Annie did it the incorrect way all the time, up until the day the thing that was in the way turned out to be a steak knife.
The cut was deep enough to need stitches, and she still had a tiny scar from it on the palm of her right hand. She could remember almost nothing about that day, other than what it was like to be in the back of the clinic, and that Beth was there with her. Beth was the one who wrapped up her hand at the diner and who walked her over and stayed until she was sure Annie was okay.
It wasn’t even a big deal. Annie certainly would have done the same thing for Beth in that situation. But it suddenly felt like a big deal.
The clinic had made a few improvements in a year. The room was as small as ever, but the bed looked a little more bed-like than the temporary cot she last saw. Beth was asleep—given a mild sedative, as Lu-Lu said—with a fresh bandage on her head and her left arm in a sling. She wasn’t strung up in the way one might expect of a person in a hospital, but this wasn’t a full hospital. She had an IV, but no vital sign monitors. Annie imagined if her friend’s injuries were life threatening, there would be someone in the room until the ambulance got there.
Annie sat in a chair on the right side of the bed and took Beth’s free hand.
“Hi, honey,” Annie said. “You probably can’t hear me, but…”
Oh my god, this is so stupid.
“But anyway. Zombies, huh? I feel kind of bad about that. I mean, I don’t know why I should, but I feel… I dunno, responsible, kinda. Weird, huh? I mean, it’s not my fault. Sure, I didn’t tell anyone about the ship, but, like, I’m not the one making zombies and sending them out to attack people.”
Beth inhaled sharply, which startled Annie. Her friend appeared to be having a nightmare: her eyes were darting around under the eyelids and she kept twitching.
“Hey, it’s okay, I’m here. It’s all right.”
Beth’s fingers started twitching. Annie wondered if she should call someone in or not.
Normal? Not normal?
“Should I call someone?”
Beth, appropriately, didn’t answer. But the twitching stopped and whatever was going on behind her eyelids quelled.
“I’ll take that as a no. Anyway. I don’t even know why I’m here, honey. I mean, if it were me looking at someone else here, right now, talking to an unconscious friend in an almost-hospital room, I’d say that someone else was here because her mom is in Boston in a real hospital right now. I mean, obviously, right? I’m probably feeling guilty about not going, and now zombies equals cancer in my head and wow, I should probably go get some sleep, huh?”
Definitely overtired, she wrote in her imaginary sociology notebook.
“Unnhhhh,” Beth grunted. Then her eyes snapped open.
“Oh, hi!” Annie said. “They said you were sedated, but how are you? I just came in to say hello before I headed home. Your parents are out in the hall, you want me to get them?”
“Are…you?”
“Dude, that’s not even funny. Lemme go and…”
“Are…you?” Beth repeated.
Annie let go of Beth’s hand, but Beth responded by grabbing Annie by the wrist.
“Aaoow, Beth, honey, let go of me! Come on, I’m serious.”
Annie was using her free hand to try and pull apart Beth’s fingers, but it felt like she was going to have to break them to get loose.
“Your grip is too tight, you’re hurting me, Beth. Cut it out!”
What the hell is going on?
“Are… you…”
“I heard you and it isn’t funny!”
“…her?”
“What did you say?”
She looked into Beth’s eyes and realized something terrible: Beth wasn’t in there.
“HELP!” she called. She didn’t know how many staff was in the building or if sound could travel far enough to reach the waiting room and make any kind of difference.
“Are you her?” Beth repeated. She was trying to use her left arm to reach for Annie, apparently not aware it was in a sling.
“Beth, let go of me.” She got two fingers loose. “HELP!”
A doctor she never met before—older man, new to the clinic clearly or she’d have known his face—burst in, quickly assessed the situation, and took Beth by the shoulders. He was trying to push her down into a prone position.
“Beth, you need to calm down,” he said, in slightly accented English.
“Help me get free, she’s hurting me,” Annie said.
The woman from the desk came in next, followed by the Welds, and then Ed and Pete. Ed, seeing what the doctor was doing, went to him first, because nobody, it appeared, cared that Annie was about to lose her damn wrist.
“Do not try and wake her up!” Ed said.
“Excuse me, sir?” the doctor said.
“I’ve seen this, and I’m telling you, if you force her awake it may kill her.”
“Oh my God,” Lu-Lu cried.
“WILL SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME?” Annie shouted.
“Sorry, sorry,” Ed said. He knelt down to work on Beth’s grip. “God, she’s really got you.”
“No kidding!”
“Beth, sweetie, calm down,” Lu-Lu said from the door. The two of them looked afraid to jump in the middle of anything.
“Almost got her loose,” Ed said. “Little help, doctor?”
He was checking Beth’s vitals, though, and not sure about respecting Ed’s advice. Pete knelt down to help instead.
“She’s too strong,” Pete said. She was looking at Ed when she said it. “She was asleep, right?”
“Her heart rate is soaring,” the doctor said, almost to himself.
“You are,” Beth said. “You are. You are.”
“What did she say?” Annie asked. “Ed…”
“YOU ARE.”
All at once, Beth collapsed back in the bed and her grip went slack. Ed pulled Annie away from the bed immediately. Annie felt her feet go out from under her as he scooped her off the ground.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
“She said, ‘are you her’, Ed. ‘Are you her?’ That was their question.”
Annie started to cry, and hated herself for it, while Ed held her.
In the bed behind them, Beth Weld started to convulse.
IN THE AFTERMATH of Corporal Vogel’s death, all the men involved in the incident were pulled from their rotations. This was explained as a temporary thing to give them an opportunity to get your heads right, which was an army tough-love way of saying perhaps you should speak to the base’s psychiatrist before we put a gun in your hand again.
Not one of the guys thought that was the real reason, though. As far as Sam—and by extension the other five—were concerned, they were pulled until everyone was cool with what happened. It was in the army’s best interest to make sure this was a situation where one soldier went nuts, tried to kill another soldier, and then died because something was wrong with his head, rather than what it looked like: six men ganging up to murder a seventh.
The frustrating thing for Sam was that being pulled from his normal rotation made it looked like he had done something wrong. There was no way around it. Everyone knew Vogel was dead, and Sam and his bunkmates were sitting on top of the man when he died. Having them taken out of duty just made it all look worse.
It helped that this was Sorrow Falls. Any other place, Sam’s story sounded a lot more suspect, but in this town, the ever-present specter of the space flu lingered in the back of everyone’s minds and made this sort of thing possible.