“Don’t give up on her, Carly. You’re the only person she’s even talking to anymore.”
“I have Vera and Danny… I can’t keep devoting twenty-four hours of the day to making sure she doesn’t slit her wrists.”
He gave her an alarmed look. “Are you saying she might do that?”
“I don’t know, Will.” She let out a heavy sigh. “It’s hard to know what’s going on with her when she won’t talk to me. I mean, really talk to me.”
Carly looked tired, the teenage girl from Houston almost completely gone now, replaced by a woman. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Carly had always been a woman. He just never noticed.
“It’s not the same Kate we left Houston with,” Carly said. “You know that, right? Losing Ted and Luke, but especially Luke… I don’t know, Will, I think we might have lost her back at the bank.”
He nodded. He saw Kate change that night, when the ghouls poured into the bank. The way she stood in the middle of the room, disoriented and confused. Ted’s death had paralyzed her, and Luke’s death crushed her spirit.
“Have you eaten yet?” he asked Carly.
She gave him a wry smile. “How’s the food?”
“It’s great.”
“Really?”
“It kind of tastes like day-old bread and newspaper. Cheap newspaper that’s been used to wrap week-old fish.”
“Yum,” Carly said.
The conversation with Carly about Kate bothered Will and lingered with him for the next few days. It took Lara and that undead hand of hers to break the spell.
“You got a minute?” she asked him through his radio.
Ben had assigned them all radios to keep in contact, though not everyone made use of them. Kate had one, too, but he didn’t think she ever actually turned it on.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I have something I want to show you.”
“Where?”
“Infirmary.”
“I’m on my way.”
When he got to the Infirmary, he found her at an examining table looking at the ghoul hand. Or at least, what was left of it. He knocked on the door to announce himself.
She smiled at him over her shoulder. “Thanks for coming.”
“Sure.”
He hadn’t realized how blue her eyes were — crystal blue — and how well they complemented the shape of her face. Was she always this attractive? For some reason he hadn’t noticed she was no longer the girl from the Sundays’ cabin, in the filthy dress, with the wild, terrified eyes.
He forced himself not to stare. “What’s up?”
Lara had dissected the hand into little chunks, with all five fingers sliced off at the second joint. The hand itself was tied onto a wooden block with a rope around what was left of the wrist and fingers. As he approached it, the remainder of the hand moved slightly underneath the rope.
“Aw geez,” Will said, looking down at the thing.
Lara had sliced the hand open then sewed it back up numerous times, so that sewing thread crisscrossed the hand from end to end. It still looked lively, straining against the restraints as if sensing his presence.
“Jesus, Lara, should I be worried?”
“I told you, I wanted to do some tests. So I’ve been doing some tests. Don’t worry, it doesn’t seem to mind regardless of how many times I cut it up and sew it back together. It just keeps on ticking like the Energizer Bunny.”
“You’ve been doing this by yourself?” he asked, alarmed.
“Of course not,” she said, looking slightly annoyed. “We agreed, remember? I always had someone here with me whenever I worked on it. Danny, Carly, Ben, some of the other guys.”
“What did Ben have to say about this?”
“He was…squeamish about it at first. But he got over it. Mostly.”
She looked at home here, surrounded by patient beds and medicine, wearing the white doctor’s coat. The handful of times he had seen her over the last three months involved follow-up visits to treat the burns on his hands and evening meals in the Cafeteria. She was always busy, Ben’s people eagerly embracing her as their doctor, third-year medical student qualifications or not. As Ben said at one point, her three years were still three years more than all of them had combined.
“So, I’m here,” he said. “What did you want to show me?”
“Watch this.”
She picked up a scalpel and stabbed it into one of the fingers lying motionless on the wooden board, then held it up to him like some kind of trophy.
“Well, that’s never happened before,” he said.
“What?”
“We haven’t done anything yet, and you’re already giving me the finger.”
She rolled her eyes. “Cute.”
He grinned, pleased with himself. “I thought so.”
She ignored him and pushed on. “What’s the difference between this finger and this hand?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“At least think about it, Will.”
He did. “The hand is still alive?”
“Exactly. But this finger was still alive, too, until it wasn’t anymore. You know why it died? I mean, died again? Blood.”
“Blood?”
“After I cut it off at the hand, it still had blood, but eventually, with the open wound, it bled out. Once it bled out…once the blood left the finger, it died. Again. Do you see?”
“Not really. People can’t survive without blood either, Lara. What’s your point?”
“That’s true. But your hand wouldn’t still be moving if I cut it off. In fact, it would instantly become just a lump of meat sans the rest of your body. But this thing”—she looked back at the hand roped against the board—“continued to survive. Thrived, even.”
“Then why didn’t the fingers live? I mean, not live, but not die. Whatever. You know what I mean.”
She smiled. “I know what you mean. It’s the blood. With enough blood, pieces of the ghoul can keep surviving. Deny it blood, and it shrinks and ceases to be.”
She put the scalpel down, then picked up another one. She held it to her palm and made a small incision.
Will almost tackled her, but she quickly held up her other hand, “Wait, watch.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Just watch for a sec.”
She held her left palm over the ghoul finger she had stabbed with the first scalpel. She squeezed her palm, putting pressure near the small incision, and a drop of blood fell and landed on the side of the finger. The blood seemed to move along the length of the finger before it was absorbed into the skin.
“Oh, man,” Will groaned.
“Watch what happens next,” she said, shushing him.
The finger on the board started to move. A small twitch at first, but then it became more active and was moving against the scalpel holding it down. She quickly grabbed the scalpel and lifted it into the air. The finger continued wiggling against the sharp point, trying to escape.
He could only stare, unable to find any words.
“Do you see?” she said. “It’s only alive as long as it has fresh blood to sustain it. Blood reanimates it, Will. But you take it out again…”
She held the finger so that the severed end faced the board, and thin trickles of blood began dripping out. The blood wasn’t red anymore — it was a thick, clumpy black ooze, the kind that poured out of ghouls when they bled.
After a dozen of the black drops had left it, the finger stopped moving, then went still.
“That’s disgusting,” he said. “But what does it mean?”
“They change us at cellular level, Will. We’re talking DNA. They’re literally rewriting our DNA. They take what we are, infect us with their own blood, make us into something else. Them. This…is nothing like I’ve ever seen before. It’s like some kind of super virus. But whatever changes they make, it destroys the body’s ability to replenish blood, so they need a constant supply once they’ve used up what they have — or acquired, for lack of a better word. Once they’re out of blood, they’re dead. Or, you know, dead again, again.”