Chapter 8
EIGHT
BEE
When I finally peel myself from the bloody floor, I don’t do anything that I should do. I don’t drape a blanket over Louise, not right away. I don’t help Emily off the bed, not yet. I don’t fetch the still-warm soups on the abandoned trolley, I snub them.
I leave all of that for after—after I scramble for the broomsticks and mops, then wrangle them through the handles of the doors to secure them.
But it’s not enough.
So I do more to barricade us in.
Alone, I push and drag the metal cupboard to the main doors. Then I add beds before I rush to the kitchen and take everything that’s left. It’s not much more than some bottles of water, chocolate bars, and salted peanuts.
Everything in the freezer is spoilt, the fridge, too, and the pantry is cleared out. But the cupboards under the metal island bench were overlooked in the raid. In them, I find a lot of instant noodles, at least a dozen. I pack those onto a trolley, then the kettle.
But I can’t barricade us into the basketball court just yet—not with Louise’s body on the floor. I don’t know how to do it. Logically, I know the steps, but… how do I just dump her body out there in the carpark when it still hasn’t hit me that she’s dead at all?
The best I can do right now is cover her body with a blanket.
So I do.
The blanket is white.
I hate that.
Why is it white?
The blood stains it quickly, so quickly. I’m transfixed by the horror of it, of fresh blood weaving through the threads, spreading.
It aches my chest with the threat of fresh sobs.
But the sobs don’t strike—not before a faint rustle comes from behind.
I stagger around, the heel of my boot knocking against Louise’s limp leg. I stare ahead at the doors, the ones that lead to the kitchen—
But the rustle isn’t coming from there.
It takes me a moment too long to understand what I’m hearing. A blanket shifting, a plastic wrapped mattress crinkling.
The only occupied bed this way is…
“Tess,” I breathe her name before I shove into a scrambled run. “Tess! Tess, I’m coming, I’m coming!”
My boots squeak as I come skidding around the pulled curtains—and I still, breath trapped in my chest.
Tesni wavers beside the bed, one hand pressed into the mattress for balance, the other holding her head as if to soothe a dizzy spell, and her face twisted against the glare of the horrid blue lights of the camping lanterns.
“Stop shouting,” she rasps, almost inaudible. “I can hear you—they can hear you in the seventh level of hell.”
The slow worming of a smile twists onto my lips. It’s pained, slick with the tears falling down my cheeks.
“You’re alive.” My voice is a breath, is a whisper, a weeping sound; chased by the heavy thuds of my steps as I stagger for her. “You’re alive.”
I’m on her in a heartbeat.
Tesni grunts under the sudden siege of my arms sweeping her into me. The clamminess of her cheek is flat against mine, her frail figure a twig in my hold, and the blood all over me is quick to stick to her.
Hungry, weak, sick, she rasps at my ear, “Is that your blood or mine?”