Chapter 7 #2
The woman makes a clicking sound with her tongue. That alone propels the final man, with a cap pulled over his red hair, into a run—and he barrels for the swing doors.
The metal cupboard rings with a sudden clatter.
The noise strikes me, and I whip my glare to the side. A pain in my neck is quick to spring, but it feels distant, dull, and I just stare at the rattling doors as the bags are zipped up and the two intruders pull away.
Ransacked.
The metal shelves are wiped out.
Only some plastic packaging is left, like tumbleweed. The duffel bags rattle with stolen contents as boots smack on the glossy floors.
I watch the two of them jog back to the others, the man with the scarf, who keeps his rifle aimed at me and Louise, and the woman with the gloves, who holds her aim on Nurse Smith.
“Take what you need,” Smith says, careful, “and leave. We are no threat to you. We are only here for the sick.”
The man with the scarf turns the rifle away from us, and aims it at her. “Not anymore.”
The gloved woman steps forward. Her eyes are oceans, gleaming against the candlelight. “You’re coming with us.”
“My daughter is injured,” the man adds. “She can’t be moved.”
Smith hesitates for a moment, the same uneasy feeling we all have.
It’s in the frequent glance I aim down at the gap in the plastic drape; the way Louise inches closer to Emily who—with a curt look her way—is scowling through the remains of her fever at the man.
But she is failing. All the strength she had has been burnt through like scraps of fuel, and now she’s idling on fumes.
Slowly, Emily’s sagging onto the mattress.
Louise meets my gaze for a beat.
I read her too easily, that pleading look burning into me. The ‘are you with me?’
‘No.’ That is the word I mouth back at her. Firm. Unrelenting. And pissed the fuck off that she would even ask that.
So many years of friendship.
I know her through and through.
So to see that firm set of her jaw, the rage that she inhales through flaring nostrils, the tension running down her strong arms—it is to see a problem.
That niggle in her that forever yearns to fight against injustice. I like that niggle, especially in the before world, but not now, in this darkness, in this savagery, when it puts us all at risk.
Louise doesn’t care, doesn’t consider.
She turns her flushed cheek to me—
And my heart sinks.
She takes a determined step closer. “She isn’t going anywhere with you. If you—”
The blast thunders through the court.
I jerk with the fright of it.
Muscles pinned to bones, I am rooted in place as my strangled breaths grate through me.
“Oh—fuuuck,” a man groans.
I don’t see him.
I hear him, but my sight is warped, it dances with ribbons of light and strings of crimson.
“I didn’t mean it,” another man’s voice comes, hitched and sort of squealy. “I didn’t mean to...”
It’s strange.
It’s all just… background noise to the heartbeats thumping, hot, in my ears.
My lashes flutter—and clinging to one, a tear dangles. No… Not a tear.
Blood.
A single drop of blood just dangling from my eyelashes.
I blink—and the warmth of it falls onto my undereye. A moaning sound hums in my throat. My eyes are widening as, slowly, my legs start to sink beneath me.
I press my hands to my face.
The slicking sound is instant.
The warmth of blood is all over me. It trickles down my face, my lips, my hands.
I drop to my knees, a trembling coward, and stare at the hole in Louise’s head.
I didn’t know it happened like that.
I thought gunshots to the head meant she would fall backwards. But she ricocheted. It threw her head back, then her knees gave out, and she crumpled to the cold, hard floor—facedown.
Now, I am staring at the back of her head. Or what is left of it.
Now, it’s shredded.
Bloodied.
Flesh and brain, pulverised.
A sickly sound crawls through me, a moan, humming in my chest like a plucked guitar string.
I turn my cheek to her and find myself eyelevel with the gap between the bed and the curtain. No point crawling into it now. No point hiding.
If they are going to kill us all, then plastic sheeting and a bed won’t protect me.
“I’m sorry.” The pitchy voice of a man is as shaken as I am. “I’m sorry—I just… My wife needs help.”
His voice fades, buried beneath a ringing in my ears. It’s all I hear, until—
The distinguishable, soft thuds of orthopaedic shoes smacks on the gym floor—a walk that feels like forever, a walk that I should do something to stop.
But I can’t.
Not without ending up like Louise.
I told her not to. She didn’t listen. That fucking sense of justice.
My face twists under the assault, the pain spreading in my chest, and I choke on a breathy sound.
I listen as bootsteps thud through the rec centre.
I try not to fall apart as the swing doors creak, loud, too loud, and I flinch against the sound.
The clatter of guns, a grunted ‘wait for me’, tins clacking together in a rustling plastic bag…
And then, finally, the groan of the exit doors.
My breath pins—one, two, three—then releases with a coarse whoosh. I choke on it, the air, the taste of blood and piss in bedpans and tomato soup.
My breaths are grating through me, rasping like I’m one of the sick, on my deathbed.
Long after the silence has returned, the bootfalls silenced, the doors shut, the intruders gone, I am still on the floor—
Right next to the hot streams of blood just spilling out of Louise’s head onto the floor, and spreading in an expanding pool of crimson.
I stare at the blood creeping over the floor. It moves elegantly along the shape of my splayed fingers.
The aftershock wracks me. It has every muscle in its clutches, and it rattles me. I jerk with it, my mouth twisted, eyes wet.
The silence disturbs.
I flinch at the rapid pounding of steps, of a run.
Cringed against it, I throw my gaze upwards—and expect to see another member of that group, an invader left behind, or one returning to finish us off.
But what I see is somehow worse.
Nurse Miller sprints across the court for the exit.
The last nurse here at the quarantine, the one who was hidden behind plastic drapes.
Last time I checked, she was holding the hand of a dying man, but that was so long ago, he’ll be gone now—and I wonder if she was hiding behind the plastic curtains, or she’d just drifted off for a bit.
Now, she runs.
Horror slackens my face as, without a word, without a backwards glance, she snatches her handbag and coat from the discarded pile on a metal trolley, then barrels through the doors.
I have no doubt about it.
Miller just abandoned us.
I blink on the dazed tears, then turn my wet gaze on Emily.
She’s slumped on the edge of her bed, right where Louise left her. But she looks at the door the nurses have gone through.
I read it on her, too.
Realisations like mine.
We are on our own now.
The soft pink of her bloodshot eyes turns to me. Her lips are parted around harsh breaths.
For a long moment, we just stare at each other.
This stranger—this woman I never knew until I came here to the quarantine, this one who arrived with a brother and a father, a brother who left once their father died—stirs something in me.
It’s a pit, the emptiness her eyes carve into me—and it opens in her, too.
My face twists beneath the blood; her mouth trembles wet with tears, and together we sob.
Together, a stranger and I, swim in the horror of this new place, this new world, and all the losses it has caused already—with an unspoken question thrumming between us:
How many more losses are to come?