“Huh?” I said numbly. Was this what shock felt like? I could feel myself growing cold. I didn’t have her luxury; my arm was hurting like crazy. It was the worst pain I’d ever had in my life. Except for the pain in my heart I was feeling right now.
“I have to look at your gunshot,” she said, opening the first aid kit. “We have to clean the wound.”
I stared at her stupidly as she opened the top of the pill bottle and dry-swallowed a half dozen pills. “What are those?” I asked.
“They’re antibiotics. I think.” Her mouth quavered. She was trying her best to hold it back for me, but I could tell that she wouldn’t make it too much longer. “It’s all I can think of. Maybe it will stave off the infection. I hope.”
“It will,” I said, trying to put an inflection of hope in my dead voice. “It has to.”
She smiled wanly at me and said softly, “Take off your shirt.”
I gave her a confused look and she laughed at me, “I need to check your arm, silly.”
“Oh,” I said sheepishly.
I did my best to get out of the shirt but she ended up having to help me in the end. The wound on my arm was burning and every movement seemed to stretch the skin in all kinds of fun and interesting ways. I was sweating by the time we had it all the way off. She winced when she saw the open wound and I couldn’t help but look at it myself. It looked ugly. The bullet had passed right through, but on the way it had sheared off a section of skin with it. If I managed to survive I’d have a real wicked scar.
Blood seeped slowly out of the hole and I could see light passing through my arm. I tried to hold it up by my face to get a closer look but that just made me hiss in pain and drop it back down. Beads of sweat popped up on my face. Fannie Mae pulled some things out of the first aid kit and set them neatly in a row next to her. Her face scrunched in concentration and her tongue popped out between her lips. If the situation wasn’t so abysmally awful I would have kissed her. She looked so cute.
She held up a roll of gauze and unscrewed the cap on a brown bottle. It looked like peroxide. She put the gauze over the hole and upended the bottle over it, soaking it into the gauze. When she was done she held the bottle out to me. “This is peroxide. This is gonna hurt, Dukey.”
I nodded at her. “Just get it over with.”
She grabbed my hand firmly with her free one and then placed the wet gauze on my arm. My mouth opened wide and I could feel the tendons in my neck stretching taut as I tried to hold in my scream. No need to let the zombies know where we were. I could feel the skin on my body go through various degrees of hot and cold and honestly came about an inch shy of taking a crap in my pants. The pain was that intense. After some interminable time that felt like a million years but was probably no more than 30 seconds the pain finally began to ebb. I breathed in deeply, trying to will the pain away from me and telling myself that I could feel nothing.
That must have been what Fannie Mae was waiting for because she finally took the gauze away from my arm. The wetness of it had mixed with my blood and it looked pink in the dim light. I tried to smile at her. “Thanks, Fannie Mae.”
She shook her head at me. “Don’t thank me yet. I still have to do the other side.”
I felt my stomach do flip-flops and my mouth dried up. “Okay, then.”
She sighed and repeated the whole process with a new piece of gauze. If anything this time it hurt worse. It was like I could feel every drop of the peroxide interacting with my nerves and each pop and sizzle they made sent a current of pain into my brain. I might have let out a couple little drops of pee. Just a couple, mind you.
She finally peeled the gauze away, but the pain never really subsided. It felt like I was going to be sick. I could feel the bile rising in my throat but I managed to keep it down. Barely. But I could taste every scrap of food I’d had in the last couple days and when I burped the taste of it all came back. It didn’t taste very good.
Fannie Mae squeezed a tube of antiseptic all over the holes and then finally wrapped my arm in gauze and taped it over. When we were done she handed my shirt back to me silently.
“Thanks, Fannie Mae. Let’s do your bite now.”
She laughed bitterly. It hurt my heart to hear that sound come out of her mouth. “There’s no point in doing mine, Dukey. You know that.”
“Hey,” I said, grabbing her arm and making her look me in the eyes. “Don’t talk like that. There’s still a chance. We, we can, um, clean it up. You took the antibiotic and if we clean the wound we can clear the infection.”
“Dukey,” she said solemnly, “don’t be stupid. You and I both know that the only way we could have cleared me of this would have been to cut my arm off the second I got bitten. That would have maybe been enough to stop this, but it’s way too late now. I can,” she paused, “almost feel the virus coursing through my body. It’s filling up my blood and everywhere it goes my body is going numb.”
She stopped and wiggled her fingers at me. “I can’t feel my hands anymore, Dukey. It’s like they’re someone else’s hands and I’m just controlling them like a puppet master. I can already not feel my thighs and if I got up to walk right now I think I’d be stumbling around here like a zombie already.”
I could feel the tears coursing down my cheeks. I didn’t even know I was crying until they fell silently into my lap. The pain in my arm paled in comparison to the pain I was feeling in my heart right now. It was like nothing else existed but me and her. I didn’t give a crap about the zombies outside the door anymore.
“Kiss me, Duke,” she said, closing the distance between us to a few inches. “Kiss me some more before my lips go numb and I can no longer feel you. I want to feel you, Duke. I want to feel everything,” she whispered.
So that’s what we proceeded to do. I sat on the edge of the couch and she kneeled before me, our faces at the same level. I put my arms around her waist, wincing with the pain of it, and she put her arms around my neck. I drew her in and we kissed like there was no tomorrow. I guess there really wasn’t.
Her lips were soft and dry, the skin brittle to the touch. Her tongue danced in my mouth and intertwined with mine. We didn’t do anything else but that. We kissed and held each other and it wasn’t enough. Dammit, it wasn’t enough. I can still feel her lips on mine and her forehead on mine and her arms holding my neck tightly. It was never enough.
