“Give it to me!” he said.
Adam gingerly handed the bottles to the man, as though the very act of it pained him. As Jack took the bottles, Sarah’s M4 slid off his shoulder and clattered to the tile floor. But Jack left it there and fled down the aisle.
“Jackie, wait!” shouted Lucy, pursuing her companion.
“Stay away from me!” he called out, his panic-filled voice echoing through the nearly empty drugstore. “Don’t you come near me!”
Their howls continued out the door into the parking lot; eventually they drifted away, leaving Adam and Sarah alone in the store. Adam placed his hands on his knees and took some deep breaths; he felt dizzy and hot.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I thought we were dead.”
“Wow,” Sarah said, retrieving her M4. “Where did you come up with that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I knew I had no chance with the gun. Then it occurred to me that if there’s one thing everyone’s still afraid of, it’s Medusa. Wait here.”
“Where are you going?”
“I gave him blood pressure medication. The antiviral is still in the back.”
Sarah laughed out loud.
Adam retrieved the bottles from the pharmacy, and they left the store. The rain had stopped, but it was still cloudy and misty. He threw the truck into drive and screeched out of the parking lot.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
They buried baby Stephen in the shade of a large pine tree on the edge of the camp.
Deep down, he’d known there was nothing they’d be able to do, that the trip he’d taken with Sarah had been nothing more than a lark and frolic, one that had nearly gotten them killed. They’d fought the good fight, administering as much medicine as they could, as often as they could. It had given Caroline a small measure of comfort, there at the end, as Stephen drew his last few breaths. But in the end, it hadn’t done any good. His fever continued climbing, the cough worsening and deepening. And, as Adam expected, Medusa did to Stephen what it had done to everyone else, and he had died on the morning of September 30.
“Thank you for trying,” she’d said to Adam, holding Stephen close to her, quiet and free of his suffering.
Freddie spent the afternoon digging a tiny grave for Stephen. He took great care in doing so, excavating a small but virtually perfect rectangle that faced east. Caroline liked that it looked back across the empty country toward Georgia, where, in another life, another universe, another dimension, little Stephen would have grown up.
The women stood at the foot of the grave; Caroline wept silently, her left arm linked in Sarah’s, her right in Nadia’s. Max stood next to Adam, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, silent, miserable. At Caroline’s request, Adam held Stephen and would be the one to hand him over to Freddie for his final interment.
“Can I touch him one more time?” Caroline asked, looking over at Adam.
He didn’t know why she thought she had to ask, but he looked into her pleading eyes, flowing with tears, and it seemed important to her that he bless her request.
He nodded.
Stephen’s body was wrapped in a light blue baby blanket, peppered with all manner of airplanes and helicopters and spaceships, which Caroline had been carrying with her for weeks. It had become a talisman in the last days of her pregnancy, but now, instead of naptimes and comfort, this blanket would serve as his shroud. She took him into her arms, held him close and kissed him on the head. Adam wondered if she would uncover his face, and he hoped she wouldn’t. See, in her mind, she was picturing the face she’d seen upon his birth, the face she’d imagined a million times as an expectant mommy. To look at his face now, in the aftermath of its terrible war with Medusa, would destroy that and remind her of all that was awful and dark and evil.
But she did.
She unwrapped the blanket and kissed his forehead and his cheeks, and she began to wail. Adam closed his eyes and waited for it to be over.
“It’s time to say goodbye,” he heard Sarah say.
He opened his eyes and saw Sarah holding Caroline’s face, red and gaunt, in her hands. He thought she did this to discourage her from kissing the baby again.
“It’s time to say goodbye,” Sarah said again.
Caroline nodded and passed the baby to Freddie, who lay Stephen down on the black dirt, so tiny and small, given back to the world that hadn’t given him anything, not even a chance. The big man knelt down and picked a few stray bits of dirt off the blanket, an act of kindness that Adam found almost incomprehensibly sad.
“Adam?” Caroline asked, her face still in Sarah’s hands.
He looked at her.
“Would you say something?” she asked. “For Stephen.”
She looked at him again, with that expectant face, the one that had once looked upon him with hope and promise and belief that it was all going to work out, because seriously, what were the odds that she’d find an obstetrician after ALL THIS?
“Of course,” he said, his words barely a whisper.
He cleared his throat and searched for something to say, anything to give this poor woman comfort. Any of them, really. He looked down at the small figure, free of all the horrors this world had seen fit to share with them.
“Dear Lord, we gather here today to say goodbye to a very brave, very beautiful little boy.”
Caroline began to sob.
“This world we live in now, it’s a new world for all of us.”
He paused, the words not coming easily. He didn’t know if he was coming across as sincere. He didn’t know if this was comforting Caroline or torturing her. They were just words. What good could these stupid words do? No matter how beautifully or eloquently he spoke, Stephen would still be dead. The world would still be a graveyard. But he pressed onward, aware of his voice, his posture, everything feeling wrong, wrong, wrong.
“And I don’t know why You chose to take him back so soon after he got here. But, I suppose, that may not be for us to know. So, all we can ask is that You welcome baby Stephen into Your loving arms. That You look after him now and always. That You bring his mother comfort and solace for the difficult days ahead. That You protect us and give us the guidance and wisdom we will need going forward.
“Amen.”
A ripple of Amens from the others.
They all looked at Caroline, who continued staring down into her son’s grave.
“Thank you, Adam,” she said. “That was very nice.”
She said it flatly, without emotion. Adam felt like she was just going through the paces, saying the things she thought people would expect her to say.
Each of them carefully poured a shovelful of dirt into the grave, Caroline going last. She sprinkled the dirt gently over her son and handed the shovel back to Freddie. As Freddie refilled the hole with the loose dirt, Caroline drifted away from the group, away to deal with her grief however she planned to deal with it. Adam, Sarah, Nadia, and Max watched as the dirt piled up, up, up until the hole was full.
#
The scotch tasted different.
What had been warm and inviting on the day Stephen had been born, like a roaring fire on a cold New England night, now tasted swampy and hot. It reminded Adam of all those houses under gunmetal skies in all those towns and cities they’d passed through, the air conditioning long dead, full of roasting corpses.
But Adam drank it just the same. He tipped the bottle to his mouth, feeling it scorch its way down like gasoline, and nestled the bottle between his thighs. He was seated on the floor of his tent, at the foot of his sleeping bag, exhausted but awake. It was late, after midnight. Fast-moving clouds zipped along overhead, giving a slight strobe effect to the night.
As a clinical matter, he knew he was drunk. If he’d been out driving and had been pulled over by an observant state trooper (and what he wouldn’t have given to see a cruiser blow by on a busy highway, its blue lights oscillating, pulsing with tremendous urgency and importance), he’d blow right past the lim
it just as simple as you please. But he didn’t feel drunk. He didn’t feel anything. Whatever the opposite of feeling was, that’s what it was. He suspected it might have been within shouting distance of what Caroline was feeling.
Sure, the world had ended, had come undone around him like a sandcastle at high tide, but even then he’d felt something. Terror. Panic. Confusion. Those were all full-blooded feelings. And then he’d heard the message from Rachel, and that had been another feeling. Joy. Relief. So there, the gamut of human emotion was still there, even at the end of all things.
But this. This was something else.
An absence of emotion. Numbness. The way your lips feel after the Novocaine.
How easy it had been to say the words at Stephen’s memorial, to make them sound good. He’d never enjoyed laying down words of comfort when a patient had lost a pregnancy or the Pap smear had come back abnormal, but they seemed to work. And so he had done it, without believing the words he was saying, the way he hadn’t believed the words he was uttering at Stephen’s funeral.
After the memorial, each of them had retreated from the gravesite into his or her own tent, forsaking the group dinner. No one felt like eating anyway. As night had fallen, the camp had grown quieter and quieter; even Caroline’s sobs had petered out to silence, a once-rushing river drying up in a salt flat. The next morning, no one had emerged from their tent, and they’d spent the day grieving for Stephen, for Caroline, for all of those lost, for all they still had to lose.
He heard a rustling outside his tent.
“Adam?”
“In here,” he said.
The tent flap drew back and Sarah eased inside. Even by the weak light of the lantern, he could see the sadness etched on her lovely face.
“Have a seat,” Adam said, motioning toward the ground.
Sarah took a seat, cross-legged, directly across from Adam.
“Drink?” he said, tilting the bottle toward her.
She shook her head.
“Suit yourself.”
He tilted the bottle back and took a drink. The slug went down the wrong way, and he began hacking and coughing, the alcohol burning his nostrils and throat, until he was able to clear his airway.
“You OK?”
He nodded, turning his head and spitting in the corner of the tent. Then he screwed the cap back on the bottle and tossed it near his pillow.
“Sorry.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“You’re not here to tell me that I did everything I could, right?”
“Nope. Any idea how he caught it?”
“From his mother, I suppose,” he said. “If I had to guess, her antibodies protected him in utero, but after he was born, he was on his own.”
“That doesn’t bode well for us,” Sarah said.
“No, it doesn’t.”
He reached into his bag and took out two chocolate bars.
“Want one?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re really turning down a lot of southern hospitality here.”
He opened the first bar, snapped off a quarter of it, and popped it in his mouth. He chewed slowly, trying to enjoy the taste, but with the residue of the scotch lingering on his tongue, it tasted bitter and hot.
“You need something?” he asked.
“No need to get nasty.”
He rubbed his eyes with the thumb and index finger of his left hand.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“I thought we needed to talk,” she said.
Great, he thought. A big, heaping spoonful of humiliation on top of the shit sundae.
“Nothing to talk about,” he said. “I’m a big boy.”
“No, I know. You don’t understand.”
He was too tired to argue, so he sat silently as Sarah struggled to organize her thoughts. He took another bite of the candy bar. This piece tasted a little better.
“It’s just that…”
Chew, chew, chew.
He honestly had no clue where she was headed, and he figured he could only make things worse by saying anything, so he continued eating the candy bar. When he finished it, he unwrapped the second one.
This seemed to derail her, and she pointed at the chocolate in his hand.
“Really throwing caution to the wind, huh?”
“All that time, worrying about what I ate,” he said. “I could be dead tomorrow. Not in the abstract sense, like people used to say. For real. Any of us could be dead tomorrow. After that thing with the fox, I’m lucky I’m not already dead. So I’m going to have two candy bars tonight. And if I’m still alive tomorrow night, I’ll have two more.”
Then he nodded his head at her, forcefully, demonstrably.
And that was when she started laughing. Her whole body shook, and she clapped her hand over her mouth, presumably to keep herself from making too much noise, but she couldn’t stop; the giggles overwhelmed her. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but these weren’t tears of sadness. Her eyes sparkled in the dim light, and for a moment, even Adam’s chocolate bar tasted good.
The laughter subsided after a few seconds, and then they were back in the moment. She took a few deep breaths to settle herself down.
“The way you nodded your head at me,” she said. She pressed the tip of her thumb against her teeth and closed her eyes tight. “That was just too much.
“If you’re willing to share,” she said, “I think I will take you up on a little of that chocolate.”
He snapped off the piece he’d bitten from and handed her the rest. She took a bite and smiled, perhaps tasting the chocolate the way it was supposed to taste, the cocoa hitting her dopamine receptors. He winked at her as he chewed, and she winked back.
“So,” Adam said, crumpling up the wrapper and tucking it into his duffel bag. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”
She held the remaining chocolate up.
“You know what?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I think it can-”
A deep, primal howl exploded through the camp, shattering the night calm. Sarah dropped the candy bar as she scampered to her feet. She pulled the flap of the tent back just enough to peek out toward the center of the camp. Her heart thudded crazily, and she was relieved she’d made it a rule to not go anywhere without her M4. She glanced over at Adam, who’d retrieved his own gun and had taken post opposite her.
Ten seconds.
That’s how close she’d come to telling him. Another ten seconds, and she’d have told him about the Huntington’s.
Yeah, she thought. Focus on that right now. The camp could be crawling with killers right now, but your near tell-all to the handsome doctor, that’s what’s important. Idiot.
She primed her ears and listened for the telltale sounds of intruders in the camp, but she heard nothing. She looked over at Adam, who was craning his head this way and that, trying to make out what was going on, but he shrugged his shoulders upon returning her gaze.
Years of embedded training took over. Yet another drill drilled, another scenario planned for, repeated ad nauseam until she could execute it in her sleep. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they gamed it, a terrorist or supposedly friendly local sneaking into camp at night and looking to massacre U.S. soldiers. She ducked out into the darkness, her weapon up and ready, sweeping it from side to side. She scurried along the edge of the tents, trying to stay invisible.
“Help! Somebody help!”
Freddie.
Freddie’s tent was across the way, but his voice seemed to be coming from this side of the camp, where Caroline had pitched hers. She pulled back the flap of Caroline’s tent and ducked inside. The smell was what she noticed first, a thick slap of sourness hanging in the air, as though someone had been sick recently. A lantern glowed in the corner, casting the interior in a ghastly yellow light, the color of sickness and infection and jaundice. Freddie was on his knees in the corner, near Caroline’s bedroll, his massive frame blocking Sarah’s vie
w of Caroline.
“No, no, no,” Freddie was pleading.
“What’s wrong?” Adam barked.
“I think she’s dead,” Freddie said softly, his words coming out in barely a whisper, more like a sigh.
A touch on Sarah’s shoulder startled her, and she looked back to see Adam’s face, tight and drawn, staring back at her. He had the look of a man who’d seen about all he could take and she glanced away so she wouldn’t have to look into that fallen face, that face devoid of anything.
“Let me see,” Adam said, curling around Sarah like smoke.
He knelt next to Freddie and felt for a pulse, first in Caroline’s wrist and then in her neck. His shoulders sagged, and he rocked back on his haunches, his arms draped over his knees.
“She’s dead,” Adam said.
Freddie stood up, his head in his hands, grimacing like he was experiencing the world’s worst migraine; he paced around the tent, muttering to himself over and over.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Sarah edged toward Adam for a closer look and saw Caroline’s face. Her eyes were open, blank. Her mouth hung open, a thin film on her lips.
“What happened?” Adam asked.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Freddie said. “Saw her lantern was on so I came over to check on her. Found her lying here.”
Adam began scouring Caroline’s sleeping area while Freddie resumed his pacing.
“God dammit,” Adam muttered a moment later.
“What?” Sarah asked.
He held up a small pill bottle; its amber color glinted in the light of the lantern.
“This is oxycodone,” Adam said. “Did anyone know she had these?”
“Oh, no,” Freddie said.
“What?”
“She said her leg was bothering her this afternoon and asked me for something,” Freddie said.
“Where did you get these?”
“Before we hooked up with you guys. On the road.”
“And you didn’t think to check with me before prescribing these, Doctor?” Adam snapped.
Freddie stood silently, towering over Sarah and Adam, who looked like a toy action figure next to the big man’s mass. Sarah didn’t like where this was going at all.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 27