No Time To Bleed

I plunked my breakfast tray down just clear of 8:15 in the morning and clenched my jaw.

“Wow!” Cece looked up from her magazine. “Who the hell gave you that shiner?!”

Alex looked up and sort of laughed. I punched him in the arm and he flinched. “It’s not funny! It really hurts and I was just starting to get prettier!”

I fell down to my seat and breathed stubbornly.

“Who did this?” Alex asked. “Get to a fight with some snobby girl.”

He still chuckled as he bit into his lime green apple.

I rolled my eyes and popped open my milk. “No. Some security guard here. Things got really weird last night.”

“A security guard hit you?” Cece clarified. “Why?”

I sank my cheek down to my hand and explained the whole situation. As I did, all Alex did was staring down at the table heatedly.

“We have got to get out of this fucking place. It’s too pent up and those guards are power hungry.”

We were still speaking in whispers.

“And why was Jesse there anyway? Was he watching you?” Cece said.

Did she really honestly care about that?

“I don’t know. If was, then that’s creepy.”

Alex bit into his apple again. “It wouldn’t be just creepy. It’d be desperate.”

We all chuckled slowly and tried to finish our breakfasts.

Kyle soon came over looking more worried than usual.

“Something wrong?” Alex asked him.

Kyle kept glancing around and had this scared look on his face. “Have any of you guys seen Antoinette anymore? I haven’t seen her this morning.”

Cece rolled her eyes and just continued eating her food.

“No. Haven’t seen her. Did you check her room?”

Kyle nodded, crossing his arms. “Yeah. She snuck me an extra room key a while ago and I went there this morning. I feel like something’s wrong.”

“Have you asked any of the guards?” I questioned again.

“That’s not even worth it. They won’t tell me anything. For all I know she could’ve run off somewhere.”

Cece jumped in now, agitated. “There’s no place to run off. They have guards everywhere and a giant fence.”

“Well, she could have flown a plane.” Kyle combatted childishly and Alex smiled.

“Do you want us to help you look for her?” Alex asked.

Kyle nodded. “Thanks. None of my other friends cared enough to help me.”

Cece got up and threw her tray away before holding her hands to her hips. “Well maybe you need new friends.”

“Is that an offer?” Kyle smiled.

Cece rolled her eyes again and went over to lean against a wall. Alex helped and threw my stuff away as well as his. Then, he went over to a guard and asked questions.

He came back to us. “The guard said we can check the infirmary.”

“But, they don’t usually let people in there.”

“We still have to try.”

10 minutes later, we ended up at the airport infirmary: a large and regular waiting lobby with a giant white curtain holding back any access of diseases from the outside. A woman in a nurse uniform stood up front at a desk.

Behind could be heard the various groans and sounds of the ill.

Kyle walked up first with Cece tapping her foot impatiently beside me.

“Excuse me. I was wondering if there was anyone under the name of Antoinette Gerald here?”

The nurse typed in on the computer. “I’m sorry. We have no one in the infirmary under that name… What your relationship with that person?”

“I’m her brother.” Kyle had his hands shoved steadily in his pockets.

“Was there a reason you believed your sister was ill?”

Kyle shrugged his shoulders. “We were caught on the roof last night and she was pretty upset. I haven’t seen her since then.”

“So, you and this girl were on the roof alone without supervision?” The nurse raised her eyebrow.

“I just said that.” Kyle snapped. “Could you give me any other way of finding out where my sister is?”

The nurse’s cheeks changed to a strange hue of red and she picked up the phone next to the laptop on her desk.

“At least you guys have internet…” Cece grumbled.

“Um, hello, I wanted to look in the records for an Antoinette Gerald? Her brother is here with me looking for her?”

The woman listened into the receiver for a long while. “Ah, interesting. Thanks for you help.”

She set down the receiver then, looked over our group.

“There’s no record of an Antoinette Gerald ever being in contact with Lexicon.”

What she’d said took a long while to make contact with our brains.

“What do you mean there’s no record? We all saw her yesterday.” Alex argued.

“The same kids who were unsupervised on the roof?”

“That has nothing to do with this! My sister was here!” Kyle argued. “Where the hell is she?! She didn’t just up and disappear!”

Then, Cece, Alex, and I all shared the same expression.

Antoinette must have been taken for what she’d known about Lexicon. They’d probably pin the whole things on her being potentially contaminated or do what they were right now, covering the entire thing up.

“Kyle, come on.” Alex grabbed Kyle’s arm.

“What the hell are you doing? Don’t you see that bitch is lying?!” he shrieked.

We kept on walking until were in clear view of anyone’s ears.

Alex turned around and faced Kyle. “Look, Lexicon has some obvious reason for taking your sister and lying about. What was wrong with her yesterday?”

Kyle’s jaw dropped a little, confusion hit his face as he saw all of our expression were of the same seriousness.

“I-I don’t know. She never told me.”

I exhaled. If Kyle had just been able to shut up yesterday instead of insulting everyone, we would have been in a better position right now. We would have leverage.

But, we had none of that. We had nothing.

“Do you guys know something that I don’t?” he asked us.

“This is disappointing.” Cece said. “And we’re not answering any of your questions. We’ve got our own problems to worry about.”

Kyle clenched in his jaw tighter and his head sort of fell a little.

He walked with us back to the main eating area.

“Look guys, I know that I’m not the greatest guy to be around, but my sister’s somewhere in here and I need to find her…” Kyle swallowed uneasily and looked to all three of us. “Can you guys help me?”

We stood dead silent for a while and I might have even seen Cece lighten up a little bit.

It wasn’t until then that we noticed that everyone had backed away from the eating area’s main tables.

Then, a high pitched scream hit the air.

“She’s infected! She’s infected! Get here away from me!”