Meager Existance | Day ??? After Virus Release|

Lex

Don’t slip between my hands. Not now. Not again, will I fail someone in my inadequate hold. My worries, all of them, tear my heart as I reach her and feel her grow colder with a pulse, struggling to even be sluggish. I take a better look at the girl in between my arms. She’s exhausted and fighting with agony balanced with a strange calmness in her face.

No, focus on the deathly situation. The zombie’s arm struck through her middle region is frightening. Currently, it is acting as a stoppage to rapid bleeding. If I remove it uncarefully, then the smudges of sticky blood in that area will be just the start. If I fail to remove this appendage, however, she will grow infected and risk unmitigated internal damage. Act now. I stifle the cry that I want to unleash out from my chest. With blurry vision and wet eyes, I lift her up. Here. She touches the elevated surface softly. I lay a blanket to the side and carry her on top of the cloth. Taking out a surgery textbook and my metal tools, it is time to be the surgeon I’ve never trained to be.

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I feel a tinge of warmth trickling throughout the form of my left arm. This shouldn’t be happening. How many days since … I should have.

I see the insides of our temporary lab in the city from the top of this metal table. How is it I am here? Shaking off my blankets I turn to my left side. I can see more of my surroundings than I used to? So strange. I trace the exterior inwards to a tied bandage around my shoulder joint and the absence of my arm from there. What about my stomach? I look down and caress a purposeful network of bandages and patched flesh with a convenient absence of a morbid severed off zombie arm. It hurts like hell to get up off the table and stay awake. I spot Lex sleeping on a table tangled in his arms. I notice his eyes are tempered by pitch-black shadows. Next to him are maintained surgery supplies and an open surgery textbook with crimson red tainting the pages. It must be one of the textbooks he brought to read. Did he predict something like this would happen? Reading through I retrace the motions of how he learned to do surgery in a dire state. The pages for my condition are well-referenced with one-line notes.

I finally realize the fighting is over. And so everything is quiet. Among the silence, there is the still state of our generators. I look at the fuel meters closely and the power systems repeatedly. I bite my tongue. Our enemies have won today. I mend my hand into a solid shape driving it on my forehead. Not only did Lex gambit scarce time on my impossible recovery when the world needed him, but he let our research stations waste away by failing to deliver power. With no communication or support in this isolated city, there is no chance of starting or continuing our research. Overwhelmed and physically sick, I bring myself to a box next to the window and stare at the dimming moon from the second floor of the fortified building.