Mystic Cowboy(86)

Still, someone had to be the driver. He headed into the clinic to delegate. “Jesse, Madeline says Tara and Tammy and Terry can call go home. Can you take them?”

Jesse looked at Nelly, who was sleeping fitfully. “She stays?”

Nelly was still hooked up to two IVs, although Madeline had taken her off the oxygen. “For now. I’ll keep an eye on her, okay? It won’t take long, but we’ve got to get some of these people out of here.”

For a second, Jesse looked like he normally did, pouty and whining and angling for the easy way out of everything. But then he squared his shoulders, his eyes gleaming with a new purpose. “As long as no one dies on me...”

Rebel couldn’t help but chuckle. “I don’t think Madeline would send them home if she thought they were going to do that.”

Jesse leaned over and kissed Nelly’s forehead through his mask. Rebel never thought he’d see the day—Jesse being a real father to his daughter.

The situation seemed to have stabilized. Madeline began discharging patients with a fervor that struck Rebel as religious. Everyone went home with a four-week supply of antibiotics, explicit orders to finish all four weeks and some Imodium.

Finally, they were down to four kids and two elders still on IVs, which meant that for the first time in a long time, everyone was either on an exam table or a bed. Jesse had returned from one of his runs with bags of chips, candy bars and soda from the Quik-E Mart and handed them out like he was Santa. Nobody was making another pass of the place, using his mop as a crutch. The man was a night owl to begin with, but even he was slowing down.

By comparison, they were the ones in good shape. Madeline was…well, Rebel wouldn’t say collapsed at Tara’s desk, but she was damn close. Her gloved hands were propping up her masked face, but even with all that, her head was only four inches off the desk. She looked like a zombie in a lab coat.

“You should go home.” Rebel crouched down next to her, wanting to put his arm around her shoulders and hold her until she was safely off to dreamland. He was pretty sure that wasn’t the best course of action right now. Zombies were unpredictable, and he sure as hell didn’t want his head bitten off. Not to mention they both needed a bath in the worst sort of way.

Her head didn’t move, but her eyes found the clock on the wall. He followed them and saw that it was eight. The sun had just about finished setting outside. “That was a bone-crushing twenty hours of triage.” She sounded like she’d been crushed, all right. Flatter than a pancake.

“Go home, Madeline,” he said more gently. He couldn’t help it. He inched closer to her. “Get some sleep.”

This time, her head did move. With what looked like a hell of a lot of effort, she swung it around and fixed him with a look that was pure stubbornness. “Clarence first.”

“You,” he said more insistently. She couldn’t be serious—but everything about her said she was.

“No,” she replied just as insistently. “I’m staying until the lab calls. I have to know if we did the right thing.”

Rebel felt like she’d slapped him. Because of her, not a single person had died today. Not even Nelly. How could she think she’d been wrong? He caught the frustrated shout before it got out. She was jumping to conclusions again. But this time, he wasn’t going to let her go. “You did the right thing.” His arm twitched, like it wanted to grab hold of her all by itself. He fought to keep it still. “All you.”

The stubbornness melted into something else as her eyes crinkled. Damn it, this mask thing was seriously impeding his ability to read her, but he thought she was smiling.

“I couldn’t have done it without you, Rebel.”

“We make a good team, don’t we?”

The crinkles disappeared into an unreadable blankness. “I was under the impression that we didn’t do anything anymore.”

He swallowed. He didn’t want to beg—and he really didn’t want to beg in the middle of the clinic, the smell of bleach and sage and barf still strong in the air—but he would if he had to. “That’s not the impression I was operating under.”

She blinked, her eyelids moving at two different speeds. Damn it, this was not the time to be having this conversation, not when she was dead on her feet and they still had kids hooked up to IVs. Here he was, trying not to be a jerk, and he was still screwing it up.

He waited for some sort of reaction from her for a minute, but got nothing else but a few more off-kilter blinks. “Come on,” he said, getting to his feet and pulling her to hers. “I’ll take you home.”