Assumed Dead, page 22
“Warner. Call me Matt.” He stepped up to a line the one called Cal had marked in the dirt with his toe. It was a couple of meters away from the cage with the zombie it. The stink poured off the creature. It crouched and reached out through the bars of the cage toward Matt, making mindless animal snarls. Its eyes were fixed on Matt. Not on his face. They didn’t lock gazes. The hungry stare ranged over Matt like he was a juicy steak.
“I think it likes you,” Shan called, to some nervous laughter. Matt grinned but didn’t look back at the others, kept a wary eye on the zombie.
“As you see,” Mitch said, “the zombie is keen to take a bite out of Matt here. You can step back. Thank you, Matt.”
Matt went back to the group. Peter was scowling at him. Matt gave him a sheepish smile and a shrug.
“The vaccine does more than simply prevent you from developing the disease if you’re bitten,” Mitch said. “We don’t understand the mechanism yet, but however it works, zombies don’t attempt to bite vaccinated people. Once the vaccine is in full effect, it’s as if you were a tree, or a rock, or, we think, another zombie. It thinks you’re already infected and doesn’t try to bite you.”
He walked right up to the cage. Close enough that the zombie could not only have grabbed him, it could have probably sunk its teeth right into his arm or shoulder. The group gasped, and a couple of people cried out in fright.
The zombie did nothing to Mitch. It continued watching the group, as if it hoped one of them would come close enough to grab.
“And if that doesn’t convince you,” Cal said. “I’m going to pay a visit to our friend here.” He climbed up onto the flatbed of the pickup truck. “We call him Vinnie. I think it suits him.” He produced a key and unlocked the padlock that held the cage door close. Holy shit, was he… He couldn’t mean to…
He did. The door was two doors, opening down the middle. Cal opened them, stepped inside, and closed them behind him. He replaced the padlock. Matt and his friends stared, transfixed and silent. Vinnie the zombie, in the other half of the cage, took no notice of Cal. It could have reached through the bars dividing both halves of the cage, but it didn’t. Cal held up another key and undid the padlock on the divider between the two halves of the cage. It was also two doors. He opened them. Louise muffled a cry of shock, then slapped a hand over her mouth, as if the noise would trigger the zombie to attack Cal. The others stirred, nervous, murmuring. Matt made a convulsive grasp at Peter’s hand and clung to it, mind awash with memories of the zombies from the Norwegian station, utterly focused on getting at him. It must attack Cal, surely. He was right there and exposed to it! He could put his arm around it if he wanted to.
Nothing continued to happen. Vinnie and Cal shared the same cage. It was like watching a man swimming beside a great white shark, or standing beside a lion. Any second now it must go for him.
“He’s kind of dull company is our Vinnie,” Cal said, leaning on the bars of the cage. “But he makes up for that by smelling real bad.”
“Okay, quit showing off and come out of there,” Mitch said.
Cal did. He closed up the interior door in the cage and locked it, then unlocked the outer one and came out.
“Would it attack if you provoked it?” R.J. asked. “Or attacked it first?”
“No. It would try to move away. Like you were an obstacle it had to get around,” Mitch said.
“How long does the vaccine take to work?” Peter asked.
“Four days for most people. Up to a week for some.”
“I want to see that technical data.” Peter came forward, pulling his hand out of Matt’s, though Matt spotted that Mitch had seen them holding hands.
“Right here.” Mitch reached into the cabin of the truck and came back out with a well-thumbed sheaf of papers in a binder. “It’s all in there. I can’t answer anything technical. But we have a radio and can get in touch with Dr. Burnett, who created it, if you want to talk to her. We’re going to go back into town there and let you people have a chat about this. We have enough vaccine for everyone. When you’re ready, come on into the center of town. We’ve set up in the general store.” Cal jumped in the pickup truck and started the engine. The women on guard got into their station wagon. “Hope to see you soon.” Mitch got into the pickup with Cal, and it roared away. Vinnie fell down again.
After a while Louise broke the stunned silence. “Nice guys. Um. Do we believe them?”
“We all saw the demo,” Barrett said. “That zombie totally ignored both of them.”
“What if that wasn’t a zombie?” Chandra said. “Just someone made up as one? Acting like one?” That brought them up short. There was a thoughtful silence.
“Matt, you got closest,” R.J. said. “What do you think?”
“It certainly smelled like a corpse.” Matt closed his eyes and forced himself to see the creature again. To remember details he’d tried not to notice at the time. “It…it wasn’t alive,” he said. “It can’t have been. Half its cheek on one side was gone. You could see the jawbone through it. I saw…” He gulped. “A fly flew right in through the…the hole.”
“Gross,” Louise muttered.
“It had fingers missing,” Matt went on. “One nearly missing. I mean it was hanging on by the flesh. Kind of flapping about. Its teeth were black. Its eyes. I saw…a maggot.”
Everything went dark, and suddenly he was sitting on the ground, head spinning. Peter crouched at his side.
“Easy,” Peter said, resting an arm across his shoulders. “Easy. Someone get some water here, please. Matt, are you going to throw up?”
Matt took a couple of deep breaths. “No,” he said. “No. I don’t think so.”
“If he doesn’t, can I?” Louise asked.
Someone passed Matt a water bottle. He gulped the water down gratefully. “Sorry. It just hit me. I don’t think I let myself take it in at the time. The smell kind of overwhelmed everything else. But when I made myself remember the details…” He shuddered. Peter stroked his back soothingly. “Sorry.” He grimaced, feeling like a fool.
“S’okay, kid,” Barrett said. “That thing was bad enough from over here, never mind close up.”
Matt drank the bottle of water dry and looked up at the faces around him. “I’m absolutely certain that was no makeup job. That was a real zombie.”
“In that case,” R.J. said, picking up the binder from the ground and handing it to Peter. “The doc had better get on with his reading.”
* * * *
They fell to discussing who would take the vaccine first. Peter ignored that. He checked on Smithy, who was okay and enjoying some sunshine, then sequestered himself away in the back of one of the buses and read the data. Meanwhile, those not arguing fussed about setting up camp. They were likely to be here for several days. A party to go find water was put together. Others gathered wood for a fire, and Stav and Edvin started digging a pit for the fire, at R.J.’s direction. He was showing them how to build a concealed fire to keep from attracting attention with light and smoke.
It was lunchtime before Peter came out of the bus. The smell of rabbits cooking over the fire pit wafted in to him and reminded him of how hungry he was. He was on his third read over the data—making notes on a pad, triple-checking everything—so he decided he could use a break.
He climbed off the bus and walked to the group gathered around the pit, or sitting eating. Matt saw him coming and scrambled up, brought him coffee. It wasn’t good coffee, stale as hell, but the caffeine gave him a bit of pep.
“Well?” Matt said. Everyone else turned to Peter too, waiting for his verdict. It was his decision what they did. Everything changed based on what he said.
“I’ve studied the data,” he said. “It looks like it’s for real. It looks safe and effective.”
“So we should take it? All of us?” R.J. asked.
“What about the kids?” a woman from Moosonee asked.
“It’s been used on children,” Peter said. “There’s information about that in the data. No problems there.” He looked at Vicky, carrying Hope. “There’s nothing about it being used on infants, though. I think we should hold off on that until I know more.” Vicky nodded.
“We’ve been talking about who goes first,” R.J. said. “Pending your approval. Plenty of volunteers, but we’ve settled on Bud, Dr. Crawford, and Mr. Barrett.”
Peter went almost weak at the knees with relief. He’d been so afraid they’d say Matt. Matt had been in the group “discussing” who went first.
“I’m well past being able to bear children,” Dr. Crawford said. “And I don’t have any especially valuable skills. So if anything goes wrong…”
She left it unsaid. It didn’t matter as much, she meant. No special skills, not able to repopulate the world. He hated that it came to such assessments of worth to the group. That a woman as intelligent as Crawford was written off as not as valuable because she was older. Conversely, Matt must be deemed too valuable to risk because of his youth and his nursing training. So part of Peter was grateful for the ruthless calculations about people’s worth. But they had to change that. Had to get back to a world without such stark judgments of the relative value of human lives.
“Okay. I’ll give the volunteers the vaccine,” Peter said. “Then I’ll monitor them closely over forty-eight hours at least for any reaction. If there’s none, then everyone else, barring Hope, takes the vaccine too—assuming they want to.” He doubted anyone would refuse it. He’d run across a few antivaxers in his time, but he doubted even one of those would refuse this offer.
“Great,” Matt said. “So let’s go see our friends with the goodies.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A couple of hours later, Peter had set up his temporary observation ward in an abandoned house. He took Matt, Louise, and the two nurses from Moosonee with him. They set up cots in a living room where the three guinea pigs would sleep. While they were busy with that, Kennedy and Richardson arrived, without bodyguards this time. They brought vials of the vaccine with them.
Peter checked the vials over. He couldn’t know for sure what was in them. He hated having become so mistrustful. But this would have to be a very elaborate trap if this was poison of some kind.
“Do me first,” Bud said, shedding his jacket and shirt from one arm. He sat on a hard chair by a dining table. “I hate needles. Might as well get it over with.”
Peter set his kit on the table, pulled a chair up beside Bud, and took a needle from his kit. The vaccine kings had brought needles, but still… He swabbed Bud’s arm with an alcohol wipe, tossed that, and filled his syringe from one of the vials. The room took on the stillness of the air before a storm. Everyone was watching him. Except Bud, who was carefully keeping his eyes averted from the needle and fixed instead on Dr. Crawford, interestingly. Being too old to have children didn’t mean too old for romance. Peter expelled air from the syringe, making a little spurt of liquid that dropped to the carpet and soaked in.
“Here we go.” Peter injected Bud, who winced but held still. “Almost done.” He drew the needle out, mopped a bead of blood up with some cotton, then taped an adhesive bandage over the wound. He sat back. Bud looked around and started to put his shirt back on.
“Barely felt it,” he said. “You got a soft touch, Doc.”
“Thank you. Could you leave your shirt off for a little while? So I can see any signs of reaction.” He had a sleeveless shirt on under it. He was decent enough. “We’ll give it a couple of hours and, assuming nothing’s wrong, do the other volunteers.”
Kennedy put the box of vials on the table. “Then we’ll leave you folks to it.”
“How long are you planning to stay here in White Lake?” Peter asked them.
“At least another week,” Kennedy said. “We hope there’ll be more people coming to check out the demonstration.”
“Three shows a day,” Richardson said.
“The word is getting out. And we’re not the only demo team out there. When your people leave, you’ll tell others you meet where to find us, I hope.”
“Why not tell them where your secret colony is?” Matt said.
“We like to assess them first,” Kennedy said.
“Assess them for what?” Peter demanded. “Value to the colony?”
“No. Everyone is of value. We wouldn’t turn anyone away on grounds of age or disability, for example.”
“How about sexuality?” Matt asked. Peter flicked a sideways glance at him. If Matt couldn’t see that Kennedy and Richardson were a couple, he was more of a blockhead than Peter had realized.
“Hell no,” Richardson said, laughing. “Mitch would fly the rainbow flag over the gate if we let him.”
“Um, quite,” Kennedy said. “Sexuality is not an issue. It’s not a…a breeding colony, if that’s what you think. Our main focus is developing, manufacturing, and distributing the vaccine. But there are groups around with a different focus. Some of them would like to control who gets the vaccine. I won’t allow that. It belongs to everyone.”
“Do we pass the test?” Barrett asked. He was a formidable figure, even out of his leathers, in some clean clothes, and having had a bath—if you could call jumping in a nearby stream in his underwear a bath. He looked almost respectable compared to their first look at him, and the smell was barely there anymore. But he still looked like a great big, heavily tattooed biker.
“You have a doctor, several nurses, a pilot, mechanics, and ex-military personnel,” Kennedy said. “But what’s more important, you seem to know how to cooperate for the good of the whole group. Yes. You pass the test. We’ll talk about that later. For now we’ll leave you to it.” He led the way out. Richardson followed him with a last wink at Matt. Teasing rather than flirting, Peter hoped.
“Right,” Peter said when the front door banged closed. “We’re going to be monitoring through the night, so I want two of you nurses to sleep, ready to get up for an early morning shift.”
“How about you?” Matt asked. “You can’t stay up for forty-eight hours straight.”
“Matt, I’ve pulled seventy-two-hour shifts in the ER before. I am the master of the catnap.”
* * * *
Matt was in the kitchen, boiling up some water using a camping stove, by the light of a bunch of candles in a candelabra, when Peter came padding in quietly on bare feet. He’d been sleeping on the couch when Matt and one of the Moosonee nurses, Ada, came down to relieve the other shift. The three volunteers were lying on cots. Bud slept silently. Dr. Crawford was writing in her journal. Any sound from her pen was drowned out by Barrett snoring. Otherwise, all was quiet. All three had been injected with the vaccine. So far there were no apparent ill effects.
“I see we have armed guards outside,” Matt said. He’d heard voices through the bedroom window after he got up and peeked outside to see a few of their group guarding the place, rifles in their hands. He was grateful for that. Kept any wandering zombies from busting in during the night. He didn’t worry about Mitch and Cal’s group. They were friendlies.
“So we can all sleep safe in our beds,” Peter said, rubbing his eyes. “Have you slept?”
“Like a log.”
On a bare mattress, with some rather rough and scratchy blankets. But after their long trip on the buses, where he slept fitfully and woke often, he might as well have been in a four-poster bed with silk sheets. His back was almost unkinked.
Peter found some clean mugs while Matt made coffee in a French press they’d found in a cupboard, and they sat at the table. When it was brewed, Matt took a cup through to Ada in the living room. All was well there, so he went back to the kitchen. Peter was sitting at the table. Matt moved the candelabra over there and sat down. It was a somewhat ostentatious candelabra, with plenty of fiddly gilt bits and some dangling crystals that sparkled and danced in the candlelight.
“I feel like Liberace without his piano,” Matt said of their flashy illumination. It raised only a ghost of a smile from Peter.
“Matt,” he said. “We have to talk.”
That was never a good conversation starter. Matt took a gulp of coffee. It burned going down.
“The group will be going on to the colony—when Kennedy and Richardson tell us where it is. And I absolutely want to be there too. Kennedy’s right. We have to get this vaccine distributed. But before I go there, I have to go home. I have to see my house. I have to know.”
Matt put his coffee down and dropped his head to run his hands through his hair, fingers pressing hard into the scalp. He wanted to yell and howl with pain and rage. He’d hoped—oh God, how he’d hoped—Peter would have given up the idea. That even if it wasn’t because of Matt, he’d see his duty as being to the group and would stick with them. Apparently not.
“Peter…”
“Please, hear me out. It doesn’t change anything I feel for you.”
“And what if you found him? What then? Does that change what you feel for me?”
“It doesn’t change what I feel,” Peter said. Matt knew there was a “but” coming. He headed it off.
“It would change what you do, though, right? You’d want to go back to him, right? You might care about me, even love me, in a way. But you’d dump me for him.” He snorted. “Unless you’re hoping we’d be willing to share you. In which case, you can think again, mate.” His voice rose, and he took a breath, whooshed it out, set the candles flickering.
“In the end, it’s up to Harrison,” Peter said. “He’s my husband. My first duty is to him.”
“So, he has first dibs?”
“Something like that. If I found him, and if he wanted me, then I have to go back to him.”
Matt frowned, hearing more in that. “Reluctantly?” he asked. “Out of a sense of duty only?”
“I didn’t say that,” Peter said, his expression guarded. He’d implied it, though. Still, it wasn’t much of a comfort. Even if it was only out of duty, he’d do it. Even if he would rather be with Matt. Even if leaving Matt broke both their hearts. He’d do it, because he’d made those vows. He wore that ring…and he was wearing it. It gleamed softly in the candlelight, gold against the warm brown of his skin. Most of the time when working, he wore it on a cord around his neck. But he’d put it back on. Matt felt sick at the sight. He tried to cheer himself up with a happy thought.
“I think it likes you,” Shan called, to some nervous laughter. Matt grinned but didn’t look back at the others, kept a wary eye on the zombie.
“As you see,” Mitch said, “the zombie is keen to take a bite out of Matt here. You can step back. Thank you, Matt.”
Matt went back to the group. Peter was scowling at him. Matt gave him a sheepish smile and a shrug.
“The vaccine does more than simply prevent you from developing the disease if you’re bitten,” Mitch said. “We don’t understand the mechanism yet, but however it works, zombies don’t attempt to bite vaccinated people. Once the vaccine is in full effect, it’s as if you were a tree, or a rock, or, we think, another zombie. It thinks you’re already infected and doesn’t try to bite you.”
He walked right up to the cage. Close enough that the zombie could not only have grabbed him, it could have probably sunk its teeth right into his arm or shoulder. The group gasped, and a couple of people cried out in fright.
The zombie did nothing to Mitch. It continued watching the group, as if it hoped one of them would come close enough to grab.
“And if that doesn’t convince you,” Cal said. “I’m going to pay a visit to our friend here.” He climbed up onto the flatbed of the pickup truck. “We call him Vinnie. I think it suits him.” He produced a key and unlocked the padlock that held the cage door close. Holy shit, was he… He couldn’t mean to…
He did. The door was two doors, opening down the middle. Cal opened them, stepped inside, and closed them behind him. He replaced the padlock. Matt and his friends stared, transfixed and silent. Vinnie the zombie, in the other half of the cage, took no notice of Cal. It could have reached through the bars dividing both halves of the cage, but it didn’t. Cal held up another key and undid the padlock on the divider between the two halves of the cage. It was also two doors. He opened them. Louise muffled a cry of shock, then slapped a hand over her mouth, as if the noise would trigger the zombie to attack Cal. The others stirred, nervous, murmuring. Matt made a convulsive grasp at Peter’s hand and clung to it, mind awash with memories of the zombies from the Norwegian station, utterly focused on getting at him. It must attack Cal, surely. He was right there and exposed to it! He could put his arm around it if he wanted to.
Nothing continued to happen. Vinnie and Cal shared the same cage. It was like watching a man swimming beside a great white shark, or standing beside a lion. Any second now it must go for him.
“He’s kind of dull company is our Vinnie,” Cal said, leaning on the bars of the cage. “But he makes up for that by smelling real bad.”
“Okay, quit showing off and come out of there,” Mitch said.
Cal did. He closed up the interior door in the cage and locked it, then unlocked the outer one and came out.
“Would it attack if you provoked it?” R.J. asked. “Or attacked it first?”
“No. It would try to move away. Like you were an obstacle it had to get around,” Mitch said.
“How long does the vaccine take to work?” Peter asked.
“Four days for most people. Up to a week for some.”
“I want to see that technical data.” Peter came forward, pulling his hand out of Matt’s, though Matt spotted that Mitch had seen them holding hands.
“Right here.” Mitch reached into the cabin of the truck and came back out with a well-thumbed sheaf of papers in a binder. “It’s all in there. I can’t answer anything technical. But we have a radio and can get in touch with Dr. Burnett, who created it, if you want to talk to her. We’re going to go back into town there and let you people have a chat about this. We have enough vaccine for everyone. When you’re ready, come on into the center of town. We’ve set up in the general store.” Cal jumped in the pickup truck and started the engine. The women on guard got into their station wagon. “Hope to see you soon.” Mitch got into the pickup with Cal, and it roared away. Vinnie fell down again.
After a while Louise broke the stunned silence. “Nice guys. Um. Do we believe them?”
“We all saw the demo,” Barrett said. “That zombie totally ignored both of them.”
“What if that wasn’t a zombie?” Chandra said. “Just someone made up as one? Acting like one?” That brought them up short. There was a thoughtful silence.
“Matt, you got closest,” R.J. said. “What do you think?”
“It certainly smelled like a corpse.” Matt closed his eyes and forced himself to see the creature again. To remember details he’d tried not to notice at the time. “It…it wasn’t alive,” he said. “It can’t have been. Half its cheek on one side was gone. You could see the jawbone through it. I saw…” He gulped. “A fly flew right in through the…the hole.”
“Gross,” Louise muttered.
“It had fingers missing,” Matt went on. “One nearly missing. I mean it was hanging on by the flesh. Kind of flapping about. Its teeth were black. Its eyes. I saw…a maggot.”
Everything went dark, and suddenly he was sitting on the ground, head spinning. Peter crouched at his side.
“Easy,” Peter said, resting an arm across his shoulders. “Easy. Someone get some water here, please. Matt, are you going to throw up?”
Matt took a couple of deep breaths. “No,” he said. “No. I don’t think so.”
“If he doesn’t, can I?” Louise asked.
Someone passed Matt a water bottle. He gulped the water down gratefully. “Sorry. It just hit me. I don’t think I let myself take it in at the time. The smell kind of overwhelmed everything else. But when I made myself remember the details…” He shuddered. Peter stroked his back soothingly. “Sorry.” He grimaced, feeling like a fool.
“S’okay, kid,” Barrett said. “That thing was bad enough from over here, never mind close up.”
Matt drank the bottle of water dry and looked up at the faces around him. “I’m absolutely certain that was no makeup job. That was a real zombie.”
“In that case,” R.J. said, picking up the binder from the ground and handing it to Peter. “The doc had better get on with his reading.”
* * * *
They fell to discussing who would take the vaccine first. Peter ignored that. He checked on Smithy, who was okay and enjoying some sunshine, then sequestered himself away in the back of one of the buses and read the data. Meanwhile, those not arguing fussed about setting up camp. They were likely to be here for several days. A party to go find water was put together. Others gathered wood for a fire, and Stav and Edvin started digging a pit for the fire, at R.J.’s direction. He was showing them how to build a concealed fire to keep from attracting attention with light and smoke.
It was lunchtime before Peter came out of the bus. The smell of rabbits cooking over the fire pit wafted in to him and reminded him of how hungry he was. He was on his third read over the data—making notes on a pad, triple-checking everything—so he decided he could use a break.
He climbed off the bus and walked to the group gathered around the pit, or sitting eating. Matt saw him coming and scrambled up, brought him coffee. It wasn’t good coffee, stale as hell, but the caffeine gave him a bit of pep.
“Well?” Matt said. Everyone else turned to Peter too, waiting for his verdict. It was his decision what they did. Everything changed based on what he said.
“I’ve studied the data,” he said. “It looks like it’s for real. It looks safe and effective.”
“So we should take it? All of us?” R.J. asked.
“What about the kids?” a woman from Moosonee asked.
“It’s been used on children,” Peter said. “There’s information about that in the data. No problems there.” He looked at Vicky, carrying Hope. “There’s nothing about it being used on infants, though. I think we should hold off on that until I know more.” Vicky nodded.
“We’ve been talking about who goes first,” R.J. said. “Pending your approval. Plenty of volunteers, but we’ve settled on Bud, Dr. Crawford, and Mr. Barrett.”
Peter went almost weak at the knees with relief. He’d been so afraid they’d say Matt. Matt had been in the group “discussing” who went first.
“I’m well past being able to bear children,” Dr. Crawford said. “And I don’t have any especially valuable skills. So if anything goes wrong…”
She left it unsaid. It didn’t matter as much, she meant. No special skills, not able to repopulate the world. He hated that it came to such assessments of worth to the group. That a woman as intelligent as Crawford was written off as not as valuable because she was older. Conversely, Matt must be deemed too valuable to risk because of his youth and his nursing training. So part of Peter was grateful for the ruthless calculations about people’s worth. But they had to change that. Had to get back to a world without such stark judgments of the relative value of human lives.
“Okay. I’ll give the volunteers the vaccine,” Peter said. “Then I’ll monitor them closely over forty-eight hours at least for any reaction. If there’s none, then everyone else, barring Hope, takes the vaccine too—assuming they want to.” He doubted anyone would refuse it. He’d run across a few antivaxers in his time, but he doubted even one of those would refuse this offer.
“Great,” Matt said. “So let’s go see our friends with the goodies.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A couple of hours later, Peter had set up his temporary observation ward in an abandoned house. He took Matt, Louise, and the two nurses from Moosonee with him. They set up cots in a living room where the three guinea pigs would sleep. While they were busy with that, Kennedy and Richardson arrived, without bodyguards this time. They brought vials of the vaccine with them.
Peter checked the vials over. He couldn’t know for sure what was in them. He hated having become so mistrustful. But this would have to be a very elaborate trap if this was poison of some kind.
“Do me first,” Bud said, shedding his jacket and shirt from one arm. He sat on a hard chair by a dining table. “I hate needles. Might as well get it over with.”
Peter set his kit on the table, pulled a chair up beside Bud, and took a needle from his kit. The vaccine kings had brought needles, but still… He swabbed Bud’s arm with an alcohol wipe, tossed that, and filled his syringe from one of the vials. The room took on the stillness of the air before a storm. Everyone was watching him. Except Bud, who was carefully keeping his eyes averted from the needle and fixed instead on Dr. Crawford, interestingly. Being too old to have children didn’t mean too old for romance. Peter expelled air from the syringe, making a little spurt of liquid that dropped to the carpet and soaked in.
“Here we go.” Peter injected Bud, who winced but held still. “Almost done.” He drew the needle out, mopped a bead of blood up with some cotton, then taped an adhesive bandage over the wound. He sat back. Bud looked around and started to put his shirt back on.
“Barely felt it,” he said. “You got a soft touch, Doc.”
“Thank you. Could you leave your shirt off for a little while? So I can see any signs of reaction.” He had a sleeveless shirt on under it. He was decent enough. “We’ll give it a couple of hours and, assuming nothing’s wrong, do the other volunteers.”
Kennedy put the box of vials on the table. “Then we’ll leave you folks to it.”
“How long are you planning to stay here in White Lake?” Peter asked them.
“At least another week,” Kennedy said. “We hope there’ll be more people coming to check out the demonstration.”
“Three shows a day,” Richardson said.
“The word is getting out. And we’re not the only demo team out there. When your people leave, you’ll tell others you meet where to find us, I hope.”
“Why not tell them where your secret colony is?” Matt said.
“We like to assess them first,” Kennedy said.
“Assess them for what?” Peter demanded. “Value to the colony?”
“No. Everyone is of value. We wouldn’t turn anyone away on grounds of age or disability, for example.”
“How about sexuality?” Matt asked. Peter flicked a sideways glance at him. If Matt couldn’t see that Kennedy and Richardson were a couple, he was more of a blockhead than Peter had realized.
“Hell no,” Richardson said, laughing. “Mitch would fly the rainbow flag over the gate if we let him.”
“Um, quite,” Kennedy said. “Sexuality is not an issue. It’s not a…a breeding colony, if that’s what you think. Our main focus is developing, manufacturing, and distributing the vaccine. But there are groups around with a different focus. Some of them would like to control who gets the vaccine. I won’t allow that. It belongs to everyone.”
“Do we pass the test?” Barrett asked. He was a formidable figure, even out of his leathers, in some clean clothes, and having had a bath—if you could call jumping in a nearby stream in his underwear a bath. He looked almost respectable compared to their first look at him, and the smell was barely there anymore. But he still looked like a great big, heavily tattooed biker.
“You have a doctor, several nurses, a pilot, mechanics, and ex-military personnel,” Kennedy said. “But what’s more important, you seem to know how to cooperate for the good of the whole group. Yes. You pass the test. We’ll talk about that later. For now we’ll leave you to it.” He led the way out. Richardson followed him with a last wink at Matt. Teasing rather than flirting, Peter hoped.
“Right,” Peter said when the front door banged closed. “We’re going to be monitoring through the night, so I want two of you nurses to sleep, ready to get up for an early morning shift.”
“How about you?” Matt asked. “You can’t stay up for forty-eight hours straight.”
“Matt, I’ve pulled seventy-two-hour shifts in the ER before. I am the master of the catnap.”
* * * *
Matt was in the kitchen, boiling up some water using a camping stove, by the light of a bunch of candles in a candelabra, when Peter came padding in quietly on bare feet. He’d been sleeping on the couch when Matt and one of the Moosonee nurses, Ada, came down to relieve the other shift. The three volunteers were lying on cots. Bud slept silently. Dr. Crawford was writing in her journal. Any sound from her pen was drowned out by Barrett snoring. Otherwise, all was quiet. All three had been injected with the vaccine. So far there were no apparent ill effects.
“I see we have armed guards outside,” Matt said. He’d heard voices through the bedroom window after he got up and peeked outside to see a few of their group guarding the place, rifles in their hands. He was grateful for that. Kept any wandering zombies from busting in during the night. He didn’t worry about Mitch and Cal’s group. They were friendlies.
“So we can all sleep safe in our beds,” Peter said, rubbing his eyes. “Have you slept?”
“Like a log.”
On a bare mattress, with some rather rough and scratchy blankets. But after their long trip on the buses, where he slept fitfully and woke often, he might as well have been in a four-poster bed with silk sheets. His back was almost unkinked.
Peter found some clean mugs while Matt made coffee in a French press they’d found in a cupboard, and they sat at the table. When it was brewed, Matt took a cup through to Ada in the living room. All was well there, so he went back to the kitchen. Peter was sitting at the table. Matt moved the candelabra over there and sat down. It was a somewhat ostentatious candelabra, with plenty of fiddly gilt bits and some dangling crystals that sparkled and danced in the candlelight.
“I feel like Liberace without his piano,” Matt said of their flashy illumination. It raised only a ghost of a smile from Peter.
“Matt,” he said. “We have to talk.”
That was never a good conversation starter. Matt took a gulp of coffee. It burned going down.
“The group will be going on to the colony—when Kennedy and Richardson tell us where it is. And I absolutely want to be there too. Kennedy’s right. We have to get this vaccine distributed. But before I go there, I have to go home. I have to see my house. I have to know.”
Matt put his coffee down and dropped his head to run his hands through his hair, fingers pressing hard into the scalp. He wanted to yell and howl with pain and rage. He’d hoped—oh God, how he’d hoped—Peter would have given up the idea. That even if it wasn’t because of Matt, he’d see his duty as being to the group and would stick with them. Apparently not.
“Peter…”
“Please, hear me out. It doesn’t change anything I feel for you.”
“And what if you found him? What then? Does that change what you feel for me?”
“It doesn’t change what I feel,” Peter said. Matt knew there was a “but” coming. He headed it off.
“It would change what you do, though, right? You’d want to go back to him, right? You might care about me, even love me, in a way. But you’d dump me for him.” He snorted. “Unless you’re hoping we’d be willing to share you. In which case, you can think again, mate.” His voice rose, and he took a breath, whooshed it out, set the candles flickering.
“In the end, it’s up to Harrison,” Peter said. “He’s my husband. My first duty is to him.”
“So, he has first dibs?”
“Something like that. If I found him, and if he wanted me, then I have to go back to him.”
Matt frowned, hearing more in that. “Reluctantly?” he asked. “Out of a sense of duty only?”
“I didn’t say that,” Peter said, his expression guarded. He’d implied it, though. Still, it wasn’t much of a comfort. Even if it was only out of duty, he’d do it. Even if he would rather be with Matt. Even if leaving Matt broke both their hearts. He’d do it, because he’d made those vows. He wore that ring…and he was wearing it. It gleamed softly in the candlelight, gold against the warm brown of his skin. Most of the time when working, he wore it on a cord around his neck. But he’d put it back on. Matt felt sick at the sight. He tried to cheer himself up with a happy thought.
