(fic) Anything to Thin the Blood (in progress!)

[etherati]

A random prompt on Tumblr asked for Minutemen zombies; I wrote the promised vignette but there seems to have been interest for more? So I started writing more, and wow, I am having so much fun. But I'd like to keep this informal, so, see the comment section below for pieces of this as I finish them!

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part 4

[etherati]

*

God damn it but this is hard.

“I’m not saying we’re giving up. I’m willing to keep trying for as long as we can, until he’s either better, or...”

“Or dead.”

“Bill,” Hollis says again, careful, “he’s been dead since you and Ursula brought him in here. You do understand that, right?”

Bill scrubs his hands up his face, digging fingers in hard. “Kind of. I’m still having trouble getting my head around all of this. I know he died, I was there, but...”

“It’s... pretty complicated.”

“Too complicated for a dumb farm boy like me.”

“I wouldn’t--”

“No,” Bill says, lifting his eyes above the line of his hands. They’re red-rimmed, hollow. “It’s actually really simple, isn’t it? He’s like them. Outside.”

Hollis doesn’t respond for a while; he picks at the seam on one arm of the chair just for something to do with his hands. There’s a thread hanging free, and when he pulls on it the seam starts unravelling, all the pressure of stuffing inside pushing out on it, making it bulge.

He sighs, pushing the stuffing back in with his thumb. “I know you two are close. I just don’t want you unprepared for what might happen, here.”

“He’s the best friend I’ve ever had. God, that sounds so stupid.”

“Not from where I’m sitting.”

“Just these... cliche things, like, how could he do this? How can this be happening? I keep trying to wake up, like an idiot, like if I just keep trying...”

He trails off, thick hands masking his face completely. He’s been shaking, just a slight, constant baseline shudder, for the last thirty-two hours. Hollis isn’t sure he’s aware of it. It makes him think, suddenly, of Nicky Bukowski from work, the day he’d found out his wife Marcia had drowned. It’s that same terrifying depth of sorrow.

And they all know, even if he’s never said--

“Go ahead and tell me if this is out of line,” Hollis says, teasing at the thread again. “Because it probably is. But were you two ever, ah...”

He looks up as he trails off; Bill’s face is a picture of confusion. Then he seems to get it.

“Oh, uh,” he says, looking away. “No, I mean. I think he might have wanted that? But I’m, I’m not--”

Hollis nods vaguely. It doesn’t matter, he wants to say, I just wanted to know how much of a mess you’re going to be, but he can see the answer in front of him: an awful one. It doesn’t need to have been like that.

“Sometimes I wish I...” Bill says, then resettles himself in the chair, restless. He ends up leaning forward over his knees, reaching one hand out as if to touch the edge of the table. It’s all just useless, wasted motion. “I’ve always just wanted him to be happy. Now...”

Now nothing. Now it’s done.

Hollis sighs; gets up to re-wet one of the rags, arrange it across Byron’s throat where the fever is worst, heat rising from rent skin. It’s hard to get it where it needs to be, with all of the rope lashing him down.

Then a rustling from the next room, and Sally leans her head in, one hand on the doorframe like she’d had to stop from a dead run. She’s a little breathless.

“Bill, honey?” she says, all cautious gentleness. “On the radio. You’ll want to hear this.”

*