Fuck. My whole plan lay in tatters. She was right, of course. They'd kill us. Maybe if I killed myself they'd leave her alone and…no. The only way to keep her alive was to stay with her. Oh God, I called the fucking police. In a move that could get her killed.
I pulled her closer, unconsciously tightening my grip on the gun as they fanned out to encircle us, stopping several metres away.
"Great. Now, thanks to the sirens, he's got a gun and a hostage. Now what?" a voice lamented.
Her raspy breathing became more rapid. I had no hostage – she couldn't feel her legs, let alone walk – and the gun was useless empty. My brain raced her breathing, the gun by her throat. I lifted the gun into the air and started to pull back the trigger, to show them that it wasn't loaded, and they backed away a bit.
"Don't kill her," one of them breathed, more in disbelief than to me.
Kill her? I couldn’t do it, not even when she begged me to.
I stood up slowly, cradling her body in my arms, trying to keep the blankets around her.
This gave one of them the cue he needed to start giving orders. "Put the girl down and step away from her, hands in the air."
"No," she whimpered, her face white with pain and effort as she wrapped her arms clumsily around my neck. The blankets slid away from her chest, exposing her blood-soaked shirt.
I only held her tighter. "Get her an ambulance. She needs help. She’s badly hurt – I’ll put her down only in an ambulance."
I could hear one hiss to the other, "She’s bleeding badly – look at her shirt! Let him get her back to the road, then….." He lowered his voice so I couldn’t hear the rest, but I could guess…then we get him. I was beyond caring.
"I want to get her to hospital. She needs help – there’s so much blood," I repeated, much louder.
"There’s an ambulance back at the road. You can take her there," a voice called back.
I took a step forward and they took more steps back.
One step forward, two steps back, like some kind of deadly dance, through sand dunes that shifted and presented a pale backdrop to the real drama, like unwilling spectators. To say nothing of the unwilling participants.
Back on the road, bathed in the blinking red-blue-purple light from the patrol cars, was the promised ambulance, glowing like a beacon in the weird light show. It had one door open and ambulance officers standing by – like a chauffeured limousine, ready to take care of her every need.
I laid her carefully on the ambulance stretcher. In the bright, harsh light of the ambulance, I saw for the first time what they’d done to her – what I’d done to her, in letting them hurt her. Every bit of her skin that I could see was a mess of bruises and fresh and dried blood. Mike’s bloodied shirt hardly helped matters, but it probably hid far worse injuries than those I could already see.
You let them do this, I told myself, trying to hide my horror as I covered her up with a hospital-issue blanket. Scared to do anything that might hurt her further, I forced myself to reassure her as she looked at me pleadingly. I touched her hair, briefly, and smiled as best I could as I voiced my desperate hope. "You're going to be all right."
And, with an effort, she smiled back.
I drank in the sight of her. Surely saving this amazing girl's life counted for something in the overall scheme of things. Deep in my gut, I dreaded she was right and I was going to die soon. I wished I'd left some bullets in the gun – I could've used one to end the uncertainty.
Somebody behind me roughly took my arm, saying something about a few questions, and started pulling me back out of the ambulance. I stared at her in shock as she reached out for me with a hand on which all of the fingers were definitely broken, bones protruding through her skin in ways that were far from normal. Just like Alanna’s had been. As I focussed on her hand, for a moment it wasn’t her face I saw behind it, but Alanna’s. Not alive, but as dead as she'd been when I identified her in the mortuary. Like a zombie, risen from the dead to make me pay for my negligence.
You don't get to die today. You still have work to do.
I was too stunned to resist as I followed my arm out of the ambulance and back onto the road.
An ambulance officer climbed in then and hid her from sight.
Reluctantly, I turned away.
"You're in no shape to drive. I'll give you a lift to the hospital." The sympathetic voice belonged to a police officer who looked almost thirty – Senior Constable Nick Dennis, his uniform said. He gestured toward one of the patrol cars.
"Aren't you going to arrest me?" I asked dully.
"Just get in the car," he said. "As long as you cooperate, I won't need to yet." He opened the rear door.
My bum had barely touched the seat before I heard raised voices. I jumped up, trying to see what was happening.
He turned his head toward the noise, his body blocking the doorway as he started to close the door. "You should have shot her while you had the chance."
I froze with one leg sticking out of the car.
No. No…not Caitlin…they paid off a police officer…and he'd shoot me as soon as we got on the road. Caitlin…her time would come later. The ambulance officers? The nurses? The doctor? Oh God…
I threw my weight against the door. It flew open, knocking the crooked cop aside for a second, and I saw it.
Caitlin crouched at the door of the ambulance, where she wasn't supposed to be.
He took advantage of my distraction, trying to push me back inside his car, but the crack as my fist met his jaw sent him to the ground. Once he was out my way, I ran to her.
She'd climbed out of the ambulance and started staggering toward me, arms outstretched. The image of a zombie, a walking corpse – an image I'd never get out of my mind.
I swore softly under my breath – she had a death wish, this girl I had to keep alive. And I couldn’t live with myself if I let her die the way Alanna had.
I could hear the police officer on the ground shouting something at me, but I wasn’t paying attention, so I didn’t turn around to look, just kept running toward her.
"NO!" she screamed as, sickeningly, she stumbled, and her legs gave way beneath her. She fell to her knees in the gravel. She would have pitched forward face-first had I not dived forward to reach her before the rest of her body hit the ground. Her weight pushed me down onto the road. Pain burned across my shoulder as she screamed again and more blood flowed down her leg. The echo of the shots resounded in the cold air.
I opened my mouth to tell her how stupid...but those tortured eyes could have shut up even the most garrulous politician.
She sobbed helplessly, drenched in tears, shaking so violently she had trouble getting the words out. "Don't...leave me."
She’s been shot. The cop was aiming for me but shot her instead. It’s my fault she’s been shot. The thought registered and I forgot anything else. "It's all right. I wasn't leaving you." I tried to stem the stream of blood with my hands.
The torment and the pain in her eyes! Under that lurked raw terror. "Never...hurt...again. You... promised!"
God, she'd been right. Her terror at being alone and helpless again had driven her to find me. She barely had the strength to stand and it had almost killed her. I knew she’d kill herself before she’d let them hurt her again, if I wasn’t there to stop her. And I'd let her get shot.
Her twisted fingers clutched at my shirt, scrabbling at the gun in my pocket. Oh God, she's going to try and shoot herself again.
"Chris. Please." Her eyes were on fire in pain. Still she didn't let go.
"I'll never let them hurt you again. If I have to stay with you every waking moment until you recover. You'll never have to remind me again. And I won't let you hurt yourself, either." I peeled her fingers from my shirt. She gasped, squeezing her eyes shut, and her body went limp.
Her blood tainted my hands once more, but she was only unconscious. I carried her back to the ambulance and laid her down again, dimly aware of the other police officers pushi
ng the handcuffed Senior Constable Dennis into the back seat of his own patrol car. The car he'd almost killed me in.
I sat beside her in the ambulance this time, as the paramedic returned to take care of her. Squeezing past me, he didn’t spare me a glance as he sat beside me.
He pulled out a stack of dressing packs from the cupboard above her and tossed one to me. "Here, press down hard with that. It should slow the bleeding."
I stared at the dressing in my hands, confused. "You need me to help you?"
"No, but it’d be nice if you didn’t bleed to death while I’m taking care of her. She’s lost too much blood already."
I looked at him, more puzzled than ever, and he took pity on me. "You’ve been shot, Rambo. There’s blood all down your arm."
At the bottom of the last typed page, Nathan’s handwriting was almost illegible, but the words were carved deep into the paper and underlined.
I’m sorry.
I ripped the pages into pieces and dropped them into the kitchen bin, on top of the mushy, mouldy remains of some tomatoes I’d left in the fridge before I went to Melbourne. As I carried the bin bag to the wheelie bin outside, I wondered at his stupidity in writing it all down. What if someone had found it? After all the trouble I took – we both took – to hide the truth from the police and everyone else, as I’d promised I would...did he think I’d forgotten? Horrible memories, carved into my mind deeper than any knife could?
I dragged the wheelie bin to the kerb, hoping the rubbish truck wouldn’t be too long. I needed Nathan’s compromising evidence to disappear as quickly as possible.
Then I went to my bedroom and started packing my things, so I could fly away and leave all this behind to start my new life with a new name.
There could be no looking back.
After all, however sorry he might be, he didn't want me.
The story concludes with Afterlife, the third book in the Nightmares Trilogy, in 2014.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Demelza Carlton has always loved the ocean, but on her first snorkelling trip she found she was afraid of fish.
She has since swum with sea lions, sharks and sea cucumbers and stood on spray drenched cliffs over a seething sea as a seven-metre cyclonic swell surged in, shattering a shipwreck below.
Demelza now lives in Perth, Western Australia, the shark attack capital of the world.
The Ocean’s Gift series was her first foray into fiction, followed by the Nightmares trilogy.
Want to know more? You can follow Demelza on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or her blog, Demelza Carlton’s Place at:
http://www.demelzacarlton.wordpress.com
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