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

Halloran's Drug

The woman who had been calling for help turned out to be pointing a shotgun at his chest.

She was maybe thirty, built narrow and hard, with a shaved head under a rain-slick hood and a way of standing that said she'd been awake for two days and would stay awake for two more out of spite. Behind her, in the gray light, the street ran down toward a row of dead storefronts. The nearest still had a green cross hanging crooked over the door.

"Stop right there," she said.

"I'm stopped." Ethan raised his good hand. The other, in its hi-vis splint, he just let hang. "You called for help. I'm a doctor."

"You look like something the horde coughed up."

"I've had a night."

Her eyes went to the scalpel in his fist, to the blood dried black down his shoulder, to the wrong angle of his arm. He watched her do the math, the same math he'd done in a hundred triage lines: can this person help, can this person hurt me, how much does it cost if I'm wrong.

"Does that thing have shells?" he asked, nodding at the shotgun.

A long beat. "No."

"Good. Then we're both bluffing, and I'd rather spend the energy on your friend."

She didn't lower it. But she didn't pull the trigger either, and after a moment she jerked her head toward the pharmacy. "Tamsin," she said. "Reyes."

"Ethan."

"If you hurt him, Ethan, I'll find out how many shells I don't need."

Halloran's Drug had been picked over long ago, but not thoroughly. Whoever looted it had gone for the pills and the cough syrup and left the sundry aisles standing. Ethan stepped over a fallen rack of greeting cards and followed Tamsin behind the pharmacy counter, where the floor had been cleared and a bedroll laid out beside a camp lantern.

The man on the bedroll was enormous even lying down.

He had the build of someone who had been carrying heavy things for twenty years: slabbed shoulders, a neck as thick as Ethan's thigh. Mid-forties. A scar bisected his left eyebrow. His armor, scuffed black plate over a canvas jacket, had been unbuckled and pushed aside, and the shirt under it was soaked through at the collar. He was breathing in short, shallow pulls. His skin had the color of candle wax.

"Captain Garrick Voss," Tamsin said quietly. "The Ashen Company. We were eleven this morning."

Ethan crouched. Close up, the bite was almost small. A half-moon of broken skin on the left side of the neck, just under the jaw, puckered and angry. It looked like something you'd put a plaster on.

It never looks like much, he thought. That's the cruelty of it.

"When?"

"Sixteen hours. He went down fighting a Stalker at the bridge. It got his neck before he could kill it." Her voice stayed flat, but her free hand was white-knuckled on the shotgun's grip. "He told us to leave him. Nobody did, at first. Then the horde came through and I was the only one still standing."

Ethan didn't say he was sorry. People like Tamsin heard that word fifty times a day, and it had never once helped.

He closed his right hand around the scalpel and looked at the man the way the System wanted him to.

The room dropped away into layers.

The bite. The skin. The muscle under it. And there, threaded through the carotid sheath like a line of black stitching, a filament, slender as a guitar string, running upward. It had passed the jaw. It had passed the hinge of the skull. Now it was winding up along the back of the cervical spine, toward the brainstem, pulsing with a slow, patient rhythm that matched no heartbeat in the room.

[Diagnostic Eye: Parasitic neural thread, stage 3. Distance to brainstem: 2.1 cm. Estimated time to seat: 53 minutes.]

"Fifty-three minutes," Ethan said aloud.

Tamsin stared at him. "What?"

"That's how long he has before it takes root. After that, it isn't Voss in there anymore. It's something using his body to find more people." He heard how it sounded and kept going. "I can see it. I don't expect you to understand how. But I can see exactly where it is."

"Can you cut it out?"

There it was. The question every surgeon dreads, that small, fierce question from someone who has run out of other options.

He looked at the neck. He looked at the old tile floor, the lantern, the cracked bag of intravenous saline hanging from a coat hook. He thought about what he had: one working arm, two broken ribs, a blade he'd owned for nine hours, and no assistant. No anesthesia. No lights worth the name.

The honest answer was no. The honest answer had always been no.

But the Eye showed him a line, a path of safe tissue between muscle and vertebra, bright as a trail of chalk. It was thin. It was possible.

"I can try," Ethan said. "I won't lie to you. He may die on the table. If I do nothing, he dies anyway, and worse."

Tamsin lowered the shotgun, finally, and her face did something that he'd remember later, a small collapse, like a held breath leaving.

"Then try," she said.