than anyone else on the team. It was because every time someone knocked me down, knocked me clear across the ring, or I took a softball right to the face, I didn’t need to sit on the bench, go to the hospital, or miss a game. I popped right back up and was ready to continue to the game.
Speedy meant speed healing.
My roller derby and softball team saw it way before I did, and they gave me my nickname based on it. What was I going to see when the doctor took my bandage off? Now, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see the doctor. I just wanted to pretend like I was a perfectly normal shortstop who ran a tattoo shop. But I was never normal, was I? I painted the future.
Leif led me to a different wing of this big white building. It was surprisingly sterile for the apocalypse. Everyone seemed to worship Leif here. They snapped to attention as soon as they saw him, and I was sitting in an exam room in minutes.
I asked to go in alone. Aeron and Leif had been an excellent support system to me this entire time, and I was glad they ended up being the good guys, but I needed to do this alone. Did the people here know who they were? Aeron and Leif could have answered my questions better than a human doctor could, but I wanted a human doctor because I had questions. It was probably human medical technology that kept me in my coma, though I was guessing my memory loss had something to do with my father, and that was why it was so dangerous to give me information all at once.
An older man with a kind face came in. He held out his hand to me.
“I’m Doctor Gonzalez. Aeron and Leif explained to me you were in a long term, medically induced coma. If you don’t mind, I’d like to look at more than your arm. Being in a coma, then ending up out there, has probably been hard on your body. Is that okay with you?”
Was that okay with me? I should have been asking that question as soon as I woke up. If I had been flat on my back and pumped full of drugs for that long, my muscles should have atrophied. I should have hit the floor when I tried to stand. I was shaky, but I made it to the door, and not ten minutes later, I was fighting my way through a horde of Rage Heads. Why wasn’t that weird to me at the time?
“Sure. Check out everything. I was kidnapped and put in a coma. There’s no telling what they did to me.”
Doctor Gonzalez started shining a light in my eyes.
“Oh, we’ve heard all about you. First, all Leif could talk about was his amazing new girlfriend. When you went missing, Aeron and Leif went a little insane trying to find you. Then the war broke out, and they had to join the fight. Their friend Dice joined up to help, and then all three of them were looking for you in between trying to stop the world for killing each other. No one could understand why until Leif admitted you might be able to help him end all this. I’m glad he found you. Follow my finger.”
Great. All of San Quintin thought I could stop this, and they all had guns. What if my blood wasn’t the answer? Could my angel blood survive my body being riddled with bullets? I mean, my father killed my mother, so clearly, there were ways to kill angels. What if my fucking blood was a one-trick pony and could only turn people into cannibal corpses?
Doctor Gonzalez gave me a full exam and took some blood to test. He checked my arm too. I’d never had a cut this big, but I lied through my teeth and said I got it a few weeks ago when he told me it was on the mend, and he could go ahead and take the stitches out. Fuck me. I was some angel mutant.
“I will run your blood through a few tests to check your levels, but you seem healthy. You’re way too thin, but you’re in a wonderful place to remedy that. No one in San Quintin goes hungry, and aside from some processed junk food that was out there before, we have all the food you could want.”
I cocked an eyebrow