Page 42 of Hunted By Fae
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 coarsewhoosh. 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.
