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“Almost there, Jill.”
Carlos’s back is screaming, but he’s not stopping. They’re about halfway to the hospital and he is really hoping that it’s not totally overrun with zombies once they get there. He has to do something to help Jill, whether it’s a vaccine or an antidote or whatever- he’s not sure exactly what that big freak-monster stuck her with or how it might be affecting her, though it’s obviously not what’s turned half the city into zombies. Carlos is hoping that maybe Dr. Bard will be able to figure it out. Two birds with one stone: Bard will be secured, and Jill will have an actual doctor that can help her.
Assuming he doesn’t cop the same goddamn attitude with me that he did over the computer.
Even if he did, Carlos isn’t just going to let Jill suffer and die. Bard will at least try to help her, or Carlos will out-right refuse to escort the doctor from the hospital, Umbrella be damned.
Carlos rounds a corner, and is surprised again to find a lack of zombies on the street. He sees corpses here and there, but those could just be in the in-between time of dying and waking up; hard to tell until they’re actually crawling towards you, and Carlos doesn’t intend to get close enough to figure out.
Suddenly, Jill starts to move.
And at first, Carlos is relieved: He assumes that she’s waking up, and slows to a stop so he can let her down. There aren’t any zombies nearby- none that he can see, anyway- and so Carlos is looking for a place to set her down when he starts to realize that Jill isn’t stirring so much as she is shaking.
“Jill?”
The shaking increases; abruptly, Jill’s head knocks hard against Carlos’s own, and for a second he sees stars.
“Jill!”
Carlos lowers her to the ground. Neither of them is wearing a jacket or any sufficiently soft excess clothing, and so he has to resort to cupping his hands beneath Jill’s head so that she doesn’t bash her skull against the pavement. At some point in the past, Carlos had been briefed on how to deal with seizures (and a dozen other emergency medical procedures), but he’s struggling to remember them now.
“Don’t put anything in the mouth, that’s one,” Carlos mutters, grimacing as Jill’s head strikes his hands and knocks them into the pavement. “Tell someone to call 911- well that’s not fucking happening. Stop her from concussing herself, I’m doing that; don’t hold her down, not doing that either- Jill, girl, I really need you to stop seizing, please stop seizing now-”
At some point, she does.
About halfway through Carlos remembers that one of those rules is ‘time how long the seizure lasts’, but think he can be forgiven for not having them all lined up perfectly given the circumstances. Altogether Jill stops shaking after two or three minutes, four at the absolute most. She seems to rally once it ends, emerging from the unresponsive unconsciousness she’d been in before the seizure and groaning, limbs twitching in a much more natural way and blinking.
“Jill, you good? You alright?” Carlos asks, gently helping Jill sit up and guiding her to lean against him.
Her eyes flutter, hands coming up to unsteadily bump against his chest and arms. For a moment she seems to focus on him, and the word that comes out of her mouth might be his name, but it’s slurred and Carlos honestly can’t tell. Eventually, she turns her head to rest against his shoulder and falls still again.
“Shit.”
Carlos sighs, and then carefully looks Jill over: Her arms are a little scratched and banged up from smacking against the ground, but her head’s good and she seems to be breathing normally. Carlos can’t be sure that she’s really okay, but then again, it’s not like he has a doctor to offer up a professional opinion of her condition.
“Okay, up we get, we’re going.” Carlos maneuvers her onto his back again, grimacing as his back starts to ache; Jill’s not that heavy, but any sort of weight on your back in this sort of hunched-over position will start giving you problems pretty quickly. He’s lucky that no zombies took the opportunity to rip his head off while he had been preoccupied with Jill.
She groans again, right next to his ear. Carlos notices that there’s a distinct difference between a human’s groan and a zombie’s groan, and since she’s currently got her face next to his neck, he likes that a lot. “It’s okay,” Carlos mutters. “We’re almost there, partner. I’ll get you there. Just don’t die and zombie-out on me before I do, alright? You’re cute, but that’s not the kind of necking that I’m into.”
Jill groans again, and Carlos likes to think it’s intentional this time.
-End