Dandelion Iron Book One (30 page)

eating my medicine pie!

Both Wren and I went for Petal, but Wren, even post-operation, was faster. She ripped Petal off Micaiah, and the two women squared off. I stayed back.

“You don’t want to be doing this, Rosie,” Wren said.

Petal didn’t answer. Instead she whirled, plucked a Colt Terminator out of Wren’s holster, and struck my sister across the forehead. “I want my medicine now! Now!”

My sister didn’t fight back. Instead, she touched blood trickling down her eyebrow. “You patched me up not a minute ago, and now you’re making more work for yourself. Cavvy would call that ironic.”

I thought about going for Petal, but I knew I wouldn’t be fast enough and I didn’t want anyone to get shot.

Micaiah rose from the floor and moved in front of Petal. If she fired, he’d take the bullet in his chest. “First do no harm. Didn’t you take that oath when you became a doctor?”

“First do no harm,” Petal whispered. All the fight dribbled out of her.

“That’s right. First do no harm.” Micaiah eased the pistol out of her hands and gave it to Wren.

Petal went from fighting to pleading. “Micaiah, I need my medicine. Please.”

Jack and Jill swallowed a pill

and it made it all better forever.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

She leaned into him and whispered in a scratch, “I’ll die without it.”

Little Miss Muffet,

dead on her tuffet,

meds eaten all away.

“Petal, don’t you have any in your bag of tricks?” Micaiah asked. “I mean, you had all this other stuff. I don’t—”

“No!” Petal shouted. “Pilate kept me on a schedule because I liked it too much. I’m late for it now. I’m sick, Johnson, so sick.”

Wren shouldered on her ivory-colored shirt and moved over to me. She didn’t button up her shirt, and I found myself looking at her belly button. Ugh.

“I’m fixed, but how bad are you hurt, Cavvy?” she asked in a cloud of booze-breath.

“Not too bad,” I lied.

“Don’t believe that,” Wren said. “Funny, but we’re all bleeding except your boy. He’s quite the Prince Charming, letting a bunch of girls save his skinny ass, and then keeping secrets from us.” She sat with her back to the window. She took her whiskey bottle and splashed some on some extra bandages, then pushed them against her head.

I paced. “Please. We need to go.” My head was still going a million kilometers an hour.

“Hold up, Cavvy.” Wren said quietly. “Let’s get Petal taken care of first.”

It was hard to stay still, but I watched as my boy helped Petal.

First he laid her down next to Pilate on the floor. Then he took his coat, rolled it up, and put it under Petal’s head. He then went to her leg, slashed up by shrapnel.

“I don’t care about my leg,” Petal said. “I need my medicine. How are you going to help me without my medicine?”

“I’m going to nurse the nurse,” Micaiah said and ripped open a package of antibacterial wipes. He gently cleaned the wound.

“I wasn’t a nurse,” Petal murmured. “I was Dr. Rose Wilson, MD. I was a field surgeon. I didn’t want to go to the Sino. I hated the war. I protested it. I occupied Washington DC, in fact. No more war. No more war.”

The Sino really had turned her from a doctor into a sniper. Like it had turned Pilate into whatever he was. I crossed to the window to look out, but I couldn’t see anything. Maybe the other soldiers were taking cover. The storm seemed bad enough to drive even inhuman zombie women to seek shelter.

Micaiah continued to carefully, mercifully, tend to Petal’s wounds. “Yeah, the Sino was bad news. If you were so against it, how come you went?”

Petal sighed a little. “In the end, everyone went. The draft. Everyone I knew died. Everyone except for Pilate. I had to become a sniper. I had to. It all changed in the Hutongs.”

The Battle of the Hutongs in Beijing. It was both a Gettysburg and an Iwo Jima. The body count and bloodshed made both of them battles look like schoolyard scuffles.

Petal’s face changed. Each word became more agonized. The minute she said that word, Hutongs, she started to weep. “My medicine. I need my medicine. I can’t talk about it. I can’t get to the other side. Pilate said there wasn’t another side for people like us. Don’t make me talk about it. I’ll die. I’ll die, it hurts so bad.”

Micaiah shushed her gently. “No, Petal, we’re not going to talk about the Hutongs. We’ll talk about me. You know, I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.”

I listened carefully. Micaiah was talking about his past.

“I guess it made sense,” he said. “I was around all these doctors and scientists all the time, watching them. The human body is amazing, a miracle. Even more fascinating? The mind, our logic, our emotions.”

Micaiah gently applied instant sutures, all the while talking and soothing her. She was relaxing, but she could mutate into a demonic harpy at any minute. What was her medicine? And where could we get some more? My sister was right. We had to help Petal before we could run.

The boy picked up her black bag and brought it over to the window, where Wren sat and I stood. We all crouched down so we could whisper.

“How much do you two know about what Pilate’s been giving her?” Micaiah asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“None of my business,” Wren said at first, but then sighed. “You and I both know what her medicine is, Johnson. So cut to the chase. Is there any in there?”

Micaiah rummaged through Petal’s bag of tricks.

“How do you guys know what her medicine is?” I asked. “Or are you both doctors too?”

“Hush, Cavvy,” Wren said, “and you better pray there’s enough for both of you. Once that first round of drugs and your adrenaline wears off, you’re going to be one hurtin’ pup.” When she talked, she kept her hand near her mouth—to hide her mouth now that her pretty smile was gone. It didn’t do much to hide the stink of her drinking though.

“I think I found what we need.” Micaiah pulled out a length of rubber tubing, a syringe still in its plastic, and a vial. “Diacetylmorphinesextus. Otherwise known as Skye6.”

Skye6 was a synthetic morphine, real easy to make, and real cheap. One more miserable thing that the Sino gave to this weary world. I choked in a breath.

If Petal was a Skye6 addict, then Pilate had helped to keep her addicted. The son of a skank.

“How can he do it to her?” I asked. “How can he keep her hooked, and how can she believe it’s medicine and not narcotics?”

Micaiah shook his head sorrowfully. “I don’t know. But sometimes people can make themselves believe crazy things.”

“Yes, they can,” Wren muttered. “And what Petal and Pilate have is complicated. Suffice to say, we’ve seen Petal off her meds, so we’ll give her what she needs.”

Complicated. Like what Pilate and Wren had. Like, me, Micaiah, and Sharlotte. I sighed.

“How much do we give her?” Micaiah asked.

I held out a hand.

He gave me the vial. Words were scrawled across a white label in Sharpie marker—the name of the drug and two-hundred milligrams, a slash, and a twenty milliliters. I shook it in my right hand, my left hanging limp. There wasn’t but a quarter left. “Feels like five milliliters left, which I bet is the dose. Four doses per vial. We got lucky.”

“Dang, Cavvy,” Wren said. “That’s impressive.”

“We have two more vials.” Micaiah loaded up the syringe and removed the air inside like any doctor drama you ever saw. He’d loaded a rig before. Obviously. “Eight doses. When the time comes, Cavvy, I think I’ll try and give you a half-dose. You won’t have Petal’s tolerance.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want that evil drug in me.”

Wren shook the whiskey in her bottle. “I’ll try and save some of this for you, but I can’t promise anything. Hard for me to stop until I see the bottom of the bottle.”

“No whiskey. No drugs. I’ll be fine.”

Wren laughed at that. “Whatever you say, Princess.” Then she shook her head. “You guys are brilliant. Even you, Johnson. And I thought you only had your looks and your viability.”

Micaiah moved away and talked in quiet whispers to Petal. She woke up long enough for him to tie the rubber tube around her arm and to slip a needle into her vein. To dope her up like Pilate had been doing.

I would never forgive Pilate for keeping her so enslaved. Never.

Micaiah moved back. “We need to get out of here.”

“Yes, we do,” I said.

The wind died down, and that was when we all heard the roaring sound in the distance. It’d been a long time since I’d heard such a noise.

Internal combustion engines, a lot of them, coming toward us. Say what you will about diesel engines, but they do have a distinctive sound.

We’d waited too long.

(ii)

Wren buttoned up her shirt, threw on her leather vest, and retrieved an AZ3 from the floor. She snapped back the action. “Cavvy, you run with the boy. Pilate and Petal will be fine here while I take care of the new batch of skanks. I’m going to make them pay for bustin’ out my teeth.”

I’d watched Mama argue with Wren, then Sharlotte, and I’d even tried it myself. It was useless. I couldn’t stand up to Wren, couldn’t fight her, and reasoning with her even in the best of situations was an iffy proposition. Yet I’d have to try. We couldn’t fight the reinforcements coming for the boy. Pilate was down and Petal was nodding.

The time for fighting was over. It was time for thinking. And for engineering. I knew exactly what we needed to do.

I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and spoke in a strong voice. “Fifty meters north of the office complex is a truck with an ASI attachment, prolly the 3.0.3—the very worst release ever to come out of Detroit. Most likely, some salvage monkey got fed up and left it for another vehicle. If I could get the truck up and running, we’d have our getaway.”

Wren immediately listed off everything that was wrong with my plan. Might as well have been talking with Sharlotte. “That’s crazy, Cavvy. We ain’t got time for you to fiddle with no engine. And where would we get the wood? No, you take the horse. I’ll stay and hold them off.”

“Give me ten minutes to see if I can get the truck moving. Might be fine, just abandoned, but I won’t know if I don’t look at it. In the meantime, you get Pilate and Petal ready to move. Micaiah can search for wood.”

Wren cut me off. “Ten minutes? Yeah, we both know that’s twenty minutes in engineer talk. If not an hour. Even if you could get it working, they’ll hear the ASI. Come right for it.”

“With the wind blowing? Over them loud internal combustion engines? Not a chance. Come on, Wren. You can’t fight ’em all.”

She looked me dead in the eye. “I’ve spent my whole life looking for a fight I can’t win. Why do you think I came on this cattle drive?”

“Don’t kill us in the process. When it was time for fighting, you fought. You saved us. Now it’s time to run. Let me be the hero. Let me save us.”

“Save us?” Wren smirked. “You couldn’t save me not an hour ago. You didn’t take the shot. Again. Seems to me you ain’t much of a hero.”

“Maybe not with a gun,” I said. I felt the heat in my face, ashamed, and I had to look away. I couldn’t fight her, but maybe she’d take pity on me.

Micaiah shuffled a bit. Petal sighed. The wind sighed with her. With it blowing, we couldn’t hear the diesel engines.

“Okay, Cavvy,” Wren said. “I’m giving you ten minutes, not a second more. I’ll gather up the troops. You get going, Princess.”

“Not princess. Engineer,” I said with a nervous smile. I scooped up Tina Machinegun and sped out of the room.

The snow dropped down in swirling walls of white and cold and I thought about Petal’s rhyme. The sky was falling, Chicken Little, but I wasn’t going to let the world end.

I kicked my way through thirty centimeters of snow and got to the truck, a Ford Excelsior, with fat, deep-treaded snow tires. Lucky us. Thank God, His Son, and all the angels and saints in Heaven for the blizzard. It would hide our escape.

But what about Sharlotte and our headcount? Would they survive the storm? Or had the soldiers in the vehicles already found them and killed them all? Couldn’t think about that.

Couldn’t think about Sharlotte at all right then.

(iii)

I opened the driver’s side door and a skeleton in rags tumbled out causing me to curse and shiver. Didn’t calm my racing brain any. My thoughts were like skipped stones across a stormy pond.

Maybe the engine was just fine, I reasoned, and the poor salvage monkey just got unlucky. No time to check for cause of death.

I stepped over the bones and set Tina Machinegun on the passenger seat. The Ford was junked up, pipes and debris scattered around. Had the dead salvager been killed while trying to fix the thing? Seemed like it. Even if there was something seriously wrong, all I needed was steering and propulsion. I turned the steering wheel. The over-sized tires twisted in the snow.

The wind whistled like the Devil in church. After a mighty gust, it died down enough for me to hear the diesel engines again. How far away? Impossible to tell. The wind might be carrying the sound.

Dry kindling, split logs, and round trunks of wood lay heaped in the back of the cab. Greasy, disintegrating rags filled the cracks. We had fuel for the engine. Thank God.

I rushed out and around to the bed and swept snow off the ASI attachment. I could check components later. I needed a fire. I was a little afraid even with the wind blowing, the oncoming soldiers might see the smoke. Then again, God hid heroes in the Bible all the time.

Running to the cab, I threw open the back suicide door, grabbed the oily rags and saw a box of FireForge on the floor. The red lettering of the box promised “a quick fire, hot and immediate!” Better still, they had a bottle of Fast Boil. I still remembered the song the traveling saleswoman had sung to us.

In a hurry?

Don’t toil!

Use Fast Boil.

It never spoils!

I was going to put that last part to the test. I grabbed an armload of supplies and sped back to the bed and plunked down the packages. First the FireForge. I ripped it open and fluffed the ultra-flammable material. I snatched a waterproof match out of my pocket and lit it up.