Norris and the Plague Doctors (incomplete) (Patreon)

  I posted part of this as an Inktober ficlet, but I never got around to posting all of the Inktober ficlets here, so you may not have seen it before.

Trying to get this done for the 52 Project, but it is going much longer than expected.

The image was drawn by my son Alex.

Mom stirred slightly, moaning. “Come on,” Norris said, shaking her. “Come on, Mom, get up! There’s deaders on their way over here! You gotta get up!”

“Go,” Mom slurred. “Norris… run…”

“No, Mom! You gotta get up!”

Some part of Norris’ mind knew that what he was doing wasn’t going to work, and was incredibly dangerous besides. Mom had gotten bit by a deader last night. They’d cauterized the wound as soon as Norris had blown its head off with the shotgun, but cauterizing deader bites only worked half the time. Mom was cold, and clammy, and speaking slowly, and she wouldn’t get up. He knew, deep down, that she was changing, and therefore she was lost.

But he wouldn’t let himself recognize that part. Mom was all he had. “Mom, come on, let’s get you somewhere safe where you can get better,” he said. “We got some orange juice, we got some vitamins. I think we still got some canned chicken soup, I can heat it up for you.” Deaders didn’t like fire. It was dangerous to overuse fire because it told the deaders where you were, and the moment the fire went out, they’d move in, but if he could just get Mom to a place where they had a lockable door they could put at their back and a position to shoot from, he could start a fire and cook something for her. Campbell’s condensed soup wasn’t the best, you needed to add water to it, but he still had a few water bottles, and high salt diets were supposed to retard the spread of the zombie germs.

“Can’t. You… you… gotta… go.” 

He tried to lift her, but he was an undernourished 10 year old and she was a full-grown woman. He couldn’t get her up, and she wasn’t helping. “Mom! Come on, we gotta get out of here! Wake up!”

Someone’s drone buzzed overhead, but Norris knew better than to think anyone was coming to the rescue. The drones buzzed around all the time. Norris didn’t know if they were from the government or what, but they never meant help was coming.

The deaders down the street were the slow-moving kind, not zoomers, but if Mom wouldn’t get up and move, that wouldn’t make a difference. He could smell their rot on the slight breeze, could hear their groans and grunts. “Mom!”

A black van – full-size, cargo van, not a minivan like the kind Mom used to drive – came down the alley between Norris and his mom’s hiding place, and the deaders. The passenger side window in the front seat rolled down, and Norris saw a black-gloved hand throw something round toward the deaders. Three seconds later there was an explosion. Most of the group of deaders were ripped into pieces. The remaining ones kept shuffling toward the van. Another two grenades later, and they were all gone.

On the other side of the van, the side door slid open and out jumped two… people? Norris wasn’t sure. They had bizarre masks that looked like a cross between a gas mask and a bird’s face, white with goggles and extremely long beak-like protrusions that covered their nose and mouth. They wore broad-brimmed black hats, and black trenchcoats that covered their bodies, and black gloves, and both of them carried long poles with pincers at the end. 

“Looks like we’ve got a live one over here,” one of them said to the other in a distorted voice that sounded almost like a staticky radio.

“Yeah.” They approached Norris. “Move aside, kid.”

Norris tried to grab the shotgun, but before he could get it into position, one of the two weird people swung the pole at him, grabbed the shotgun with the pincers, and tossed it down the street. 

“What are you doing?” Norris yelled. “Get away from my mom!” The other one had used their pole to grab Mom by the upper arm.

“She’s not your mom anymore, kid. She’s a zombie. She just hasn’t turned all the way yet.”

The one who’d thrown his gun swung their pole back around to take Mom’s other arm, and the two of them together pulled Mom to her feet. Her head lolled, her brown skin sheened with sweat and grayish. 

Norris knew that no one who looked like that ever got better, but he charged at one of the two weird people anyway. “Let my mom go!”

“Kid. She’s dead. There’s nothing you can do for her.”

“No! She can get better! We cauterized the wound! She’s just in shock because we had to burn it, that’s all! She’ll be fine!”

The other one, the one who hadn’t spoken to him, said gently, “We’re doctors, young man. We’re going to study your mom to try to find a way to help her, and all the zombies. We can keep her alive, without turning, but we have to get her to our facility now.”

“Then take me with you!” Norris shouted. “Mom and I, we’re the only things we each have in the world. Mom would never want to be separated from me.”

“Can’t do, kid,” the first one said. “No outsiders at the facility, only patients and doctors.”

“Look, you want your mom to get treatment, right? We’ll take care of her, but if you keep getting in the way, she’ll turn, and then there’ll be no saving her.”

“Norris…” Mom mumbled. “Go…”

“Is that your name? Norris?” the kinder one said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, Norris, we don’t have anyone at our facilities who can take care of children, or anywhere for a kid to go, so I’m afraid you can’t come with us. I’m sure that if we’re able to cure your mom, she’ll come back and find you, but you’ve got to be a big boy and take care of yourself. I can see that you’re very capable.”

Fuck that patronizing crap. Norris glared at the weird doctors, knowing he couldn’t do anything to stop them from taking his mom – short of running over and getting the shotgun and shooting them, and if they really were doctors who could cure the zombie plague, and save Mom, that was the last thing he’d want to do. But fuck them.

He stood out of their way, letting them drag Mom to their van with the poles around her arms. It looked cruel and demeaning, like the way you’d treat a wild animal, but he had to admit, deaders were dangerous enough that you’d have to treat someone who was turning like that if you didn’t know them well enough to know how strong they were. Mom wouldn’t bite anyone. Mom was tough. She could keep herself under control. 

The fact that no other deaders could and that Mom herself had warned Norris that anyone who turned would definitely be a threat and there were no exceptions was another thing Norris knew but was deliberately pretending he didn’t.

He waited until the doctors got Mom up toward the van, and they were pulling her in. Then he bolted toward them, and jumped over Mom, squeezing past the one who was up in the van already.

“Shit!” the one he’d squeezed past yelled, but it was too late. He was in.

Inside it was like an ambulance, except that the bed was absolutely covered with straps, including ones that were obviously positioned to hold down a person’s wrists, ankles and neck, not just the kind that kept a person from falling out of the ambulance bed. Norris clambered over the bed and sat down on the bench seat on the other side. It seemed to be designed to fold up so that the door it was attached to could slide open, but it couldn’t fold up if he was sitting in it, now could it?

“Norris!” the second one, the one who was kinder but also really patronizing, shouted. “You can’t be in here!”

“Like hell I can’t,” Norris said. 

If language like that from a 10-year-old shocked them, he couldn’t tell through their masks. 

“I’ve already said—”

“Yeah, you said that I’m a stupid kid who’d be a big burden at your secret hospital or whatever, but I can help. My mom was a real doctor once—” not like you weirdos, he thought, but decided it was impolitic to say so—“and she taught me some stuff. I can maybe help bring you instruments. Or clean stuff! I can keep things really clean! My mom taught me all about keeping a sterile environment—”

“There is absolutely no place for you at our base—”

“She’s my goddamn Mom!” Norris shouted, terrifyingly aware of how close he was to tears. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Only babies cry. They won’t take you seriously if you cry. “First off she’s the only person I have left in the whole world and I’m the only person she has, and if you cure her but you lose me she will be major league pissed at you, and second off, you know you’re leaving me to die if you leave me here, right? You think I’m big and strong enough to fight off deaders? I don’t know anyone in this city who’ll help me out. If you’re doctors and you wanna help people, why you wanna get a kid killed?”

“He has a point,” the second doctor said.

“No, he – what the hell, Sarah? We can’t take him with us!”

They hadn’t stopped pulling Mom in and getting her strapped down to the bed. Mom moaned again. “Norris…”

“Yeah, mom, I’m here.”

She looked up at the doctors. “Heard… you think… cure?”

“Maybe,” the guy in the front passenger seat, who had turned around to watch the whole thing, said. He was wearing the same weird costume as the others. (Or she. None of their voices sounded like normal human voices, all like scratchy distorted robots, and with the masks and cloaks it wasn’t possible to tell what gender they were, but if one of them was named Sarah then probably some were girls.) “Purely experimental stages. We can put you under and retard the spread of the infection, but we can’t guarantee that we can reverse it or undo any brain damage it causes.”

“So the sooner we can get you under, the better your odds are, doctor,” the first one, the one who kept calling Norris “kid”, said. They were calling her “doctor.” Good. Doctors respected other doctors. They wouldn’t just treat her like a piece of meat turning into a deader. “Your kid needs to stop interfering.”

“Just… take him. He’s… too stubborn… own… goo….” Mom trailed off, staring at nothing.

“She’s going further into shock. We need to get her under now,” the first one said.

The second one – Sarah – said, “Ignore the kid. If he wants to ride along with his mother, let him. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

“Secrecy—”

“He’s a kid. He can’t even see out the windows from that position. He hasn’t got a GPS in his head to figure out where the base is even if he rides with us the whole way.” 

“What if she turns and bites him?”

“Then we’ll have a fresh specimen of a healthy child who’s just been infected, without any ethical issues,” Sarah snapped. “And infected mothers who turn will generally go for any available prey who isn’t their child first before going after their kids.”

“Only in 63% of observed cases.”

As they argued, they finished strapping Mom down. She was lying on a metal pan that was about six feet long and wide enough for the average person, and most of the straps fastened her to the pan, while other straps held the pan down on the bed. They put a tube in her mouth where the back part was plastic, flexible and narrow, and the front part was wide and made of metal, and then strapping it to the back of her head so she couldn’t shake it loose. Sarah removed the lid of a small brown medication bottle and poured the entire contents into the tube.

“What’s that do?” Norris asked.

“Kid, quit pushing your luck,” the gruff one said.

“It’s a sedative,” Sarah answered.

“How come you’re giving it to her by mouth and not as a shot?”

“Because deaders have really, really bad circulation if they have it at all, but their digestive system works and things introduced by mouth spread faster to the rest of the body than if introduced intravenously or through injection into the muscle, and Raoul is correct that you need to keep quiet or our colleagues in the front may just decide to stop the van and throw you out.”

After that Norris was quiet.

Mom’s eyes closed and her head lolled, though not very far since it was strapped in place. The doctors wrapped her in something bandage-like, as if she was a mummy, freeing each limb one at a time so they could wrap it and then strapping it down again, and then sprayed some sort of aerosol onto the bandages, the same way. Finally they slid a tub of icy liquid out from under the bed, unstrapped the pan Mom was laying on, and laid the pan down in the icy water. The tube in Mom’s mouth was covered with a plastic lid with a hose attached to the top, and they hooked the hose to a loud machine.

Norris wanted so badly to ask what they were doing, but they’d warned him and he knew that only one of the weird doctors was willing to let him stay; if he bothered them, they’d overrule her and throw him out. He’d ask when they got to their base. He was sure they’d try to kick him out again before they went into it, but he wasn’t going to let them. As long as they had his mom, he was sticking to them like glue.

***

Doctor Sarah was right; from the bench in the back, Norris couldn’t see out the windows. Also, he’d lived his entire life in the city, so it wasn’t exactly like he was going to be able to tell where they were going, anyway. There was a sunroof on the van, and he could see through that, but the only thing to see there was sky. He could tell from the sun that they were going east-ish and then kind of north.

He focused on his mom instead. They’d put her in a tub of ice water with a tube in her mouth, and then they’d put a lid on the tub, where there was a hole for the hose attached to the tube. The loud noise was probably an air thing, then. Things that pumped air, like the compressor at the shop Dad used to work at, or the pump for the air mattress for when Norris had had guests for a sleepover, made loud noises. So they were pumping air into her. That was good. Deaders still breathed, but they didn’t need to; the thing they were infected with could break down their bodies to get energy, so you couldn’t drown or suffocate a deader. They’d just move more slowly if they didn’t have air.

If the doctors were putting air in Mom’s lungs, then she hadn’t turned yet.

There were four doctors. At least, Norris had to assume that anyone wearing that weird costume was a doctor. Three of them were dressed in black; the driver’s costume was brown. Doctor Raoul and Doctor Sarah had white beaks, the guy in the passenger seat had a black one, and the driver’s beak was also brown. Norris could tell that the guy in brown was wearing leather, so he guessed that maybe the black outfits were also leather.

“So… you guys really like leather, huh?” he said. 

Raoul snorted. “I’m not touching that one with this pole,” he said.

“Maybe if we had one that was ten feet?” Sarah said, tilting her head slightly in a way that made Norris think she was telling a joke. He laughed a little.

“How old are you, Norris?” she asked.

“I’m ten. I was gonna be eleven in September. I mean, I guess I still am, if I live that long.” That was a depressing thought. “What’s up with the bird masks?”

“What do they teach them in school?” Raoul groused.

The guy in the passenger seat turned around and said, “Oh, like you knew about plague doctors when you were ten.”

“Do you know anything about what causes deaders?” Doctor Sarah asked.

“Um… yeah. If they bite you. Then you get infected by the stuff inside them, and you turn into one of them.”

“That’s right, of course, but it’s not the only way.” She leaned forward slightly. “Have you learned about fungi in school yet?”

“Um, like mushrooms?”

“Sarah, what the fuck. He’s ten. And we’re not keeping him around, so why are you bothering?”

“Why not?” She turned back to Norris. “Yes, like mushrooms, and yeast. The substance inside the deaders that makes them what they are is a fungus. And it essentially takes over their entire bodies, over time; it infiltrates the brain first, and the mouth. They don’t actually need to eat people, but they have a compulsion to bite.”

“Why do they want to bite people if they don’t need to eat them?”

“The short answer is, because the fungus wants to spread. If the deaders bite people, it can infect those people with the fungus. But here’s the thing. Fungus normally spreads by producing spores… and you can breathe spores in. So far we haven’t seen any cases of a zombie who was infected by breathing spores, but the model says it’s likely to happen, eventually.”

Norris’s eyes went wide. “Shit. You saying we could just breathe and get turned into a deader?”

She nodded. “It’d probably happen slower, because it’s not direct to the bloodstream, but it’ll happen.”

“Shit.”

“Our masks are designed to protect us against that. Also against the other diseases deaders carry; they have no immune system, effectively, so they generally carry practically ever human disease possible.”

“But why do they look like birds?”

Sarah laughed. “Because it looks cool, mostly. We needed a shape we could put a filter in, that would protect our faces from being bitten by deaders. We needed it to be able to accommodate goggles without fogging up. We needed to be able to make it ourselves, since manufacturing is more or less dead in this country. And none of us are expert leatherworkers or tailors, since, you know, we’re doctors. We needed something with a pattern we could get off the Internet, and maybe a video of how to do it. Turns out this shape – the plague doctor mask – is more popular than any other shape that meets our other criteria.”

“Do you even know what a plague doctor was?” Raoul asked snippily. 

“Um… you are?”

Sarah laughed again. “We are now,” she said.

“In the Middle Ages, 30% of the entire population of Europe died of the Black Plague. The doctors who treated the plague dressed like this. They thought the plague was transmitted by bad smells, so they made masks like this so they could fill them with herbs to block the smell of sick bodies.” Raoul sounded less like a teacher and more like someone who thought you should already know this and that you were stupid because you didn’t. He was almost angry-sounding.

Norris wanted to say something defensive, but he knew that if he got mad at Doctor Raoul, and showed it, they would probably kick him out of the van.

“Give the kid a break,” the guy in the front passenger seat said. “If he’s ten… I don’t think I knew about the Black Death, let alone plague doctors, by the time I was ten.”

“Yeah, well, the school system’s always been shit,” Raoul said.

“So deaders can’t bite through leather?” Norris asked.

Doctor Sarah nodded. “They can, if they’re given enough time to chew on it, but their teeth aren’t any different from normal human teeth; it’s their bite strength that’s greater, since they don’t feel pain and they’re diverting a lot of physical resources to their bite. But human teeth are not ideal for piercing thick leather; we’re more likely to end up with their bite breaking our bones than them getting through the leather and infecting us.” She gestured at herself. “This outfit is really, really annoying in the summer, but we can make new ones, we can repair these, and we can disinfect them pretty easily.”

The one in the driver’s seat, who hadn’t spoken yet, picked up something like a microphone and put it near his mouth. “Van 11 to gatehouse. Receiving? Over.”

A radio crackled. “Gatehouse receiving, Van 11. Situation? Over.”

“Coming in hot, gatehouse, we have fresh goods on ice. Over.”

“Fresh goods on ice, acknowledged. Any medical needs? Over.”

“Maybe crayons and a coloring book. Over.” He laughed. 

“Uh, Van 11, not sure we received that. Did you say crayons and a coloring book? Over.”

“Blake got—”

The other doctor in the front seat interrupted him. “We picked up a kid with the fresh goods. Seems healthy.”

“What, really?” the radio asked. “Uh, over.”

“Oh for gods’ sake,” Doctor Sarah said, unstrapping her seat belt and making her way to the front. “This is Doctor Blake. The fresh goods is a mother; her ten year old son refused to let us leave with his mother without him. And no, he doesn’t need crayons and a coloring book. Over.” The snippiness in her voice on the last word actually came through despite the weird distortion effect they all had going on, and reminded him of Ms. Watkins, his teacher from third grade.

“Gatehouse to Van 11, and we mean this with great respect, but what the fuck? Over.”

“I’ll take responsibility for him,” Doctor Sarah said. “Over.”

At that point, the van turned. Norris looked out the windshield, and saw a metal gate like the kind on a storage unit, opening slowly. Next to it there was a stone house with a walkway going through it, next to the road. The van stopped. “Stopping for checkpoint,” the driver said. “Over.”

“Norris, get away from the doors,” Doctor Sarah said. 

Three more plague doctors – two with long poles, like the ones Sarah and Raoul had used, and one with a gun – came out of the gatehouse. The driver and the passenger rolled down their windows and handed cards that they pulled out of the inside of their trenchcoats to one of the plague doctors outside. The other two disappeared to the side, and then the doors to the back of the van opened. Sarah and Raoul were pulling out their cards as the doors were opening, and they handed them to the plague doctor with the pole, while the one with the gun stood to the back.

“How come he’s got a gun?” Norris whispered.

Sarah spoke at normal volume; maybe the thing that was messing up her voice didn’t let her whisper. “If we had a loose deader in here or an adult who wasn’t a plague doctor who might be holding us hostage.” 

“Is that the kid?” the plague doctor who’d checked the ID cards asked.

“This is Norris,” Sarah said. “His mom is the fresh goods we picked up. He’ll be staying with us for a while until we can find somewhere safe to place him.”

“Why do you keep calling my mom fresh goods?” Norris asked, trying not to sound as angry about it as he was.

“It’s code for a person who’s about to turn deader,” Sarah said.

“Blake, we’ve got nowhere to keep a kid,” the one checking the IDs said.

“Bullshit, we’ve got a ton of rooms and more than enough food.”

“Ok, but we don’t have anyone free to babysit him.”

“That’s the thing. A kid clever enough to slip past us and get into the van while we were moving his mom probably doesn’t need a babysitter. And he had a good point; if we left him behind, the deaders would likely get him. So he’s staying with us until I figure out where he can go.”

The one checking the IDs shrugged. “Your call.”

They closed up the van and drove slowly through the gate. There was a winding path up a hill, with forest on either side. Norris still couldn’t see out the side windows, but when he went up to the front to peer through the grate that protected the driver and passenger from whatever was going on in the back, neither Sarah nor Raoul stopped him, so he was able to watch through the windshield. They drove up a hill, around a bend, over a speedbump. There was a building on the left and a parking lot. The van went past that, around another bend, and then came an orange brick building. It looked like it had four or five floors. The windows on the upper floors were small and narrow. Some of the ones on the first floor were much wider, but covered with bars. There were weird brick bays all around the front of the first floor, some of which had barred windows inside.

“Is this a school?” Norris asked.

“A hospital, actually,” Sarah said.

Norris was used to hospitals having huge glass doors and windows everywhere. “It doesn’t look like a hospital,” he said.

“Great, so the kid’s going to critique our choice of bases,” Raoul groused.

“It used to be a hospital for the mentally ill. We picked it because it was built with security in mind, which, as I’m guessing you’ve noticed, most hospitals are not.”

They drove around the building and pulled in at the back. Two other plague doctors came out and headed to the back of the van, where Sarah and Raoul manhandled the tub with Mom in it out from under the bed. The two additional plague doctors took two handles near the front, Sarah and Raoul took two near the back, and they all marched forward toward the doors to the building. Norris followed them. No one stopped him.

Inside, the building was a warren. Norris had no idea how many corridors they went down or how many times they turned down a different one. Eventually they reached a large and very cold room full of what looked like large chest freezers.

“Are you going to freeze her?” Norris asked, panicked.

“No, that would destroy her cells. We keep them at about 2 Celsius to reduce all life processes to almost nothing, but lower than that and we risk ice crystals forming and tearing her cells apart.”

“Is that going to hurt her?”

Sarah shook her head. “Firstly, we sedated her when we took her, and secondly, zombies don’t feel pain. She was still barely conscious when we picked her up, but by the time we got her into the tank, her consciousness had shut down.”

The doctors opened the tub and used their poles with grabbing claws at the end to lift the metal pan that she was strapped to out. She didn’t struggle or thrash; her skin, normally a deep warm brown, had turned ashen, almost greyish, and she lay limp on the pan. One of them stepped on a lever, and the freezer-like thing opened, revealing that it, too, was full of water.

“Won’t she get waterlogged?”

“No, it’s saline solution. Did your mom ever teach you about osmosis?”

“Yeah.” Norris nodded, as Sarah and the other three lowered Mom into the tank, still with the tube in her mouth. “It’s when water gets out of your cells and goes to where there’s more salt, right? So if you spend too long in the bathtub, your fingers get waterlogged because there’s more salt inside you than in the tub, and if you go to the beach and you’re in the water too long your skin gets all dry, right?”

“Right. So if we match the salinity—the amount of salt in the water—then the water doesn’t leave her cells or enter them.”

“Blake, could you maybe quit being a fifth grade science teacher and help us here?” one of the two plague doctors who’d met them at the door said.

“She’s been doing that since we picked up the kid,” Raoul groused.

“Raoul. He is ten and his mother is in that tank we are closing,” Sarah said. “I took this job to help people, not to be an asshole to kids.”

“You took this job to try to save people from zombies, not to be a kid’s nanny.”

“I am rolling my eyes so hard at both of you,” the fourth, who hadn’t spoken yet, said. “The fresh goods is on ice. Delgado’s coming down to take samples. Let’s get out of here. Unless you really love wearing all the gear.”

“Fuck no,” Raoul said. “I want about six showers.”

“Norris, you come with me,” Sarah said. 

Norris looked around the room. “Are all those freezer tanks full of deaders?”

“Not all of them, yet. We’ve got capacity for two more in here.” Sarah walked out the door, making Norris scramble to follow her. “We’ve also got a couple of other freezer rooms, but those deaders are a lot farther along. Several of them are actually dead.”

“I thought deaders were all dead?”

The corridors continued to be a maze as they went deeper into the building… or maybe they were going back out, Norris had no idea. “Oh, no. Most are still alive, but as the infection spreads within them, we can’t think of them anymore as the same organism; too much of their human body has been replaced. Eventually as the heart and brain are completely overwhelmed, we can safely say the person is actually dead – if we could kill the infection at that point, the victim would also die, because the infection has taken over too many of their bodily functions for their body to continue without it.”

They took an elevator up. As soon as they got out on the next floor, Sarah took off her hat, and then her beak mask. Norris’ eyes went wide with surprise. “I didn’t know you were black too!”

She grinned at him. Now that he could see her face, she was a middle-aged black woman with skin darker than his or Mom’s. Her hair was buzzed very short, a soft carpet of fuzz on her head. It made him think of a gym teacher. The lines on her face could have made her look stern, but her smile was broad and friendly, full of healthy teeth. “You really can’t tell with the mask and the voice distorter, can you?” It wasn’t a question. “I was a little bit leery of the decision to wear these things, but they give us an authority and an intimidation factor you just can’t get if folks can see your face.”

“I couldn’t even tell you were a girl until your friend called you Sarah,” Norris admitted.

“That’s part of what it’s for,” she said. “I can’t afford to have idiots questioning my authority when I’m trying to save them from zombies.”

“Where are we going?”

“Oh. I thought I said. We’re going to the cafeteria. I’m starving and I can tell you haven’t been eating particularly well.”

“That sounds great!” He remembered school cafeteria food, back when he went to school. It hadn’t been great, but it had been a lot better than what he got now. 

***

In fact, the cafeteria food was substantially better than what he used to get at school. There were mashed potatoes, breaded chicken strips, burgers, fries, soups, baked sweet potatoes, steamed broccoli, some kind of bean or pea in a pod, and something that looked like beef and broccoli. And also a salad bar. No soda and only one dessert, some kind of spongy apple cake, though. They had iced water, iced tea, hot tea, coffee, grape juice, orange juice, and milk. “How come you guys still get good food? I thought all the grocery stores had to close?”

“There’s local farms out in the county.” Sarah loaded her plate up with salad. “They don’t dare ship food into the city, but they know who we are and what we do, and they trade with us in exchange for medicines.”

“Medicines to cure being a zombie?” Norris asked excitedly, loading his plate with comfort foods. It’d been so long since he’d had anything that wasn’t in a can. The mashed potatoes were a little bit lumpy, meaning they were fresh, not from powder. 

Sarah smiled wryly. “No, we don’t have that yet. Medicines for their blood pressure, and diabetes, and high cholesterol, and depression. Things like that. We’ll also do checkups. Most of us are scientists more than we are doctors, but we all had to get medical degrees to do the kind of science we do.”

Norris took one dish with two chicken strips out from under the heater, and then glanced at Sarah. Two chicken strips really didn’t seem enough. “Is it okay to take two chicken strip dishes?”

“It’s okay today,” Sarah said. “But only if you also take a salad and eat it.”

“I took the broccoli,” Norris objected. “I got a vegetable.”

“Get salad too. You can put whatever you want on it.”

So Norris got salad, with croutons and cheese and little pieces of hard-boiled egg and sunflower seeds. “Mom and I wanted to get out there,” he said wistfully as he loaded his plate. “We heard there’s no deaders out in the countryside. Like, you gotta leave the county and head up north or cross the bridge and go to the Eastern Shore or something.”

“Oh, there are deaders everywhere.” Sarah poured dressing on her salad. “Places of high population density are a lot worse, of course, but there’s deaders living in the woods. They hide and grab prey that go too near. Some small towns got completely taken over; they’re ghost towns now, since deaders have to stay on the move to get more prey. Farm country’s mostly fairly safe; they’ve all got guns and flat open land and they can see a deader a mile away. But you and your mom wouldn’t have been safe up there. They shoot outsiders; they just don’t wait for them to get close enough to tell that they’re deaders. We get close because they see the masks and the hats, so they know what we are.”

They sat down at a table and dug in. The chicken strips were actually amazing. They were made of real breast meat and they were juicy and tasted like chicken, not like processed chicken-flavored cardboard. The milk was really great, too. Mom hadn’t been able to drink milk without getting sick, but Dad had been able to drink gallons of the stuff, and so far Norris hadn’t lost his milk-drinking ability yet like most of his classmates had even before school had closed forever. “This milk tastes really good.”

“It’s probably a lot fresher than you’re used to.” She speared an olive and a piece of nondescript pale meat. “Enjoying the chicken strips?”

“Yeah!”

“We have a lot less fresh meat here than you were probably used to before all this happened, so the next time you get chicken strips, I want you to put a lot fewer on your plate. There’s canned chicken in the salad, and you can get protein from eggs and mushrooms and soybeans.”

He made a face. “You telling me all I get to eat around here is salad?”

“You can have as much potato as you want,” Sarah said with a smile. “And yes, you can have meat, but it’s rationed. I let you have my ration today because you’re much too skinny. In the future, you can take two of those strips. Or you can have a burger. They’re pretty substantial but the meat’s mixed with some soy and mushrooms to make it go farther.”

Norris sighed. “I guess.” It was better than the canned condensed soups he’d been eating. Mom and he had saved rainwater in discarded water bottles to drink and put in their soups. They’d had to scavenge the soups from empty grocery stores. 

“A lot of the salad stuff, we actually grow here on the campus. Some of us managed to rescue our families and bring them here, and they don’t work as doctors – they do support work, like growing tomatoes, peppers, soybeans and salad greens.” She took another bite of salad and wiped the glob of dressing off her lips with her napkin. “Does that sound like something you’d like to do?”

“Uh, no.”

“I could place you with one of the families here as your foster family and you could help out. Grow food, fix things…”

“Nuh-uh. I want to help you guys.” Norris stopped inhaling his mashed potatoes for a moment and looked up at Sarah. “I grew up in the city. All I know about gardening is my mom killing houseplants. And the one year my dad tried to have a potted tomato on the front porch, and some jerks stole it. But I know a lot about science and stuff! I could help you!”

Gently but with just a touch of exasperation in her voice, Sarah said, “Norris, you’re ten. You’ve had at best a fifth grade education and given what happened to the world and when the schools shut down, more likely fourth.”

“That’s not true! My mom homeschooled me while we were trying to survive and running from deaders. I told you guys she was a doctor, right? She was a pediatrician, and she taught me a lot about medicine and science. I can name all the bones in the human body!”

“So can I,” Sarah said dryly. “Let’s imagine you’re a genius and your mother was an amazing teacher; you still aren’t at the level of people who went to medical school for years, or graduate school and medical school like many of us. There’s really nothing you can do to help with the research.”

“I could help you rescue people, though,” Norris said desperately. 

“That’s really not a good idea.”

“Come on! You’re like, I dunno, knights from the Middle Ages and you want me to go be a peasant.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We’re not knights, Norris. We’re plague doctors. We poke the afflicted with our sticks, and drag them off, and sometimes we deliver a mercy blow. We aren’t here to rescue anyone. When we saw with our drone that your mother was turning, that’s why we went in to get her; if she’d just broken her leg we would have left the two of you to die, because we’re trying to rescue the entire human race, not use up our resources saving one or two people here or there.”

Norris deflated slightly. “Okay. But I still want to help! I can shoot a gun, I can bandage people—”

She sighed. “Norris—”

“Could I at least learn how to make your masks and costumes and stuff? That’s just leatherworking, right? I bet it would make your lives easier if you didn’t have to do that yourselves!”

“Well, nowadays we don’t. The person who makes the costumes is married to a doctor.”

“Okay, but if there’s only one person, I could help them.”

“Fine. I’ll take you to the quartermaster and she can decide if she wants to take on an apprentice.”

***

The quartermaster was also wearing all leather, but her hands and her head were free. She was a heavy white woman with brown hair. “Sarah Blake! I’ve been hearing all about you picking up a little stray, there.”

“This is Norris,” Sarah said. “Norris, this is Jessie. She makes our armor and our masks.”

“Hi,” Norris said.

“Well, hello! Have you brought him to be fitted for armor?”

“We might as well,” Sarah said. “I don’t think I told you this, Norris, but within the compound, it’s a rule that we always have to be wearing our leather armor, and we have to have masks and gloves at the ready.”

Jessie nodded. “You ought to see mine. I went with a harlequin theme, since I’m not a doctor.” She picked up a mask off the table she’d been sitting at. It was a creepy smiling face, all white except for two red spots on the cheeks. “Nice, huh?”

“Kinda… a little creepy, honestly,” Norris said. 

Jessie laughed. “Of course it is! Turns out, deaders have very little ability to react to actual threats, like guns or spears. But they can react to things that hit us in more primitive parts of our brain. The plague doctor masks scare them. So does the harlequin. Only the fresher ones are capable of feeling fear at all, so it’s not like I can drive all the deaders off with a mask, but they’ll back off for a bit.”

“Why do we have to wear that stuff inside?”

“Well, what would happen if a deader got loose?” Jessie asked, but it was one of those questions grownups asked to see if you knew. 

“I guess… you wanna have the armor on so you can stop a deader and it can’t bite you?”

“Bingo!” She stood up. “Let’s take your measurements.”

“Jessie, Norris has asked if he can apprentice with you to help you with the leatherworking. Could you use a kid to help out?”

“I learn real fast,” Norris put in. “My mom taught me a lot of stuff. I know how to sew to fix clothes, if that’s anything like this.”

“It’s… not unlike it,” Jessie said in a considerating tone. “Yeah, ok. I heard from Nish the situation with his mom and all, so if he wants to learn how to help me, I’m cool with that. We’ll see if it works out.”

“Can you get him set up with a room?”

“Sure. I’ll put him in the kids’ ward, all the beds are too small so the only people living up there are short women and we’ve got plenty of space. You cool with that, Norris?”

“I guess.”

He didn’t really want to be left behind; Sarah had been kind and understanding and he didn’t know how this woman was going to treat him. But he didn’t think he was going to be given a choice.

***

As it turned out, Jessie was actually quite nice. She showed him all of her tools, and explained what they did. She took his measurements and began the process of making him leather armor, explaining what she was doing as she did it. She had him practice punching holes with an awl. “You be careful with that. The guy who invented Braille? He went blind in the first place because he poked himself in the eye with an awl, and it got infected, and the infection got into the other eye too.”

“I read a book about that,” Norris said, nodding.

When she was done for the day, she took him to the cafeteria for dinner. There was spaghetti with tomato sauce, which advertised itself as vegan and spicy, and a stir-fry with what looked like chicken, both of which had peppers and mushrooms and onions in them, and there was a baked fish dish covered with cheese. No rice. He would have expected rice with a stir-fry. Instead there were mashed potatoes again, that you could have with the stir-fry or the baked fish. There was salad, but he wasn’t required to take any, so he didn’t. There were a lot of vegetables in the spaghetti sauce, in his opinion. Dessert was carrot cake.

Jessie told him about the foods that could be obtained locally and the ones that couldn’t. “You’re not getting chocolate or vanilla anytime soon,” she said. “They didn’t think to add it to the stockpiles, and they only grow in tropical regions. Same with coffee, but they did stockpile that. Once we run out, though, there won’t be anything but tea. And it’s not very easy to grow tea in this climate.”

Norris made a face. “I don’t really like either one.”

“Well, hopefully the world will be back to normal by the time you’re an adult and need the caffeine to stay awake,” she said. “We don’t have sugar; that does grow in the United States, but not around here, and the longer the distance we have to go, the more dangerous it is for the farmers to ship their products. There’s a lot of corn, so we use corn syrup, and there’s no shortage of bees, so we use honey.”

“Do you really think the world will ever be back to normal?”

“Oh, yeah!” Jessie grinned broadly. “They’re working on a cure. You know it’s a fungus, right?”

“Uh… like a mushroom?”

“More like a yeast – uh. You wouldn’t know about that. More like athlete’s foot, but it gets inside your brain, and your body, and eventually it takes you over completely. Well, there’s some reason why it’s really hard to make a vaccine against a fungus, I don’t know why. I’m not a doctor. But you can make a fungicide. Problem is that most fungicides we have can’t go inside the body, and they haven’t yet found something that can kill the fungus without killing the person, and you can’t cure it by just grabbing deader after deader and filling them up with fungicide; you might as well just shoot them if the fungicide kills them. But eventually they’ll have a cure that works, and if you can treat people right after they get bit with the fungicide, they won’t turn deader.” She leaned forward. “That’s the whole thing, you know? That’s why we’re doing this.”

“I want to help out,” Norris said.

“Yup. So that’s why you’re going to help me with the costumes!”

***

Norris’s bedroom was in an area where only two other people had bedrooms; each room had its own private bathroom, and there was a refrigerator and a microwave in a common area, where you could store food from the cafeteria and then heat it up. It was more freedom than Norris had ever had, and more loneliness. He had no parents here, and Jessie and Sarah weren’t staying up here with him. The two women who lived up here were doctors and didn’t interact with him much. He could stay up as late as he wanted; there were books here he could read, in the common room. But there was no one to spend time with.

He managed to distract himself from the loneliness well enough, though, because there was a computer, and it was connected to the Internet.

Norris had thought the Internet was gone. Apparently not. Sarah told him that of the data centers run by the big companies that had existed before the zombies came, and at the universities and on the military basis, many of them were still up and running, because they’d been designed to be difficult to break into, and the people inside them had the Internet and could contact military people who also had Internet if the deaders boxed them in and they needed food. Power was still running for the same reason – most of the countryside didn’t have any, aside maybe from generators they ran off propane tanks that they were eventually going to run out of, but there was a nuclear reactor in their state, and some hydro, and the governor had had a whole lot of wind towers put up by the National Guard and energy contractors in a big hurry when this whole thing had started. So there was some power, and it was being routed to places where the people could defend themselves well enough to stay in one place and use the power… like here.

So Norris had a computer, and he had the Internet. There was no social media anymore. No one was posting new videos to Youtube, but all the old ones were still there. Wikipedia was up. Google was up. There was no Netflix, no Hulu, no Disney Prime, but there were a lot of how-to articles, and Google had removed restrictions on Google Books so all of the books were available online now, because it wasn’t like anyone could buy them.

At first, he went looking for the cartoons he used to watch, but he couldn’t get into them anymore; after surviving on the streets during a zombie apocalypse, they felt unreal, unrelatable. He watched videos about leatherworking to try to learn more about what Jessie was teaching him, but it was easier to learn from Jessie, who was an expert he could ask questions rather than a recording. So he decided he was going to learn medicine, and he was going to learn enough about it that Sarah and the others would let him join them.

There were some field medic videos that had gone up before most people had lost Internet access, when the zombies had first showed up. There were, however, not a lot of videos about actually being a doctor, because that was a thing doctors used to go to school for years about. Also, when he tried to read medical books that doctors learned from in medical school, he understood only about every third word. Obviously he needed to start earlier and simpler than that.

So he studied biology and chemistry and math. The things his mom had taught him had been more like the field medic stuff, probably not useful for finding out how to cure zombies. She’d homeschooled him while they’d been running from zombies; when he took an online test to find out how much math and science he knew, it said he was at a seventh grade level, which was great because Sarah had been right, the last time Norris had been in real school it had been the fourth grade. Mom and Dad had always taught him stuff about math and science and he’d always been ahead of his class in those subjects, but it was nice to see how much ahead he was.

Seventh grade, however, was not college, and apparently doctors had to go to college first and learn biology and chemistry there, after learning it in high school and maybe also middle school, and only then did they get to go to medical school to learn to be doctors. That was a ridiculous amount of stuff to learn, but Norris had the Internet and a lot of free time; Jessie had him work with her as her apprentice about five or six hours a day, the same amount as school had been, but then he didn’t have anyone to talk to. No online games to play, no friends to chat with. No parents. No homework to do. No chores. No zombies to run away from. So he had time.

He found web sites where they talked about the state curriculum and what he was supposed to learn in which grade. Social studies was dumb, he didn’t need to spend time learning that. Reading was important in that he needed to learn new words, but he didn’t need to learn how to analyze a text, whatever that meant. He needed to know how to learn science from books, so he needed reading for that, but he didn’t need to read books about the struggles of other black kids who didn’t happen to be living through a zombie apocalypse, which was pretty much entirely what the state curriculum suggested he ought to be reading for English class. Well, and some books about weird science fiction worlds where nobody could see color or animals took over farms or stuff like that, and some stuff about Asian kids and Native American kids. But none of it was important anymore because none of it helped with zombies.

His mom was in a cold tank downstairs. He checked in on her every so often. Raoul continued to be an asshole, Sarah continued to be nice, and the other doctors continued to mostly ignore him. They took samples from her sometimes but they weren’t going to pull her out to experiment with treatments until they had a thing they knew wouldn’t kill people… or mice. They killed a lot of mice, trying out treatments to see if maybe they wouldn’t kill mice, because if they didn’t kill mice then they could test them on monkeys (they did not actually have any monkeys; this was going to involve a long and dangerous trip to Atlanta that they told Norris he absolutely could not go on once they did it) and if the monkeys lived they could try humans.

His mom was in a cold tank downstairs, and all he wanted to do, all he wanted to do, was to do whatever it took to get her out and get her cured. If that meant do nothing with his free time but learn math and science from videos and books on the Internet, on the crappy old desktop in his room that was apparently put together from spare parts and would never have played a decent game but was good enough for what he needed it for, so be it.

***

Norris had been with the doctors for two months by the time he made his first full costume. Jessie had made him a suit of leather armor because you needed to have that here, and a mask – he’d gotten one that looked like Spider-Man but colored like Venom because it was black with white lines – but she’d had him working on making one of his own for himself.

His costume was lumpy and it pinched in some places and it was too loose in others, but he’d made it himself and it would protect him from being bitten by a deader. He went to the lab where the doctors he knew were working. “Hey, Sarah, check out my armor! I made it myself!”

Sarah looked up from her microscope and smiled. “Nice. You’re getting good at this.”

“So how are things going?” He leaned on the wall in an elaborate pose of being cool.

“Pretty good, actually,” she said. “We’re going out to collect some more specimens tomorrow; we want some fresh deaders who we can do some brain scans on.”

“That sounds scary. The brain scans, I mean.”

“Not really. We fasten them down with plenty of rope. We can’t use metal because the MRI machine would just pull it off, but the nylon rope we use is practically unbreakable.”

“Can I help?”

Sarah sighed. “Norris, we’ve been over this.”

“I’ve been studying biology and chemistry online! There’s a computer someone left in my room! I could be like your nurse and help you out.”

“We have actual nurses,” Sarah pointed out. “Who are adults, and went to nursing school. What’s wrong with helping out with the leatherworking? Are you having problems with Jessie?”

“No, no! Jessie’s great. She’s fine. But you guys don’t get a lot of new recruits; she says my armor was the first all-new piece she’s made in months, and mostly she’s just repairing what you guys use. I wanna do something that’s more help.”

“I just don’t think—”

“I could wash your petri dishes, and organize your slides,” Norris said desperately. “I bet you’ve got a lot of dishwashing you need to do. I’m great at washing dishes.” He glanced at the lab sink. There were, in fact, a good number of petri dishes, flasks, and other glassware sitting next to the sink waiting to be washed.

“You are, huh?” Sarah lifted her eyebrows, but she was smiling. “Well, tell you what. Why don’t you wash up those dishes and show us what you can do, okay?”

So Norris washed dishes. He fed mice and cleaned their bedding, which was a euphemism for changing the shredded newspaper in their cages that was covered with pee and poop. He swept. He cleaned off counters with a bleach solution. And he talked to the doctors, asking them about what they used to do before the zombies, did they have families, what did they enjoy doing in their spare time. Sarah used to work as a researcher for the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, but the government had cut CDC funding in less than half, a year before the zombies, so she had moved back to Baltimore, where she’d grown up. Peter Weiss had a wife and two kids, who lived on the campus but not in the main building, and they raised goats and made soap, and grew tomatoes. Vinay Narayan had come to the United States when he was a little boy, and his parents had saved all the money they made from the restaurant they ran to send him to medical school, but they’d been very disappointed when he decided to go into medical research rather than a practice, because medical research didn’t pay as well as being a practicing physician. Aileen Walsh had been a practicing doctor, but had joined the plague doctors because her husband had been bitten. Raoul Alvarez continued to be an asshole and wouldn’t tell Norris anything. 

When he was done cleaning up, Sarah and Peter praised his work and Vinay praised his work ethic. Aileen was concentrating on something and probably didn’t even notice him. Raoul, of course, had nothing good to say, but Norris didn’t expect differently.

He went to the cafeteria and got dinner. And then he went to the garage and concealed himself behind a van that was in a state of partial repair, with its axles up on concrete blocks instead of having wheels.

Norris tried to stay awake, figuring that if he was awake when they came in, it would make it a lot easier for him to sneak into whatever van they took. It was a lost cause, though. He worked too hard during the day to be able to stay up late anymore. At some point, his eyes closed and his head nodded.

***

Norris had always been a “gifted” child, singled out in school as one of the smart kids. It had enabled him to get away with shit that none of his friends could have. His parents trained him to clearly enunciate and speak standard English around white people and anyone in authority, and he got a reputation as the kid who would stand up and challenge the teacher for bullying students, using excessive punishments, or acting racist… and would win, a lot of the time. His dad was a college professor and his mom was a doctor, and they made sure that the school authorities knew them as Professor and Doctor Wilkins, not Mr. and Mrs. They were both active in the PTA, they bought from school fundraisers, they chaperoned and drove for school field trips, they donated a lot of school supplies. It got them considerable credit with the school, as did Norris’ high scores on standardized tests.

In truth, Norris had never been all that good at language arts – he’d learned to read early but he couldn’t care less about diagramming a sentence or figuring out analogies. His parents had drilled him on that stuff back when school was a thing, to make sure he could get high scores on the tests, because high scores on the tests, for a black kid, meant being treated by the school as valuable and therefore if the school gave him shit for standing up for his rights, the threat of pulling him out and putting him in private school was one the school had taken seriously. In math and science, his subjects of interest, he had been a genuine prodigy. Dad had taught him set theory at the kitchen table when he was 4, and the basics of algebra when he was 7. Mom had watched science documentaries with him since he was 5, about black holes and bacteria and animal behavior and the physics of bridge building. 

When the zombies had come, they’d all gone on the run, all three of them. They’d moved into a nearby store that had the rolling metal covers to put over the windows, because the store owner had been attacked by zombies in the very early days and no one else had come to claim the place. It had been a convenience store, so there was food, but the food had eventually run out. Mom and Dad had gone out to scavenge more food and watch each other’s backs against zombies. They hadn’t been careful enough about humans. Some white guy shot Dad and then claimed he thought he was a zombie. Mom didn’t say what had happened after that, but Norris strongly suspected she’d shot the guy.

After that, Mom and Norris would go out together. Norris already knew a little about how to shoot, because Dad used to take him to a range to teach him. Dad had been big on knowing how to use weapons to defend yourself and having legal guns, at least until the cops shot that one guy who admitted to being a legal gun owner and was getting his ID. After that, Mom’s argument that carrying a gun would just get you shot by a cop had been the rule Dad had followed, until the zombies came. He’d drilled Mom and Norris in how to shoot, because it was the best way to take out zombies. They didn’t always die when you hit them in the head, but if you hit them with enough shots in the torso, you could destroy enough of their bodies that they’d fall down and be unable to walk, and if you could make leg shots you could cripple them even faster. Crippled zombies would still crawl or slither, so they weren’t helpless, but you could cover them with lighter fluid and set them on fire if they were crawling. He and Mom used to carry water guns full of lighter fluid, and matches.

On the concrete floor of the garage, he slept badly, waking up several times. Memories of Mom and Dad standing up for him, of the things they’d taught him, haunted him as he tried to sleep. Most nights he worked until he was exhausted, and then he collapsed into bed and let everything go black, and he slept so deeply that when the alarm went off in the morning he never remembered any dreams. He kept the grief at bay by keeping busy, like he’d kept the grief about Dad at bay by focusing on helping Mom to keep them both alive. But he was much too uncomfortable to sleep deeply right now, and he couldn’t stop memories from spooling through his head.

Several times during the night, tears pricked his eyes, and he sniffled, but he managed to keep from breaking into full-on sobs. Men didn’t cry, and if he had no mom and dad then he had to be a man, right? He had to be tough and strong if he wanted to survive… and if he wanted to help the doctors save Mom, despite their resistance.

All his life, Norris had gotten anything he was passionate about wanting. He hadn’t gotten every video game he’d ever wanted, he’d never gotten the puppy he’d asked for, but any time he’d wanted something really, really badly, and had shown he was willing to work hard for it, his mom and dad had moved heaven and earth to make it happen. Including going to teachers or the principal and demanding he be allowed to do that thing – like join the other three kids who were doing independent math study, when he was in fourth grade, because it wasn’t fair that he was excluded when he had the best grades in the class, and the fact that they’d been in a different teacher’s classroom than him last year and had been assigned then, and his new teacher hadn’t wanted to “rock the boat” by adding any more kids to independent study, should be irrelevant. His whole life had taught him that if you work hard, you do everything right and present yourself as well-dressed and clean and you talk mostly like a white kid with an advanced vocabulary rather than how you’d talk to your friends, you make yourself important and invaluable through your hard work, and then you make demands, you get what you want. He’d tried all that. Now it was time to be really, really pushy.

Despite being hungry – he hadn’t had breakfast – and exhausted because he’d slept so badly, he perked up as soon as one of the doctors came in and unlocked the van. While they went around the side to check the tires and make sure there was gas and stuff like that, Norris climbed in through the back doors that had been left open, and hid under the specimen table, where normally they kept the box of ice water. When they came in with the box of ice water, he scooted out from under the table and made himself very small, between the specimen table and the barrier closing off the front seats from the back. Once the box was in, he crawled back under the table. If he lay very flat and he kept his head turned sideways, he could just barely fit between the lid of the box and the bottom of the table. 

The doctors on today’s mission were Sarah, Raoul, Peter driving, and Aileen in the front seat rather than Vinay, who’d been there on the mission where Norris came in. They weren’t looking for a stowaway, so they left the back wide open with no doctor anywhere around it, multiple times, as they got the stuff they wanted to load. It wasn’t hard for Norris to stay clear of them. He was wearing the leather armor Jessie had made for him, not the one he’d made himself, because it was better made and fit better, but his mask was balled up and stuffed in a pocket. It was lumpy and uncomfortable, but Norris was relying on his black leather and black hair and dark brown skin to make him nearly invisible under here. His mask was black but painted with reflective white stripes in the pattern of a Spider-Man mask; it was designed to make him easier to see in the dark. Deaders went by smell more than sight; their sight usually started failing them as the fungus invaded more and more of their brain. The idea was to make him easier for humans to see, and right now, he didn’t want humans to see him.

The van started. He could feel the engine rumbling through the box of water he was lying on. The speed bump actively hurt, making him hit his head on the bottom of the bed he was lying under. He managed not to yell. They needed to be a lot farther away from their base before they found him. Norris drifted off, despite his discomfort, lulled by the rumbling of the engine and the fact that he’d had so little sleep the night before.