The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  He looked at her, and she looked back. Steady. But his gaze broke her down, and she sighed.

  “He’s dead,” she said softly.

  “Maybe…maybe someone can save him,” Cal said. “Since I can’t.”

  This was important to him, she saw that much. Somehow, some some way, Cal wanted to be able to save this guy. So she nodded and bent to help lift the weight of him. Together they put him in the backseat.

  She didn’t want to turn around and see a corpse in the backseat of her car. Cal wove through the wreckage, easing the Volvo through to the other side of the road, where he picked up speed. He hit a bump going too fast, and Renton rolled. He hit the back of her seat. He hit the floor.

  “Keep going,” Abbie said through a thick throat when it looked as though Cal meant to slow down. “He’s not going to mind. The sooner you get him to the hospital, the sooner you can get him help.”

  The sooner you could admit he’s dead, she thought but kept to herself.

  The closest hospital was still standing, as was most of the town when they got there. Emergency personnel, all of whom seemed to know Cal by sight, rushed out to meet them. They took Renton away and left Abbie and Cal to wait.

  There was paperwork. There always is. The ER was overflowing with refugees from the destruction. Many of them knew Cal too. More than one, mostly the women, gave Abbie the sort of half-curious, half-hostile looks she’d come to expect from other females, especially when there was an attractive man involved.

  Still, paperwork aside, they were only there for fifteen minutes before the doctor came out to talk to them. “I’m sorry. He’s gone.”

  Abbie tried hard to look appropriately sad. “Oh. That’s too bad.”

  “Was he a friend?”

  Cal shook his head. “No. We just met up with him over by Pickett…well. Shit. What used to be Pickett…”

  The doctor nodded. “It’s bad out there, I hear.”

  Cal nodded, solemn. “Yeah. It’s bad.”

  “Well. I’m sorry he didn’t make it, but there wasn’t anything we could do. He was gone when you brought him in. Probably stroke, though they’ll do an autopsy to be sure. It’s going to be a long night.” The doctor sighed, rubbed his eyes. “We could use some extra hands around here, if you’re willing, Cal. Your friend too.”

  Abbie shook her head. “Oh. I don’t have any medical training…”

  The doctor gave her a bleak smile. “You can make coffee, right?”

  She hesitated, then nodded with a quick glance at Cal. “Yes. I guess I can.”

  Those five words were the reason why she was in the ER when they brought in the screaming woman. There’d been a lot of noise there. Injured people who were still conscious tended to shout out their agony or frustration if they weren’t deemed high priority and had to take a turn in the hard plastic bucket seats while they waited for the attentions of the overrun and overwhelmed staff. A few screams had filtered out from the exam rooms as doctors and PAs reset bones or stitched wounds. But nobody had been wheeled into the emergency room shrieking like a fire bell.

  What made it worse was that the EMTs were as overwhelmed as the onsite staff, if not more. Instead of taking her into an exam room, they simply brought her in the wheelchair, pushed it to the side of the admittance desk, locked the wheels and left her to go back out on call. The nurse at the desk tried to get some information from her, but all she did was scream. She had no visible injuries. No blood. Her clothes weren’t even torn.

  Maybe it was grief, Abbie thought, watching the nurse try to deal with her. That could make a person scream like that. In that case, she needed the psych ward. The nurse was trying to talk to her, calm her down, but all the woman did was bat at the nurse as her screams rose to an even greater pitch.

  Abbie had been heading out to the front to refresh the coffeepots that were emptied seemingly as fast as she could fill them, and to check the supplies of sandwiches a local restaurant had been sending in for the staff. It wasn’t that she minded being a runner. Cal had been working in the back with the wounded. The last time she’d seen him he was covered in blood, and a little spilled coffee and overexposure to tuna salad was far better than that. Still, she needed a break and there didn’t seem to be any way to take one without leaving the hospital completely — and she didn’t want to abandon him. Stupid, she knew that, but she couldn’t just leave without at least telling Cal where she’d gone.

  “You! You!”

  It took Abbie a couple seconds to realize the screaming woman had not only cut off her fire bell clanging, but that she was talking to Abbie. She turned and caught the nurse’s look of relief, but shrugged. She had nothing to do with it, really. “Me?”

  “Yes. You. Come here.”

  Abbie settled the glass carafe on the hotplate and pulled out the filter, dumped the grounds and opened another packet of coffee before she answered. “I’m busy.”

  The exhausted young mother who’d been there for almost four hours holding her cranky, colicky baby gave her a weary smile. Abbie returned it. She’d offered to walk with the baby when it was screaming, and it was a statement about the woman’s state of mind that she’d let a stranger hold her baby. Now the infant slept, curled tight against her mother. If the wacko over by the desk had woken her, Abbie thought the young mother might’ve been compelled to contemplate murder.

  The coffee brewing, she went to the woman at the desk. “Yes?”

  The woman lunged forward hard enough to grab hold of her shirt. “You’ve seen it. Haven’t you? I can smell it on you.”

  It had been too long since she’d showered, and self-consciously Abbie pulled away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The flowers,” the woman said. “You saw the flowers.”

  Abbie tasted the memory of that bitterness again. She swallowed hard, not sure why she lied except that being a liar seemed to have become her nature. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The flowers,” the woman insisted. “I can smell them on you, you must’ve seen them. They’re inside you now.”

  The woman opened her fist to reveal a palmful of blue and purple blossoms, the crimson threads of the roots wound around her fingers. They’d stained her fingers with brown juice, and the smell that came up was both exquisite and revolting.

  “Ma’am I’m going to need your —” The nurse broke off with a grimace and put a hand on her stomach. “Hmm.”

  Abbie felt the way she had in the early days of both her pregnancies. Queasy and starving at the same time. The woman closed her fingers over the flowers, and the smell diminished but didn’t fade entirely.

  “They’re inside you now,” the woman repeated. She closed her eyes, her head lolling. Mouth open. A low, growling groan grated from her throat, which convulsed.

  “Oh, dammit.” The nurse sounded totally put out. “I’m too tired to deal with this.”

  The woman’s head snapped upright. She stared hard at Abbie, who noticed her eyes were the same color blue as those flowers. The veins the same threaded crimson as the roots. A single, clear strand of drool appeared in the corner of her mouth and hung, swinging.

  “It’s not over,” the woman said. “There are still more coming.”

  TWO

  4

  If it hadn’t been for the pork-n-beans, everything would’ve been fine.

  But no, she’d gone ahead and opened that can, she’d heated it on the stove and she’d been the one to throw it on the floor. Now she had to be the one to get down on her hands and knees and clean up the spattered, tomatoey mess. Who was she kidding? Nothing was fine. The stink of it made her stomach heave, and for a few crazy seconds Marnie thought about opening her mouth and letting the vomit spew out all over the floor along with everything else. What difference would it make? What difference could anything possibly make when everything had turned to shit?

  Above her, the floor creaked. Marnie paused with her hands full of cold, congealed beans, her