Grave New World (Book 3): Dead Men Don't Skip

by S. P. Blackmore

  It’s easy to jump to anger when something terrible happens. Anger and rage are easier to stomach than sorrow. Anger makes you feel like you can do something. Change something.

  Sorrow doesn’t change. It destroys.

  Logan reached upward and grasped Tony’s upper left arm with both of his hands. I thought he might twist himself loose, step aside, maybe calm himself.

  Instead, he flipped Tony up and over his shoulder, sending him crashing onto the floor.

  Tony lay there, seemingly stunned, for a few precious seconds. Then his right leg snapped out and caught the soldier behind the knee. Logan toppled forward and landed right near him.

  “Stop,” I said.

  Logan sprang to his feet immediately and crouched over Tony. I saw his fist lift, and then smash down into my friend’s face. Crack.

  “Stop!”

  Tony swung right back at him from the floor. Logan didn’t bother blocking the hit, and took the blow across his cheekbone.

  Evie yowled and tried to twist away from Dax.

  Logan reached behind his back and yanked out a knife.

  Oh, shit. A couple of punches between men was one thing. Bladed weapons was something entirely different.

  “I fucking said stop it!”

  My voice slammed into both of them, briefly stilling all action.

  The knife wavered. Logan’s resolve seemed to temporarily crumble, but he found it again, a hard set coming into his eyes.

  Evie growled.

  I don’t exactly remember leaping onto his back. Just that somehow I was flying through the air and then attaching myself to his shoulders. I hung onto him with my left hand and fumbled around with my right, trying to grab at the knife and generally transforming myself into the heaviest, squirmiest backpack ever.

  Logan tried to wheel around, slicing blindly at the air, blood from his injured hand flying all over the place. I let go of him and slid to the ground, then spotted his legs right in front of me. I leaped for those next, wrapping myself around them.

  He fell.

  Tony tackled him, and after a brief struggle pried the knife away.

  Something broke in Logan. He lay on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Once I knew the blade was safe, I let go of Logan’s legs and sat up, painfully aware that I could hear my thumping heart.

  Across from me, Tony wiped blood from his nose. The carpet had acquired a lovely new element of decor, one that I decided to call Blood Spatter.

  “Great,” Tony said. “Now Keller’s going to scream at us for trashing the place.”

  “It needs redecorating anyway,” I said.

  Logan covered his face with his hands, then seemed to realize he was bleeding. He held his injured hand up and stared at it, as if not entirely sure it belonged to him. “Oh…fuck.”

  Since the danger seemed past, I got to my feet. “I’ll get my first aid kit,” I said. “Stay there. Don’t touch it.”

  Someone banged on the front door.

  Oh for the love of…

  Reason fled me. I can’t explain why I walked over to the door and yanked it open, only that I did. The neighbor we had so recently met stood out there, the whites of his eyes showing, bathrobe only loosely tied over what appeared to be flannel pants and a T-shirt.

  He also clutched a tiny pistol.

  At first I wasn’t sure if it was even a real gun; it was about the size of a miniature squirt gun you might find in a supermarket. It had to be real, though. Only a real gun would give him enough chutzpah to come back to what was clearly a soldier on the verge of a meltdown.

  I stared at him, then at the way he held his tiny little pistol—with his fingertips, like it was some kind of dead animal to be disposed of. In those few seconds, I learned quite a bit about him.

  This stupid fuck had never shot a firearm in his life. I didn’t know where he’d found this particular weapon. Maybe he’d picked it up as a curiosity before the endtimes, something to chuckle over with his wife. It might have been tiny, but it had the same effect on him as an AR-15 might have on me: the very feeling of a gun in his hand gave him some sort of inexplicable inner strength. Combine that with the sort of fearful hysteria the apocalypse tends to bring on and somehow he’d become an overconfident son of a bitch.

  I continued to stare at him.

  “I heard shooting.” He lifted the little pistol in what I’m sure was intended as menace.

  “Accident,” I said, keeping my cold gaze fixed on him.

  “You need to be quiet,” he insisted. “This is a respectable neighborhood!”

  “Is it?”

  Something in my stare must have unnerved him, because the glint of fear came back in his eyes.

  “This is the fucking apocalypse,” I said, keeping my voice soft and level, like I was talking to a nervous child. “In case you weren’t aware.”

  “Be quiet—”

  “No, you be quiet!” I intended to slap the gun aside, but my palm struck the barrel and it flew right out of his hand, landing on the front porch with a clatter.

  He watched the gun land, then gaped at me.

  “Gotta hold it firmly,” I said. My hand shot out again, and I grabbed the lapel of his robe. Soft cotton of some sort. Very nice. I stepped forward and shoved him backward along the porch, past his stupid little gun and then down the steps and the walkway. I was dimly aware of a handful of neighbors standing there—probably awakened by the shouting and gunfire—but I no longer gave two shits.

  When we reached the sidewalk that ran along the outside of the property, I yanked him close to me. “Go home,” I said. “And never come back.”

  “This neighborhood—”

  “You think I care about this fucking neighborhood? Go away or I will end you,” I hissed. “Do you hear me? I will end you.”

  One last good shove sent him stumbling a couple feet away from me.

  I looked around at our neighbors, probably none of them particularly bad people, but all staring, all watching, waiting for me to do something. Some dim part of me could sort of imagine what they saw: a slender, otherwise unremarkable woman with murder in her eyes, pushing their friend around. Bringing the horror and barbarity of whatever happened outside their big strong walls right to their street.

  Everyone’s the villain in someone else’s story, I reminded myself. Might as well be over-the-top about it.

  “Go back to sleep,” I said to the group. “Leave us alone. And be glad it’s me and not the goddamn living dead standing here.”

  The man scrambled across the hedges and raced into his townhouse.

  I scooped up his little gun and carried it inside with me. I checked the chamber out of curiosity and almost stopped in my tracks. One bullet. What the hell did he think he was going to do with one bullet? Fire it into the ceiling? Shoot himself in a panic?

  This is who we’re dealing with, I reminded myself. Scared people. I was one of them once.

  Sometimes I was pretty sure I still was one of them.

  Dax waited for me just inside, his hands locked around Evie’s collar. “That was probably the most badass thing you ever did,” he informed me.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And lock the door…please.”

  I went into the kitchen, deposited the gun on the counter, grabbed my kit, and went back into the living room, where Logan and Tony were sitting next to each other in front of the coffee table. A quick inspection of Logan’s hand revealed a broken finger and severely torn-up knuckles, but nothing worse.

  I dabbed at the blood with a piece of gauze.

  Dax and the dog joined us. “Vibeke threatened to kill our neighbor,” he said. “Might want to send them a casserole or something tomorrow.”

  The other men looked at me. “You did what?” Tony asked. Blood still dripped from one nostril, winding its way down his face and landing on his robe.

  “He had it coming.” I cracked Logan’s finger back into place.

  He yelped and tried to jerk his hand away, but I had a good g
rip on him. “Don’t look at what I’m doing,” I said. His knuckles were easy enough to clean up, though they’d probably swell up and turn black and blue within the hour.

  He stared numbly at the dog while I worked. “She’s gone,” he said quietly. “Jesus, she’s gone…I need…where’s your bathroom?”

  “The working one is upstairs,” Dax said.

  Logan didn’t ask me to let go of his hand. He just turned and swept away, taking the stairs two at a time. The bathroom door slammed before I fully registered what had happened.

  After a moment, Dax went up after him. Evie paced back and forth at the bottom of the stairs, no doubt unsettled by the all the emotional tension our group was sending off.

  That meant it was just me, Tony, and the the river of crimson on his face.

  “You gonna pinch that?” I asked him. “It’s dripping.”

  “Gonna help me out, medic?”

  I shrugged and brought my kit over to him. I pushed gauze into his hand, then pushed his hand up to his nose.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Much.”

  He had a bruise on the side of his head, presumably where Logan had punched him. I touched it gingerly, retreating when he flinched away. “You need an ice pack,” I said. “That’s gonna get ugly.”

  “Just like everything else around here.”

  Alyssa had known things were going wrong in Hastings. She’d probably nursed that feeling for quite some time, and finally been able to do something about it. That was why she’d helped us. Encouraged us. Tried to secure help for the rest of the people trapped here.

  And now she was gone.

  Dead.

  I put my head in my hands, no longer caring that I had the blood of two men splashed across them. My entire body shook.

  After a few seconds, Tony put his hand on my shoulder. “You can cry,” he said. “I know you were friends. Might help.”

  I tried. I was pretty sure I’d choked down more than my fair share of tears since all this shit started, and now I simply expected them to come spilling out without further warning. It might have felt good to cry. To mourn—for Alyssa, and for everyone else trapped in this shit show of an apocalypse.

  But while my throat ached and my chest grew heavy, my eyes—my stupid eyes—remained dry.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Logan came to the Plague Tent with me at the crack of dawn, intent on recovering Alyssa’s body. I tried to explain to him that it might not be possible—that bodies were disposed of quickly to prevent just the sort of problem that had doomed Elderwood—but he insisted he needed to see her again, to say goodbye properly. That much I understood. How many people had I never seen again since all this started?

  Lattimore got in my face the instant I walked into the main tent. “Twelve people,” she said, her expression devoid of its usual detachment. “We lost twelve last night.”

  Twelve? For a few seconds I fumbled with a response, unable to quite gauge that many deaths. “They were fine,” I said. “Well, not fine, but they were…they were all right…they were breathing?”

  She looked past me and to Logan, and her brow furrowed, as if trying to work out who he was.

  “This is Specialist Andrews,” I said. “Alyssa was his sister.”

  “Alyssa,” she repeated.

  She clearly had no clue who Alyssa was.

  “She died last night,” Logan said.

  “Oh. The one you always spoke to?”

  I nodded. It wasn’t exactly what Alyssa ought to be remembered for, but at least she was remembered.

  Lattimore drew herself up, her expression smoothing slightly. She was trying for a sympathetic gaze, something that must have become quite foreign to her over time as she tried to fight back against the inexorable tide of death that swept through her little medical complex. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said. She probably meant it, too—at least, as much as she could.

  “I want her body,” Logan said.

  The sympathy on Lattimore’s face, however forced it may have been, abruptly vanished, replaced by the coldly practical woman I knew. “She’s already been moved,” she said. “We can’t leave them around here. You know that.”

  “I don’t care if she’s been popped or not. But the burnings and burials aren’t scheduled until later in the day. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Logan set his jaw.

  “Figure it out,” I muttered to Lattimore. “He won’t leave until he gets her.”

  “I don’t have her. But he’s welcome to look out in back. I don’t know where they stash them…ask Pete.”

  Logan stalked away. Maybe Pete could share some of his weed, too—the man needed it.

  Lattimore’s attention fixed on me again. “I take it they were all right when you left.”

  “I did my rounds. Sedated those I could. Only Alyssa was awake, and we talked…” I didn’t know why this was important; perhaps it wasn’t. But some part of me wanted Lattimore to know she had been awake, and talking, and the others could have been, too. “I knew she wasn’t doing well, but she was coherent. I went to Renati to get some more sedative, and we gave them the antibiotics—”

  Her gaze hardened. “Antibiotics?”

  “He had some in his lab.” Had Renati called it by name? I couldn’t remember.

  Lattimore’s jaw fell open. “And you gave it to them?”

  “What else was I supposed to do?”

  She sputtered openly for a moment.

  “You said we couldn’t help them. You were ready to give up on them.” I knew my tone had sharpened into something accusatory, but I couldn’t help myself. “Yes, Renati had another drug. What the hell were we supposed to do?”

  “A lot of help your little drug did. They died, didn’t they?” She spun away from me, but not before I saw her lift her hands and clench them into fists. “Jesus fucking Christ, that little shit. That little shit. I’ll have him kicked out of the city, fed to the ghouls in the stadium—”

  She paused, composed herself, and turned back to face me, her face now cold as opposed to flushed with anger. “So you gave them that experimental shit. Well, I trust you’re happy with the results. I was afraid he’d do something like this, but I needed a fucking medical professional in charge of this ward. How many people got the new stuff?”

  Not all her anger was directed at me; that much I could see. Some long-simmering frustration with Renati, combined with the feeling of hopelessness that must have permeated her entire body of work these days, was about to blow up in my face.

  “Everyone,” I said.

  She paled. “Everyone?”

  “It was the only thing we had left! They were sick. They were dying. We had to try something.”

  “Yes, and instead you hastened death along for some of them.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it.

  “Your friend Alyssa included,” she added.

  No. No, no, no.

  “God, did you not even think? Renati’s predecessor was the chief of R&D. He cooked up some very very powerful drugs, yes, but did you even consider what a drug of that power would do to someone already weakened?”

  I hadn’t.

  It had never even occurred to me.

  “That shit burned right through her body,” Lattimore went on. “Through all of them. Christ, we’re lucky they didn’t all die.”

  “The doctor—”

  “Renati is not a medical doctor! Not anymore! He’s a researcher. He thinks in terms of plagues and cures, not comfort and quality of life. He had no business giving them that drug, and he knew it.” Her eyes cut into me, and I wanted to shrink away, to turn my head from her rage and the shame building inside me. Should I have known? People had been murmuring about Renati for as long as I’d been working here.

  She took a deep breath. “You thought you were helping. You thought, well, none of the other drugs work, so maybe this one will. Part of treating people is knowing when
to use a scalpel as opposed to…to a buzz saw!”

  We were trying to help…

  Her tone calmed somewhat, though the chill didn’t leave her eyes. “Do me a favor. Next time Renati wants to give patients any sort of drug I haven’t specifically called for, you tell me, and maybe we avoid another mass die-off, all right?”

  I nodded, biting the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted a bit of blood.

  “Now get to work. See if you can keep from killing any more of them.”

  She strode off, leaving me there awash in feelings of guilt and horror. I hadn’t killed them. I hadn’t known…and he had seemed so reassuring. Sure, it was an untested drug, but it was more than what we were giving them up to that point.

  We had to do something.

  I had to do something.

  I choked down my growing horror and tried to lose myself in my work.

  You might have killed her, Vibby.

  You might have killed them all.

  “What did Renati give her?”

  Logan came storming back into the tent an hour later, nearly knocking over a passing medic en route. When no one immediately answered him, he marched himself to the center of everything, then shouted, “What did he give her?”

  The Plague Tent was not a place of cheerful chatter to begin with, but a terrible silence fell over it. The other medic shrank away from him, and Lattimore straightened up from the patient she had been tending to.

  “Specialist Andrews,” she said, “How can I help you?”

  “Pete said Renati gave them some sort of drug. What the fuck was it?”

  “He gave them a powerful antibiotic,” she said. “Perhaps too powerful. But—”

  “Who else was on duty? Who else?”

  The other medic fled.

  He started turning in my direction, and I busied myself with marking off yet another set of unchanged vitals. Lattimore, evidently still furious with my part in the antibiotic scandal, had told me to take off once I finished a single round of the tent. Maybe I should have listened to her.

  Logan had not asked me anything else about my previous shift when he was at the house. Maybe he hadn’t thought to.

  “What’s done is done, Andrews,” Lattimore said.

  Not helping, Doc. It was the wrong thing to say to a grieving brother. Logan’s hand clenched into a fist as he approached me.