Serial Killer Z: Sanctuary by Philip Harris

Author:Philip Harris [Harris, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2017-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

Bandages and Blood

I remember fragments of what happened next. Being jostled and bounced as someone picked me up. The rumbling of an engine and the grinding of manual gears. Voices and bright lights, a sharp pain in my arm, and the smell of disinfectant. Most of all, I remember feeling as though I were floating, adrift on an ice-cold sea with nothing but darkness around me.

When I finally came to, I was in a makeshift hospital. The room had once been a classroom. Whiteboards lined the walls, and there was still a handful of amateurish paintings stuck along one side of the room. The chairs and desks had been replaced with beds. There were six of them. I was in one, and another held a young woman. The rest were empty.

The woman had a bloodstained bandage wrapped around her forearm. A tube ran from her other arm to a bag of clear liquid hanging from a metal stand near the bed. Her forehead glistened with sweat. She was unconscious, but she whimpered and tossed and turned in her sleep. Her breath came in short, fevered gasps.

The room smelled clean. The sheets on my bed were crisp and white. It had been a long time since I’d seen truly clean linen. I pictured what a mess I must be making in my gore-soaked state. Then I realized someone had washed me. They’d dressed my wounds as well. I could feel a bandage wrapped tight around my right leg, my left shoulder, and my ribs. The swelling above my eye had gone down, and I could breathe more easily. I was still tired, and my muscles ached, but it was the stiffness of lying in one place for an extended period of time, not the pain of near death.

I tried to work out how long I’d been in the room. It was light outside, and I could see gray sky through the rectangular windows running along the top of the wall opposite. Assuming I’d reached Hope sometime in the early afternoon, it was probably the next day, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

The woman let out an anguished cry. A few moments later, a man carrying a small bucket came into the room. He was wearing a white jacket, like a doctor, but the baggy jeans, oversize sneakers, and patchy stubble on his chin made him look more like a skateboarder than a GP.

He ignored me and walked right past my bed. The shadow flickered inside me, and for a moment I felt the urge to reach out and grab him, to haul him back onto the bed and snap his neck. I swear he slowed a little as the thought struck me, as though some lizard part of his brain had sensed the threat.

He knelt by the woman’s bed and retrieved a piece of black cloth from the bucket. It was wet, and he wrung it out and dabbed it against the woman’s forehead. She muttered something and tried to knock his hand away.

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