He waits for me on the porch while I approach him, limping as I go. I don’t want him standing there. I want him to go away and I want him to talk to Lexi. I want the two of them to have the fear of what I might do to them in their eyes. I want it all to just come to an end finally. I’ve come to terms with death, but I don’t think that up until this moment that I actually wanted to die. I just want all of it to be over, once and for all. I suppose that’s a sort of surrender that I’m willing to accept.
Rushing down the steps, he tries to help me in my attempt to climb them. Before he can touch me, I hold up my hand to keep him at bay. “Come on, babe, let me help you,” he says kindly to me, trying to act like he loves me. I know the truth. I know better. I wish that he would just get on board. Read the signs.
“I’m not your babe,” I tell him coldly, cutting deep at him. He reaches out to touch me, but the very idea of his hands being on me makes me want to throw up all over him. I can’t deal with that right now. I shake my head and hastily take another step, too hastily. I feel the pain and exhaustion hitting me like a cement truck and it’s almost too much for me. I can feel my knees shaking, trembling under the pressure as I lean against the railing of the porch steps with black spots dancing before my eyes. “Fuck off,” I tell him harshly, not willing to have him near me anymore. It’s time for him to just get the hint once and for all.
“Babe, are you okay?” he asks me. I’m sure there’s a huge complexity to that question, but I’m not having any of it.
“I know, Greg,” I tell him coldly. “I know everything.” As I approach the door, leaving him behind me with the gravity of that statement, I know that he’s wondering what happens next. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking about that question a lot but I know what I need to do. I’m just not so certain he’s going to know what to do with himself. I think mercy is a bizarre concept. Mercy should not exist. Mercy is an abomination against the rules and laws of nature. For someone to act with mercy is against our animal nature. It throws everything out of balance. It is unnatural, a human concept. There’s something distinctly wrong in the world when mercy is applied. I step in over the threshold and look back at him. “Get on the table,” I tell him.
I don’t bother watching him as he awkwardly and cautiously climbs onto the table. I don’t want to feel any compassion as he struggles or grits his teeth against the pain. As he follows my instructions, I hand him a bottle of painkillers without so much as turning to face him. Lexi gives each of us a water bottle. I finally turn towards Greg as he nervously takes two of the pills. I can see the sweat beading across his face as he lies there, anticipating what’s to come. I untie the belt from around his knee and hand it to him. He’s not going to need it anymore. I’m going to save his leg, of that I have no doubt. He can be grateful for it later.
Getting all of the supplies I need, I look at him and meet his nervous, sorrowful gaze. The forlorn and saddened eyes look at me, hoping that I might forgive him or that I might let him have a second chance. If only he knew how impossible that request truly was. “This is going to hurt,” I tell him honestly, brutally so. “The painkillers I just gave you aren’t going to work for a while, but we don’t have time. It’ll dull the pain in a while, but immediately, you’re going to be in a world of hurt and I can’t help that. Try to keep as calm as you can, the faster your heart rate, the faster you’ll bleed out.” It’s only right that he should suffer.
Wrapping the belt around his head, I keep his mouth open. He’ll chew down on the belt, but it won’t move. Lexi hands me her own belt after I request it, and I take it from her, tying down his hands to the legs of the table. I’m not letting him get the chance to interrupt this impromptu surgery. I use my belt to fasten his other arm. Lexi quickly locates some nylon rope from the cellar and together we bind down Greg’s legs as well. I wonder if a part of her will enjoy the pain I put Greg through. I can’t say that I am not at least looking forward to it a little bit. It isn’t revenge. Not necessarily. More like a trade. His physical pain for my emotional pain. Tit for tat. Fighting a grin at the evil thought, I force myself to push my emotions aside for the moment. As I take a deep breath, the spots return before my eyes and in a brief moment of absolute clarity I can feel the inferno within my gut as the infection there grows worse by the second. I don’t have much time and every precious second is going to count. He’s going to need me working until my dying breath.
First things first, I remind myself of the basic, simple rule that everyone should follow when looking at a mountain of work. I grab the scalpels and look at the necrotic, infected wound sitting before me. There’s a reasonable amount of cutting that’s going to need to be done and the inflamed, highly sensitive tissue with exposed nerve endings has to go first. It’s going to hurt like hell and he’s going to feel every last bit of it. There’s no help for it even if I didn’t want him to feel the hurt.
He screams, as loud as his lungs will let him as I start to cut away the infected flesh. I toss the scraps of flesh and tissue I’m slicing away from him into a bowl that Lexi brings me. She paces nervously as he screams at the top of his lungs, his eyes wide in pain and his body bucking at the suffering that I’m inflicting upon him. I don’t feel the slightest drop of sympathy for him as I continue cutting. It’s hard to even identify this as human tissue when I cut it away. It just looks like rotten meat to me. Puss oozes out in small amounts, and as I work I try to imagine what the scar is going to look like. I’ll be able to bind it closed tightly, after I’ve removed the decaying muscle tissue, but it’ll still look pretty nasty when I’m through. He’ll never be the same again, but then again, no survivor of this world could ever go back to who they were.
While I work, I can feel my vision coming and going, blurring on me as I flush the wound out with clean water before scraping down, nearly to the bone. I don’t know if it’s from the exhaustion after today’s events or if it’s the infection working its magic on me. I don’t trust myself or my body any longer. Stopping when my vision starts to cloud, I wipe my forehead with my arm, feigning that I am simply tired. Putting down my instruments, I take a sip of water, knowing it’s not enough, no matter how much I drink. Holding the bottle with my shaking hand, I look at the back of my hand and see drops of sweat. I’m sweating… everywhere. I’m sweating and the house is relatively cool. There’s no reason I should be sweating this much. This is so much more than a nervous sweat. I blink, realizing that my face is covered in sweat again already. I try to brush away the realization and get back to work, but I’m scared. I’m terrified that I’m not going to finish and that my time is going to be up sooner rather than later.
My shirt is mostly soaked from my own blood, but I’m sure that Lexi thinks it’s still wet from the dog she beat to death on top of me. I’m glad she hasn’t said anything about it. Finishing up with the infected tissue, I nod to myself, having taken everything that I can out of him. The wound is relatively clean, and what infection remains should be cleared out by the antibiotics within days. It’s not pretty, but he’ll live if I can get the damned thing closed. I can feel death breathing down my neck as Lexi tries to calm Charlie’s screams.
Greg is screaming.
Charlie is screaming.
My mind is screaming.
But death… he remains silently breathing down my neck.
I shake my head to clear it. It’s time to start suturing and I quickly go to work, bringing the enormous gaps between the torn muscle together. Placing a drain, I start bringing the gaping wound together around it, making sure that the drain is set properly. He’ll have no clue what it’s used for if I don’t explain it to him, but hopefully I’ll last that long. Every stitch seems to take an eternity. The needle feels clumsy in my hand. My fingers hold it awkwardly as my shaking seems magnified tenfold. I work from the bottom up, layer by layer, trying to do quality work, but it is near impossible. Fortunately, by now, Greg’s painkillers are taking the edge off. I watch as the gaping, once infected wound, made
much larger by my work, is beginning to grow smaller once more. It’s not pretty, but it’ll suffice.
Looking up from his leg, I see that Greg’s face is still covered with beads of sweat and that his eyes are wide with suffering as I make each puncture wound, drawing the thread through and pulling his severed pieces together. I watch him pant as tears roll down his cheeks, running into his too long hair. I look back down at my work. I refuse to be a sucker for his tears. I’ve done everything that I can for him. For all of them. They won’t need me now that I’ve gotten them this far. There is no time for me to be a sensitive wreck.
I jab his shoulder, drawing his attention. “Look,” I command him, pointing to the drain that I’ve placed in his leg. Upon further inspection, I’m impressed with my own work. I’ve been out of practice and I’ve only done this maybe three times in my training before the world went to hell. He looks to where I’m pointing and I know that he’s doing the best that he can while being tied down to a heavy wooden table. “This is called a drain,” I tell him, educating his poor, dumb ass about what he’ll need to do to survive without me. “This is how you’re going to clean the wound and flush out any infection that builds up. Watch this as if your life depended upon it, because it does.”
Grabbing the bag of saline I hook it up to the drain, my fingers remembering everything that my teachers taught them and so much more. I place the bag over the wound, holding it properly and giving the bag a squeeze. Greg bucks and his whole body goes tense as the pressure skyrockets in the wound, while the saline rushes into every cavity and nook that is down there in the injury, hunting down any hiding spots for the infection that will inevitably try to come back. I give his face a mild slap to get his attention again. He looks at me like I’ve just stuck a knife into his face. I point to the bubbles of saline coming up from between the stitches, and the fluid oozes out.
Disconnecting the bag, I grab his leg and give it a squeeze, working my way from the knee down to his wound and then from his ankle up to his wound, pushing and forcing all of the liquid to the surface. It’s crimson with blood and I watch as his face twists in grimaces, enduring the agony that I’m forcing upon him with as much dignity that he can muster. It isn’t much. We watch as blood and all the other fluids inside his leg come rushing up and out through the drain. It’s a disturbing sight, like a morbid volcano, but it’s necessary if he wants to keep the wound clean.
“This is going to keep you alive,” I repeat coldly. “You need to do this twice a day until the drain starts to bulge out of your wound. Once it starts to bulge, it’ll need to be removed, but until then, twice a day. Got it?” He gives me a nod even though I still have him gagged. Picking up a bottle of pills, I put them on his chest. “These are also going to be taken twice a day. If you don’t take at least two a day, your body will build up an immunity to the antibiotics too quickly and they’ll stop working and you’ll die from an infection. So take the pills twice a day.” I step back from the table unsteadily as the edges of my vision grow dark. It’s better when I talk, so I try to keep my voice working. My heart pounds and there’s a thumping in my whirling head. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stand much longer. “I’ve done the best I can. I hope it works.”
I have to sit down. I turn away from the table, feeling like I’m going to throw up again, but before I can do anything, I feel the ground rushing up toward me. Something is wrong. I didn’t have enough time. I’m not going to make it. The darkness swirls around me. It’s too much. This has to be the end. Death has finally grown tired of my charade.
Chapter Eighteen
I decide that I’m over waking up when my eyes finally peel apart and I see the light streaming in at me. At first, I don’t recognize where I am. There are posters on the walls of bands that I’ve never liked and pictures of movies that I wouldn’t be caught dead seeing. As I stare at the walls, I feel like I’m waking up in the skin of someone else. I’m not sure exactly where I am still as I look at the surroundings; I just know that I shouldn’t be here.
It’s not that I shouldn’t be here in this room. It’s that I shouldn’t be alive in the first place. I should be dead right now. There’s no doubting it. Maybe I am and this is some demented reality, but sadly I doubt the rabbit hole has gone that deep yet. I remember blacking out and falling to the ground, but the darkness and the silence that followed felt like they lasted a lifetime. Rolling over on the bed, I look across the room, seeing that Lexi is seated in a chair, rocking as she feeds Charlie. The sight of her makes me wish that I’d died. Who knows how long I’ve been out, but it hasn’t been long enough.
The thought of her and Greg still makes me want to throw up, but I’m certain that there are better things that I should be spending these last few moments with her thinking about. I should let it go, but I’m not so certain that I’m ready quite yet to do that. I’m entitled to a bit of bitterness and I intend to relish it for a while. I don’t know how they saved me or if it was just dumb luck, but I want to spend the last of my life the way I’d like it to end, not watching her sniveling and apologizing. I’m not up for that.
There’s no sign of Greg, which makes me grateful, at least a little bit. He’s probably the last thing that I want to see right now. The only one of them that I can stomach is poor Charlie, who has to put up the rest of his life with these two idiots as his parents and not having me around to help him out. I pity him, but I think he’s going to be a certain kind of strong that’s going to put his parents to shame. If he’s anything like his grandfather, or like his aunt, then he’s going to be just fine. In fact, I’m sure he’ll be running the show in no time.
Lexi notices that I’m awake and looks at me with delighted, happy eyes. “You’re up,” she says with a grin the size of Texas on her face. It’s an obnoxious smile and I don’t want to look at it. It makes me want to throw something at her. Not because it’s a gloating or malicious smile, but because she actually seems genuinely delighted to see that I’m alive and not dead. I’m sure she doesn’t want our last conversation to be her confessing that she cheated on me with my boyfriend.
“How long was I out?” I ask her, feeling like I have a thunderstorm raging inside of my head.
“About a day and a half,” Lexi tells me with a bit of worry in her voice, like that was too long to be out. I don’t know what she’s been giving me to drink, but there’s something potent and terrible tasting in my mouth right now. I don’t think I want to ask her. But, it’s almost as if she can sense the thoughts rolling around in my head and anticipates them before I can avoid asking them. “We ground up some of the antibiotics in another one of the bottles and dissolved them in the water we’ve been giving you. Thankfully, you’ve been drinking them and it looks like your fever broke.”
I smile at the thought she must have put into that. It’s nice of her and a great gesture, but that’s like giving a glass of water to bleached bones. It’s a waste, but I’m not going to shatter her feelings by telling her just how pointless it is to give me the antibiotics. If they’re lucky, they won’t have need of them before they find another supply. Maybe they’ll be smart and use my theory of hitting the veterinary clinics after making sure there are no zombie dogs around waiting for a fresh meal.
“Thanks,” I tell her genuinely, but under the blanket they have on me, I reach blindly for my wound and can feel the heat still radiating from it and the pain is worse than ever. The stiffness is almost absolute and I know that I’m as good as dead still. There’s no hoping that they’re going to save me or that there’s something inside that bag of tricks we gathered in the vet clinic that will keep me alive any longer than my body will allow. I’m on borrowed time now. I look at Lexi, strangely comforted by the fact that I know I’m still dying. It gives me a sort of freedom to act. “Where’s Greg?”
Lexi points next to the bed where I see that there’s another chair and a little desk that is completely covered with another pile of notebooks and papers that match another pile on the
floor. The sight of it is strangely comforting, but I don’t really know what it is that I’m looking at. “He’s been studying since the moment I untied him from that table and got you to the bed,” she tells me with a sort of pride in her voice. I reach out and grab one of the notebooks, flipping through it and finding journal entries that are signed ‘J’. I don’t know what most of the equations are, but the designs in the notebook look like someone was planning on building something extensive and important. There are enormous structures that look like planter boxes with greenhouses built on top of them. I toss the notebook down and look at a map that they’ve found somewhere in the house. It’s marked with dozens of X’s all over Dayton and the surrounding communities.
“This guy Jason had a lot going on,” Lexi tells me with a certain excitement in her voice that reminds me of the determination that had been in our father’s voice before the end. I look at her, not expecting this from my sister. She was usually so cynical and bitter. It’s like letting the truth out has deflated and drained all the hostility from her finally and I can actually stand her for once. I hate that the poison she had inside of her turned out to be what it was, but I’ll deal with it for now. “We found a supply of food that he had stashed away in the basement and all these maps that correspond to detailed notebooks. He lists everything he raided from where, and if there were hostiles in the area. Just from the intelligence reports that he took, we could remain here indefinitely.”
“But it’s so much more than that.” Greg’s voice startles me as I turn and look toward the door where he’s standing with more notebooks in his hands. He limps to the chair next to my bed and sits down in it with a bit of an awkward, pained struggle. Already, looking at his complexion, I know that he’s doing much better. The infection is starting to recede out of him. If he keeps up the antibiotic regiment, he’ll be fine in no time. I like the sight of the two of them healthy and well. It makes me feel like I’ve actually accomplished what I set out to do. “Jason appears to have been some sort of agricultural student,” Greg tells me. “From what I can gather, his fiancée and he moved back here from Arizona State and found the place deserted. While they worked on raiding, he spent his nights figuring out what was wrong with the soil and why the fertilizers killed everything. He hypothesized that the only way to get plant life back was to create new soil. It’s a simple enough process and he has a huge pile of compost in that shed out back. It’s insane, Val, I think he can actually do it.” He pauses for a moment and looks at me with a sad look on his face. “I mean, we can do it. He just warns that we’ll have to make a compound to keep the soil from getting stripped in the storms, but until then, he designed these greenhouse structures that should start doing the trick. It’s incredible really.”
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 98