by A. M. Geever
Skye nodded. “I was out cold until the gunshot woke me.”
Miranda thought again about Doug taking a shot at Jeremiah and Courtney to scare them into compliance. He had not meant to hit them. If he had, one of them would be dead.
“That was out of character for Doug,” Miranda said. “He’s been having a…rage problem. Speak of the devil.”
Skye twisted in her seat. Doug trotted down the lobby staircase, looking as falling-flat-on-his-face tired as Miranda felt.
“I thought you were going to bed. Both of you.” He stood behind the chair between Miranda and Skye at the square table.
Miranda said, “I’m just trying to summon the energy to stand.”
“You can do it, Coppertop. I know you can.”
“Where did you put Courtney?” Skye asked. “Where Jeremiah was when you first got here?”
Doug pulled out the chair and sat down. “Yep. She’s in the dungeon. Now we just need to figure out how that happened.”
Miranda didn’t want to talk about how Jere-fucking-miah had manipulated the stupid young woman and spread his contagion. She gripped the table and dragged herself to her feet. Her body felt like it was made of lead.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Me too,” Skye said.
Doug’s hand slipped under Skye’s elbow as she stood. He was not fussing over her, not exactly, but the way he attended to her made it seem like he was.
“I’ll walk you back,” he said.
“Stay till I fall asleep?” Skye asked.
Doug nodded, and she gave him the tiniest of smiles, the affection of Doug’s gaze reflected back to him. There was a lightness between them, a familiarity in the way they stood close to one another, just inside the other’s bubble of personal space. But not accidentally on purpose, where they pretended not to notice, like she had seen before. A blind person could see that they were acutely aware of one another, that a longing to touch simmered just below the surface. Even if they weren’t ready to act on it yet, whatever was going on between them was out of the box.
“Did you take anything for that, Miri?” Doug asked. “It must hurt like hell.”
Miranda looked down at her hand, safely ensconced in strips of clean, white cotton. Alicia had done a good job wrapping the bandages.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll live.”
“Sleep tight, then,” Doug said.
Miranda squinted and covered her eyes. The sun was too bright. Blinding. Then it wasn’t. She looked up, up, up, until her head could not tip back any more. A perfect circle of blue sky. But she was in the dark, the circle of sky far above her.
She stretched her arms. Her fingers touched cool, wet stone. All around her she heard the sounds of water dripping from the cool rocks, plopping into puddles at her feet. She lifted her face, droplets splashing against it. They felt like kisses, soft and cool.
“I’m at the bottom of a well.”
It was dark, except for the circle of sky above. She looked down at her feet. They had plunged into icy water, so cold it hurt. She tried to pull them out, but there was nowhere to put them. She ran her hands along the smooth sides of the well. No cracks nor mortared indentations she could grip. Just dripping stone, smooth and slippy.
“I can’t climb this.”
The circle of sky was so far away. The freezing water climbed up her shins, but the cool drops on her face still felt lovely.
Miranda!
She turned around, but there was no one with her at the bottom of the well. Nowhere for another person to be. Only room enough for she.
To be, for she. She smiled because it rhymed.
Miranda!
She looked up at the circle of blue sky, so perfectly round. The voice came from up there, from the sky. Maybe it’s God, she thought. But she knew that it wasn’t… God didn’t sound like this voice. This familiar voice. But it was nice to think it was, especially now that the frigid water was above her knees.
She would never get out.
She was going to drown.
“Miranda!”
Miranda struggled to open her eyes, but the pain in her head split her skull. Phantom hands touched her shoulders and back, the back of her knees.
“She’s coming to! Miri, can you hear me?”
The voice from the circle of blue sky. It wasn’t God. She started to sob, swaddled tight in despair. God was supposed to be everywhere, but the voice wasn’t God. And the light was so bright she couldn’t open her eyes. Her legs almost felt like they weren’t there.
An earthquake of pain rumbled through her body.
“Ohhhh,” she whimpered, waking up, leaving the well behind in the dreamscape.
“I’m sorry, Miri. Hang on, just hang on.”
She knew that voice.
“Doug?” She gasped, knives slicing her throat. “It hurts.”
Not just the knives in her throat, but everything. Every part of her. She almost felt like she was flying, moving through the air, but it had a rhythm that pounded with pain. She jerked at the loud bang, then the softer one after. The pounding, flying rhythm sped up, setting her nerves on fire. She forced her eyes open long enough to see Doug’s anxious face. Then her eyes slammed shut.
“I know it hurts, Miri,” he said. “Stay with me, okay?”
Another voice, far away. “The ice bath—”
Then cold surrounded her, sucked her down.
“Doug.”
Doug jerked awake. Miranda’s eyes were open. Relief rushed through him that she was still alive.
“Hey, Coppertop.”
She tried to speak, but no words came. She smacked her chapped lips, then tried again.
“Can I have some water?”
Doug picked up the glass on the table beside Miranda’s bed. Sweat ran off her body like she was being sprinkled by a hose. It soaked the sheets and mattress, saturating the room with a sour smell.
Doug saw her try to reach for the glass, but the restraint stopped her arm, rattling the tubes of her IV.
“Ow,” she whispered.
Doug crouched close, cradling the back of her damp, fiery scalp with his hand, and lifted the glass to her mouth. She took tiny sips, then lay back, looking depleted from the effort. She glanced down at the leather restraints fastened around her wrists.
“That bad, huh?”
Doug couldn’t answer. When Miranda wasn’t writhing in her bed, mumbling incoherently, she was so still that a few times he thought she had quit breathing. He had laid his hand to her sternum to find its shallow rise and fall continued, but the icy coolness or inferno hot skin leached his relief away.
“He infected me.”
Doug shut his eyes, steeling himself, trying to work up his nerve. When he opened them again, he said, “Yeah. He did.”
Miranda took a wheezy breath. “How?”
“We don’t know. Different strain, or a mutation. You’re vaccinated. It shouldn’t be possible.”
“Would have been nice to know he could do that.”
Anger welled up in Doug’s chest, pushing up his throat, so bitter it tasted sharp and metallic on his tongue.
“Yeah. That would have been helpful,” he said, almost whispering. He hated how defeated he sounded, but for the first time in his life, he could not dredge up a scrap of optimism.
“Mario will be here soon,” he continued when she didn’t speak.
“Good.” A tremor, tiny but insistent, made her body quake. “I’m cold.”
Doug reached for the blanket at her feet and tucked it around her. She seemed frail, even though she had only been ill a few hours. Her skin was beginning to look mottled, white and gray, like marble.
“I hurt,” she said. “Everything hurts.”
She sounded so helpless. Doug felt tears run down his face. He swiped them away before she could see.
“River can’t give you anything more or you’ll stop breathing.”
The spark that usually filled her cornflower-blue eyes was gone. H
er gaze looked vacant.
“Don’t cry.”
“I’m not—” he started to say, but realized he was. “I’m not crying. You’re crying.”
She laughed, then coughed. It started high and papery, but devolved into a deep, rattling hack.
“Jesus,” she said, breathless, when the coughing fit finally subsided. “I’m on my deathbed, and you’re teasing me.”
Doug clamped his mouth shut tight, but not before a whimper snuck out. His heart contracted, pushing in on itself.
“Don’t say that, Miranda. Please don’t say that.”
She closed her eyes again. “Don’t let me turn.”
“Miranda,” he pleaded, desperate, trying to deny the evidence of his eyes. “Don’t give up. You have to fight. We don’t know—”
“Promise me. Don’t let me turn. And don’t let Mario try to do it.”
There was iron in her voice, under the rancid-sweet scent of decay. They had promised one another years ago, when they had gained a measure of cavalier swagger that only the young are foolish enough to indulge in. When they had viewed death in the abstract. She opened her eyes and looked at him, some of the vacancy gone from her gaze.
He nodded. Barely. His hair fell into his face, but he didn’t push it away like he normally did. His tears fell thick and fast, spattering his shirt.
“Do you love Skye?”
He looked up at her. In just the past minute, the dark smudges under her eyes had become darker, her skin paler. Doug could feel Death circling the bed. It was so like her to press this advantage. She might be gone within the hour, everything that made Miri Miri subsumed by a virus that didn’t care how much devastation it wrought, but she was still in there.
“I do. And you have no shame asking me now.”
She looked triumphant for a second. “I knew it.”
He couldn’t help himself and smiled. “I thought saying ‘I told you so’ is bad form.”
She coughed again, not as bad as before. The fingers of her hand began to flutter. He took them in his, shocked at their papery dryness.
“Don’t waste time like I did.”
“Okay,” he said. “I won’t.”
“I’m scared,” she said, voice trembling. “Is there really a God waiting for us?”
“Yes, there is,” he said, conviction filling his voice. He might be a failure as a priest, but watching Miranda’s tenuous hold on life and the pureness of her spirit that shone despite it made his faith stronger than ever. “And He loves you, but it’s too soon. Please, Miri, don’t give up.”
Tears began to slip from the corners of her eyes.
“Is Courtney okay?”
Dread blossomed in Doug’s belly. Courtney had turned within an hour of being bitten. It hadn’t happened to Miranda yet, but it would. She got sicker and sicker with every passing minute, but he needed her to fight. He would keep his promise, but he wasn’t ready to face life without her. Not yet.
“Courtney didn’t get sick, Miri. That’s how I know you’ll be fine.”
The light was so low that Mario was afraid he’d miss it if Miranda opened her eyes, but she had cried that it stabbed them before when the lights were brighter. Not cried, but whimpered. She’d been too weak to cry.
Wispy breaths rasped in and out of her chest, shallow, scraping. Her skin was cold, and her teeth had chattered almost nonstop until a short time ago. He’d spent six days at her bedside, unable to do anything but watch her get worse. He knew it wouldn’t be long now.
And he couldn’t believe it.
“Sam?”
Her voice startled him. She asked for her boyfriend when the zombies first appeared. Sam had sacrificed himself to save Miranda. Mario would do anything, make any bargain, if it let him do what Sam had done. But he couldn’t. All he could do was watch her die.
“It’s Mario, sweetheart. I’m here.”
“Oh,” she whispered. “Right. What…happened?”
Her cheek felt like a slab of meat, chilling his hand. Mario tried to bite back the tears as he stroked her hair from her forehead.
“You got sick, Miri.” His throat grew tight. He tried to will the tears away. If this was all the time he had left with her, all he wanted her to see, to feel, was how much he loved her. “You got sick after Jeremiah bit you.”
“Oh,” she whispered, the word drawn out as if she was drunk. “I don’t…remember.”
She closed her eyes, exhausted from the effort it took to talk.
“You have to fight, Miranda. Do you hear me? You have to fight. Fight for me, okay? I love you so much. And I need you. I need you here, with me. You have to fight to stay with me.”
“I’m tired,” she whimpered.
Anger tangled Mario in its web. He wanted to shake her, to shout at her to try, to fight. To stay alive. He wanted—
Hoarse sobs racked his chest, like an attacker hitting him from behind, where he couldn’t see it coming. It couldn’t end like this, not now.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered.
“I love you, Miri, so much,” he said, trying and failing to choke the grief back. “Please don’t give up. You have to fight.”
Her eyes were flitting around the room, as if she could see something he couldn’t.
“The baby…”
Grief pierced Mario’s heart, flaying him open, while she rambled about a baby that didn’t exist.
“There’s no baby, honey,” he said. “Just you and me.”
In the dim room, her eyes looked as gray as her skin. She fought to keep them open but was losing.
“There is.”
27
“Hey, beautiful,” Mario whispered.
Miranda squinted up at him. She frowned and swallowed, then ran her tongue over her teeth.
“I don’t feel beautiful.”
Mario laughed out loud. The lightness in his chest made him feel like he was floating. The ache from grinding his teeth had been supplanted by sore muscles because he couldn’t stop smiling. And he leaned into that ache as hard as he could, into the kinesthetic promise that Miranda was okay. That she had lived.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“You’ve been on death’s door for almost two weeks. You’re gonna be tired.”
“Two weeks?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Get me a toothbrush right now.”
Unruly tears pricked the corners of Mario’s eyes. She wanted a toothbrush. He almost sobbed with relief.
“I’ll get right on that.”
A few minutes later, her teeth were brushed. She lay back on the pillow, wiped out by the small task. But she was tired because she was alive. He knew he should get River so that she could examine Miranda when she could answer questions, but he didn’t want to leave her. He was too afraid that if he did, he would return to a waking nightmare like the last time, when he should have stayed close. When he should have put himself between her and whatever the danger might be, not taken for granted that she would be there when he returned. When she had said that what she needed to talk to him about—that she was pregnant—could wait.
He should have been here.
He sat on the edge of the bed, her hand in his. It was warm again, not the clammy chill that had filled him with dread.
“You scared the shit out of me,” he said, throat suddenly tight. Tears filled his eyes and overspilled. He swiped at his face, embarrassed that he could not keep it together. He didn’t want to worry her when all of her energy should be spent getting well.
“Hey,” she said. She cupped his cheek with her hand. “Don’t cry. It’s all right.”
He looked away, trying to compose himself. From the corner of his eye, Mario saw Doug arrive in the open doorway behind them.
“He’s either crying or wearing a shit-eating grin,” Doug said. “Get used to it, Miri. You’re in love with a two-trick pony.”
She laughed, then sucked her breath in with a hiss. Terror crushed Mario in its fist.
“What’s wrong?�
� he said, his chest constricting, stomach collapsing.
“I’ll get River,” Doug said, his worried voice receding as he dashed out of sight.
“It’s okay, I’m okay,” she said hurriedly. “Just achy.”
Mario reached out to stroke her cheek, so afraid that she would turn out to be a mirage. But touching her, this solid, real, warm Miranda, made the fear leach away. He had never seen her so frail. So helpless. He wasn’t sure what to do with this version of her. She looked so fragile. He was afraid he might break her.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
She nodded. The love he saw in her eyes calmed him.
“I’m sure,” she said. “And Doug’s getting River.” She looked down for a second, then raised her eyes to his, looking uncertain. Slowly, she said, “I’m pregnant. Or I was.”
Mario blinked, surprised. He had not expected her to bring it up almost as soon as she woke up. But Miranda always jumped in the deep end. He ought to know that by now.
“I know.”
Her eyes widened. “How?”
“You said something to me. I thought you were delirious, but when I told Doug, he—”
“He let the cat out of the bag,” she said, sounding halfway between annoyed and relieved.
Mario smiled. “You let the cat out of the bag. Doug just picked up the kitten.”
She smiled, but her face was pensive. “Am I still, or did this…”
“You are,” he said swiftly, wanting to reassure her.
But maybe the fact that she was still pregnant wasn’t reassuring. Wasn’t what she wanted. Was that a flash of panic in her eyes? He couldn’t be sure. It had blinked out too quickly.
They looked at one another.
“Did River say anything?” she asked, her voice trailing.
Mario felt like he was balancing on a tightrope. In high wind. While holding a huge sail. He didn’t know what she wanted to do, but based on past conversations, he had a pretty good idea.
“As far as she can tell everything’s—” He searched for something neutral. “On track?”
Miranda absorbed the information, such as it was. Her face began to fill with trepidation.