Recluse by Gabriel Zavala

Author:Gabriel Zavala [Zavala, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

31

Elizabeth

July 12

Blood spewed from the boy’s mouth.

The horrific sight made Elizabeth’s tears spill down her face and trail to her bloody hands. She was almost out of time. The boy’s skin was growing bluer by the second as he suffocated in his own blood.

His face was masked with thick scarlet stains that made him unrecognizable. Choking, his bloody arms flailed by his side as more blood spilled from his mouth onto the metal table.

Elizabeth couldn’t get him to breathe. Nothing was working.

She spun around sobbing, looking for any surgical tools in the blurry room—but there was nothing.

There was nothing.

They were sealed in a doorless room, illuminated by a single hanging light over the boy. Her pleading wails reverberated off the walls and echoed into an endless chamber of suffering.

She spun back to the dying boy, who was now looking more like a ghost fading into a memory. His youthful blood was dripping down the table onto the floor as she clasped her hand over her screaming mouth.

Without a second to lose, Elizabeth placed her bloody hands on his convoluting chest. Cardiac arrest was imminent. But as her trembling eyes fell down to her hands in front of her, she noticed a small, long metal object was tucked in her hand. How could she have forgotten what she was holding?

She held the long, hollow needle in front of her.

Elizabeth gasped in relief and, without a second thought, thrust the needle into his cricothyroid membrane just below his thyroid. The cricothyrotomy had to work. The puncture would allow his airway to continue through the needle, and every ounce of her being prayed that he would breathe. He had to. He just had to.

A few long seconds later, the boy fell silent as his arms collapsed and dangled off the table.

The blood stopped bursting from his mouth.

She cradled his head in her hands. “Breathe, baby!”

The room fell silent as she listened carefully for the faintest catch of his breath. But he didn’t.

He was just as lifeless as the ghosts that followed her.

“Breathe!”

But this time, her eyes sprung open to the darkness of her bedroom, panting.

That damn night, she thought.

Taking a deep breath, Elizabeth’s hands found the lamp on her nightstand and flicked the small light on. She let a sigh of relief out as the room she was sleeping in was still her own, not the one from her nightmare. Her bedroom was small and warm light, with a French window at her side peering into the creeping night and a large closet opposite her bed.

The closet was mostly filled with stacks of boxes of old medical files and research papers that led to criminal rehabilitation across America. Her entire life’s work sealed into a box. Her worst enemy, just behind a closet door.

She buried her face in her hands, reminding herself her dream wasn’t real, that she was safe. Memories can’t hurt me, she repeated to herself. Some holistic cognitive behavioral foolishness. It never worked with her. The mind was the untamable animal, the king of beasts, and Elizabeth found it easier to let it run wild rather than contain it.

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