Before You

I’d assume in an attempt to help Ian get his mind off wanting to kill me, Aiden had him apply pressure to Bree’s wound to try to stop some of the bleeding til Ande and Taylor made it back. I guessed the hospital they called Lakeview wasn’t far or else they would not have allowed the little girl to go along. Either that or the general area was abandoned. I guess I really didn’t care, though.

It wasn’t til now that I noticed my own wounds. A few received after I had woken up and some I had when I did. My arm was still pretty useless and swollen, and my eyebrow and lip still bled if I moved wrong and ripped them open. Elexus had managed to get one of the bullets out of her arm, but another was still lodged in her shoulder and she was cursing as she failed again to remove the foreign object.

With out asking I walked over and grabbed the small pocketknife she held poised in her hand. Her grip stayed tight until she realized there was no other option and finally let me ease the blade out of her hand and remove the bullet for her, letting it bounce off the blood stained bed onto the floor. I grabbed the sheet and ripped off a piece of it, bunched it up and pressed it to her shoulder. She took over, holding it in place and I proceeded to use more ripped off pieces to wipe the dried blood off my face.

“Here,” Aiden was standing next to us, a small white box with a red medical sign on the front. “This is what we have, you might be able to use something.”

I took the box from him and opened it as he walked back to where Bree lay in agony. Her whimpers finally died down now that she was resting, or maybe she passed out from the pain. Or maybe she was dying. I dug through the contents of the small container, finding some thread and suturing needles. Nothing for pain, or iodine. A few band aids and alcohol swabs. I ended up using the antiseptic wipes to clean the area before I began stitching up the wound. I never met her eyes, never knew if she was trying to hold back pain or kept a straight face. In my first few months of training I was beaten til my face showed no emotion. Til I went numb. It was the only way they would stop. She had probably gone through something similar, being an Elite such as myself. When I was finished, I reached for the other one in her arm but she stopped me. “I can do this one myself.”

She didn't say it with anger, but her glare held mine til I backed off. I said under my breath so the others wouldn't hear, “I know medical training taught us how to help ourselves, but why when you don’t have to?”

It was a rhetorical question. Although I felt uneasy helping out a fellow operative, we never worked in teams and if we did, it was pretty much every man for himself. The only things teams were good for was numbers, and they usually sent out the lower class, like Hit Men, since Trainees aren’t allowed to leave HQ. They are expendable. Assassins and Elites work better alone, and are more tactically prepared, but really, it depended on the mission.

I returned to the bed I claimed as my own and sat down. I slowly lowered myself til my head rested on the mattress and remained still, letting my mind ease for only a moment. It wasn’t long before Ande and Taylor showed back up, a duffel full of medical supplies slung over their shoulders. Aiden spared no time getting ready. As soon as he started working on Bree, her moans of pain started up again. Ian and Ande had to hold her down, and it seemed to go on for hours. I was about ready to shoot her and put her out of my misery when she finally passed out from the pain again. When Aiden pulled the latex gloves he’d be wearing off, he sighed. “She seems to be stable, I stopped the bleeding at least. We’ll see how she’s doing in the morning.”

Aiden disappeared around the corner and came back holding two pillows still in their package. He tossed one at me, and laid the other beside Elexus and proceeded to move to his own bed near Bree.

I took the opportunity to start asking some questions. "So what happened here?"

"The city? No one knows. No one knows when it started, or how or even why. Everyone has their theories of course," Aiden trailed off. He stared off into the dark part of the room and I wondered if he was going to elaborate or not.

When he didn't, I said, " Where did everyone go?"

It took him a second to respond, "Died. It hit so fast, there was barely anyone left to evacuate. Most were killed and turned. A few others took their own lives. My cousin died in a bathroom from starvation. Lots of shit happened, and just when you think you've seen it all, we stumble onto another sad, sick scene."

He closed his eyes, no doubt trying to shake the images that flooded his mind. Memories of death and decay. The thing of nightmares. He opened his eyes again and smiled, making him look almost normal again. "What about you? Obviously not a local."

"Just kinda dropped in. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure why I'm here." It was the truth. It was also all I was willing to share so I turned my head to stare back up at the ceiling.

"What do you know about those things?" I said, referring to the walking corpses outside.

Aiden shifted in his seat, considering the question. "We know they aren't human anymore. That they are bloodthirsty and hard to kill."

I thought, 'Funny, he just described me...'

"Only way to kill them is destroy the brain. They bite you and infect you with their saliva, you turn into one of them. No way to stop it. No cure. Its practically a death sentence," he said with finality.

I listened as Taylor got up to leave when Aiden stopped her. “Where do you think you’re going?” he said it playfully, like she was up to no good.

“Bathroom,” her tiny voice replied.

Aiden nodded and she skipped out of the room. I lay there for a while longer, processing this new found information, unable to ignore the horrible nicotine craving that had been an unnoticeable nuisance before but now reared its ugly head in full blown withdrawal. I got up, “Going to look around. I’ll be back.”

No one said anything and I didn’t wait for a reply. Elexus’ eyes followed me the whole way out, but she never made a move to follow. The mall, I didn’t catch the name, looked like one giant two story hallway. It had escalators, and row upon row of stores. Of course the escalators didn’t work anymore, so I walked down the stairs to the first level. The electricity had been shut off, but some lights seemed to be running on some sort of back up generator. A few were shot out and busted, littering the floor beneath them with glass.

I noticed that the floor had more than just glass on its surface. Bloody footprints, and pools of the dark fluid were smeared through out. The two main fountains weren’t running, and I noticed a few dead bodies. The corpse of a female lay half in the water, half out. She was decapitated, her head floating feet away from her carcass. The blood had tainted the water a sickly dark pink. The other fountain didn’t look tainted, and I used the opportunity to wet my face and remove some of the grime that I couldn’t earlier. It felt refreshing in a lukewarm sort of way, but I wasn’t complaining. I had definitely been on worse excursion in the past.