Once, after they’d removed my appendix, the pain had been excruciating. I didn’t think I would survive it. I’d lain curled up on my side, holding my stomach. The pain was so intense, I’d begun vomiting, which only made matters worse.
“Oh, Jesus, Remy.” Daniels had rushed over to me. He knelt down on the cot as I dry-heaved over the edge. “You’re going to rip your stitches.”
“I don’t care,” I said with tears streaming down my cheeks. “I hope I do. I hope I die.”
“You don’t mean that.” He pressed a cold washcloth against my forehead, which was searing hot from a fever. “If there’s one thing I know about you, it’s that you’re a survivor.”
“No.” I shook my head and swallowed hard to keep from throwing up. “I’m not. I can’t do this anymore.”
“It will be awhile before you have surgery again,” Daniels tried to reassure me.
He kept wiping at my face. I swatted his hand, trying to push it away, but I didn’t have the strength. Since I couldn’t push it away, I just grabbed his hand and held it, forcing him to look me in the eye.
“No, Daniels, I can’t do this. Please,” I begged him with tears in my eyes. “Please don’t make me go through that again. Kill me first. I can’t.”
He pursed his lips, then let go of my hand and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t know how long he was gone. I rolled onto my back and kicked at the wall. That only made my abdomen hurt worse, but by then, I was in so much pain, I could barely notice the fluctuations in it. It was intense, excruciating, and constant.
When Daniels came back, he was carrying a syringe. He sat down on the edge of my cot and reached for my arm, but I pulled it back from him.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’ll make you sleep,” he said and tried to take my arm again, but I jerked it back.
“What?” I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t, so I just glared up at him. “You have something that can make me sleep, and you’re giving it to me after the surgery?”
“I’m sorry, Remy. If they knew I was giving it to you now, they’d put me in the stockades.”
“Why?” I demanded. “If you have medicine that can help my pain, why wouldn’t you give it to me?”
His eyes were sad and dark when he shook his head. “We only have a finite amount of pharmaceuticals. We know how to make some of them, but we’re not equipped to mass produce them, so we need to be careful with what we have.”
“And they don’t want to waste them on me, because I’m going to die anyway,” I said, finishing his thought. “I don’t matter.”
“I’m sorry,” Daniels said, and it sounded like he genuinely meant it. “I don’t make these decisions. I just have to follow orders.”
“You and the Nazis,” I muttered and refused to look at him anymore.
“I’ll do everything in my power to make you as comfortable as I can,” Daniel said. “I can promise you that much. I know what a sacrifice you’re making for us all, and I know you deserve so much better than this.”
I didn’t say anything to that. He reached for my arm again, and I let him take it. He injected me with the syringe, and soon after, I fell asleep. I don’t know if I moaned in my sleep that time, but I woke up with tears on my cheeks again.
Even after the horrors I’d seen with the zombies, unspeakable vicious gore, the worst of my nightmares were of the quarantine’s operating room. Naked and tied down to a cold metal table, with the bright lamp shining down on me.
They were doctors, with scalpels and stiches and surgical precision. But they might as well have been serial killers, torturing me in their basement when I felt the knife slice into my skin, saw my own blood pooling in my naval.
Every time I went into that room, I was never sure if I would come out of it alive. Sometimes I’d pass out on the table, when the pain became unbearable, and I’d hope I was dead. But then I’d wake up to that horrible nightmare all over again.
I got up from where I sat next to Max and went down to the stream. I needed to clear my head. I crouched down on the bank and splashed cold water on my face.
Max had startled me awake, but I remembered the haze of my nightmares. Tonight they weren’t about the quarantine, although the alternative wasn’t much better. They’d been about Blue and Harlow.
The whole time I’d been in the quarantine, enduring everything I had, what got me through was the knowledge that I was doing it for the people I cared about. So people like Blue and Harlow, and Max and Lazlo, could have a better life without monsters roaming the Earth.
But nothing I had done had mattered at all. Daniels hadn’t been able to find a cure. Zombies were doomed to plague mankind until the end of the time. And Blue and Harlow were dead.
I hadn’t had a chance to mourn either of them yet, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to acknowledge the ever-growing ache in my chest.
To distract myself from my thoughts, I went over to see how Boden was doing. I walked past Serg on my way over to him, and he appeared sound asleep. He had used his bag as a pillow and draped his jacket over himself like a blanket.
Boden stood at the top of the embankment so his head almost touched the bridge above us. He had his hand up on it, resting against the concrete almost as if he were leaning on it. His gun hung over his shoulder on a strap, and he stared out at the moonlit night.
“Need any company?” I asked when I reached him.
He shrugged. “Sure.”
The storm might have passed, but the night was still chilly, so I wrapped my arms around myself to warm up. Boden was only wearing short sleeves and a threadbare shirt, but he didn’t seem to mind the cold.
“Have you heard anything from him?” I asked and nodded in the direction of Serg.
“Not a peep.” He shook his head, then looked down at me. “I heard you, though.”
I sighed. “It’s just bad dreams, I guess.”
“We all have bad dreams.” He turned back to the long grass blowing in the wind. “This whole world is one long bad dream.”
16.
With the map spread out on the ground in front of us, Boden and I crouched low, both of us scrutinizing the quickest ways to Canada that bypassed major roads and towns. Bishop stood behind us, peering down at it.