Ray climbed through, careful not to injure herself further on the broken glass. A glance in the surgeon’s mirror stopped her in her tracks. She was almost naked and bleeding badly from her flayed wrist. She could see red muscle and tendons shining whitely where her skin would normally be.
Her medical training kicked in. She grabbed a blue surgeon’s smock from the neat pile by the door and shrugged into it leaving her torn garments in place. A quick test revealed that the surgery door wasn’t locked from this side, so she let herself back into the surgical suite.
Pritchard was still breathing but showing no other signs of life. Rapidly she opened draws and cupboards. Grabbing diamorph ampules, syringes, a suture kit and dressings at random. She would have loved to find Haemo-Tabs but doubted there would be any reason to stock them in a surgical suite.
She shakily drew up a minimal dose of diamorph, dropping two ampules in the process, and injected it into her arm. It was enough to take the edge off the pain but still leave her sharp enough to run. She spotted a pair of slippers, neatly stowed in one corner, and grabbed them. Unsurprisingly they fitted perfectly. Ray bundled her supplies into a plastic bag she found on a shelf and headed back out the door.
The corridor beyond the gowning vestibule was quiet and deserted as Ray entered, her swag of medical supplies slung over her shoulder. She had wrapped a towel around her wrist to stop the worst of the blood dripping onto the floor, making her easy to follow.
She didn’t recognize the corridor. It traveled around a hundred feet either left or right before turning corners. Fifty-fifty, Ray thought to herself. She chose left. Fast walking on soft knees she moved down the corridor.
She peaked around the bend seeing a similar corridor stretching to a set of familiar crash doors. An exit. This corridor had some doors along its length and a couple of side passages leading off. Ray headed towards the crash doors, her heart hammering in her ears.
Nearing the first of the side passages she slid along the wall to listen. She heard soft footsteps heading in her direction. She couldn’t look now. If they were looking in her direction they were bound to notice her bright red hair flashing around the corner.
Ray glanced around. She chose a door at random and slid over silently. The handle moved, and the door clicked open. Not locked. The click of the door catch sounding like a gunshot to Ray’s ears. She slipped inside, closing the door as quietly as she could and ducked down in the darkened room.
Peering through the door’s glass panel, she saw two of her clones returning. Probably to assess the damage Pritchard had done. They walked past the door talking quietly to one another.
Ray didn’t have long. She slid down the door to rest for a few seconds. Her hand and gut were aching horribly. She would need a lot more pain relief before she could properly rest.
As her eyes became used to the darkness, Ray started to see shadows. She was in a long hospital ward and could see shapes in the beds. As Ray stood a sensor light flicked on, dimly illuminating the first few beds. Ray locked eyes with herself. She froze as the clone stared back at her unblinking and prepared to run.
The clone lay in the bed propped up to forty-five degrees, her head lolling to the side in Ray’s direction. The clone’s lank red hair hung around her shoulders and Ray realized with a start that she was naked.
She was unmistakably Ray, but her features were gaunt, her pallid skin stretched over bone in the wan light. Below a pair of pendulous breast, a great rise of belly arched upwards. The belly was striated with livid purple stretch marks and was so distended it lay on top of the woman’s thighs.
Ray slithered sideways along the wall. The woman’s eyes did not follow her. Ray started to see more beds as her eyes adjusted. Pregnant clones. The room was full of pregnant clones of her. Grotesquely pregnant. Huge bellies straining to contain what Ray assumed were multiple babies.
The fixed pupils of the dead faced clone closest to Ray told that she had barely any brain function at all. Tubes ran into their noses to feed them and tubes ran out of them, their excrement dripping into plastic bags hanging on the beds.
Ray could see scars on the women’s’ bellies, possibly from repeated cesareans. The horror of the scene tingled up Ray’s spine and made her scalp contract, her hair shifting as her body fought to make her run. Get away from this monstrous room.
Ray watched in horror as the huge belly on the nearest woman suddenly moved. Something inside pushing out against the skin. Ray feared the stretched flesh would rupture, spilling the alien spawn onto the floor.
This was how they did it. Astrid was clearly mad. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to assuage her obsessions. And her daughters too. The noise of running feet from down the corridor snapped Ray out of her trance. They knew she had escaped. Ray watched as the two clones ran down the corridor and turned down the same branch they had come from.
Ray grabbed her chance before they fetched the others. She swung open the door and bolted. Running as fast as her traumatized body would move. She didn’t even glance down the corridor as she streaked by, hitting the crash bar at speed and flinging the emergency exit open to the cool welcoming safety of the night.
Ray sprinted across the brightly lit common area towards the darkness between the children’s barracks. Pairs of children in the play area paused in their games to watch the strange woman in the blue dress flash by. Ray heard women’s and now men’s shouts behind her but didn’t look back. She was free, and she wouldn’t be caught.
She flashed by the barracks towards the safety of the trees. Luckily, it was still technically day, so she had just enough light to avoid the bigger tree trunks as she crashed through the dense foliage. Vines snatched at her surgeon’s smock and one of her slippers flew off, but she didn’t stop. She ran until she couldn’t go on, collapsing into a pile of leaves and moss in the darkness.
CHAPTER 28
Every fiber in Ray’s body cried out for sleep but the pain in her hand and gut, exacerbated by running, denied any thoughts of rest. She lay curled on the ground for a period listening for sounds of pursuit. She had heard a few sporadic shouts as she ran from the compound and the sound of transports driving at speed but nothing for a while now.
The night was almost completely windless, and the depth of the silence made Ray feel as if she had gone deaf. She knew she had to move. She needed to find water to clean the wound on her hand. She heaved herself up and leaned against the dark bulk of a tree while her head cleared from the intense rush of pain. She thought about taking another diamorph but decided to keep her wits instead.
She staggered on. Moving towards the slightly brighter edge of the sky where the stars faded slightly, where she thought the light side must be. After an hour of nearly blind stumbling she began to feel desperate. If she didn’t clean her wounds soon the risk of infection was severe.
She hadn’t happened upon any water at all, let alone a clear running stream that she could at least be partially confident wouldn’t make matters worse. She could touch the flap of raw skin where her hand had was partially flayed and already thought that it might be too late to try and stitch herself back together.
There was nothing she could do about her gut wound apart from hope that her bowel hadn’t been nicked and her abdominal space filling with the remnants of her most recent meal. If that was the case, she would know soon enough she thought grimly.
A further hour of stumbling and Ray began to feel distinctly dizzy. She tested her forehead and it felt hot. She had no way to tell if she were hot from the running or whether the first signs of sepsis were setting in. A root tripped Ray and she pitched forward, her reactions too slow to raise her hands in time. She crashed down heavily amongst the roots.
It felt so good to be lying down that Ray couldn’t even tell if the wound under the dressing on her face had opened. She was starting to not care.
She must have fainted for a while, the pain now washing over her in waves, felt like it was happening to somebody else. As her se
nse of self solidified once again she forced herself to acknowledge the pain.
“My body, my pain. If I stay here I die.”
She crawled to a knee and gingerly levered herself up using a spindly tree. A web of vines was strung between the trees and she leaned into them for a minute, letting the strong tendrils hold her weight.
She forced herself to move on. Step after painful step, her mind beginning to wander. The forest shifted and bent sickeningly, and she began seeing movement in her peripheral vision. Black clad soldiers flittering among the trees as she staggered on.
When she looked directly at the phantoms, they froze into solid black spaces between trees or a shiny patch of sap materialized out of an imagined reflection of a soldier’s night goggles. She imagined she heard the crack of gun shots somewhere off in the distance and wondered briefly if they were shooting at her.
At some point she became aware that she was walking on a road. Some part of her mind knew to follow it towards the dull pink on the far horizon. She held that thin ribbon of color in her vision as she walked. Unable to keep her head still the pink ribbon bobbed and weaved with the jerkiness of her stumble. Her view sometimes disappearing altogether as the forest consumed the road ahead or as she staggered up an incline.
She knew she was exposed on the road, but she needed to make quicker progress and the forest was simply too dense to make reasonable headway
The road ran on an on, twisting crazily to avoid terrain and obstacles. An age later, Ray was falling regularly from pure exhaustion.
Twice she woke face down and assumed she must have fainted again. She had no way to tell how much time had passed. She had found no water and her swag was missing. She must have forgotten to regather it after a fainting spell. Her awareness had shrunk to the width of the road and she was struggling to remember to lift her head and check her surroundings. The confusion was so intense she was struggling to make sense of the sky and remember what she was trying to achieve.
Dreams started to invade her progress. Her mother, her friends, memories from her childhood, all intertwined and nonsensical. In the midst of a vivid memory of a conversation with Nettle, the forest lit up around her. White and stark and deep with penetrating shadows. The shadows skewed across the trees and bounced merrily. She could see her own shadow stretching along the road and winding up into the trees.
A low rumble vibrated through her feet and her shadow waggled around, taunting her. She smiled at it and imagined yelling,
“leave me alone,” and then grinned stupidly at herself.
Too late she turned and saw a single bright headlight approaching from behind. She turned to run but only succeeded in dropping to her knees. She looked down at the wreck of her hand, now brightly lit by the headlights. It was crusted with dried blood with wet bright red rivulets still dripping persistently from the wound where her movements cracked the scab. Enough, she thought, and allowed herself to collapse forward unto all fours.
The truck slowed and stopped behind her and she heard the door latch operate. She couldn’t even raise her head to look. A tall silhouette broke the beam if the left beam and spoke.
“Ray?”
The voice was familiar, but Ray was beyond caring. She made to lie down on the road. Sleep, that’s what she wanted. Long, endless, dreamless sleep. She felt hands grab her upper arms and lift. The pain as the wound in her gut stretched was distant. Ray shut her eyes, prepared to be carried anywhere.
“Ray it’s me,” the voice persisted.
Ray opened her eyes a slither some part of her still aware enough to be intrigued. She chuckled internally. Apparently, Jonah had turned up out of nowhere. She could see his face, clearly lit now as he turned back towards the vehicle. What a cruel hoax.
“Ray wake up, what have you done to yourself,” the man shook her a little and lifted one of her eyelids. He looked concerned at least, not murderous. He stooped and lifted Ray easily, carrying her to the back of the truck. He placed her carefully and fussed over her for a while. She felt several sharp pinches in her arms and legs and the pain in her gut and hand eased enough that her awareness returned a little.
“Morning sunshine,” Jonah commented smiling. “Been to a costume party?”
It really was him. Weakly Ray held her arms up. Jonah smiled and hugged her, careful not to squeeze to hard. They sat that way for a while, the vibration of the idling truck humming between them where Ray’s ear pressed into his neck. She could have stayed there forever but Jonah gently disengaged himself. Ray managed to sign,
“Long story,” to which Jonah nodded.
“I’m sure we will get to that soon enough.”
Ray looked down at herself remembering that she was still wearing the surgeons smock and belatedly understanding Jonah’s joke about the costume party. She checked her hand. It looked as if Jonah had sprayed some sort of gel on it. Now that she could get a better look, it appeared that the flesh was only peeled from the top of her hand. Luckily it still appeared fairly well perfused meaning that it still had blood supply.
“I need to stitch this,” Ray signed.
Jonah nodded curtly and fished out the first aid kit from the bulkhead. Ray used all the swabs cleaning the leaf and forest debris out of the wound and flushed it liberally with Jonah’s drinking water. She helped herself to a long drink at the same time before ripping open a sterile pre-threaded suture kit. Steeling herself, she showed Jonah how to stretch the skin and hold it so she could suture with her good hand.
“Lucky it’s my left that’s injured otherwise you would be doing this,” she commented.
“You wouldn’t want that. I’m all thumbs when it comes to darning. “
“I wish we had a local anesthetic.” Jonah offered her a bottle of an amber spirit that was stashed between the seats, but Ray shook her head. She applied some fresh skin gel to speed healing and, gritting her teeth against the intense pain, started sewing.
The skin puckered and pinched, pulling against the thin suture thread and she was forced to double the skin over so that the stitches didn’t simply rip through. Luckily, she had a reasonable thickness of skin to work with. She hoped it would hold. The thought of going through this again didn’t appeal to her at all.
By the time she had finished, even Jonah was looking a little green in the harsh white light of the truck interior. Ray grabbed two slings from the first aid kit. One she set aside and the other she used to cover her privates while she lifted the surgeon’s smock to examine the wound in her belly.
The remnants of her underwear were gone. She assumed they must have slipped off during her flight through the forest. The wound appeared to have closed and wasn’t overly red or hot and wasn’t oozing. Maybe she had dodged a bullet and nothing inside was badly damaged or leaking.
“What happened there?” Jonah asked looking concerned. “Bullet?”
“No…I got stabbed, some kind of metal spike. Clean though luckily. I don’t think it’s infected.”
“I gave you a broad spectrum anti-bacterial just before and two ampules of diamorph.”
“I thought I felt better, I could use some fluid if there’s a bag in there and a Haemo-Tab.”
“Done and done.” Jonah hung a bag on a purposed built hook on the truck roof and ran a cannula into Ray’s arm, letting the fluid run in under gravity. He popped a Haemo-Tab out of his own supply and handed it to Ray with his canteen. Ray smiled and took it gratefully feeling drowsy now from the pain relief.
“How are you here?” she finally thought to ask. “How did you survive?”
Jonah made a cushion out of his jacket and slid it under Ray’s head.
“Let’s drive,” he said, “I’ll tell you on the way.
He made Ray as comfortable as he could and hunched forward through the cab into the driver’s seat. As they got underway he explained.
“The firefight lasted a while. I thought they might give up once they had you, but they didn’t. I suspect they were under orders to make sure we
didn’t survive. Aymes is pretty messed up. Left shoulder shot to hell and one in the abdomen. Even on the ground through she’s still the most lethal soldier I’ve ever seen. Short story, we managed to fight them off. I managed to drag Aymes into a decent hiding spot but there is no way I could get her back to Atlas on foot, so I tracked you to that weird compound and stole a truck. I was torn between trying to rescue you or get help. In the end I decided your best chance was to come back with reinforcements. I was on my way back to get Aymes when I saw you. The other two trucks must have headed out in different directions. I haven’t seen them. I suspect we may have a welcoming committee coming from Atlas though. There is nothing to stop them calling ahead.”
Ray tapped the floor to get Jonah’s attention.
“Do you still have the communicator?”
“Yup…...that survived. I’ve been talking to your brother. He knows you were taken. I’ve been too busy to check in on what’s been going on, but he seemed pretty pissed when we spoke. Your Mum is improving though he said.”
Jonah’s concentration returned to the road and the truck wallowed along the uneven trail. Ray drifted off into dreamy thought. She had a million questions still but felt too tired to try and attract his attention again. She felt pretty sure there would be a GPS locater in the vehicle, probably on the comms board. If they came within range of a comms tower it would report their location. Once they stopped she would attend to that before Jager and Pfeffer had a chance to respond. Maybe they already had. The rolling vehicle was comforting, and it felt so good to be lying down. Relative freedom from pain had lifted her spirits enormously and she still couldn’t quite believe that Jonah had found her. She smiled quietly to herself. Despite everything, this was a much better day that yesterday.
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