Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
How long that helicopter flight lasted, Jesse didn’t know. He wasn’t in his own body for most of it, too numbed up to feel anything.
He huddled in the space blanket he was given, shivering in his soaked-through clothes, and answered questions automatically, staring out of the nearest window, watching forest give way to ocean until Vancouver Island swung into view, lit up golden by the morning sun.
No direct flight to Victoria, though. The helicopter landed on some vacation island to the east, to a welcome party of machine guns and hazmat suits.
Jesse went where the guns pointed, to the medics who cleared him for bite wounds. He zoned out the whole time, just staring at a distant horizon gone fuzzy through the haze, and one of the medics must’ve clocked him.
Because, “Nothing left,” she told him, her voice muffled behind her face shield and mask. She nodded to the mainland. “Too dangerous to maintain the quarantine post there. You’re one of the last to make it through.” She squeezed his shoulder with her double-gloved hand. “One of the lucky ones.”
“Lucky,” Jesse echoed. His voice sounded so weird, like it had been hollowed out.
The medic didn’t call him on it, though. Just nodded to the decontamination shower. “Okay, Jesse. I’m gonna need you to go ahead and strip now.”
Jesse did. Paused for a second, a faltering one, before he shucked his pants, then did it anyway.
The embarrassment was far away and muted.
Besides, Jesse was gonna guess that a guy escaping a horde of zombies while wearing a cum-stained thong probably wasn’t the weirdest shit these medics had seen.
He’d seen worse in the before times, point of fact. Like that compound tib-fib fracture guy and his neon pink mankini. Nobody needed to see that. Jesse didn’t need to, not again, not even in his memory.
But fuck, it was a less horrific memory than his latest ones, so he let it play while the medics gathered his clothes and tossed them onto the waiting fire. While they dumped him into a decontamination shower and scrubbed until Jesse was whistle clean and shivering.
Or, still shivering. Just worse.
Jesse went through the motions, blank with a numbness he knew was shock, but knowing it didn’t make him any less numb.
He shivered in the sweatshirt and sweats he was given. Shivered as he drank shitty instant coffee, ate powdery oatmeal. Shivered and didn’t sleep, not at all, until another medic in a hazmat suit came to check him over and give him some pills.
Then he slept for way too long, and dreamed way too much, and when he woke up, bleary-eyed and still shivering, he was transferred to the main quarantine holding area, bundled in with all the other new arrivals and processed again.
He was given a bunk, then herded out into a sparse, fenced-off recreation yard. Sneaky way to check for light aversion. Usually the first symptom to show.
So Jesse let the guards see him turn his face up to the weakass evening sun, and then he tucked himself into the shelter of one of the bunkhouses. He did the staring thing again, looking without really seeing, picking reflexively at a hangnail and cracking his knuckles until they hurt.
But down in the numbness, something caught.
His eyes caught too, snagged by a woman out by the fence line. She’d been talking with one of the guards in the watchtower when Jesse first noticed her, calling up to him, her voice taken by the wind. But now she was walking the perimeter, heading Jesse’s way.
She was shorter than Jesse, small, real delicate looking, with long dark hair and a sharp profile — a sharper face when she turned to glare at Jesse.
“Take a photograph, douchebag. It’ll last longer.”
But Jesse didn’t need to, because recognition hit like a sledgehammer. He stumbled a step toward her, finger raised and pointing. “You!”
The chick startled, like her glare was usually weapon enough to make men cower. But Jesse was immune now — to the pouty mouth and the spectacular rack, to the big, dark eyes.
Nothing sweet about those eyes this time around, not even pretend. They narrowed at Jesse, instantly suspicious. “Do I know you?”
“Yes!” Jesse yelped. “Yes, you know me, you crazy fucking psychopath!”
Another moment of recognition. “Oh,” Maddie breathed. “I do know you. You’re the doofus who let himself be handcuffed to a rusty pipe in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.”
A burning flash of indignation cut through the numbness. “I didn’t let myself!”
Maddie shrugged. “You didn’t exactly put up a fight, dude.”
“Because I thought it was, like, I don’t know — a sex game! Like, fuck, kinky bondage or some shit like that.”
“Ew, bro.”
“Ew?” Jesse echoed, the long overdue crash-out coming in fast. “You were the one grinding in my lap!”
“Yeah, only because I wanted to steal your shit, shit for brains.”
“Which you did!” Jesse shot back, and the months’ old anger flaring to life in his chest chased that cold fucking numbness away.
“You stole a fully equipped med kit.” The kit Wyatt had risked his life to replace.
The med kit that — fuck — in the panic, Jesse had left back at the cabin.
Everything Wyatt had gone through to get that kit, and Jesse had forgotten.
That made him want to freaking cry, suddenly.
Made his eyes burn anyhow. “It was so fucking valuable.”
“Yeah, dude, I know.” Maddie threw up her hands, gesturing to the yard, to the fence all around. “That’s why I used it to trade for a ticket to paradise.”
Jesse’s eyes were wet, suddenly. He scrubbed at them. “Some fucking paradise.”
“Yikes, little rain cloud.” Maddie cocked her head, considering Jesse a second, then she rooted around in the pocket of her sweats and produced a candy bar. “Wanna share?”
Jesse squinted at it, then at her. “Where the fuck did you get that?”
“Bro, a magician never reveals her secrets.”
Jesse squinted some more. He didn’t need secrets. He could already guess. “Did you handcuff somebody again?”
“I mean.” Maddie shrugged. “If it ain’t broke, right?”
“Jesus.” Jesse snagged the bar from her hand and snapped it in half. Took his half and then half of the bench by the bunkhouse door. It creaked as Maddie sat down next to him. There was chocolate in the corners of her mouth and between her teeth when she grinned obnoxiously to show him.
“Is your name really Maddie?” Jesse asked.
Maddie snorted. “Not even close, bud.”
The nickname landed like a punch. Jesse sucked down a breath while his heart throbbed, a fucked-up, aching excuse for a vital organ. He breathed through it until he could speak again. “I’m gonna call you Maddie anyhow.”
Maddie shrugged. “Eh. Fair.”
They sat like that, side by side, watching the sun set low to the horizon — orange and yellow, pink to purple, then an afterimage, already fading to blue.
“But hey, where’s the silver fox at?”
Jesse blinked over at Maddie. They’d sat for so long in silence that his brain tripped. “Huh?”
“You know, your salt-and-pepper shadow?” Maddie was already grinning at her own joke, but she stopped when she realized that Jesse wasn’t. Frowned at him. Glanced around, still frowning. “So, like, really, where’s the old dude at?”
“He’s—” Jesse couldn’t say it. The words were barbs, the spikes digging in. “Wyatt got me out. He stayed behind to get me out. He’s—” The words he still couldn’t say stuck and caught. Jesse took a breath. Didn’t help. He took another breath, and that didn’t fucking help either. “He’s dead now.”
Maddie nodded. There was a look on her face that maybe she thought was sympathetic, like she’d practiced it in the mirror. “He’s probably a zombie, dude.”
Probably. Odds were even that Wyatt was a zombie or zombie food. Either way, Jesse didn’t want to think about it. But he did think about it. He fucking ruminated on it every time his eyes were shut and a whole heap of time when they were open.
Mostly he just hoped that Wyatt was dead. Really, truly dead, and what kind of fucked-up thing was that to hope? But fuck hope, because hope didn’t belong to Jesse anymore.
So, “Probably,” Jesse said at last, his voice cracking like a dip cone, the futile fucking hope of it all melting away, lost in the gutter and gone. “Yeah, probably.”