Prologue
The sirens are deafening, and the lights are blinding.
I shakily raise a hand to my face, squinting in the face of the red and blue beams that still manage to slither in through the cracks in my fingers. In front of me, the lawn sprawls out in a way that makes it look like it goes on forever, and no matter how hard I focus, I can’t seem to stop the Earth see-sawing from left to right. Highwaters Institution is alive, taking hefty, angry breathes that rock the ground, determined to make even this final hurdle an impossible mission.
I don’t know if I’m running or crawling, but I know I’m moving and that I mustn’t stop moving. I have a strong urge to throw my hands over my ears and refuse to go any further until the noisy, bright chaos has settled down. I don’t, because some deep buried instinct knows I need to get to those standing in the navy-blue uniform. I can’t quite remember why, I just know that they’re waiting for me, and that I have to get to them. I don’t think they’ve seen me yet. Or perhaps, they think I’m someone to fear. Someone for them to raise their weapons at, warning me not to come any closer.
I become aware of the dampness in between my fingers. Grass. Soft, wet, dew-soaked grass, pressed into my palms. I’ve lost my footing, then. I must be crawling.
I drag myself along as fast as I possibly can, bringing with me fistfuls of grass. Pain in every part of my body begs me to stop. Underneath me, I watch the blood running off my body, seeping into the soil. It trickles in drips and streams to the dirt between my hands, expanding to puddles of vibrant red. The colour of my blood, the colour of their blood. I wish there was some way for me to separate it, to identify what has come from my punctured skin and what has come from theirs. I feel sick, watching the mixture of our DNA, unable to tell where I end, and where they begin. I’m tempted just to stay here, to forget my mission to get to those safe haven sirens and wait until all the red has left my body and disappeared into the Earth. I want their blood off me and as far away from me as possible. I want it even more than I want the furious burning in my left thigh to stop.
But then I remember what I was running from in the first place. Something nuzzled deep within my brain, foggy from blood loss, dizzy from chloroform, reminds me. I try to find my feet but soon I’m back on my hands and knees, crawling for my life.
I know they’re dead. Of course, I know that. I watched them die. More than that – I am the reason one of them is dead.
It’s not enough. Maybe they’re dead, but someone’s still alive. Someone I need to be far, far away from.
I can’t look back.
Something in me wants too. It’s like being six years old and fighting the temptation to touch the oven. You know it’s hot, you know it will burn, but a part of you so badly wants to touch it just because you know you shouldn’t.
I move faster. The burning in my leg amplifies but I pay it no mind. I need to get away before the devil on my shoulder wins. Because if I look back that person could be right behind me. Worse, somehow looking back at the shed might take me right back there. Like Medusa in building form, only waiting for me to make the fatal mistake of eye contact before turning my helpless body to stone and dragging me back there.
There’s an itching in my throat. just like the pulsing heat that starts in your chest and sizzles up towards your mouth when you’ve stayed underwater for too long. My lungs are begging me to breathe, but I can’t. I have no time to breathe.
The world either side of me blends together, until it is nothing short of a blur. I am a train, flying down the tracks, and everything else is a flash out the windows as I pass. My eyes threaten to close.
There are footsteps, murmurs, people ascending on me. These are the things I’m vaguely aware of. That, and the fact that I am no longer on all fours, but rather lying, collapsed in the green grass with its deep red stains.
‘’Miss? Can you hear me?’’
I think I manage a nod. I can hear him, but only just. He’s competing with so many other sounds. The sound of my heart hammering in my ears. My strained breathing, heaving into the lawn. Those fucking sirens.
‘’What’s your name?’’ Someone’s speaking again. My eyes are fluttering between closed and open, but I can just manage to focus on a tall, lanky cop. Her face is stern, and her eyes are cold. She’s doing a good job at keeping emotions out of this.
‘’Rosie. Rosie Dodd.’’ It’s barley a whisper, but she nods in confirmation that she heard me.
‘’How many people are dead, Rosie?’’ Static and crackling voices come through the radio clipped to her uniform. I can’t make out what the person on the other end is saying. I don’t particularly want too.
I start to cry. Meaningless and empty words of consolation that drift from the officers around me are nothing but another sound to try and tune out.
Nobody is to know that my tears are not for my leg, which will probably never heal, or for the aching in every fibre of my body, or even for the horrors that I witnessed tonight.
My tears are for the fact that I don’t know how to answer that question.
The answer is two, and yet, the answer is not two. The answer to ‘’how many people have died tonight?’’ is two.
But that’s not what she asked. She asked how many people are dead. Maybe she does only mean tonight, but with a question so broad, how can I ignore all of those that slipped away into the night? The patients without names, identities or anyone who still cared enough to ask questions, who were here one day and gone the next? Twenty years of victims, so many that we all stopped counting.
‘’I… I don’t know.’’ I sob over a trembling bottom lip. ‘’I don’t know.’’
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