Chapter 192: Boardwalk Night

After what felt like both an eternity and a blink, Shawn finally stepped back from the examination table and stripped off the thin plastic gloves he’d improvised from what looked like food-handling material taped tight at the wrists.

Time had warped while he worked—ten minutes, maybe fifteen, maybe more. I’d lost track of anything but the rhythm of his movements: the soft scrape of instruments, the periodic change of bloodied gauze, the rustle of fresh bandages being unwrapped, and underneath it all, Clara’s shallow breathing that never quite deepened into something I could trust.

He’d done everything alone under the glow of a small LED lantern hanging from a ceiling hook, powered by what was probably a scavenged battery pack taped somewhere out of sight. The light swung slightly whenever someone moved too close, sending shadows dancing across the walls. It wasn’t much—nothing like the surgical lighting of pre-collapse hospitals—but it was enough for steady hands to find what they needed.

Now the instruments lay arranged on their metal tray again, no longer pristine but organized with the same care as before. Fresh white bandages wrapped Clara’s shoulder and upper chest in layers, secured with medical tape and what looked like strips of cloth torn from something cleaner than what we’d been using. Her skin had been wiped down, the worst of the blood scrubbed away to reveal pale flesh marked by dark bruising radiating from the entry wound.

Shawn tossed the gloves into a metal waste bin with a soft thump, then rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist, smearing a faint streak of red across his temple that he didn’t seem to notice or care about. When he turned toward me, his exhaustion was visible again—no longer pushed to the edges by professional focus, but settling back into the lines around his eyes and the set of his shoulders.

"She’s going to need rest," he said without preamble. "A few days minimum of complete rest. No lifting anything, no sudden movements, nothing that makes her twist her torso or raise that arm above shoulder height. I strapped her shoulder pretty tight to immobilize it, so she physically won’t be able to move her right arm much anyway, but make absolutely sure she understands that when she wakes up. Some people panic when they realize they can’t move and try to rip the bindings off."

I stood up from the wooden bench outside the doorway. "I’ll make sure she knows."

"I also gave her painkillers—actual pharmaceutical-grade stuff, not herbal nonsense," Shawn continued, a hint of professional pride entering his voice. "Strong enough that she’ll stay under for several hours, which is exactly what she needs right now. The first and most important thing for recovery is a proper night’s sleep—deep, uninterrupted, giving her body a chance to start healing without stress hormones flooding her system every time she moves wrong."

I nodded, feeling something loosen slightly in my chest. The tight band of anxiety that had been constricting my breathing since the bullet hit eased just enough for me to take a full breath. "Thank you. Really."

"Just doing my job," Shawn replied with a slight shrug. Then his gaze sharpened as he looked me over more carefully, taking in details he’d probably registered earlier but set aside while Clara was the priority. "What about you, though? You hurt anywhere I should know about? Because your entire body looks like you went for a swim in a slaughterhouse."

I glanced down at myself, seeing what he saw.

He wasn’t exaggerating. My jacket was stiff with dried blood in patches that had turned from red to brown-black, the fabric crackling slightly when I moved. My shirt underneath showed through tears in the jacket—also soaked, also stiff, creating an uncomfortable second skin that pulled at chest hair and scraped against my ribs. There were streaks along my neck and jaw where something—infected blood, probably, mixed with Clara’s arterial spray—had spattered and then dried in crusty lines.

"No, I’m not injured," I said quietly. "It’s just... infected blood mostly. And Clara’s blood."

She’d taken the bullet that was meant for me. If I hadn’t turned my head at that precise microsecond, if my body hadn’t shifted those few critical centimeters to the side, that round would have punched straight through my skull instead of grazing past to find her shoulder. I’d be the one on that table—or more likely, I’d be dead on a street somewhere with my brain matter decorating the pavement.

I wouldn’t say I regretted the reflexive movement that had saved my life. Survival instincts weren’t really subject to moral judgment. But there was a strange, uncomfortable guilt sitting in my stomach anyway, an ugly feeling that whispered I should have been faster, should have tackled her to the ground, should have done something other than let her body catch the bullet my dodge had redirected.

"You ought to get some sleep too, lad," Shawn said, his tone shifting into something that might have been concern or might just have been professional assessment. "You’ve got dark rings under your eyes that look like bruises. When’s the last time you actually slept? And I mean real sleep, not just closing your eyes for twenty minutes."

"We traveled for days straight trying to find somewhere safe to settle," I said, which was technically true even if it wasn’t the complete truth. "There wasn’t really time for proper rest."

That was the sanitized version. The reality was more complicated and darker.

Yes, we’d had night shifts and rotating watch schedules. Yes, Rachel and the others had asked me—practically begged me at certain points—to take a proper rest period and let someone else shoulder the burden of vigilance for a few hours. But I’d been unable to sleep even when I tried.

Every time I closed my eyes, I had those vivid, visceral dreams. Jasmine’s face swam up out of the darkness—her expression in those final moments before the infection took her completely, the way her features had twisted between human grief and inhuman hunger, the tears streaming down her cheeks while her body betrayed everything she’d once been.

After what I could call barely a nap, I’d wake up gasping, sweat-soaked, with rage and grief warring in my chest so violently I thought they might actually tear me apart from the inside. Jason was dead now—truly, permanently dead after our final confrontation. But killing him hadn’t changed anything. The grief was still there. The rage was still there. Jasmine was still gone.

Vengeance truly resolved nothing except satisfying barely a bitter feeling.

And then there was the other thing, the reason that kept me hypervigilant even when exhaustion made my vision swim.

The Starakians wanted Wanda back. They’d tried once to reclaim their "asset" and failed, but failure didn’t mean they’d given up. I lived with the constant, gnawing fear that they would return at any moment—maybe with more force, maybe with better planning, maybe with tactics we couldn’t counter.

Someone needed to watch over her. Someone needed to be ready to respond instantly if alien forces materialized out of the darkness to reclaim what they considered their property.

Of course, I couldn’t explain any of that to Shawn. The Starakians, the alien conspiracy behind the infection, my Dullahan enhancements, Wanda’s nature—all of it existed in a category of truth that Margaret had wisely decided to keep sealed away from the broader survivor community.

"I can give you something to help you sleep if you want," Shawn offered, moving toward one of the cabinets. "Something mild that’ll just take the edge off the adrenaline enough for your body to actually rest."

"No, I’m fine," I said quickly, perhaps too quickly based on the way his eyebrows rose slightly. "Really. I just need to make sure Clara’s settled properly. But thank you for taking care of her."

I stepped past him into the examination room to get a proper look at Clara now that the immediate crisis had passed.

The transformation was remarkable. Where before there had been blood-soaked chaos and the raw ugliness of a fresh wound, now there was clinical order. Her shoulder had been completely cleaned, the skin around the injury site showing stark white against the bruising. The bandages were professionally applied—tight enough to prevent movement and provide compression, but not so tight they’d restrict circulation. The strapping across her chest and around her arm immobilized the joint exactly as Shawn had described.

Yeah, she’d taken a bullet. Actually taken one, absorbed it into her body, had it tear through muscle and tissue and possibly nick bone.

Clara was an ordinary woman without any enhancements or supernatural resilience. Just human. And this was the real world where bullets did exactly what physics and biology dictated—unlike movies where people got shot and kept fighting, real gunshot wounds were catastrophic trauma that could easily kill through shock, blood loss, or infection even with medical care.nhs

Seeing it now, cleaned and bandaged but still visibly severe, made the reality worse somehow. Made it more real in a way the chaotic moments after she’d been hit hadn’t allowed me to fully process.

"Follow me, I’ll show you your room for tonight," Molly said from the doorway.

I nodded, carefully wrapping my arms under Clara’s knees and behind her back, then lifting her slowly to avoid jostling her shoulder. She remained completely unconscious, her head lolling against my chest, her breathing steady but shallow. The painkillers Shawn had administered were clearly doing their job.

"You can leave her here, you know?" Shawn said, his tone carrying a edge of irritation mixed with what might have been offense. "Or are you actually thinking I’d do something inappropriate to an unconscious injured woman in my care?"

"No, that’s not it at all," I said quickly, shaking my head. "It’s not about trust in you professionally. She’s my responsibility. My people left her in my care specifically, and I promised I’d stay with her until she recovered."

I didn’t add the other reasons—that leaving her alone in an unfamiliar place with people I’d just met while we were technically in what Sydney had called "enemy territory" felt like abandoning my duty. That after everything that had gone wrong tonight, I needed to physically see her breathing to believe she was actually going to survive.

"Aren’t you quite sweet," Molly chuckled, moving to hold the clinic door open for me. "Protective type. Your group’s lucky to have someone who takes responsibility that seriously."

I nodded without responding, stepping carefully through the doorway with Clara’s weight balanced in my arms. We left the clinic behind, its smell of antiseptic and old fear fading as we emerged back into Atlantic City’s night air.

Molly clicked on her flashlight, the beam cutting a path ahead of us through the darkness. The LED strings that had provided ambient lighting near the barricade didn’t extend this far into the settlement, leaving us dependent on her torch to navigate between buildings.

"At this hour, everyone’s sleeping," she explained as we walked, her voice dropping to a quieter register as if worried about disturbing the settlement’s rest. "We have a pretty strict curfew that starts early in the evening. Since electricity is extremely rare and precious, we can’t afford to waste the batteries we’ve scavenged by keeping lights burning all night. Marlon wants everyone settled and ready to sleep before the sun sets completely, leaving everything in darkness except for essential watch positions."

"That makes sense from a resource management perspective," I said, following her lead through what appeared to be a narrow passage between two buildings. "But don’t you have emergency battery reserves or alternative lighting options for situations that require it?"

"What do you mean exactly?" Molly glanced back at me, her face half-illuminated by the reflected torchlight.

I hesitated, trying to figure out how to phrase the question without sounding condescending or like I was criticizing their setup.

The electrical work I’d seen so far—those scattered LED strings powered by small battery packs—seemed almost primitive compared to what Mark had accomplished back at the municipal office in Jackson Township. He’d somehow managed to restore partial functionality to the actual electrical grid, routing power from a combination of solar panels, wind generators, and carefully maintained diesel backup systems through repaired distribution lines. We’d had consistent lighting in common areas, refrigeration for medical supplies and food storage, even the occasional luxury of heated water.

But I supposed not everyone was lucky enough to have someone like Mark in their community—an engineer with both the theoretical knowledge and practical skills to resurrect pre-collapse infrastructure. And criticizing what the Boardwalk community had managed to build with limited resources and expertise would be both ungrateful and unfair.

"Never mind," I said finally. "I was just curious about your power setup. What you’ve managed to accomplish with limited resources is already impressive."

Yeah, I guess Mark was just an anomaly, that old smoker literally built flamethrowers from scraps now that I think about it...

What the hell?

Molly seemed to accept my deflection, turning back to continue guiding us not toward some auxiliary shelter, but directly toward the towering casino hotel where most of the community apparently lived.

As we approached, I could finally make out the faded lettering above the main entrance, partially illuminated by a single LED string someone had draped across the awning: Emerald Casino Hotel. The words were rendered in what had once been an elegant script, probably backlit with green neon in the old world, now reduced to peeling paint and tarnished metal.

"The elevators obviously don’t work anymore," Molly said with a dry chuckle as we reached the entrance. "So most people sleep on the first few floors. Can you imagine the pain of climbing stairs to the twentieth floor every single night? We’d spend half our energy just getting to bed."

We passed through glass doors—one shattered and boarded, the other propped permanently open—into what had once been a grand reception hall. Crystal chandeliers still hung from the ceiling, dark and dusty, their hundreds of glass pendants catching faint light like frozen tears. The marble floor showed scuff marks and stains where the pre-collapse polish had worn away under months of hard use.

I spotted a handful of people sitting on benches near what had been the reception desk, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking in low voices despite the late hour. They glanced at me briefly—taking in the blood-covered stranger carrying an unconscious woman—then nodded acknowledgment at Molly before returning to their conversation as if this kind of scene was unremarkable.

"I’m giving you a room on the first floor," Molly said as we started up a wide staircase with ornate railings. "There’s an empty one available... well, forcefully emptied by Callighan’s men, if I’m being honest."

Her voice carried a bitter edge on those words.

"The furniture’s still inside and it’s been cleaned as best we could manage, so it should be comfortable enough for you. Just try not to move things around too much or disturb anything that might have sentimental value we’re holding for the original residents."

"It’s only for one night," I said quietly, understanding. "We’ll be gone as soon as Clara can travel."

She nodded appreciatively at that, and when we reached a door about halfway down the first-floor corridor, she simply pushed it open without ceremony. The electronic card reader mounted beside it was dead and useless, its little lights dark, the whole security system rendered irrelevant by collapse.

Once inside, I found myself genuinely standing in what had been a proper casino hotel room—not some stripped-down survival shelter, but an actual preserved space that people had clearly tried to maintain.

"Here," Molly said, leading me through a small sitting area into the bedroom proper.

The bed was made with actual sheets—mismatched and faded, but clean. A dresser stood against one wall, a bathroom door stood ajar revealing tile and fixtures, and heavy curtains blocked the windows. Someone had even left a battery-powered lantern on the nightstand, currently dark but available.

I walked carefully to the bed and lowered Clara onto it as gently as possible, then pulled the sheet up over her unconscious form. Her breathing remained steady and shallow, her face peaceful in a way it hadn’t been since the bullet hit.

"You should take a wash down at the beach while you have the chance," Molly said from behind me. "Get that blood off before it sets any harder."

"No, it’s fine," I said automatically, my gaze still fixed on Clara’s chest rising and falling.

"Boy, look at yourself," Molly said with exasperation, pointing toward a large mirror mounted on the wall across from the bed.

I reluctantly turned to look.

The reflection showed someone I barely recognized. My face was streaked with dried blood in dark lines that followed the contours of my jaw and cheekbones. My hair was matted and stiff with it. My clothes hung on me like a second skin of violence—jacket crusted and stiff, shirt underneath showing through tears as equally ruined. I looked less like a person and more like something that had crawled out of a mass grave.

My gaze drifted back to Clara.

"She won’t disappear while you’re gone, I promise," Molly sighed, reading my hesitation correctly. "She’s medicated and stable. Thirty minutes won’t change anything except getting you clean enough that you don’t contaminate her wound with whatever bacteria you’re currently covered in."

That argument landed. I nodded finally and followed her back out of the room, pulling the door mostly closed behind us.

She led the way through corridors and down a different staircase, eventually bringing us out through a side exit that opened directly onto the famous Atlantic City Boardwalk. The wooden planks stretched in both directions, weathered and salt-worn, and beyond them the beach spread out toward the ocean.

The breeze hit me immediately—cold, clean, carrying the salt-and-seaweed smell of the Atlantic and the rhythmic sound of waves rolling onto sand. After hours breathing the stench of infected flesh, gun smoke, and fear-sweat, the ocean air felt like a physical relief.

"You’ve got a flashlight, right?" Molly asked. "When you’re finished, you know the way back to your room?"

"Yeah, I’ve got it," I confirmed, touching the small torch in my pocket.

"Good. Don’t stay out too long—the patrols know you’re here, but unexpected movement on the beach at night makes people nervous." She gave me a small wave and turned back toward the hotel, leaving me alone with the ocean.

I walked forward, my boots transitioning from wood to sand with each step, the ground shifting beneath my weight in a way that urban ruins and paved streets never did. The sensation felt unexpectedly good natural, connected to something older than cities and infection.

The ocean stretched ahead, vast and dark, waves catching moonlight in silver lines as they rolled toward shore. The sound of them breaking filled the space around me, drowning out the distant noises of the settlement behind. Out here, for this moment, it was just me and the sea.

I stopped where the sand was still dry and removed my boots, setting them carefully aside. The cold sand between my toes felt shockingly alive after days in heavy boots. Then I stripped off my jacket and waded into the surf.

The water was cold—genuinely cold for summer, but nothing my enhanced physiology couldn’t handle. Where a normal person might have gasped and retreated, I barely registered it as more than sharp awareness.

I dunked my jacket completely, wringing it out with force, watching the water run dark with diluted blood. Again. And again. Repeating the process until the ocean ran mostly clear and only the worst stains remained embedded in the fabric.

Then I did the same with my shirt, stripping it off and leaving myself bare-chested under the moon. The cold air hit my wet skin, raising goosebumps, but I ignored it and focused on scrubbing the fabric as best I could without soap. When I was satisfied both were as clean as ocean and physical force could make them, I threw them higher up the beach where waves wouldn’t reach and waded deeper.

The ocean accepted me without judgment, rising from my knees to my waist to my chest as I walked forward. When it reached my shoulders, I dove under completely, feeling the cold envelope my head and wash through my hair.

I stayed submerged for what felt like a full minute, eyes closed, suspended in the Atlantic’s massive indifference to human suffering. Down here, there were no infected, no warlords, no alien conspiracies.

Finally, I surfaced, gasping and shaking water from my face.

I scrubbed at my hair with my fingers, working out the dried blood and dirt, then brushed it back from my face. Reaching into my pocket—miraculously still there despite the soaking—I pulled out Cindy’s pink hairband and used it to tie my wet hair back properly.

For a moment I just stood there, water at knee level, and stared up at the sky.

The moon hung huge and bright, surrounded by more stars than Atlantic City’s light pollution had allowed in the old world. Beautiful. Indifferent. Eternal in ways humanity would never be I guess.

Somewhere up there, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the moon, maybe beyond this entire solar system, the Starakians existed. Living on some distant planet, maybe in another galaxy entirely, pursuing their unfathomable agenda that had brought infection and death to Earth.

I clenched my fist until the knuckles showed white, then punched down into the water with all the force my enhanced strength could muster. The impact sent spray exploding upward, drenching my face and chest again, the violence of it satisfying in a way that solved nothing.

"Why..." I muttered, my voice breaking, feeling a single tear track down my cheek to mix with the ocean already coating my face.

Behind me, I sensed sudden presence. Not infected-presence, but aware-presence. Human attention focused on my back.

I snapped around instantly, scanning the beach and boardwalk, hands coming up into defensive positions automatically.

Nothing. No one visible in the darkness. Just sand and weathered wood and distant settlement lights.

Had I imagined it? Was exhaustion finally pulling me into paranoid hallucinations?

I wiped at my face with the back of my hand—a useless gesture given how drenched I was—and trudged back toward shore, toward my discarded clothes, finally toward the hotel.