AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Turning a corner, I yelped as a hand reached out and grabbed me, pulling me into an unseen room.
“Shh …” The voice was female, and the woman it belonged to released me immediately.
“You’re not a doctor,” she said, tapping her wrist against the side of her head. “Not a doctor, not a doctor.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Shoes.” She gestured at my sopping wet runners. “Doctors wear shoes.”
I glanced down at her socked feet and understood.
“Do you need a doctor?”
“The voices.” She cringed, tapping harder and harder. “They’re too loud. They’re too loud!”
My heart broke for her. I was sure no one had been there to administer her meds since the shoot-out.
“What’s your name?” I asked, steering her away from the open door and over to the bed, but she was too anxious to sit.
“Hemina,” she replied, tapping her wrists against one another now.
“Hemina, this is gonna be over soon. But first, I need to know where the dead soldiers are. There was a shootout here yesterday. Where are the bodies?”
Staring at the floor, Hemina hesitated for several seconds. Then, she took me by the hand and led me out the door. With her as my escort, the other patients left me alone, but they glared and hissed at my feet as we passed.
Doctors wear shoes.
Up a flight of stairs Hemina led me, shushing herself and tapping her head, until we emerged at the end of a long hallway.
That was littered with bodies.
I should have been elated—one of those soldiers might have what I needed—but all I could see, all I could feel, were their heavy, bleeding bodies lying on top of mine.
The flashing red lights brightened to white fluorescents, and the hallway narrowed to the size of the space behind the Howth fish market counter. I was no longer dressed and upright; I was naked on the floor, surrounded by a pile of men that Damien had just killed, terrified that, at any second, the unit of living crewmen who’d just walked in would notice me and finish what their comrades had started.
“Shh …”
A gentle tapping on my temple brought me back into my body.
Blinking at the woman standing beside me, I realized that Hemina was soothing me the way she’d soothed herself.
“Too loud,” she whispered, her deep brown eyes full of understanding.
It hadn’t been a question. She knew.
I’d been trying my whole life to convince myself and everyone else that I wasn’t crazy, but what if I was?
What if crazy was just a word that meant something inside of you hurt really, really badly?
What if the only crazy thing about any of us was the lengths we had to go to cope with the pain?
Tears blurred my vision as I held her knowing stare and nodded my head.
Yeah, I thought. Too fucking loud.
Looking down, I realized that Hemina and I had continued walking during my flashback, all the way to the pile of bodies. But this time, when I looked at them, the red lights stayed red. The hallway stayed a hallway. And the past stayed in the past. I wasn’t lying beneath them, naked and afraid. I was standing over them, living and breathing, all because Damien had come for me when I’d needed him.
And now, it was my turn to return the favor.
