Chapter 10

For three days, he languished in a fever. When it broke on the afternoon of the fourth, it was only by how much better he felt that Ghoul knew how bad he had really been.

They were back at the ranch house where it had all begun. Ghoul was glad to see it again; the gutted and decaying rooms gave him a sense of security.

By evening, he felt well enough to get up. It was only then that he could take a full accounting of his injuries. His head barely gave him any trouble at all. Just a little concussion, Ray told him with confidence. Nothing to worry about. There wasn't a fracture, at least they were pretty sure there wasn't.

It was his hands that had worried them the most. The wire they had used to bind his wrists probably hadn't been too clean, and it had dug in deep, flaying Ghoul's wrists down to the raw muscle underneath.

"But it doesn't hurt," Ghoul objected. He looked down at his hands. The clean white gauze wrapped around his wrists was a profound mercy. He didn't want to see what was underneath it.

"That's because you're full of Percocet," Ray said. "Absolutely stoned out of your mind."

Ghoul laughed, but Ray had fallen curiously silent. All at once, he began to speak again, very quickly, as if in anticipation of a question that Ghoul had not even thought to ask.

"It belonged to my wife. They prescribed it to her after she dropped a picture frame on her foot and broke her toe, but she didn't like to take it. She never took anything stronger than Aspirin. So the bottle stayed in the medicine cabinet for years, until I found it again. And I held onto it, because I thought there might be enough, if I took it all at once…"

He didn't finish. Ghoul acted as if he had not said anything at all.

"Thanks for letting me have some."

Ray shrugged. "You sure got lucky, kid."

"Yeah, I know." Ghoul had never liked being called "kid" or "son" or any of those stupid diminutives, but this time he didn't complain. He knew it had come from a place of profound concern.

"Anyway," Ray said. "Poison's out on the porch. Do you feel up to seeing him?"

"Sure," Ghoul replied. "Why wouldn't I?"

He had expected to find Poison smoking when he went out to find him, but Poison was sitting empty-handed, quite still, on the edge of the porch. His boots hung over the edge into the red dust and he was looking out over the darkening desert. Whatever was on his mind, he seemed to forget it when Ghoul stepped outside.

Poison got up to meet him. There was a bruise on his face, purple almost to the point of blackness. His broken nose had gotten straightened out at some point, but it was a little flatter than it had been. Ghoul was surprised he had even noticed, it was such a small change.

As he came closer, Poison extended a hand in a cautious, uncertain gesture. Ghoul took hold of it at once.

"Are you feeling better?"

"Yeah," Ghoul said. He shifted his hold on Poison's hand, as subtly as he could, so that only the tips of their fingers touched. Poison had been gripping him hard, hard enough to hurt. "A lot."

"I'm relieved."

Poison was watching him intently. Ghoul glanced away, looking out over the desert. "Thanks… for coming when you did."

"They left a trail. It wasn't difficult to find you."

"Lucky me," Ghoul said. And then, without any warning at all, he started to cry.

"Stop it," Poison said in alarm. He passed his free hand awkwardly over Ghoul's cheek. "Stop it."

And Ghoul did, with the same artless suddenness with which he had begun. "Sorry. I…"

"I don't know what to do when you do that," Poison said. "When I saw that they had you, then I knew exactly what to do, without even stopping to think about it. But when you do that…"

"You don't have to do anything," Ghoul said. He let Poison's hand fall. "Just fucking murder people when I need you to, I guess."

Poison looked at him curiously. "I would murder anyone you asked me to."

Ghoul laughed, because it seemed too ridiculous not to, but his laughter tasted sour, curdled, in his mouth. "That's okay. I think I'm good for now."

Before Poison could answer, Ghoul leaned in to kiss him. A hitch in his back brought him up short, and he fell back on his heels, warned off any more sudden movements.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Poison said.

"Yeah." Ghoul frowned. "Just pulled a muscle or something. That fucking guy…" He trailed off. An image of the big blond's face had appeared momentarily, half-formed in his mind, and then been replaced just as quickly by a pool of red slime spreading across filthy floorboards.

"Never mind," he said softly.

"You should lay down," Poison said. "We can stay here until you've recovered."

"Maybe we shouldn't have ever left in the first place."

Poison did not reply, but Ghoul didn't know what the hell he had expected him to say.

The next day, the fever had returned.

Poison had been afraid of infection from the first, and he watched Ghoul's hands with wary anxiousness for the first sign that the venom had spread to his blood. They didn't have any antibiotics. Poison knew that Ghoul could lose an arm very easily. If it came to that, he was confident that he would be able to take the limb off without hesitation – he imagined himself doing it quickly, in a single merciful stroke – and he would be able to press a cauterizing brand onto the stump.

Beyond that, he knew, he wouldn't be able to do much good. But he refused to consider, even for a moment, that Ghoul might die.

No, he knew that would not come to pass.

On the second day, the pain in Ghoul's back that he had at first taken for a pulled muscle was much worse. He complained about it in a vague, weak, feverish voice. Poison took notice of this. Ghoul was often irrational, frequently a scold, but he practically never complained about anything.

A secondary hypothesis had begun to take shape in Poison's mind.

When, on the third day, he inspected Ghoul's hands for signs of infection, his fingers were stiff, knotted into fists. They refused to unclench. Poison lingered over this new information for a long time, but in the end decided to say nothing.

Then the fourth day came. Poison tried to force him to take a little water, but the muscles of Ghoul's jaw were so stiff that he could only open his mouth a crack. He had trouble keeping down what little liquid Poison could get into him. Poison crushed one of the painkillers into a powder and made Ghoul swallow it. That seemed to help a little, but even the painkillers were starting to run dangerously low.

"You should have been a nurse," Ray said, when Poison found him out behind the house.

Poison's expression did not waver. "An infection of Clostridium tetani."

"What?"

"Tetanus."

Ray folded his arms closely over his chest. "You mean, like, he stepped on a rusty nail?"

"No, rust doesn't cause it," Poison said vaguely. All at once, his eyes hardened. "We will need to find a doctor."

"Where?" Ray said. "Battery City?"

"No. That place is closed to us. So we will have to go to another city. I suppose… doctors are general in all cities?"

He looked to Ray for confirmation. Poison had never been out of Battery City in his life, and he had grown up being told that outside the protective buffer of the Zones there were nothing but refuges of barbarism and crime and terror. But there was always the possibility that, too, had been a lie.

"Sure," Ray said. "Not as good as the Battery doctors, but—"

"No, of course, not nearly as good. But it is treated easily enough."

"So what? You want to head through the Firebreak? It'll be tough without him to help us."

"No," Poison said slowly. "I don't want to do that. But perhaps we could go south."

"You mean across the border? That's even chancier than the Zones."

"We can hire one of the criminal guides. I know that they exist. My father—" He shut his mouth so hard that his teeth made an audible click. "I read about them somewhere."

"How are we going to hire a guide?" Ray said. "They don't come cheap."

"We have your car," Poison said. "And if that is not enough then I will negotiate with them. But Ghoul wouldn't like it if I did that, so we ought to at least try to sell the car first. I know where we will go. You'll drive; I'll navigate. "

"I thought you liked the car…" Ray sighed. He liked the car very much. Maybe he liked it even more than he liked Ghoul, but he knew not to say that out loud.

Poison ignored him. He felt much better now that they had a plan, a course of action, a goal to strive for. He was once more the undisputed master of the situation. Of every situation. And he held sway over everything, even life and death. Even in the wasteland.