Page 34 of Hunted By Fae

Nurse Smith has little to do with the corpse dumping, so I suppose she’s off to prepare either canned soup for the remaining survivors in here or heated spam with crackers.

My mouth twists at the thought of the processed meat. The stench of it is enough to make me gag.

She disappears through the swing doors.

I turn my frown on the abandoned beds.

Most are curtained, but a lot of them are tucked together, no drapes, just bodies covered in blankets. The dead, waiting to be discarded outside.

Louise is working fast, or time is slipping by me.

I can’t smell them yet, the bodies, not through the stink of formaldehyde that Louise wiped over surfaces and along the stripped, plastic mattresses too many have died on.

So many.

At first, every few hours, people came rushing through those doors. We were some of them, just people, seeking help for our sick.

But then some started abandoning their loved ones on their deathbeds, leaving them behind.

Things change so quickly.

Human nature reveals so easily from the dismantled practice of civility.

The panic really took hold when the blackout tumbled overhead. It was no longer advancing, coming for us, a threat for another day. It was upon us.

That was just a handful of hours after we arrived.

We lost a few when that happened. Nurses and people who stuck to the bedsides of their loved ones left, just snuck out in the quieter moments when most of us were asleep.

“I would never do that to you,” I find the words whispering from me without much awareness, no intention to actually speak them.

I turn to look at Tesni’s pale face, glistening with a sheen of fresh sweat.

Deep in a fever dream, her long lashes are trembling, her eyelids flickering. Lips so pale—white and chapped—gleam with a constant sweat.

“I won’t leave you.”

She can’t hear me.

Still, I tell her, “You’re going to get better… and then I’m going to get us to safety.” My promise is the softest whisper, one so quiet that no others can hear me.

I run my gaze over her hair.

I know she loathes to have it in her face, always braided back, or in a ponytail, maybe some sort of half-up style she calls abutterfly, I don’t know why.

So I pick at strands now, then finger-comb them to drape over the edges of the pillow, a burnt halo of sorts. Her hair is such a pale strawberry shade that it’s practically just blonde. But against the glowing camping lanterns peppered all over the rec centre, the strands look darker, coppery, as if poorly rinsed and stained with blood.

Blood…

Isthatwhy she’s so poorly, and I’m not sick at all?

Our blood is not the same.

Not at all the same.

Would that save her?

To be like me, to share in my secret?