“You can,” he told her. “I know it. And if you can’t you’ll do everything can be done.”
She nodded. “I’ll need to stop for supplies.”
Quey nodded.
Quey got her location and was glad she’d spent as much time heading west as south because he knew a place they could meet and get to before Rain bled out.
Quey hopped into the passenger’s seat of the truck and Arnie climbed in beside him. Reggie was back behind the wheel of his car with Rachel riding shotgun and Leone was in the back with Rain. Dusty was in the back of the moving truck.
They pulled out of the parking lot and started down the highway.
Arnie drove in silence for a long while and this was why Quey had insisted he drive the truck. There had been an argument on the subject but in the end Rain had told him to do as he was asked. Quey told him Reggie was better with the car than the truck and the speeds they needed to travel at required a confident touch. All that was true but what was also true was the need for Quey and Arnie to clear the air a bit. Quey was trying to figure a way of broaching the subject when Arnie did it for him.
“You’re in love with her.” It wasn’t a statement or a question but something in between. Maybe an accusation, but if it was it was weak.
Quey shook his head and sighed. “You want the truth?” Quey asked, exhausted as he sank down in his seat.
Arnie glanced over at him and nodded, “Yeah.”
“In love… no. We had a time together and in it I developed a fondness, no denying that, and maybe some other where or some other when that would have grown into being ‘in love,’ but it never got the chance in this when and where.” Arnie swallowed hard before Quey went on. “It took with you,” he conceded. “It took with you and though I’ll always have a shine for her it’ll never be that, what it is for you and her.” He sighed. “All I can assure you on is that I have no intention toward bedding or wedding her. But I do mean to look to her and after her as best I can until I can’t no more, whether it’s due to the passing of my life or her wanting for it.”
Arnie looked over at him, took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m glad we’re with you,” Arnie said. “And not just cause we’d be dead by now if we weren’t.”
Quey chuckled. His head was soupy and he wanted to sleep. Sleep sounded good but he knew it was bad. “I don’t know,” he said then muttered some nonsense and passed out.
The car was a tomb. Rachel stared out the window at the landscape whipping past. Feeling had begun to creep back into her and the pain from her burns was nearly unbearable but she wouldn’t let it be known. Besides, right about now she rather liked the physical pain. It was easier to deal with than the other kind that was threatening to crumble her into a pile of uselessness.
Leone curled up against Rain in the back seat and talked to her. She was pale, more so than usual, Reggie could see as he glanced into the rear view mirror. The wound was bad and there was a lot of blood. She was going to die.
“And there was…” Leone trailed off and glanced at the two people in the front seat.
“What?” Rain asked dully.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Hey,” Reggie said and Leone looked at him. “We’re not here, kay buddy. You tell her everything you want her to know.”
Rachel shot him a look. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ it asked and he added, “Just talk to her. It helps.”
The boy looked at his sister who might as well have been his mother and started talking again. He told her about a girl he liked. A girl who reminded him of her. A girl who had kissed him. A girl he’d never see again.
Rain smiled and said, “That’s good.” She ruffled his hair weakly. “Not the never seeing again but, you know… the rest of it.”
Reggie had seen this in the war. He’d ridden in two vehicles carrying friends with wounds like this. Both had died and both had been going to a place with doctors, not medical school drop outs.
“Viona!” the boy shouted from the back seat and Rachel turned around in her seat. She watched the boy scream in her face, blind with panic. “Viney, wake up. Wake up Viney,” he begged repeatedly until he grew angry. He wasn’t sure why he was mad, just that he was and so he slapped her and that brought her around just enough. She looked at him.
“Okay,” he said through tears. “Please don’t leave me,” he pleaded through a wall of sobs. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” he told her and she touched his face. He gripped her hand and looked in her eyes and spoke frantically. “Okay, I couldn’t have done it without you, I’d have died without you and… and I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry I blamed you for leaving and I’m sorry for the time I didn’t talk to you and I’m sorry you had to take care of me because without that-”
Rain sat up just a bit and gripped his mouth with her hand. Rachel could see it was solid, her fingers pressing hard against his cheeks.
“Don’t you dare,” she said in a whisper. “Anything else is fine but don’t you ever apologize for that.”
He nodded frantically and she let him go and slumped back in her seat. He fell against her weeping. “Don’t go,” he said.
“Listen to me,” she managed. Leone settled into subtle sobs as he struggled to keep silent. Rain was looking at Rachel, the color gone from her face, her eyes glassy and something behind them was fading but still she held the woman’s gaze. When she spoke she was speaking to Rachel. “No matter what, you stay with them,” she told Leone. “Quey and Rachel, you stay with them you hear me? Don’t run off.”
Leone sat up and looked at her. “What about Arnie?” he asked. Rain kept Rachel’s gaze until she nodded and the truth she saw in her face allowed the girl in the back seat a sigh of relief. “Arnie was for me,” Rain said, looking at Leone and touching his face again. “He was good for me but Quey will be good for you. What you need to get through this and stay alive,” she finished. Her eyes drifted lazily and she looked at Rachel one last time, just to be sure. Rachel reached out and touched Leone’s shoulder and she was.
Natalie was waiting for them out front of another cheap motel along the side of the road. They didn’t have time to worry about being spotted at the moment. The blue four door and the moving truck rolled into the parking lot and parked haphazardly in front of the room where Natalie was standing. The doors flew open. Quey hopped from his side of the truck and Natalie was checking him when he heard the commotion in the car. Leone was sobbing wildly and Rachel was trying to calm him. Reggie stepped from the car. He glanced at Arnie but couldn’t keep his eyes there so he moved his gaze to Quey. “She’s dead,” he said quietly but Arnie heard.
Quey felt his heart sink into freefall. He watched Reggie and Rachel try to hold Arnie and Leone out of the way while Natalie leaned into the back seat to have a look at the girl. Quey could see her, eyes closed, too pale, too much blood soaked into her shirt and the makeshift bandage they’d wrapped around her. Far too much pooled in the back seat around her. He smacked his wounded shoulder and sent a surge of pain shooting though him just to feel something that wasn’t this.
“She’s not dead,” Natalie said loudly. Everyone stopped. “But we need to get her inside now.”
They moved with purpose and without conversation. Reggie and Arnie eased her out of the car and started for the door. Quey ran to the door and opened it, holding it as they brought her inside.
“Table,” Natalie said.
It was a square breakfast table near the window and Arnie and Reggie set her down gently. She was a small girl but her legs dangled off the end. Quey noted there was a good deal of supplies around the room.
“Any chance you know her blood type?” Natalie asked.
“We’re the same,” Leone said.
“What is it?”
Leone shook his head and tried to remember but couldn’t. “I don’t remember, just that we’re the same.”
“Go in the red bag. Should be two packs of O neg,” she told Arnie, then looked at Leone. “After th
at I might need you,” she told the boy and he nodded.
“Where’d you get this?” Quey asked.
“You really want to know right now?” Natalie asked him with a hard glance.
He dropped it and went to the corner where he sat and watched. Rachel, it seemed, had a knack for nursing. She wasn’t squeamish and she did everything Natalie asked with minimal instruction. When Natalie gave Rain a dose of painkillers she gave one to Rachel as well.
“You let me know if you get soupy,” Nat told her.
“I’ll be fine,” Rachel replied.
The two of them worked like a machine digging into the hole in Rain’s gut, trying to locate and remove the bullet. Arnie sat on the bed with his head in his hands and tears in his eyes. Reggie stayed close to the table, doing whatever the ladies couldn’t on their own, mostly it involved grabbing the dangling overhead light and adjusting it so they could see better.
When the blood she’d brought was gone Natalie ran a tube from the vein in Leone’s arm to Rain’s. Finally the bullet came out and Natalie set in to fixing the wound as best she could. Luckily the days of stitching were over, they had a tissue bonding solution that could seal damage far worse than a bullet could cause. It would remain tender until it actually healed, until the body grew closed again, but until then everything would be held tight.
Leone was pale and Natalie tried to separate him from Rain. He gripped her hand. “She needs more,” he said.
“You can’t,” Natalie said. “She’s had all we can give her.”
“She needs more to be okay?” he asked and saw the answer in her face. Taking the bullet out had been time consuming and time meant blood loss. “Then I’ll give her more.”
“You can’t,” Natalie said firmly.
Leone looked at her desperately, his eyes shimmering but all his tears had fallen, a lifetime’s worth shed, it seemed, in a single day. “Please,” he said weakly.
“Mom,” Amber said. She’d been quiet the whole time, so quiet Quey’d forgotten she was there at all.
“Quiet,” Natalie said with a tinge of sharpness in her voice.
“Mom,” she repeated and Natalie gave her a glare. She continued anyway. “You know I’m O negative.” The girl stood and went to Leone. She looked at his eyes, red and puffy with dark circles around them, orbs of despair in a face drained of color and filled with fear. He was a porcelain doll ready to shatter and she had a pillow on which he could fall. “Let me,” she said to him. “Let me help her.”
Leone thanked her with a look and nodded.
Natalie sighed and looked at her daughter. They had a conversation without saying a word and in the end Natalie connected her daughter to Rain.
Leone stood and nearly collapsed, the only thing that saved him was Quey, who jumped to his feet and caught him, his shoulder screaming as he did. They laid the boy on the bed and brought him some water; it was all they had to give him for the time being.
Natalie looked at Quey and asked, “How about we get that bullet out of you now.”
“Rachel first.”
Natalie looked at the burns running down the left side of Rachel’s body and said, “The worst is passed for her. You need to be next.”
“Much obliged,” he replied warily. There was no question in any of their minds that Quey was in a bad way, and that he would have sat by and let himself die before he would have taken Natalie’s attention from the rest of them.
Comparatively his wound was nothing. She was able to remove the bullet in just a few minutes. After that she sealed the wound and he went to the bed and collapsed beside Leone.
Rachel’s wounds were more time consuming. They took to the bathroom where Natalie carefully separated the charred clothing from her flesh. After that she dosed her with a bit more painkiller and took to pulling off the charred bits of skin before she washed and dressed the wounds.
“It’s going to be a while,” Natalie warned her and Rachel nodded. “We’re going to need to change these at least twice a day.”
Tears filled Rachel’s eyes as she nodded again. It wasn’t her wounds that had brought them. It was that they didn’t have a bandage that would help her Dusty, who was even now starting to decay in the back of a moving truck.
Quey woke sometime later with a start. Leone was beside him and Rain was on the other side of the boy. A deathbed built for three, he thought with a smile before blacking out again.
Arnie and Reggie drove the truck and car two miles up the road to a diner and parked them around back. Natalie had followed in the van she’d apparently stolen from a medical facility and the three returned together.
“We needed the supplies,” she told Reggie and Rachel, “And I didn’t have time to load them all into the car. Besides, it never hurts to switch vehicles when people are looking for you.”
The big man looked to Rachel and they both agreed with a nod.
It had been risky, leaving the cars parked at the motel for so many hours, since apparently no one could be trusted these days, but they hadn’t had a choice.
Rachel spent most of her time in the hotel room watching over the three sleeping bodies on the bed, taking the pills Natalie had given her a bit more often than she needed. She thought briefly about how if things had gone differently…
She looked at Quey and imagined that’s how it’d gone for her Dusty. She saw him sleeping on that bed and how desperate with worry she would have been. Worried to the point she probably would have spent some time angry with him for getting himself shot. Worried to the point where her stomach would churn and her chest would tighten and she wouldn’t be able to breathe. She would have traded anything for that worry without hesitation.
It was worse later, when the others returned and the sun went down and the time came to get some sleep. Rachel went into her room and the instant the door closed she felt alone. The room seemed hollow, every object in it devoid of meaning or even purpose. She collapsed onto the bed and it was so cold. For the first time in many years there was nobody there to help her warm it. Nothing warm to settle against. Nothing to complain about how cold her feet were.
“If you’re going to put those ice cloppers on me at least let me have a respectable amount of blanket.”
She heard his voice clearly in her head and that shattered her. Her face twisted with agony and she buried it in the flat motel pillow and wept hysterically. She begged for him to still be alive. She demanded to know why. Then she flew into fits of anger because she knew why. She hated Quey and Reggie… but it wasn’t their fault. She hated that stupid little bitch Rain… no she didn’t. Stupid little rich bitch with her stupid little made up name. Viona, wasn’t that what she was really called, it sounded stuck up. It sounded like the name of a selfish girl getting people killed because her daddy didn’t buy her a fucking pony…
It wasn’t her fault.
It was someone’s fault.
It was all their faults. She’d been hurt in the raid of Fen Quada. The Brood had pursued them then and still she and Dusty stayed on the road. In Northshire when they got the call from Arnie she could have said no, any of them could have. Any of them could have gone their own way at any time. Just this morning at the motel… she could have gone out first. Maybe she would have looked both ways before crossing the street.
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.
She wept for a long time, not sobbing but whimpering as tears poured from her eyes. She thought she couldn’t breathe sometimes. Sometimes she wished she couldn’t. That night she didn’t sleep. By morning she was out of tears. She was out of pain and sadness. She made coffee in the tiny pot and allowed Natalie to look over and clean and dress her wounds. She felt like a robot, a creature going through the motions of habit despite the dead world around her. She drank coffee slowly while sitting at the table in her room. She didn’t think about anything. She didn’t feel anything.
Later, when she thought she could hold it together around people she joined the others. When the time came i
t was she who took the initiative and talked with Natalie. They went over the things Quey had told her at her kitchen table again only this time she had questions about what their plan was and what was going to happen next.
“We’re going to the Robotics compound to make sense of it,” Rachel said dryly.
After that Rachel told her what she knew of Sticklan Stone, the man who had been in her house. Telling her his name was enough, however, for Natalie had seen the news feeds. “If you want to be mad at us, fine. If you want to think we ruined your life, we did.” Rachel shrugged, “But how long was it really going to last. A few measly years at best.”
Natalie sighed.
“I’m sorry,” Quey said weakly from the bed. Rachel and Natalie looked over at him. Leone and Reggie had taken Amber out for a bite. Rain and Arnie were in another room now. “I didn’t mean to get you into this.”
Natalie shook her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she said exhausted.
Rachel clasped her hand and said, “You come with us then.”
Quey sat up on the bed and said, “When we get back to the Robotics Compound we’re going to figure out what to do with this data.” Natalie looked over at him. “Very soon, everyone will know.”
She huffed a chuckle and shook her head.
“We understand if you have to make a go of it on your own,” Rachel said. “Just be careful. Stone and the Brood will probably be keeping an eye out for you.”
Natalie closed her eyes and thought. None of this was real, it couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible. Finally she nodded, “We’ll go with you. Rain’ll need looking after. Someone has to help you for a bit longer,” she added to Rachel.
Quey smiled briefly and went to sleep again.
“’Sides,” she said after a long patch of quiet. “Not like we have anywhere else to go.”
Rachel woke Quey sometime after dawn. He sat up, a dull pain stabbing through his shoulder, and winced. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her large green eyes staring down at the floor.
The Saffron Malformation Page 44