Reborn before the outbreak, Now they beg at my gate

CHAPTER 8: THE BITE THAT STOPPED

Brandon was still breathing, and somehow that was the worst part.

He lay across the foot of our bed with his teeth chattering and his face slick with sweat, and the black lines under his skin crept up his forearm one slow, terrible inch at a time. Vanessa knelt beside him and held his good hand against her cheek, sobbing his name, while Nora moved around them both with the flat, fast calm of someone who had done this a thousand times before.

"Towel," she said. "Clean. Now."

I pulled one from the bathroom and threw it to her. She wrapped it around Brandon's bicep, twisted it with a pen from her pocket, and drew it tight above the elbow until he screamed through his teeth.

"Hold him down."

"I am not touching him," Vanessa whispered.

"Then get out of the way."

I took Brandon's shoulders. His skin burned through his shirt, hot and dry, and his eyes rolled toward me with a bright, desperate, animal confusion I had never seen on that smug face before. For one second, only one, something in my chest wavered.

Then I remembered his voice calling through the narrowing gate. That should be enough time for us to reach the boats.

My hands stayed steady.

Nora flushed the bite with a bottle of antiseptic from her coat, scrubbed it until it bled clean and red, and bound it tight with gauze. She worked in total silence, her jaw set, one dark lock of wet hair falling across her eyes. When she finally sat back on her heels, she looked at me, and I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

"I can clean it. I can slow the blood flow. But whatever is in him is moving too fast for anything I carry." She lowered her voice. "Leo. At the warehouse club you bought out the pharmacy's antibiotics. If there is anything you are not telling me about, anything at all, this is the time."

Vanessa's head snapped up.

I had been waiting for this. I had rehearsed it in my head as I stood in a dozen checkout lines, and I knew exactly how it had to look. I walked to the closet, took down my old canvas messenger bag, and turned my back to the room. Then I unzipped it, slid my hand inside, and thought the word out.

A sealed box of doxycycline dropped into my palm. Two more followed it, and one bottle of amoxicillin.

Only four items, and not one more. I carried the bag back with the careful, reluctant slowness of a man handing over his last savings.

"This is everything," I said. "A friend at a clinic gave it to me last week. I was going to donate it."

Nora took the boxes and read the labels. She glanced at the bag, which had looked completely empty a moment ago and now sagged in my hand with nothing in it, and for the length of a breath her gray eyes rested on mine. She did not say a word. She only gave a small nod, as though she were filing something away for later.

"Four doses," she said at last. "It will not cure him. But it might hold the infection back long enough for us to understand it."

She crushed two tablets into water and tipped it between Brandon's cracked lips. He choked, swallowed, and sagged back against the pillows.

Minutes crawled by. Outside, rain began to patter against the open window, and somewhere down the block a car alarm shrieked and cut off. Nora shut the window and wedged a chair beneath the latch. I dragged the dead courier out onto the landing, my stomach heaving, and pulled the broken door shut behind me as far as the shattered hinge would allow.

When I came back, the black lines had stopped at Brandon's elbow.

They did not retreat, but they did not climb. His breathing slowed. His eyelids drooped, and the fever on his forehead broke into a thin sweat, and he drifted into something that looked, from a distance, almost like sleep.

"Oh thank God," Vanessa breathed. She pressed both palms to her mouth, shaking all over. "Thank God, thank God."

I watched her cry for a man who was not me, and I waited to feel something. Grief, maybe, or rage. Instead I felt a vast and quiet tiredness, as though a heavy coat I had worn for six years had finally slid off my shoulders.

When she looked up and found me watching, her expression flickered. Then she gave a small, wet, hopeful smile.

"Leo," she said softly. "You saved him. You are not angry with me, are you? About earlier, I mean. I was just scared. You understand."

"I understand," I said.

It was the truest thing I had said all night, and she was too frightened to hear it.

"Come with me," Nora murmured, close to my ear. "Your hip is bleeding."

I had not even noticed. She steered me into the living room and sat me on the arm of the sofa, and before I could argue she was pushing up my torn shirt and pressing a cold cloth to the bruise blooming across my side. Her fingers were quick and practical, but they paused, once, when I hissed.

"Sorry," she said.

"It is fine."

"It is not." She did not look at me. A flush had crept along her cheekbone, which could have been exhaustion. "You went back for them. Both of them. After what they did, after that woman shoved you at a door, you went back. Why?"

I thought about lying. Then I thought about the way she had come up the stairs in the rain with a tire iron and no questions, and I found I did not have the energy for another mask.

"I do not know," I said. "I think I wanted to be sure I could."

Her hand went still against my side.

"Be sure you could what?"

"Walk away when it counts."

She lifted her head then, and for the first time that night, her expression softened into something so unguarded that my pulse stumbled over itself. She opened her mouth.

Her phone rang.

It was the hospital's emergency tone, a hard, three-note pulse, and the screen read Night Charge. Nora glanced at it, frowned, and answered on the second ring.

"Vale."

I could not hear the voice on the other end. I only watched her face. I watched the color leave it in slow stages, first her lips, then her cheeks, until she looked as pale as the plaster dust on the floor.

"Say that again," she said. "All of them? On every ward?"

A pause.

"No. Do not touch them. Lock the doors. Lock every door, I am coming." She lowered the phone, very slowly, and when she looked at me again, her eyes had changed. They were not warm anymore. They were sharp, clear, and utterly certain.

"The patients in the isolation ward," she said. "The ones who died this week. They are all sitting up."

I said nothing.

"You are not surprised," said Nora Vale.