Serum, Part 7

We spent four hours looking for Gray. No sign of her in the warehouse or the streets immediately around us.

There was too much stuff at the stash for the two of us to carry it in one trip. I was unconcerned about Gray. She’d always been able to handle herself.

If anything, I was annoyed. You don’t split up like that out in the field. Anyone knows that. It’s ancient, written into us. It goes back to when we were still taming wolves.

The survivor who’d led us here insisted that we move the supplies before nightfall. I fought with him about it, but I didn’t know the lay of the land. We could’ve kept looking for Gray, but if we didn’t find her we’d have to take two trips and we wouldn’t have had enough time to do both. It didn’t really matter, anyway. Gray had the map, so I wasn’t going around the city by myself. I probably could have made my way back to the airstrip, but since we hadn’t called back to base there would’ve been nobody there waiting for us.

So we went back to the safe-house, taking as much as we could carry. It was rough going. It had rained while we were searching for Gray, and the streets had already been filled with water in the morning. By the time we made it to the safe-house, my feet were wet despite my boots. The survivor sprained his ankle in a hole he hadn’t been able to see beneath the water’s surface. I had to drag his load behind me while he limped along, which didn’t make things better.

He wasn’t happy when Gray was waiting for us on the other side of the moat.

“You ran off and left us!”

I don’t remember what she said in response. It was good enough to calm him down. He was mostly just angry because of the pain and having to limp back.

I said nothing. Truth be told, I was angry. Looking back, I suspect Gray was losing it a little. Too much violence, too little downtime. But every time we did a combat stress assessment she came up fine.

I should’ve said something to her. They were willing to let us stay a few extra days, get some rest. But we were running a tight schedule, and the last thing I wanted was to get stuck out on the bay for a long time. The survivors were friendly enough, but if we started to be a burden on them I wasn’t sure how they’d react.