Page 141 of Chaos

“Also in need of blood,” Alice says tersely, attaching the needle to the bag and dropping it onto an IV pole. “His skull is fractured. But he’s AB positive. And … everyone seems to want to donate for him.” She lifts the back of Frankie’s shirt and tuts at what she sees there. “I’ll be right back. Keep undressing. I think we’ll do a saline drip to help clear out the smoke, and I’ll need to debride it all.”

She bustles off.

As soon as she’s gone, I help Frankie peel the bloody, dusty shirt off her back to much hissing and cursing.

Maybe forty or fifty pieces of stone and glass are stuck in her back like shrapnel.

To distract her, I fill her in about the bullet machine, and how the mission went smoothly until we found Kelly, and how the butcher forced Rey to sabotage Thornewood to keep Kelly from dying, but they stabbed her anyway and left her half dead.

“That explains why she was so weird when Ephie was arrested.” Her eyes lock on me. “I’d have done it for you.”

“Maybe. I’d like to think you’d have tried to find another way.”

She turns away at that, and shucks off her dusty pants, then roots around in a pocket and pulls out her necklace, blood crusted along the points. “Everything else we had is burning right now.”

I think about that. The only thing I’m truly sad to lose is the painting she made for me. “It’s okay. We’re alive.”

She scrubs at the blood on the tip of the necklace.

“He’s dead?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“You okay about it?”

“Shane shot him.” She sets the necklace down on the windowsill very carefully. “Right between the eyes.”

That's good news for Shane, at least about his hand. I’d it worked once, it’ll work again. I’m sure he has feelings about it, though. “I’ll talk to him some more.”

This is where I should tell her about the army from DC, the promise I made to go, but it’s a shitty place, and a shitty time. There have to be forty or fifty people outside the sheet partitions.

Through the windows, soldiers carry crates from the un-crumbled parts of Thornewood closest to the lobby and the collapsed tower, moving them to the undisturbed wings that jut off the main structure.

Snowflakes are thick as dimes now, and no longer floating down but falling fast.

Stewing over the words, knowing she’ll hate them, I use the soapy water to clean away the worst of the soot and dust from her face and neck.

We’ve just gotten her mostly clean, and facedown on a gurney, naked but for a pair of pants Alice delivered, when Rey’s voice breaks through the hush of the pool house.

“Just let me see her first. Please!” she says, voice thick and imploring on the other side of the sheet.

Colleen and Jacquetta argue briefly with her, too quiet to hear, before Colleen finally says, “Five minutes. She’s unconscious, and will need surgery. But you can have five minutes.”

I touch Frankie’s cheek, straightening, my hand going to the pocket of my combat pants, where Wendell’s bullet and the ring Kelly gave me sit.

“Can you give me a minute?” I ask her.

“Yeah.” Something wary moves behind her eyes.

I take the slowly-filling blood bag with me and duck under the sheet to find Jacquetta and Ebundi leading Rey toward Kelly’s partition.

When she sees me, Rey digs in her feet and stops, her hands cuffed behind her. “They said they’d kill her. I just … you have to understand. You of all people, you have to understand.” Her face is twisted, red with what I can easily imagine is frustration and fear and anger.

“I do understand.” I pull the ring from my pocket, hold it up so it takes the light, shining silver and chunky. “She asked me to give this to you on your anniversary. It’s in a couple days, but … under the circumstances … She asked me to tell you that she loves you.” I grimace, imagining what this must feellike to Rey, a proposal like this, when being together is impossible, one of them half dead, reliant on a heart surgeon without a hospital after the apocalypse, and the other arrested by a makeshift government. “She said you would understand what it meant.”

A tear slips down Rey’s nose as she looks at the thin white sheet separating us from Kelly’s hospital bed, lifts her chin, and says the words, “I do.” She tips, her chin at the ring in my hand. “Can you?”

I bend awkwardly, reach around her, and slide the ring onto her left ring finger. She curls her hands into fists, and heads into Kelly’s sheeted hospital room with red-rimmed eyes.

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