Cured [ManxMan]

Chapter Eighteen

We hadn't been back for more than an hour when the door slammed open.

I startled at the sudden sound, wincing when the motion jostled my arm. Sensation was returning, making my entire arm feel like it was being stabbed by tiny needles, and they all ripped into me at once when I moved too quickly.

Mattie sent the boy in the doorway a scathing glare. "Do you need something?" he asked, irritation bleeding into the words, but the kid paid him no attention. No, his full focus was on me, making me squirm a bit uncomfortably. I wasn't sure I liked the way he was scrutinizing me, like he was trying to figure me out.

But as I peered back at him, I realized I knew who this boy was. For one, he was the kid I tried to eat the day Ajay and his team retrieved me from the city. There was more than that, though, some familiarity that perked up from the back of my mind, but I couldn't quite place where I could have met this boy before...

And then he grinned, and I recognized that smile, wide and carefree, scrunching his face around his nose and crinkling around the eyes. Oh yes, I knew that smile; it was Mattie's smile.

I remembered a little boy, maybe six or seven, screaming and laughing as he barreled toward us, and Mattie picking him up and hanging him upside down by the ankles. Mattie's kid brother. What was his name?

"Ollie," Mattie groaned, exasperated. Yeah that was right, and I distantly remembered Ajay and Kiara referencing the name just after I arrived. "What are you doing here?"

The kid ignored his brother to continue studying me, and I studied him back. He had ash blonde hair I remembered he shared with his mother, and his eyes were a grayish blue. Honestly, besides their smiles, which were startlingly similar, the two boys looked very different, and I wouldn't have pegged them for being related at a glance, Mattie with his tanned skin and dark hair leaning toward his Hispanic heritage and Ollie with near alabaster skin and altogether unexotic features. Half-brothers, maybe? Just similar enough to ward off the possibility of one being adopted, but too dissimilar to be full brothers.

"Why did no one tell me?" Ollie finally declared, sparing a glance at his brother and Kiara, even glancing behind him at Ajay, who had followed him in with arms crossed over his chest and a disproving frown across his lips. "And made me do extra work to keep me busy and away, but I still figured it out! Mattie, is this why Jasper seemed upset when I went to your apartment and he told me you weren't there?"

He bounced forward to plop himself on the edge of my bed, jostling my arm again and drawing a growl from my throat, the first zombie-like sound I'd made in days. The sound shocked both of us, and Ollie scrambled away, staring at me with wide eyes, but Mattie, perched on the chair on the other side of the bed, was unfazed.

"That's what you get for jostling him. He just got out of surgery, be careful, squirt," he scolded, earning him a brief glare from his brother before the boy, apparently already over his shock and fear, settled himself back onto the bed, being careful not to shake it too much.

"It took me awhile to figure it out," he said, grinning. "I mean, you were a zombie the first time I saw you, and you just don't expect to recognize zombies, but I did, just a little, do you remember? I said so, I said 'I recognize him', and no one believed me, but I just couldn't place where I knew you from. But it's so cool that you've been cured, like, the first person ever cured of the zombie virus. Also, what's it like to be a zombie?"

Mattie cut in, "Oliver, think before you speak, for once in your life."

"It's okay. I don't mind," I spoke up before Ollie could snap back. Mattie made it sound like it was a sensitive topic, but I had been a zombie, and I was the only person alive who could describe what it was like. I could see Kiara over Ollie's shoulder readying her clipboard. "It was lonely," I said, "but I didn't... know it at the time.