Chapter 16 Nancy
SIXTEEN
NANCY
Days had passed since Robert cornered me in the stairwell, but the memory still haunted every interaction between us. His words, his grip, the look in his eyes. I tried to bury them, told myself to forget the whole business with Ginny and keep my head down. To stop stepping out of line.
But Wellard had other plans.
I found Ginny in a crumpled heap near the woods behind the asylum. Great tears split her white dress, her pallid skin streaked with blood and dirt. For one horrible second I feared she’d lost her baby. I dropped to my knees beside her, searching her skin frantically with quick hands.
The blood came from cuts. Angry slashes across her hands, calves and arms where the brambles must have snatched at her.
Not from her belly.
Thank God, not from there.
Ginny’s eyes were open, but vacant. Staring past me to the grey skies beyond.
Catatonic.
‘Ginny,’ I whispered, tenderly brushing damp hair from her face.
No response. Little red gashes cracked her dry lips.
I dragged her limp weight halfway back toward the building before my arms shook too badly to keep going. My uniform stuck to my skin with sweat, my back screaming with tension. I couldn’t leave her.
‘We need to get her to a hospital,’ I told Dr. Marney when he appeared at the edge of the grounds, summoned by a member of staff.
‘No, we don’t.’
Marney didn’t even crouch down to inspect her, just prodded her side with the toe of his shoe, rolling her just enough to see her face.
‘Surface wounds. She’ll live.’
‘She’s hurt. Unresponsive. What if someone molested her in the woods?’ I hadn’t forgotten her claims about Elijah and the cum on her thighs.
Marney’s lip curled, and he let out a sharp laugh. ‘Wouldn’t be the last time. Look at her. She’s a whore.’
His words made bile rise in my throat. He didn’t care about what happened to her. But why did I expect anything different? He didn’t want her taken to a hospital because no one left Wellard. Not alive. Not whole.
Patients survived there, until they didn’t.
Not for the first time, I regretted ever agreeing to work here.
Robert had gotten me the job. I’ve hated it every day since.
I stayed for the patients, and even that felt like a pathetic lie.
My ‘help’ amounted to patching them up after the doctors used them for experimentation. Or fun. It wasn’t enough.
It was never enough.
Ginny stirred, a moan catching in her throat as I tried to lift her. My knees buckled.
I panted, half holding Ginny against me as Marney watched. Neither he, nor the other staff made a move to help me.
Larry appeared, towering in the doorway. His face crumpled as he saw Ginny.
‘Nurse Nancy,’ he said, his words holding that childlike tone they so often did.
‘Help me?’ I puffed. Without a word he crossed the ground and stooped to lift her up in his massive arms. She hung there like an unloved ragdoll, left in the Asylum to be forgotten by anyone who had once loved her.
Larry’s huge hands dwarfed her spindly limbs.
She was slight in all but her swollen stomach.
Larry held her like she was made of spun glass, more care in his touch than I’d seen from any of the staff.
‘She’s hurt,’ he whispered. Tears stained his eyes, and I feared he’d lose control.
‘It’ll be okay,’ I said, placing a hand on his arm and turning him toward the building. ‘Just help me get her upstairs. She’ll be right as rain.’
A sniffle made Larry’s shoulders rise.
I swallowed hard, guiding him gently as he carried Ginny back inside, my chest aching with the weight of it all.