Chapter 7: The Lower Infirmary

Veda found him on the lowest deck, in the dark.

The ship's old infirmary annex sat behind a steel door at the end of a corridor that smelled of bleach.

A single lamp burned inside.

Twelve cots stood in two rows, and in each cot lay someone who had been written off on the pool deck three nights ago.

Tobias sat on a stool between two of them with his blanket around his shoulders.

He was reading aloud from a battered paperback in a low, even voice.

An old woman in the cot beside him had her eyes closed, and a smile on her face.

A man in the next cot, grey-faced and gaunt, was listening with his mouth open.

Veda stood in the doorway, and she did not make a sound.

She had run down flight after flight of stairs in her bare feet, thinking he had collapsed somewhere, or been taken.

She had pictured his body at the bottom of a stairwell.

Instead he was reading a murder mystery to twelve dying strangers, doing all the voices.

He looked up and saw her.

"Oh," he said. "Hello."

The old woman opened her eyes.

"Is this your girl?" she asked him.

"Yes," he said, without hesitation.

"She looks like she wants to kill you."

"She usually does."

The man in the next cot started to laugh, a wheezing, breathless laugh that turned into a cough.

Tobias set his book aside, and put a hand on the man's shoulder until the coughing stopped.

Then he stood up.

He swayed.

Veda was across the room before she knew she had moved.

She put her arm around his waist, and he leaned into her without a word.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Reborn: Apocalypse Tyrant Endlessly Pampers Her Sickly Lover from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.