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

The Tithe

Twenty-two compressions. Then twenty-three. Then a count he lost track of, because Ethan's ribs were screaming and his vision was going gray at the edges and every time he pressed down he felt something in his chest give a little more.

"Epinephrine!" he barked. "Behind the counter, second shelf, the little white box."

Tamsin was already moving. She came back with a cardboard carton, the label faded to nothing, and he snapped an ampoule against the edge of the counter and drew it up with a hand that shook so hard the needle rattled.

"It's expired," she said.

"Everything's expired."

He drove it into the muscle of Voss's shoulder. Then he went back to the compressions, and counted, and said the numbers under his breath like a prayer he didn't believe in.

On the ninth cycle, something under his hands kicked.

Voss's chest lifted. A sound tore out of his throat, a ragged, wet gasp, and the lantern light caught his eyes as they flew open, brown and wild and fixed on nothing. Then they rolled up white, and his whole body sagged, and the pulse in his neck, thin, thready, but real, began to tick.

Tamsin made a sound like a sob that she immediately swallowed.

Ethan sat back on his heels and discovered he couldn't feel his hands.

[Patient stabilized. Death averted.]

[Tithe condition met. Collecting.]

The air seemed to tighten.

Something went through him, quick and bright and utterly unlike pain. It started in his sternum and ran out along his arms like warm water, like standing in a doorway as the sun came through it. He felt his heartbeat steady. He felt the muscles in his back unknot. Even the grinding in his ribs eased, just a little, enough to take a full breath.

[Tithe received: Lifespan +5 years.]

[Tithe received: Combat strength +10% (Voss, G.).]

[New total lifespan: 43 years.]

He looked at his hands. They were just his hands. But when he closed them, the grip felt different, heavier, denser, as if somebody had quietly poured sand into the bones.

Ten percent of a man like that, he thought. Ten percent of twenty years of fighting.

He should have felt triumph. He had expected to, if he was honest. He had walked out of the horde with a miracle in his pocket, and here was the proof, glittering in his own blood.

Instead there was only a cold, small unease, and a thought that wouldn't leave him alone.

I took that from someone who was unconscious on a bedroll.

He pushed it down. He'd earned it. He had saved the man's life, for God's sake. A life, taken away from the grave, in exchange for a few years and some muscle. That was a bargain. It was more than a bargain.

But he'd noticed the way the System had said collecting. Like a bill.

Tamsin knelt on the other side of the bedroll. She had the lantern in one hand and her other was pressed flat against Voss's chest, as if she needed to feel it rise. "He's breathing," she said, to no one.

"He is."

"You pulled that thing out of him."

"I did."

"You saved him." She turned her head, and he saw that she was crying and had not noticed. "Eleven of us. I thought I was the last, and then you walked up out of the dark with a knife."

"Scalpel," Ethan said, because it was the only thing he could think to say.

She laughed, a cracked, wet, startled laugh. And that was the moment he realized, with a faint, queer shock, that he had not heard anyone laugh in nine months.

He closed the incision with the silk sutures from his pocket, the last of the roll Marcus hadn't found, and dressed it with gauze. He cleaned the blade on his sleeve. He drank water from Tamsin's canteen and ate half a protein bar she pressed on him, and he was careful not to look at the ledger again until she'd fallen asleep against the wall, her shotgun across her knees.

Then he opened it, alone, in the dark.

Level: 2 Vitality: 44% Lifespan: 43 years Strength: 14 (+1.6 from Tithe) Skills: Basic Diagnostic Eye Tools: Spectral Scalpel (E)

He stared at the numbers for a long time.

Outside, the wind moved through the dead street, and somewhere far away a lone infected moaned, once, and fell quiet.

"Nobody told me what it would feel like," Ethan said softly, to the room, to the System, to the sleeping man on the bedroll who had no idea what he'd just paid.

The ledger offered no answer.

He lay down on the cold tile, one hand resting on the scalpel, and slept.