Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

“Right,” she quickly agreed, happy to skip past the potential faux-pas. “So consider that in the Navy, out of all the people they recruited each year, only about six percent or so actually qualified just to attempt the training. Of those, only one in four actually graduated.”

“How many people did the Navy recruit every year?” asked Wang.

“I don’t know for sure,” Olivia admitted. “I’m Army; Sixty-Eight Whiskey.”

“Sixty-wha—?”

“Combat Medic. Anyway, the point is that the Seal community was already vanishingly small when the Plague hit. There’s nothing inherently special about Seals, besides whatever it is inside of them that enables them to be Seals to begin with, so they died off just as hard as the rest of us. When you think about the numbers involved, the crippling death toll, it’s a bit of a miracle that we even have the Otter with us.”

Wearing a befuddled expression, Wang asked, “You all call him Otter? Wouldn’t you call him, like, Commander, or… uh… Sir?”

She grinned. “You’ll understand when you meet him. He is without question the most professional person I’ve ever met in my life, but he’s also not terribly big on formality… even more so now after everything’s gone sideways.”

“What do you mean?”

She opened her mouth, hesitated, and then closed it. Pursing her lips a moment, she finally said, “Let’s leave that for later, okay? We have more important things to deal with.”

Wang didn’t like the sound of that. “Oh… kay?”

“Before our discussion took a detour, you were telling me what you could remember…”

“Right,” he agreed. He cast about internally for a moment before he remembered where he left off. “Well, I sure remember being shot. Felt like being tackled by a football player, not that I ever played. Things get a little hazy after that. There were some flashes of light here and there and a lot of noise… but… eh. I wouldn’t want to try to describe any of it. It all starts to feel like a fever dream.”

She nodded. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Wang felt his heart rate quicken. His breath came in quick gasps.

“You took a high-powered rifle round to the left hip, Wang. It hit the bone and completely pulverized the top of your femur as well as portions of the pubis and ischium. It wasn’t even a question of trying to screw things back together; there was nothing left but fragments.”

“Je… sus…” he croaked. He was beginning to feel nauseous.

Olivia took his left hand in hers, holding it in an arm wrestler’s grip, and continued. “Back in the day, you would have been looking at a hip replacement, I suppose, though I’m just a medic. But now… well, we just don’t have the facilities to do that anymore. We had to take your leg, Wang.”

“I… can… feel it, though.”

Olivia hung her head briefly, just long enough to betray the exhaustion she carried but not so long that the gesture suggested she was ready to start phoning it in. She looked up at him, and now her right hand joined her left, rubbing the back of Wang’s hand slowly. “Feel it how?” she asked.

He raised his head in an attempt to see his bottom half. When it became clear what he was doing, Olivia stood immediately to help, jamming an extra pillow behind his shoulders. He thanked her and then lay in place for a moment, panting, keeping his eyes locked on the rounded tent ceiling. She saw beads of sweat standing out on his forehead and realized that his panting was not from the exertion of sitting up; he was fighting off a wave of anxiety. She took up his hand again, squeezing it in turns to remind him of her presence, and waited. After a minute or so, he slowed his breathing and looked down at his bottom half. He saw the impression of his remaining leg under the blanket and void where the other limb should have been. His breath caught in his throat.

“Is it painful?” she asked.

Unable to move his eyes away from that horrible void, he said, “At the hip, yes. Down the… uh… I feel… pressure. At the bottom. Around the toes.”

“Well, that’s good news, at least,” she said.

His head jerked in her direction as though yanked by a puppeteer. “What?”

She shrugged and said, “It’s Phantom Limb Pain. Some patients report intense itching, burning, or worse. Episodes can last seconds, minutes, or hours… or even days.” She remained silent for a few seconds, giving him a chance to understand the implication. “The sensations you experience can and probably will change over time but, for right now, count your blessings that you only feel pressure.”

“Does it ever go away?” Wang’s voice was disconnected. Hollow.

“I can say that the intensity will most likely decrease within a six month period. I can’t promise it will ever fully go away, though. You have to understand that the sensation you’re feeling isn’t happening in your leg; the leg isn’t there anymore. What you’re feeling is coming from your spinal column. It basically amounts to a lot of noise and confused signals due to the fact that you have a whole bundle of nerves that are a lot shorter than they used to be. Your brain doesn’t understand how to interpret that. It’s convinced that your leg should be there.”

Wang’s head had fallen back as she spoke; now he looked at her again. He glanced down at her hands wrapped around his own and asked, “You’ve dealt with these a lot? Amputations, I mean.”

“I have.”

His eyes drifted forward, centering on the canvas flap separating his enclosure from whatever was beyond. “How much is left?”

Olivia sighed. “Nothing. We had to take it off at the hip.”

Wang exhaled slowly, closing his eyes.

“Can I have a moment?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m right on the other side of the flap. Call me when you’re ready but don’t be too long. We have a lot to go over.”

A surprised laugh erupted from Wang’s mouth. “Such as what?”

“Recovery, Wang. You don’t get to lie around just because you lost a leg. There’s much to do around here.”

Wang had his first real foray into the last known functioning tent city of the United States, named The Elysium Fields by its inhabitants, five days later. The time leading up to that day had been a prolonged cycle of recovery, punctuated by periods of helplessness, frustration, and misery. Between the long stretches of vacant time (seconds ticking by like minutes ticking by like hours), there were dressing changes, bedpan swaps, feedings, examinations, and the physical therapy sessions under the strong hands of Specialist Olivia Lee. These sessions were particularly humiliating, as he could not yet wear normal clothes again due to their interference with his bandages. He had to make do with sandwiching himself between two hospital gowns; one pulled over his front followed by another pulled over his back like a raincoat. And, so far as Wang could tell, it didn’t matter what kind of man you were, even if you were the hardest, most grizzled, weather-beaten sailor; wearing a hospital gown made you look like an old invalid grandmother. It was also not helpful that bending over was still far too painful for all of the pulling and tugging at his scar that such activity produced, a reality that required Olivia to kneel before him to pull his one sock and slipper on over his foot. Apart from her taking his bedpan away, it was the one thing in his daily routine that he dreaded the most. To make matters worse, Olivia prompted him with a hearty, “Stuff it in there, big boy!” when she held the sock open for him.

His first steps (or “step,” he supposed) were taken with the aid of a Zimmer Frame. That was what Olivia called it, though Wang knew it was just a goddamned walker; he suspected she called it a Zimmer Frame to avoid using the term “walker,” which worked about as well as a shit salad, Wang thought darkly. The avoidance of the term only served to highlight its absence; to point it out, as it were. He thought in his rambling fashion (most of his thinking tended to be rambling these days, a combination of too much idle time and pain medication) that “walker” wasn’t such an appropriate term anymore, either. A “stepper” or “hobbler” seemed to fit the bill far better. As he practiced dragging himself across the little recovery tent, Olivia pointed to a set of gray aluminum forearm crutches, the kind that strapped on just below the elbow, which she had managed to dig up for him from God knew where, and said, “Just keep it up, Wang. You’ll be graduating to that set of getaway sticks over there, and then you’ll be about as close to ass-kicking condition as we’re likely to get you.”