Free Web NovelChapter 17: Where Is She?
The second operating table beside the dead girl was the cleanest surface in the room, which was a low bar given the state of the floor, and I sat beside it with the supply chest open in front of me, with the first aid kit out while Tikki methodically inspected every item in it with the attention of a quality control inspector.
The wound on my right side had already been washed out at the sink, which had drained red for longer than I would have preferred.
But at least the damage turned out to be a graze rather than penetration, one inch deep along the oblique, painful and bleeding freely but not the kind of wound that killed you unless you left it alone.
I tore open a package of combat gauze and started packing the wound with it, pushing the hemostatic dressing into the cut in sections, and the piercing pain immediately shot through my side.
I hissed through my teeth and kept pushing because the gauze needed to be in contact with the bleeding tissue to do anything useful.
"You know, Tikki," I said, because the silence in the room was getting suffocating.
He looked up from the antiseptic bottle he had been investigating.
"Back in the previous timeline, about a year into the shit show, I was staying at a very large survivor camp." I pushed more gauze in. "The leader there was a powerful man. Had soldiers, connections, supplies. Had a daughter with a heart condition."
Tikki had located the bandage roll and was now determining whether it posed a threat.
"There was this little girl there. Deaf and mute. She just started following me around one day... I never asked why, and eventually I took her in.... Even managed to find a sign language book... Spent months learning it at night while she slept."
I covered the wound with sterile gauze and pressed it down and held the pressure while I started wrapping my side, winding the bandage tight.
"She thought my signing was terrible." I chuckled. "Which frankly... it was. Every time I got a sign wrong she gave me this look like I wsa of weak blood or something..."
Tikki looked up from the bandage roll.
"Yep, exactly that look." I chuckled as I secured a loop and kept going until I was securely wrapped.
"One day the leader’s daughter got worse. A few days after that, they rounded everyone up for what they called a medical examination." I said, reaching for the painkiller strip before taking out two tablets.
Then came the migraine medication. Then a long pull from the water bottle.
"After the examination, they pulled her aside. Said she’s showing tuberculosis symptoms... Said she needed more tests."
I started closing the supply chest, arranging things back into place.
"That was the last day I saw her." The chest got shut with a resounding click.
While I sat with the closed chest in front of me for a moment, I didn’t say anything, and Tikki sat beside it, watching me with his tail wrapped around his feet.
"Later, a guard I was friends with told me she had been a suitable candidate... The leader’s daughter needed a heart transplant."
I picked up the shotgun.
"I swear to god, I never felt so useless in my entire life...," I breathed, picking the shotgun up. "Never felt so... I left the camp that same day and never went back."
Tikki looked at me with his eyes wide.
And I couldn’t help but chuckle.
Reaching out, I gave his head a rough rub that made him flatten his ears and shake his head from my hand before looking up at me, offended.
"Alright, that’s enough trivia for today. Let’s move."
And with that, he jumped onto my shoulder.
No proximity charges had detonated while I was patching myself up, which meant the ground floor was still holding, which meant I still had time to find Kara, get on my hyper bike, and ride into the sunset.
To say that thought alone was relieving would be a massive understatement.
I walked toward the reinforced door at the end of the corridor with the shotgun up and the awareness running, mapping the space beyond the door in pieces.
I felt the large space, and before I could map anything further-
-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud...
Slow, rhythmic, and dull sound wafted out, and under it was crying.
[Right place, I guess.]
The reinforced door opened into a basement that ran the full footprint of the building, lit by fluorescent strips, with five shipping containers lined along the far wall, and a smell that had layers to it: unwashed bodies, damp concrete, and pure despair.
But what gave me a pause were the sobs, because they were those of a man.
The man’s sobs pulled my attention before I had finished taking in the space, and I followed them to the concrete pillar close by.
And I found three men.
The first was on his back in a wide pool of blood, not moving, with a massive wound on his throat.
The second sat on the floor holding his bleeding hand against his stomach, staring at the body with his mouth slightly open.
The third was on his knees with his forehead pressed to the concrete wall, and he kept lifting his head, slamming it back into the surface while blood ran down his face, mixing with the tears and the snot.
"My brother... my boy," he sobbed between each impact.
But what caught my eye were the black veins that started at his collarbone and ran up the side of his neck toward his jaw.
My hand tightened on the shotgun.
The man as though sensing my gaze, snapped his head up and his eyes found mine, and for one full second something human was in there, and then it wasn’t.
-WAARRRHHH-!
-Dich-!
The shot hit him dead center, and the body went backward. He twitched for a second or two before going still.
[It’s starting...] The thought floated up, while the hand holding the gun shook.
The second man lurched backward across the floor almost immediately, pulling a knife, scrambling away with his heels scrabbling on the floor.
"Stay back! Stay back, please!"
His eyes were on me, covered head to toe in blood that was not mine, holding a smoking shotgun, and I understood what I must’ve looked like to him. And to be honest, I was what I was looking like.
"Where are the new girls?" I growled. "Take me there. Now!"
His knife in his hand shook badly enough that the blade was making small circles in the air.
But eventually, with a bit more persuasion, he got up and took me to the third container along the wall, talking the entire way, his mother was sick, he needed money, he hadn’t wanted any of this, they had forced him, please, please, he would cooperate and blah, blah, and fuckin blah.
I didn’t even bother replying to him.
The key ring came out of his pocket with shaking hands and he tried three wrong keys before finding the right one.
And finally the container doors swung open and the smell of close-packed bodies came out immediately, and inside ten women were pressed together in the space with small ventilation gaps near the roof.
Almost all of them recoiled the moment I appeared in the doorway.
"Kara!" I stepped inside. "Kara, it’s me! Nikki!"
Face after face I scanned in the dim light. But none of them hers.
I went through them again. And yet the answer remained the same.
One of the women close to the back stared at me. "You’re only here for one girl? You’re not police?"
I turned back, the shotgun came up, and the man’s hands went up the very same instant.
"Brown hair, brown eyes, white hoodie " I said. "She was taken today... Where. Is. She."
"Wait, wait, don’t shoot!" He was already backing against the container wall. "Blue jeans, right? That girl?"
Tikki hissed on my shoulder. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
"Upstairs!" The word came out fast. "She caught the boss’s eye, she kept rejecting him for months, so he had her kidnapped and brought up to him directly! I swear, he did not know she was with you, I swear!"
"Where’s the boss?"
"Third floor!" He started crying. "Please, man. Please let me go, I swear, please-"
-Dich-!
The shot took him in the face, obliterating most of it, while the women behind me screamed like a pack of fucking banshees!
Tikki had his claws through my jacket and into my shoulder while I stood in the middle of it for a long moment with the gun loose at my side and my eyes on the ceiling.
"Fuck..."
I had bled through an entire floor of this building. I had lost the awareness, taken two gunshots, and euthanized however many men, rigged the top ground floor with explosives, only to find Kara was never in the basement.
She was on the third floor.
And the worst of it all, the Turning had already started.
And here I was, standing there with a bunch of frightened women behind me, the shotgun hanging from my hand, and Tikki’s claws keeping steady pressure on my shoulder.
"You lot are on your own," I turned to the women, "Riots are happening everywhere. Rescue whoever you want and get out of the city. Head west."
Pulling out the two shells, I reloaded the shotgun and started walking toward the stairs.
"FUCK!!!"
