Chapter 114: The Long Road to Novamed

The rain drummed heavily against the thin sheet metal of the sedan's roof, sending soft vibrations down into the door panels.

Florence shifted in the seat beside Dion, her hands coming out and reaching for him before he could pull the hem of his top down over his waist.

"Hold still, Dion. Let me see your injuries," she said, her voice sharp enough to stop his arm mid-motion.

"I'm fine," Dion muttered, pressing his back harder against the passenger door.

"You are not at all okay. You've got blood everywhere. Now sit still and let me see," Florence said, her brows furrowing harshly, reaching straight over to tug the torn fabric away from his skin. "We have to clean them out at least to whatever best we can, and give you something for the pain, otherwise, you'll be useless to all of us ."

Dion gritted his teeth as her cold fingers brushed the edge of the raw flesh.

'... I guess I knew this would be coming.' He sighed to himself internally.

The finger-thick quills from the beast's tail had ripped clean through the heavy fabric of his trousers during the brawl, dragging jagged, hot lines deep into his muscle.

Florence leaned closer under the weak amber glow of the dashboard lights, her brows drawing together.

"How..." She muttered looking at the injuries.

The bleeding had already stopped completely.

Where gaping tears in his muscle ought to have been oozing dark crimson, the raw edges were already pulling together, sealed over by a thin layer of pale red tissue.

"This shouldn't be closing like this," Florence murmured, her fingers hovering a fraction of an inch above his hip without making contact. "A tear this deep needs proper stitches, a saline flush, and heavy antibiotics. And yet... It's already sealing itself."

As she said so from the corner of his eye he saw how the two at the front glanced back at them in the mirror.

Dion pulled what was left of his top back down over his waist, keeping his face completely neutral.

"It's a passive attribute I got form my class," Dion said flatly. "I have a heightened regeneration."

Florence looked at him for a long, silent moment, her eyes narrowing a little. After what had happened back in that room, a part of her believed that there could be more to what he was saying and what he might have still been hiding.

But she didn't press him for anything more.

To her other side, Julian leaned forward over her lap, squeezing his chewed stuffed bear against his chest.

"Does the class make the pain go away too?" Julian asked softly, his small voice brushing through the hum of the heater.

Dion turned his head slightly to look back at the boy, offering a faint, tired nod.

"Eventually," Dion said. "It just takes a bit of time."

Julian looked down at his bear, patting its worn head before settling back against the rear bench. "See, I told you bro Dion is super cool, Einstein. The bad skunk wasn't going to beat him."

Dion gave a faint smile, glancing back to Florence.

Florence let out a slow, breathy sigh, turning her attention back toward the streaming windscreen.

"Well," she said quietly, "at least I don't have to waste our limited medication on you."

Basil kept his hands firm on the wheel, guiding the sedan slow through the flooded avenue while the wipers slapped their steady rhythm across the glass as they travelled in silence long way after that.

"Don't stop on this street," Florence said, pointing her slim finger toward a dark side road clogged with abandoned vehicles. "There's a produce market two blocks down and the wooden stalls collapsed straight into the roadway. Take the next left past the laundromat. That road stays three lanes wide all the way to the main interchange."

Outside the fogged windows, this sector of the city looked noticeably worse than the district they had left behind.

The standing dead were far more numerous along these pavements.

They stood scattered across the concrete with their pale faces tilted straight up into the falling rain, completely unmoving until the car drew near.

Dion watched one of them track the sedan's progress from half a block away, its head pivoting on its neck with a smooth, deliberate motion.

Earlier that morning, a zombie wouldn't have bothered turning its head until an engine passed within five meters of its ears.

'Their senses are getting more powerful...' Dion silently thought to himself.

Dion kept the observation quiet, seeing no value in giving the others another reason to panic. There was already more than enough they had to worry about.

Florence broke the heavy silence that had settled inside the cabin since leaving the pharmacy group behind.

"Your son," Florence said softly, her eyes still watching the road ahead. "Is he at Novamed, or somewhere near the area?"

Basil didn't answer right away.

His right hand remained clamped over the steering wheel.

The steady patter of rain on the roof filled the long pause between them.

"He's at the hospital, if he's anywhere," Basil said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register. "He works night shifts in the emergency wing. It's an internship through his nursing program's third year. He was on shift when the city went under. The last text message I got from him came from the ward at half past two in the morning."

"He's a nurse?" Florence asked in confirmation, her tone shifting slightly with interest, and some melancholy.

"Training to be one, yeah." Basil corrected, a brief, tight tremor moving through his jaw. "He turned nineteen back in March."

A quiet, dry breath escaped his chest, sounding like a laugh that had failed to fully form.

"He's about a year older than that one," Basil added, tipping his chin toward Paris.

Paris sat in the back seat beside Julian, his iron pipe resting across his knees while he looked down at his scarred knuckles without saying a word.

"I managed the finances for a logistics firm for twenty-two years," Basil said, the words coming smoother now.

It sounded as if the man had been holding the story in his chest for days, waiting for someone to ask.

"Jacob grew up watching me bring stacks of accounting paper home to the kitchen table every weekend. I had it fixed in my head that he'd walk down the exact path I had and have a stable desk job. I even used an old client connection to get a spot lined up for him the summer he finished school, a proper little desk in a proper little office. But..."

Basil gave a slight laugh that interrupted him.

"He only lasted working there for nine days. He came home on the tenth afternoon and told me he wasn't going back, that he couldn't spend his entire life counting other people's money. He wanted work where somebody was better off at the end of the day simply because he'd been in the room."

"So he chose night shifts..." Florence said quietly. That nighttime was, unfortunately, the time when, relatively, more grievous injuries demanded attention from hospitals, so she understood it all too well.

Basil agreed with a nod, staring out through the streaked windscreen, his expression hardened under the dim dashboard light.

"I told him he was throwing away all the favour of the nepotistic future I had lined up because I had been upsted those years ago. We didn't speak a proper word to each other for most of the month after." He spoke fondly of the memory.

Florence leaned back slowly against her seat.

Dion watched her in the side mirror as she tucked the emotions he could hear in her heart neatly away.

"The emergency wards have storage rooms that lock from the inside," Florence said, her voice remaining perfectly steady. "The nursing interns all know where they are. Every single one of them has hidden in those rooms at some point to catch two hours of sleep."

"...Thank you," Basil said softly.

Dion shifted his gaze back to the grey streets outside.

Eventually, two streets short of the highway junction, Basil pressed his foot onto the brake pedal, bringing the sedan to a gentle halt.

Nobody inside the car needed to ask why they had stopped.

The roadway ahead had been completely blocked.

A twelve-story commercial office block on the north side of the avenue had collapsed straight down into the street.

Whether the structural failure had occurred on the initial night or during the torrential rain since, the entire facade lay across the asphalt in a massive slope of shattered concrete, twisted rebar, and jagged glass.

The rubble pile rose shoulder-high at its lowest point, with the crushed metal roofs of buried sedans poking out through the debris like broken teeth.

Rainwater poured off the concrete slope in dozens of muddy streams, washing into the clogged storm drains below.

Beyond the massive pile of rubble, through the wide gap where the building used to stand, there was only a wall of grey fog and falling water.

"Well... shit. Of all things, a building collapsed in the middle of the road?" Paris muttered.

"We just have to go around then," Dion said, his jaw briefly tensing.