The fire – and its gathering group of women – is noted. Interest certainly piqued, but Marcus was road-weary enough to not care that the women were already on offer. He could go challenge-seeking when he wasn't worried about where the fuck he was going to sleep at night. Sharing time with the hot and easy wasn't exactly a hardship.
But the large man most obviously relaxed at their reactions to the meds. Not addicts, then. Hell, the Teagan woman was claiming that there weren't any addicts in the whole damn camp, which was fairly impressive given their numbers. The population wasn't huge, but it wasn't insignificant, either. He was tempted to ask how they could be so sure of that, what their policies were, how they inventoried controlled substances... and he might do that one day, when he was more comfortable with their system. Or – more likely – he'd figure it the fuck out. Mostly, he was just grateful that he hadn't fallen into a nest of white, racist, Southern meth addicts. Worst-case scenarios weren't hard to imagine these days, but that one had been on his internal mental list. Top five, definitely.
"Infections I can handle," he said, voice serious and low in a near-growl. It wasn't meant to come across as angry, but he'd seen too many people inclined to amputate a limb or abandon a person over a scratch or bite these days (death sentence, in most cases). He'd been left to treat himself more than once by people whose paranoia was seeded so deeply it actively offended him. Rodeo's candor made him forget that he was supposed to be keeping his own cards at least a bit vested. These were people who needed help, and weren't getting it from what was left of the system. And Marcus had seen the system fail, countless times before. People getting denied basic human decency because they couldn't fucking afford it. People dying of shit that shouldn't necessarily be fatal.
It got under his skin. The sheer fucking wrongness of it. He shakes his head. "Not stocked on prenatals, or trained for that. Never did pediatrics. Started as a CNA for DD, went Critical Care a few years back. Moved to ER at my last gig, but shit, everywhere's an ER these fucking days, so trauma I can deal with. Some PT, but I'm not specialist." He sighs, letting the cards fall. It hadn't been much of a game, anyway. "Tengo reglas. Not like the government fucks do, but I follow fucking protocol with the meds, and I take my job real fucking serious. Not my fucking place to say who lives and dies. That's self-righteous doctor shit I can't fucking stand. But you got injured – sick people here -- I'll fucking help if I can. En siero. I'll try."