going to lie back down.
“Lie down,” Nate insisted, a lot less gentle than Parker as he shoved my other shoulder backward. Looked like I was going to lie back down after all. My pulse was still galloping as I stared at the ceiling above me, the dancing shadows of the fire nearby twisting my mind this way and that. Or maybe that was the adrenaline continuing to mess with me.
“What the—“ I panted, barely finding the energy to speak. Roused I might be, but not quite over that shit.
Before I could do more, Nate was leaning in, making it impossible for Parker to do the same. “You heard all that? Just nod, that’s quicker.” I gave a light jerk with my head. “Good. Your take on that? Falling into that half-coma can be a sign of exhaustion as well, but today wasn’t that bad, and you’ve been eating enough. Enough extra to put on some weight. Do you agree with me on that?”
I nodded.
“Any injuries you’re aware of?”
That was much harder to answer, and it took me a good ten seconds to order the thought fragments zipping through my mind to form a coherent sentence. “I’m a little banged up, but nothing serious.” But that wasn’t true. Breathing out slowly—which really was a series of shallow pants�
��I did my best to steel myself. “My left middle finger’s acting up. I think Raynor was a little too optimistic about just clipping off the very top and removing the nail.”
Nate glanced at Parker, but the medic shook his head. “Might become an issue if it turns color, but not enough to cause a fever that high. With the serum working full-strength for weeks, her entire hand would have had to rot away to cause sepsis on a level to kickstart a systemic response.”
And right there we had the likely cause. Talking was hard enough that I waited for them to figure it out. They were smart guys. Eventually, they would.
Red was the one to go for it first. “You think she still has a latent infection from before?”
Parker shrugged but didn’t look doubtful at all. “It makes the most sense.”
“But why now?” Nate interjected. “I’ve spent the better part of a week cleaning her wounds until not a single one was swollen or warm, with no pus leaking out for more than a day.”
“Something deeper,” I croaked out, drawing their attention back to me. Easily ignored I wouldn’t be, even though I could so have done without all this. “Raynor said she expected my immune system to take care of it all. Must have missed something. Had weeks to fester and spread.” And my, wasn’t that a lovely thought. Suddenly, lying still was getting increasingly harder, my fingers itching to grab the next available knife and cut into myself until I could get it all out!
Nate’s fingers wrapped around my left hand, partly hidden from view by how our bodies were aligned toward each other, and squeezed. It wasn’t much—and made me all the more aware that I wasn’t feeling part of my middle finger anymore—but it helped a lot to center and calm me down. Breathe. I just needed to breathe, and it would be all right.
“Anything still sore?” Parker asked, rather unhelpfully. “If it’s infected enough to cause fever, you should be feeling it, at least as a diffuse ache.”
I stared at him as if he’d gone mad. “Want to ask me the scale question?” He frowned, so I explained. “On a scale from one to ten, how much I hurt? Twenty, on a good day. Thirty, in the mornings. After an entire day of running, hiding, and fighting? Fifty going on infinity. But if I had to take a guess, somewhere on my right side, likely toward the back. That’s where the worst of the damage was.” I swallowed thickly. “Maybe my left thigh, but while that’s flaring up several times a day, it’s not a constant, diffuse ache, as you so succinctly put it.”
Red snorted while Parker was hard-pressed to decide between being pissed off or just plain taken aback. Annoyed with their continuing inaction, I started peeling myself first out of the sleeping bag, then the layers on my upper body until I was in just the thick thermal that I could push up to my shoulders as I hunched over. “Take your pick.”
Parker needed exactly five seconds and two prods to make me howl with agony. Bingo. “There’s some light subcutaneous bruising,” he noted as he squinted at my skin. I wondered if bruises could even show with all the scar tissue present around there. He had me lie back and prodded the side of my abdomen next. If before it had been bad, this was so much worse.
“Liver or kidney,” Parker mused as he pulled back.
“Don’t have a kidney there anymore, and half my liver’s gone. I think,” I helpfully supplied between clenched teeth.
Red sounded surprisingly chipper when he surmised, “Only one way to find out.” He got a hostile glare from me for that, but he met it with an even one. “Or do you have a better idea?”
I shook my head.
When I looked at him, I found Parker chewing his bottom lip, clearly apprehensive. “I’m not a trained surgeon,” he offered when the guys noticed his hesitation as well. “Not that it matters much. The way your body works now, you either die, or whatever I do is, at best, helping just a little. And there’s only so much I can do in the first place.”
Nate’s smirk wasn’t a friendly one. “Let me guess. The part that has you all twisted up isn’t that you’re afraid of not being able to do the job, but doing it without anesthetics, painkillers, or even a good old paralytic.”
This just kept getting better and better. Parker shrugged. “I don’t have anything strong enough to knock her out. And Hamilton has the only two doses of paralytic. I presume you don’t want to go over and ask him for it?”
I was sure that it was a waste of time, so before they could continue to hedge around, I put a stop to this. “Just do it. I don’t care. Either it’s something you can fix now, or I’ll likely be dead tomorrow.” That realization didn’t even shock me anymore. Everything becomes normal when it happens often enough. And it wasn’t like I’d said anything that everyone present hadn’t been thinking.
“Where?” Nate asked Parker, briefly casting around. We were in the barn, out of sight of the others, who were bunking inside the farm house. It was as far from sterile as anything could get, barring me rolling in animal feces.
Parker seemed to come to the same conclusion. “Over there. Spread a tarp over the packed dirt. If that keeps her from splitting her skull open as she thrashes, all the better. I’m not keen on spending the entire night on this.”
Nate uttered a sound low in his throat that came close to a growl, but rather than go after Parker, he helped me get up. I didn’t expect a pep talk from him—after over a year and a half together, I knew him well enough to be aware that he didn’t believe in postponing the inevitable—but as I was half-standing, half-hanging on him, he pulled me closer, his lips briefly touching my temple. “You’ll get through this,” he whispered, low enough that only I could hear him. “It will be hell, but a long shot from everything you’ve already been through. Don’t forget that.”
I was hard-pressed not to laugh in his face—maybe it was for the better that he didn’t do pep talks more often—but my throat closed up with emotion… and something else. So all I did was nod. By the time I lay down on the tarp, my middle bared, the skin from my ribs down to the partly covered crease of my hip smeared with iodine solution, the warm, fuzzy feeling was gone, leaving only fear. Parker did a last round of prodding, also to make sure that no other parts of me drew the same level of reaction, thankfully coming up blank.
“How do you want to do this?” Red asked Nate, surprising me a little that he seemed ready to defer rather than insist on knowing better. Burns and Tanner were waiting nearby, none of them looking very excited but trying hard to hide it. Nate considered, weighing his options—probably literally.
“Burns, you take her thighs and hips where you don’t get in Parker’s way. Those are her strongest muscles, and you have the most mass to keep her down. Richards and I will try to keep her head and upper torso down. Tanner, take her lower legs.” His gaze skipped to Parker, then back up my body, still calculating. “Stay sharp.” When he caught my curious look, he shrugged. “Depending on how exhausted your body is, it might not happen, but I give you a fifty percent chance that you’ll kick into overdrive, and then it will take the four of us everything we got to hold you down. Welcome to the joys of doing field surgery on the invincible.”
I didn’t feel very invincible right then, but did my best to relax as I gave Parker the go-ahead. Nate put his left forearm across my upper chest, his fingers grabbing one shoulder while he leaned on the other, making it hard to breathe for a second. He also kept me from seeing anything except him or the rafters above. His other hand wrapped around the fingers of my left, waiting for me to squeeze back. It took them a little to get ready, and when Parker simply poked the marked part of my anatomy, making agony flare up and me, consequently, buck, it proved to be more than necessary to do some coordinating. Parker’s remarks about me smashing my own skull open echoed through my mind, the folded sleeping bag underneath my head suddenly feeling way too thin to cushion any impacts. Exhaling, I closed my eyes, waiting as my heart raced inside my chest. Trying to prep myself once for something like this had been bad enough. A second time? Impossible.
Something touched my free hand—Burns, I rea
lized, belatedly. If he wanted me to try to crush his fingers, I was only too happy to oblige him.
“Let’s do this,” Parker muttered—and a second later, I felt the sharp bite of his scalpel. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep a whimper from escaping me. Everyone froze, including Parker, my panting the only sound.
“Keep your hand over her mouth,” Nate told Richards. “If she bites off one of your fingers, you’re doing it wrong.”
“Har har,” Red remarked, but did as he was told. I might have appreciated that under different circumstances, but Parker resuming made that pretty much impossible.
I’d hated that paralytic that had turned me into a dead slab of meat on Raynor’s operating table with the kind of vengeance only reserved for very few people and even fewer things, but now I missed it. Enough that, less than a minute in, I was ready to plead with them to go ask Hamilton. Even if I had to crawl on my hands and knees myself to get it, that would be okay. But I couldn’t, because not only did Red’s iron grip on my jaw make sure that only very muffled sounds escaped me, no. It was impossible for me to plead with anyone or anything.
So all I could do was try to push through the pain, and draw the next, inadequate breath through my nose. Breathe. Just breathe.
Parker was quick, taking less than thirty minutes, which, all things considered, was bordering on a miracle. That was still a billion minutes too many for me. It was probably my saving grace that my heartbeat remained strong enough to keep me in a state of constant panic rather than drop and send me into shock or cardiac arrest, but it didn’t feel like that. Twice, I bucked hard enough that I almost threw Burns off, and Nate’s grip would have slipped had Red not pushed hard into both of us; but somehow, they managed to keep me mostly restrained. Parker’s near constant cursing told me that it wasn’t easy on him, but I had a certain feeling that he wasn’t quite the stranger to such circumstances. He’d sure been quick enough to switch to impersonal pronouns when he’d thought I’d already died.
The pain didn’t lessen once the sutures were done and a bandage applied. It might even have increased as they let go of me, stepping away so I could curl up into a ball, trying but failing to lessen the strain on my abdomen and everything right through my body to my very spine. Shit, but that hurt. So. Fucking. Much.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 61