Page 251 of The Night Shift
And then I don’t.
The pain erases everything.
The scream that escapes me doesn’t sound human.
It doesn’t stop. It scoops and scoops and scoops like carving rot from fruit. Rust scraping soft tissue. The spoon grinds against bone.
Something wet hits the floor.
“One more.”
I don’t feel it.
The world is slipping away in fragments. A shattered kaleidoscope of pain and silence, one piece at a time.
I try to hold on, try to make sense of anything, but nothing.
My skin is warm, wet, sticky, like I’ve been submerged in a vat of blood. It’s seeping down my throat, clogging my airway, making every breath feel like drowning.
I can’t feel anything anymore. Numbness spreads like ice. Poison.
First my chest, then my limbs, until I can’t feel my fingers twitching, my legs kicking weakly against the restraints.
The world spins, and then it stops.
I hear my heartbeat. My lungs are straining.
I hear the scrape of metal on tissue. I hear it digging and carving and grinding and taking. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to. I just want to die.
A voice comes, but it’s distant.
I try to process it. To hold onto it. But the thought slips through my fingers.
And then it goes quiet. Cold. So cold.
No blood, no screams, no nothing. I’m not even sure if I’m still breathing. It doesn’t feel like I am.
Finally, I let go. The tension, the terror, all of it slips away into nothing. And I wonder if this is how most toxic friendships die. With a whimper, slowly, and then gone.
Chapter 46
Theo
Two days later
EGH
The lovesick couple cuddled up on the couch is the first I notice.
Bright fluorescent light slams into my eyes. My head feels like someone cracked it open with a sledgehammer. I try to move, but everything hurts. My chest is tight. My throat’s dry and I feel like I’ve inhaled a bucket worth of sawdust.
I look down at my body. My dominant arm is immobilized in a rigid fibreglass cast. I try to move my fingers. They twitch. Not paralyzed. Thank fuck.
There’s pain in my abdomen. Cold. The dressing is pressure-packed over the right lower quadrant. Stab wound. Feels deep. I feel a midline incision. Emergency laparotomy, I assume.
I try to speak.
A gasp to my right. April hits Parker’s arm several times. “Parker, wake up.Wake up! Theo’s awake!”
