Read Online Honey to Soothe the Itch by Kris Austen Radcliffe - Free Book Online Page B

to cross over northern Europe.  The group fights, the zombies amassing, but without Jeffries they will be dead as soon as their ammo runs out.  Randall, doing his damnedest not to send the sensory feedback of his knotted guts and need to scream, sent his remaining fighter jet and a cargo helicopter from London, praying he’d get at least a few out alive. 
    Now we wait and I sit here in my dark room, technically alone but feeling my stomach churn because there are people we need to save.  And I can’t.  I can’t save Jeffries’ group and I can’t save myself, so I try not to scratch open the welt on my arm.
    Yesterday, m y hunters brought in another family—a mother with a ten-year-old girl and a teenaged boy she found after the world ended.  The boy’s jittery and my nurse, Amanda, thinks he’s going to go over, but his immune system is still keeping it under control.  She’s checking him for antibodies, and if it’s true, it’s only a matter of time.  But until it happens, he’s with us, and he can work. 
    The mother’s got programming skills.  Tony put her to work as soon as they walked through the fence. 
    The girl sits in the corner behind her mother, rocking back and forth.  She won’t let anyone touch her, not even Amanda.
    On the net, Lin-We reported a break in the cloud deck over Brisbane.  The sun shines in Australia, even as we watch Jefferies vanish.
    Just under two hundred thousand free humans remain, spread out over the globe.  It’s enough—they could come back from this.  But fifteen implanted might not be enough to guide them through the end of the world.
    And it might not be enough to hold them together.
    It will be fourteen, soon.  Another lesion opened on my calf when we lost Jefferies.  I don’t pull up my dirty jeans to look at it, but it’s itching in that deep, cracking way.  Amanda would see if I looked, and she’d make me lie down.  I’ve tried to tell her lying down doesn’t do squat but she’s a nurse and she knows best. 
    A flash drops into my head —Randall got fifteen out.  The relief of exhausted adrenalin floods my systems.  I’m suddenly too tired to scratch my itches, but I can’t rest.  He lost two of his own.  Six of the rescued have programming skills.  One was a young woman with pre-implants. 
    He’s hopef ul, but he needs to fly them out.
    The door cracks and light floods my little room.  Real light, diffuse and dull from filtering through the fractal clouds, but it comes from a real sun in a physical world.  Motion sickness sets in, partly from the jarring use of my eyes and partly from Randall’s exhaustion, and I lift my hand to shield my face.
    Amanda steps in.
    She’s this perky thing, tall and thin but she stands up straight and wears her soul like a huge, silly hat meant to scream support for the home team she won’t let the end of the world crush.  I suspect she used to keep her hair in a nice-but-utilitarian cut, one that said I’m friendly but I’m your nurse so shut up.  Now, it’s a mass of ordinary curls pulled back and tied with a piece of twine.
    She’s the only thing keeping me alive.
    “I brought broth.”  Amanda walks across the squeaky floor, carefully staying within the shaft of light thrown into the room by the sun outside.  “You need to eat.”
    I nod and take the bowl, knowing full well that the new family needed the food, too.  And that I needed extra, to power my revved metabolism.  Have to power the implants somehow.
    I told her to just give me candy bars, but the hunters cleared out all the stores and warehouses a month ago.  Now I eat like the rest of them—broth from the bones of the few deer and rabbits they manage to catch, and the flat bread Amanda figured out how to make from stale flour. 
    At this point, I don’t think I could keep down anything other than broth and a little bread, anyway.  Cancer’s a cruel bitch. 
    I taste the broth.  It’s got a sting to it—someone must