Death's Nemesis: The Apocalypse Doctor Who Refused to Die

A Debt, Not a Gift

Garrick Voss woke on the second morning, slowly, the way big animals do.

Ethan was changing the dressing when it happened. He felt the change in the man's breathing first: the shallow pull deepening, the muscles under his fingers going from slack to attentive. When he looked up, Voss's eyes were open and fixed on him, clear and brown and a good deal sharper than a man two days from death had any right to be.

"Don't sit up," Ethan said.

"Wasn't going to." The voice was a rasp, like a rusted gate. Voss swallowed, tried again. "Where's my sergeant?"

"Here," said Tamsin, from the doorway, and the way she said it, flat and careful, told Ethan she'd been standing there for some time. She crossed the room in three strides and stopped beside the bedroll, her hands twitching like she wanted to touch him and didn't dare. "Captain."

"Reyes." Voss looked her over, the shaved head, the grime, the exhaustion cut into her face. "You look like hell."

"You look worse."

Something that was almost a smile moved the scar over his eyebrow. Then it faded, and he turned his attention back to Ethan, and Ethan understood why men followed him.

It wasn't the size. It was the attention. Voss looked at people the way a surgeon looks at a wound: nothing wasted, nothing assumed.

"I felt it," he said quietly. "The thing in my neck. I felt it climbing. Then I felt it stop." His hand lifted, slow and stiff, and touched the bandage at the back of his neck. "You did this."

"Yes."

"How?"

Ethan considered several answers. I have a System that reads the layers of your body and a blade that cuts what I understand did not seem like one that would improve anyone's morning.

"I'm a surgeon," he said. "I got lucky. The parasite was anchored in a spot I could reach."

"Bullshit." It was said mildly. "Eleven field medics looked at men like me, in the last year. Every one of them said the same thing. You hold their hand and you wait." The brown eyes narrowed. "But I'll take the lie, Doc. I've got no right to ask for more."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, the wind scraped something loose against the pharmacy's roof.

"Something's off," Voss said, almost to himself. He flexed his right hand, opened it, closed it. "I feel like I left a coat somewhere. Like I'm lighter than I was."

The words landed in Ethan's stomach like a stone.

He kept his face still. It was a skill, and he'd had years to learn it, sitting across from frightened people while telling them the things that frightened them. "You were nearly dead," he said. "Your body's been through a lot. You'll feel strange for a while."

Voss held his gaze one beat longer than comfortable. Then he nodded.

"Doc," he said. "I owe you my life. That's not a thing I say lightly. Most people who earn that from me, I do them one favor and I forget the rest." He pushed himself up on one elbow, wincing, and refused Tamsin's hand. "But I don't forget this."

He held out his hand, palm up, in the old mercenary way.

"Until you reach a place with walls, I'm your shield. Me and what's left of the Ashen Company. That's my oath, and I'll keep it until you tell me it's done, or until I'm dead. After that, we'll talk about what comes next."

Ethan looked at the hand. It was the size of a dinner plate and crossed with scars.

He thought about the cold small thing under his ribs. He thought about the ten percent he was carrying that was not his.

Tell him, said a quiet voice in him. Tell him now.

But there was Tamsin, watching with her red-rimmed eyes. There was the dead street outside, the horde that was drifting somewhere on the highway, the empty pharmacy shelves. There was a wasteland that would eat him alive in a week, and one man with a sword who could stand between him and it.

He took the hand.

"Temporary," Ethan said.

"Temporary," Voss agreed. And the grip was gentle, and the smile on his face was tired and real, and Ethan hated himself a little, quietly, for what he had not said.