Chapter 2

Episode 9 - Sick Day

Was it a lie to say you woke up feeling awful when you couldn’t be positive you’d ever actually fallen asleep? For some reason, Brady couldn’t keep that thought from running circles through his brain, providing a mocking harmony to the chills snaking up his spine and the nausea swirling in his gut.

These days were always the worst—or at least, they were when he was in the middle of them. The ones that dropped out of a clear blue sky always felt worst when they hit, but nothing could quite reach the misery of an awful day coming on top of an already exhaustingly bad one.

It was hard to tell exactly when he’d slipped past the point of no return, but whenever it had happened, he was definitely there now. Brady absently fingered the button for a moment, hoping Rachelle had had the good sense to redirect it to the nurse’s station, where it wouldn’t interrupt any scrap of sleep she’d somehow managed to snatch. But probably no one in the den would be surprised to hear that he was sick today, considering how bad yesterday had been, and he’d have no chance of even attempting to be a help to anyone if he didn’t take the shot.

Swallowing hard, he pressed the button and waited, trying to shove the pounding of his head as far as possible toward the back of his consciousness, and in a surprisingly short amount of time, the squeak of unfamiliar shoes in the hall scraped in his ears. Brady couldn’t help a slight shiver at the memory of what had happened the last time he’d asked a nurse to take over this part of his care, but either that one had been an outlier or the whole staff had been thoroughly briefed on the surface-level details of their situation, because this one didn’t touch the light or speak more than a few whispered words before leaving to report to the doctor.

Brady’s senses continued to swirl, and he wondered dazedly if the injection was somehow working without a needle, as he imagined he could hear the doctor’s voice much too soon from not nearly far enough away. But only a few seconds later by his fuzzy reckoning, Dr. Mattox’s hand was on his wrist, and the prick on his arm was too sharp to be imagined. His aching brain blurred and swirled, and he let the darkness sweep him away.

When he woke again, it was to a patchwork of noise like someone was turning a radio dial—the distinct sounds of Rachelle humming and a little girl crying faded in and out of a sea of undefined rattles, creaks, and snatches of whispered conversations. Brady lay still and tried to draw back the threads of his fractured attention, but he was obviously more tired than usual, and it took longer to corral them than he’d become used to.

He left his hearing trained on Grace’s room for a moment, comforted by the fact that at least the active crying seemed to be coming from an entirely different direction. Grace coughed and moaned a little, but Rachelle continued to hum, and Brady lay still for several moments longer before slowly pulling himself upright.

His head swam at the change of elevation, and Brady held tight to his mattress as his body adjusted to being vertical after a night spent tossing and turning the way he had. He levered himself carefully to his feet and, with another immoderate yawn, retreated toward the bathroom.

Thankfully, the warm shower helped to relax some of his cramping muscles, and a splash of cold water on his face afterward went a long way toward sharpening his still hazy focus. Brady felt almost like himself again when he finally stepped out into the dark hallway, but he’d barely taken a step toward the common when he tripped over something and barely saved himself from running headlong into the wall.

“What in—” The exclamation burst from him much too loudly for whatever hour of the morning it was—which Brady realized with an odd sense of detachment that he’d somehow forgotten to check.

“Sorry.” The answering word was a whisper, but it came from the apparently empty hallway, and Brady’s heart sped up a beat before realizing there was only one potentially plausible explanation.

“Harper?”

“Mhm. Sorry, didn’t expect you up for a while. Nobody warned me.”

“Didn’t warn me either.” Brady let out a sigh of relief and shook off the shiver that lingered in his skin. “But what are you doing here? I mean, obviously you weren’t looking for someone else to be up at o-dark-thirty, but is there a reason you’re just sitting in an empty hallway instead of—literally anywhere else?”

Harper hummed in a way that didn’t come close to answering his question, but after a second’s uncertain pause, she sighed.

“How well did the common get wiped down yesterday? Did you see?”

Brady tried hard not to groan as the muscles in his neck and forehead tightened nearly to the point of aching despite the injection, forcing himself to remember Dash’s words of the day before. He wasn’t the one to judge when he’d never dealt with Harper’s specific issues and didn’t truly know how bad they could truly get. But all the same, cowering on the floor of the hallway because she didn’t trust the cleaning staff that had given her literally no reason to doubt them felt like overkill, especially for a simple flu.

“As well as it ever is. I had the kick of those cleaners ping-ponging around my sinuses half the night; pretty sure they didn’t miss a trick.”

Harper hummed again in answer, but this time, Brady could clearly hear the suspicious tone in the inarticulate response.

“I just really don’t want to plop myself down in the middle of a germ-fest in there. At least I know neither of them’s been past this line since Little Miss Incubator got started.”

Brady was still trying not to be harsh about the obvious phobia she had toward germs or viruses or whatever, but honestly, this was getting a little ridiculous. Especially when it involved any hint of blaming Grace for the sickness that she was the one currently suffering from.

“So are you not going out today, then?”

“Hmm? Planning on it, why?”

“Because this flu didn’t fall out of a clear sky, Harper. You have no idea how many other people in the city are carrying it, or where they are. If you can’t touch something that touched something that might have touched Grace, I don’t know how you’re going to survive out on the streets.”

“Please don’t tell me that.” Harper moaned, and the sound muffled a little as she probably curled in on herself, although Brady couldn’t have sworn to it in her invisible state. He blew out a steadying breath and tried to relax the tension that seemed to be coiling through his whole body.

Okay, so people’s fears weren’t always consistent or rational, and Harper’s definitely seemed to fit that mold. But to be fair, maybe she’d be less skittish out in an area she didn’t know to be contaminated, rather than being shut up in her room, listening to Grace’s coughing through the wall, and waiting to get sick.

“Well, you’re going to have to cross that line sometime to get out of the den. Unless you want to set off the emergency alarm—but you’ll be the one explaining to Dr. Mattox.”

“You say that like she’d find me.” A hint of a grin returned to Harper’s voice, and Brady considered nudging her, but he couldn’t be certain he knew exactly where she was anymore, and he didn’t feel like expending the effort to figure it out at the moment.

“So are you calling Car, or should I?”

Harper made a sound a little too close to a growl for Brady to be sure it wasn’t, but then she paused for a moment, and when she spoke again, it was obvious that her logistics brain was winning over her paranoia.

“Better be me. You’ll have to go pester DeAndre for our breakfasts—unless you want me to get caught trying to carry them back.”

A little shiver ran up Brady’s back at the thought of the cold shake awaiting him, but he let the thought go and stuck his tongue out halfheartedly.

“Fine. I’ll go. You get Car headed this way—and figure out who and when you’re going to wake up to keep an eye on us.”

“Aww, come on, not fair. What else are you going to do?” She didn’t have to be visible for the fake pout curving her mouth to be on full display, and Brady scowled in her general direction probably a little harder than was warranted.

“How about bring your breakfast down along with mine and not make you get it yourself?” He sighed and let his eyes fall closed for a moment, and Harper was quiet for a few seconds before replying.

“Need me to tell Car to hold off for a while? You sound like you could use some more sleep.”

Brady opened his mouth for a quick denial, then paused. She was right; that last response had come out a bit too snippy and not at all the way he’d intended it. And the thought of going back to bed for a while didn’t feel as awful as it probably should. But he’d be stuck there for days after the injection wore off, and with the amount of sleep he’d gotten last night, it might take him most of the day to refill his tank to anything resembling normal.

“Sorry. But no, I’m fine. I’ll close my eyes on the couch for a minute while we’re waiting. I assume it’ll take her at least a little time to get over here.”

“If you say so.” Harper clambered to her feet—or he guessed she did from the sounds of it—and took a few steps down the hall before pausing. “Brady? You coming?”

“Yeah.” Brady pushed off the wall and sent up a silent prayer for wisdom and strength for the day before shuffling toward the elevator and DeAndre.