Page 31 of Hunted By Fae
She has to wake up.
I can’t let myself think of any other possibility.
She must wake.
And I wait for that moment, that flutter of her long lashes.
The chair creaks as I shift my weight to the side, as if to ease some of the tension from my lower back.
The quarantine is quiet, the occasional rustling of a curtain, the clang of a bedpan being moved, the flap of a blanket before it’s spread out over a mattress, coughs here and there.
Same noises, hour after hour, day after day.
But it isn’t day, is it?
There are no days anymore. No nights.
It’s only darkness out there.
The rectangular windows of this basketball court line the height of the walls, just at the cusp of the ceiling. I look at them and should see blue skies and the glare of a bright summer sun, or a star speckled midnight drape with the gleam of the moon.
But it’s only darkness beyond the glass.
The blackout has swallowed the whole world.
Yet, it’s the quarantine itself that’s most like hell.
More than a hundred empty beds are lined in rows spanning the whole court, each of them shrouded in plastic curtains.
Not long ago, those beds were a symphony of hacking and moans and raspy breaths.
Now, so many are hidden by the curtains, and there are no sounds to come from them.
Most have died.
Louise helps the last of the nurses, the two still standing, clear the bodies.
There were three nurses who stuck around, but one of them ended up on a bed of her own. The ones who didn’t stay, four to be exact, abandoned the quarantine when the darkness swallowed the sky.
No doctors.
If there were ever doctors here, I don’t know what became of them, if they ran, abandoned ship, or got sick before we even arrived.
We had to drive further inland to find a quarantine, to chase radio frequencies here.
Now, as I run a warm cloth along Tesni’s arm, wedging it between her limp fingers for good measure, I hardly see the point in coming here at all. All it has been is the offer of a bed to die on.
And that’s apparently all I can do, too; offer her some scraps of comfort in her last days.
My movements are monotonous.
I wash her with the cloth as I do every day, but I wander my attention around the repurposed basketball court.
So many dead. So many drawn curtains with no signs of life behind them, no coughs, no wheezing.
The ones who do moan, whisper, wheeze, there are only two nurses left to tend to them, and Louise.
She stepped up the moment we arrived, since being a gym teacher means having first aid training. She takes care of both Ramona and Ruby; she uses the gas stove in the kitchen to make whatever food we have left here; she helps cart the dead into wheelbarrows and take them outside where they are dumped.
