Dreamland by Robert L. Anderson

Author:Robert L. Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

They walked as fast as they could without seeming as if they were hurrying. Two doctors passed them without so much as glancing up from their charts. So far, so good. Dea scanned the hall, the clusters of nurses in their identical scrubs, all of them indistinguishable in her panic. Would they recognize her? Had these been the same nurses who had stuck her in the Crazy Ward in the first place?

They took the first stairwell they could find, moving quickly, in silence, to the ground floor. Dea was hoping the stairs would lead them to an emergency exit but instead they found themselves in yet another hallway. It reminded her of the maze she’d walked with her mother years ago in Florida, the high white walls and halls that dead-ended or abruptly switched directions, signs indicating an exit that never materialized. Everything looked the same: blue doors and speckled linoleum floors and bad pastel art.

But finally the hall dumped them into a lobby, and then they were through the revolving doors and out into the dark.

The cold was shocking. The wind cut right through her sweatshirt and wrapped a hand around her lungs. The sky was clear. The glare of the hospital complex couldn’t quite obscure a smattering of stars. Dea wrapped her arms around her chest, inhaling clean, sharp air, watching her breath condense in clouds. It felt like a long, long time since she had been outside. She still half expected an explosion of shouting to begin at any minute, hands to materialize from the dark and grab her.

But they made it to Connor’s car without trouble. He’d parked at the edge of the parking lot, in a dark wedge of space between streetlamps. As always, the car smelled like gum and old wood shavings, and once they were inside—with the rest of the world locked out, pressed and flattened behind walls of glass—it finally hit Dea that they had done it. She was out. She should have felt triumphant but she was overcome with exhaustion. Her whole body was numb with cold. They had studied shock in Health Ed, and she was pretty sure that her uncontrollable shivering, plus the way her thoughts kept bouncing off each other like deranged rubber balls, meant she had it.

Connor punched on the heat, and wordlessly passed her a blanket from the backseat.

“All right,” he said. “Talk.”

“Not here.” She heard the wail of an approaching siren and tensed; but it was only an ambulance, pulling into the ER.

“Dea . . .” His hands tightened on the wheel. For a second, she was terrified he would order her out of the car.

“I promise, I’ll explain everything. I swear. But we’re not safe here.”

He exhaled—a long, heavy breath. “Where do you want to go?”

She shook her head. She was out and free and she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t go to Gollum’s—it was the first place the cops would look, and besides, Gollum was already covering for Connor. She had no money.

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