“COME ON, LET’S GET YOU IN BED.” Eva helped transfer Cole from the wheelchair to the bed, and he dutifully pretended to need that help. She sat in the wheelchair herself and began to roll back and forth. Cole watched her for a minute, happy that they could be content with being bored. She continued to roll around on the wheelchair, and then got more adventurous. She started to roll all over the room, treating the bed and side table like an obstacle course.
Cole took the opportunity to look at his wound for the first time, curious as to how it looked, since he could hardly feel it anymore. He peeled the bandage away from his skin—this hurt more than the stab wound—and saw that the knife had left a scar. It was slightly raised, pink, and about an inch in length. He put his finger against it and poked around a bit. He didn’t notice that Eva had rolled up to the side of his bed and was watching him.
“How is that even possible?” Eva stood up from the wheelchair and leaned across his body, trying to peek at the wound.
“What?” Cole covered it up.
“It looks like a…” she started to reach for it, but Cole held her hand to keep her from touching it, even over the bandage “It’s a scar now? After a day?”
“No, it’s just, you didn’t see it well. I should keep it covered, it’s gross, trust me, I—”
Eva’s phone buzzed. “To be continued,” she said.
There’d never been better timing in the world. Eva took her hand away from Cole’s, and pulled her phone out of her pocket.
“Wait a minute,” Eva said as she read.
“What is it?” Cole asked.
“It’s Michael. He just told me to get your blood and give it to the people. He said his mom told him to tell me.”
“She said what?”
Eva rolled her eyes. She repeated the text verbatim: “Mom says get the blood. Give it out like she showed you.”
“Why can’t she do it?”
“I don’t know.” Eva looked through her text again as though she’d missed something. “He doesn’t say.”
“Text him back,” Cole said.
Eva’s thumbs tapped away at her phone. He watched as she waited for a response that never came. She looked up at Cole, apologetically. “I think we should just do it. We don’t know how long she’s going to be. Somebody could need it right now.”
“You’re right. Screw it. I mean, you’ve already done it once.”
“Okay, ummm…” Eva darted off, away from the bed to a counter at the side of the room, one of the areas that Brady appeared to have rummaged through. She tore through a bunch of stuff that was piled there. Boxes fell to the ground, along with a stethoscope or two, a couple of clipboards. Finally, Eva turned around to show Cole a handful of needles. Cole gave her a thumbs-up. Soon, Eva was back over the bed. She had all the needles with her, seven by Cole’s count, and he counted very carefully.
“Seven?” Cole asked.
“Yeah, there are a lot of people sick, right?”
“Right…”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “When it’s over, I’ll find you all the cookies.”
“Every last single one of them,” he said.
Eva set to work, and Cole was impressed by how efficient she was. Before he knew it, all the syringes were full of his blood, lined up in a row. After she was done, she even found cotton balls and bandages for Cole to use.
“Not that you’ll need them,” she said, ensuring that Cole knew their conversation about his knife wound was far from over.
“I can’t explain it,” Cole said, as Eva placed a cotton ball over each place in Cole’s arm that she’d put in a needle. She taped down the cotton balls with bandages. “I can’t explain why it did that,” he said, motioning to the stab wound. “But I’m going to try and figure it out.”
“Are you going to do all that figuring-out way back in the city, or…” Eva gathered the needles carefully, so as not to stick herself with one of them, and she avoided eye contact with Cole just as carefully. He thought, he hoped, that she was trying to seem like she didn’t care either way, which meant that she actually did care.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I should get back, you know. My grandma’s down there and everything. My auntie. Friends, school.”
“Right,” Eva said. “Well…”
She walked over to the door.
“But I’d like to come back,” he blurted out. “If that would be okay. I mean, with people in general.”
“It’d be okay with me.”
They looked at each other for longer than a moment. Cole couldn’t tell how long it was. They got lost in time. He didn’t want it to end, so his heart sunk a bit when she snapped out of it. “Well, I better get started.”
“Are you going to be okay doing that?” he asked.
“Oh yeah. Everything’s going to be okay now, Cole. Really. Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“For more blood?”
“To bring cookies, remember?”
“Promise?”
“Yeah. I promise.”