Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Jesse passed quarantine. A full thirty days that reset twice when three different dudes in his cohort turned and started munching on their bunkmates.
But Jesse passed quarantine, and so did Maddie, and they were released from the holding facility and given mandated employment in Paradise.
Jesse was assigned a medic position, working in what passed for an emergency department these days. It was more like a field hospital, but it wasn’t unfamiliar, not to the work Jesse had been doing for months on the road or for years before that.
Plus, he was a quick learner and he learned a lot, quickly. Stuff that only doctors could do in the before times, Jesse did now too.
He worked so much. Every night, pretty much. A heap of days too. For hours and hours, endless. For weeks that became months, months that became a year and then change.
It was good, though. Working. It was a good thing, because Jesse was tired all of the time. Straight up, lowdown, deadass exhausted. He worked and he slept and that was all he did. But it was good, because he didn’t have time to think, and thinking never led anywhere good.
Maddie was a courier, biking messages and supplies from one command post to another, all across the Island.
Or that’s what she did on paper, at least. Jesse was pretty sure she was also running some kind of blackmarket op, but she brought him a candy bar every time they met up, so he didn’t rat her out.
It was a half-melted Snickers this time, and a boujee swing set in the backyard of an abandoned waterfront mansion in Oak Bay.
Jesse crunched peanuts, his teeth gone sticky with caramel, swinging himself with just one foot. It had been a crazy day in the emergency room and his bad ankle was aching.
Maddie handed over another Snickers when he was done with the first. Jesse squinted at it, then at her, suspiciously, but she waved him away.
“Eat up,” she told him instead. “You’re getting way too skinny. Kinda gray too, honestly. You sleeping okay, dude? Or do I gotta drag your ass back to quarantine before you turn on me?”
Jesse breathed a laugh as he turned back to the view. Sun sparkling on the water, tiny little diamonds of light. Somebody had to have paid a crazy amount of Canadian dollars for that view in the before times, and now it belonged to Jesse and his friendly neighborhood criminal mastermind.
“You liked him a whole lot, huh? The sexy old dude.”
Little more than liked, but Jesse wasn’t about to tell Maddie that. He blinked the glare out of his eyes. Looked over to find Maddie looking right back at him. “Wyatt wasn’t old,” Jesse said instead.
“Old enough, bro.” Maddie squinted a second, like she was puzzling something out. “Like, for real though? You liked him? Like, liked him liked him?”
“Why are you even asking?” They hadn’t talked about Wyatt, not once, not since that first day in quarantine. Better that way. “What the fuck?”
Maddie scowled at him. “Just answer the question, doofus.”
“Yes,” Jesse bit out. “Yes, I liked him. I liked him a whole fucking lot. That what you wanna hear?”
Obviously the answer Maddie had been expecting. She nodded, and she yanked at Jesse’s chains, jerking him hard to the side, shaking him a little. “Then I’m pretty sure he must have liked you too, to put up with all this bullshit.”
Jesse choked out a laugh. “Guess so.”
“It’s been over a year now, dude. More than. You’re still fucked up.”
Jesse tried to blink away the sting, the burn of tears coming in zero to sixty. Didn’t help much. He scrubbed the cuff of his sweatshirt across his face instead, just so he could hide a second. “I know, okay?” he said, because he did. “I know I’m fucked up about it.”
“Like shit, he gave up his life to save yours.”
A statement, not a question even at all, but Jesse nodded anyhow.
And Maddie nodded too. “So, like, I’m gonna guess he would want you to live your life. Gonna guess that was the wholeass point.”
Jesse couldn’t argue. How could he?
Wyatt, who’d dragged Jesse’s ass through the apocalypse, who’d saved Jesse’s ass more times than Jesse could count, who’d given up everything to save Jesse’s useless ass one last time — he wouldn’t want this for Jesse, this fucked-up, numbed-up, empty shell of a life.
Fuck, even Jesse didn’t want that for Jesse.
So Jesse sucked down a breath. “I guess you’re right.”
“Don’t guess, fuckface.” Maddie kicked him in the shin, hard enough to bruise. “Know.”
“I do know,” Jesse said, scowling at her.
“Cool. So are you gonna do something about it then?”
“Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know, honor the hot old dude’s heroic, cliched-ass sacrifice? Or like, shit — maybe just not be such a pathetic loser for once?”
Some kinda feeling flared in the aching, empty excuse for a chest cavity that Jesse’s heart called home. It was something real rusty, but it was something real. It was something, maybe, a little like hope.
“I—” Jesse blew out a breath. His heart was beating weird, still, but he could feel it. Really feel it. “Fuck,” he said. “Okay, yeah, you’re right.”
“I always am. About what, specifically?”
“I’m gonna try,” Jesse said. “Like, I don’t know, try living and shit. All the shit you said. I’m gonna do it.”
Maddie’s face broke into one of her rare, real grins. She socked Jesse in the arm, hard. “Yeah you are, my dude.”
They stared at each other for one long second, one genuine, earnest as fuck moment.
Then, “Jesus,” Jesse breathed. He shuddered. Couldn’t help it. “That shit was way too heartfelt.”
“Yeah,” Maddie agreed. “I’m feeling, like, super uncomfortable right now.”
“Wanna handcuff me to some rusty plumbing? Might make you feel better.”
“You say all the nicest things.” Maddie kicked Jesse’s thigh this time and sent him spinning. “Eat your candy bar, dumbass.”
* * *
Turned out that getting chewed out by a retired supervillain was the exact form of motivational pep talk that Jesse needed.
He worked a little less and slept a little more. Helped himself to his fair share of rations and a much wider selection of Maddie’s blackmarket fair. Stopped looking so gray and vaguely skeletal.
Saved multiple lives along the way, which was always the coolest thing, but was exponentially more awesome in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
Especially when that winter was such a bad one, flu season starting early and ripping through the Island, hitting hard in a way the was worrying to both the emergency room’s oxygen supplies and their rationed antivirals.
“Jesse.”
Jesse spun around. He’d been busy inhaling one of Maddie’s blackmarket candy bars, the first thing he’d eaten since breakfast. Wasn’t, technically speaking, his break, so getting snuck up on by the hospital’s Chief of Emergency Medicine wasn’t exactly an ideal outcome.
“Uh…”
Dr. Kohli had a wad of official-looking papers in his hand and an armed guard from Central Command standing at his shoulder. And Jesse was a fuck up, sure, but he hadn’t fucked up more than mildly recently and definitely not enough to attract the attention of Command.
“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.”
“I would very much hope that you didn’t,” Dr. Kohli said. He held up the papers. “Orders from Command. From the Lab, specifically, requiring your presence.”
The Lab, capital letter implicit, the super secret research laboratory that somehow everybody knew about anyhow.
It was run by a bunch of crazy scientists — or, like, highly qualified virologists and microbiologists — who had the equally crazy pipe dream of manufacturing a vaccine for the zombie virus.
And cool for them or whatever. But Jesse wasn’t a biochemist, and he sure as shit wasn’t a genius. So, “What do they need me for?”
“Your phlebotomy skills.”
“I have phlebotomy skills?”
“Given your place of work — again, I would very much hope so.”
Jesse shook his head. Didn’t help the confusion. “They need me to do blood draws? Don’t they have their own techs for that?”
“They do, but they need more, and you’re the member of my team least likely to be overawed by the situation, so I’m sending you, as ordered.”
And that right there didn’t sound any kind of good. Jesse swallowed. “What kind of situation are we talking about here, doc?”
Dr. Kohli glanced over his shoulder at the guard, then he stepped closer so that he could lower his voice.
“You didn’t hear this from me, and who I heard it from is immaterial.
But it’s my understanding that you’ll be carrying out blood draws on a research cohort who—” Another glance at the guard.
An even lower voice, pretty much a whisper.
“A cohort who have all suffered bite wounds from the undead and haven’t, as of yet, turned. ”
“Jesus,” Jesse breathed. “Bitten and not turned.” He shook his head again, all kinds of incredulous. “That’s a thing?”
* * *
It was a thing.
It really fucking was.
Jesse spent the afternoon holed up in a windowless lab in the bowels of Central Command, in the company of way more armed guards than the zero armed guards a blood draw usually entailed.
But whatever. It was the apocalypse. Still. Fuck.
Jesse collected his samples, one after the other, intensely carefully, not a single stick going to waste. The venipuncture kits they had left were precious under any circumstance, but they were made extra precious that day by what they contained.
Literal living zombie kibble blood.
Five women, twenty men. A few of them haunted. Some of them missing chunks. Most of them allergic to eye contact. All of them scarred.
Jesse got it. He did. He kept things quick and quiet and calm. Ran through his list in a few hours and called for the last guy in line.
“Take a seat,” Jesse said, flipping open the right file. “I’ll be with you in a second.”
No names. Just numbers and pertinent details. Jesse skimmed them over with half an eye as he prepped his collection kit.
Male, fifty-one, O-neg, multiple bites, full recovery. No other health concerns. And absolutely nothing else that Jesse needed to know, because Jesse’s security clearance was subterranean.
So, “Roll up your sleeve for me and—“
Jesse stopped. It was stupid, but something about the bare forearm resting on the table in front of him made him stop.
The tracery of veins, maybe. The tiny mole in the crook of the guy’s elbow. The map of his skin under the silvered, ragged scars of a collection of old zombie bites.
A familiar map.
A familiar arm.
And when Jesse sucked in a breath and looked up, a really fucking familiar face was looking back at him too.
“Hey, bud,” Wyatt said.