The Wounded (The Woodlands Series) (7 page)

Rash could barely keep up with me
now, and I know it was taking all his self-restraint not to stop and take in the town. Compared to the ordered blandness of the Rings, this must have looked like a cardboard city a child had created in their bedroom, crooked, corrugated roofs and all.

When I stopped at Addy’s, Rash ran straight past me and had to backtrack. This time I saw him staring at the surroundings, the
colored flower boxes, and the stone streets with the spines of Spinner tracks running through them. He shook his head in disbelief. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s so different to the Woodlands that it has to be.”

A sob caught in my throat
. I didn’t want to frighten him any more than I already had, but when I looked around, I couldn’t see beauty. The beauty was in the people who lived here. Its emptiness made it ugly in my eyes.

Addy’s door was ajar as well. I ran my hands over a neatly
shattered window panel. Someone had broken into her house. When I stepped inside, I could see her carefully organized chaos had been disturbed. There were bags with rugs leaking out of them, a ball of wool trailing across the dark floor, and a candle that had burned down to the bottom of the wick. I imagined them bursting in here, pushing her back into her bedroom, and my heart clenched.

Reluctantly,
I crept further in, so scared of what I might find in her room. I wrapped my fingers around the doorframe to her bedroom and peered inside, but it was empty just like my house.

When we left, Rash slid his arm around my waist
to support my swaying body. “You don’t look so good. You should rest, Soar.”

I shook my head
, my world spinning. I couldn’t rest. I had to find them.

*****

I got halfway up the stairs to Apella and Alexei’s apartment and stopped. The air was scrubbed clean of noises. I knew they weren’t there.

The other
Survivors checked homes too, zigzagging in and out of doors like startled bugs, yelling ‘clear’ and calling out people’s names.

We were
just pushing the heavy door to Apella’s apartment building open when we heard a man scream, “Found something!”

His
shouts were far off in the distance and came floating down from back up the hill. We both ran, joining others as we went, all desperately hoping it wasn’t our loved one that had been ‘found’.

The yells came from the edge of th
e forest, close to where I’d done my training with Careen and Pietre. People were crowded around something, shaking their heads, a warble of confusion drifting towards us as we approached. Two men shifted their legs, and I saw a flash of orange fur like flames and iron bars. I pushed my way into the group and looked down at the ground.

Its
ribs rose and fell in a labored manner, a dense, strangled roar stuck in its throat. Blood had poured from a bullet wound in its stomach, creating a dark red halo around its body, but it was now a slow ooze. I felt nausea clouding my head, and I stumbled. Pelo caught my elbow and steadied me. His face showed a flash of concern. I shook off his grip and leaned down to the creature’s gigantic jaw, a disproportionately small trickle of blood slipped down its lip from where someone had wrenched a fang from its mouth. I shook my head with hurt and anger. A Survivor would never do this.

The people who did this had no respect, no
understanding, for the life outside their concrete walls. I realized that the flash of white I saw hanging form that soldier’s neck when I was on the spinner heading home was a tooth. Somehow, they’d beat us here.

I snatched the stunner from Pelo
’s backpack and held it to the beast’s temple. Squeezing my eyes tightly shut, I squeezed the trigger and held it there until I could no longer hear its ragged breathing.

When I
stood, everyone’s wide eyes were on me. I handed Pelo the stunner and secretly wished Pietre had been here to see me do that. He was wrong about me. He said I didn’t have it in me to use the stunner when it was necessary. He just didn’t understand what necessary was to me.

I fa
ced the men and women. Clasping my fingers around my pledge charm, I tugged it violently and held it up in front of them. “I don’t want to see any one of you kissing this damn thing and saying goodbye to Gwen, or to whoever you think you’ve lost.” I stood on my tiptoes to connect with each and every pair of eyes. “Until we see their bodies in front of us, they are still alive. Do you hear me?” My voice cracked a little at the end, and I whispered, “They’re still alive.”

To my
surprise, everyone nodded.

Matthew took over, ordering everyone to search and then meet back at the
theater in three hours.

*****

We helped Matthew carry Pietre down to the hospital. With no Spinner, it was a bumpy ride and, after a string of profanities, he passed out from the pain, again. It was worrying. He was getting weaker.

Matthew talked in short burst
s over his shoulder as we stumbled down the street. “I need to repair that leg.”

Careen
blinked up from staring at Pietre’s face, which looked pained even in sleep. Rash was walking next to me, unabashedly staring at her breasts as they bounced up and down with every footfall. “Can you?” she asked.

Matthew’s brow was
tight, and he looked like he might be sweating slightly. This didn’t seem like a good sign. “Until we x-ray it, I can’t be sure, but the infection from the exposed bone is getting worse.”

Careen worried her brow.
The expression made her look like a cute, perplexed doll. We tramped towards the bottom of the hill with purpose until the sight before us stopped us all in our tracks.

U
p until now it had looked like everyone had just evaporated mid morning tea. Like a magic spell had made them all disappear. But the hospital was a disaster. Whatever happened, it happened right here.

The glass doors were
barricaded. Piles of furniture and medical equipment blocked the entrance. Once we broke our way inside, it was like viewing a torn-apart book. Everything was pulled to pieces. The decimated spine lay open and devastated, the pages incomplete or missing. The story no longer making sense. It was the kind of destruction you’d expect when someone was out of their minds looking for something. Every bed was upturned. Every cupboard door swung on its hinges. Matthew’s face drew down in horror. His hospital was in shreds.

We cleared a space and lay Pietre down
, still on the carrier I’d made, on top of a bed. He was still out cold. As we started moving things aside and cleaning up, a bedpan slid off the debris and scuttled across the floor, hitting a hospital bed leg with a loud clang. Under an upturned bed, movement caught my eyes. I ran towards the source.
Please, please, please be Joseph
.

A weathered hand reached out
, and then an irritated voice crackled through a pile of bed sheets. “Well, aren’t you going to help me, you dull girl?”

Addy’s skin was close to black. Purplish stains ran across her face and down her arm. I pulled her gently to sitting, and she arranged her legs, pulling them up to her chin. Her stick-like figure jutted out at all angles, like a sharply folded piece of paper. She shook from cold, shock, or both, and I gathered a clump of sheets to throw over her back. When they landed on her, she let out a horrible cough and blood sprayed across the back of her hand. My heart went cold and shivery. Panic was smothered by dread.

O
ld blood crusted in the corners of her mouth, like a wolf in need of a stream clean. I didn’t used to be a screamer. Most of the time, it seemed pointless to carry on like that, but when I took in the full devastation of Addy, I sat down in front of her like a child awaiting a lesson and screamed my lungs out.

“Matthew!
Matthew! Matthew!” I held onto my chest, because in that moment, I felt like every emotion was fighting to get out, like there was a stag ramming the inside of my rib cage with his bony antlers.

“They’re still alive
,” I whispered to myself.

I heard clattering
. Matthew and Rash came running from the tech rooms, where Deshi had been working through the leftover technology. Matthew stopped still when he saw her. Wiping dust and dirt on his pants, he took a deep breath to fortify himself and approached. He seemed to collapse as he neared Addy, becoming smaller and smaller. Like me, he was suddenly a child. He knelt down in a nest of twisted sheets in front of her. “Babushka, no,” he whispered.

“Shh
,” Addy managed, her voice sounding like air being let out of a tire.

Matthew lifted her arm and put his fingers to her wrist, shaking his head. “What happened
? Where is everyone?”

“They came. But we saw them coming. Everyone evacuated
. Retreated to the hiding place. I’m sorry, my good boy. I was already in here when they arrived. I’d had a fall.” She tapped her leg listlessly. “They weren’t interested in this old girl. They were after…” I felt a surge of hope. They were alive.

“The healing machine,” Matthew interrupted, cursing under his breath.

“Don’t use that kind of language,” Addy chided.

Rash
stood back, tears stinging the corners of his eyes. I glared at him. I didn’t want anyone to cry. She wasn’t dead. She was still here, talking to us. Why was everyone looking at her like it was already over?

“It’s destroyed
,” Matthew whispered.

Addy nodded.
“Yes. They destroyed it with their bombs.”

Matthew scooped her
up, and I righted a gurney. He placed her gently on the mattress. She looked like part of it, thin as the sheets. Her breath slow, her bare feet sticking out the bottom of a nightdress, cracked and scabbed. But she looked whole. Battered, but whole.

“W
hat should I do?” Matthew asked, lost, his voice snagging on fought-back tears.

“Get the others and go to the hiding place. It’s time to fight back
,” Addy said, her hand clasping around something. “Leave me,” she said, forcing a smile.

Matthew
nodded, but didn’t release her hand. I shook my head, hoping I’d heard wrong. “What? No. What are you taking about? We’re not leaving her here,” I yelled.

Addy’s
bright, scrunched-up eyes snapped to me. “I’m dying, dear.”

I felt thrumming and crashing in my
ears, like they were filling up with water. “No you’re not,” I said stubbornly. “You’re fine. Just bruised.” I laughed weakly. “Don’t be such a baby.” Every word felt like a stabbing.

Matthew grabbed my arm firmly and dragged me away from the bed. He took me behind a
fallen-down partition and said, “Rosa, Addy’s bleeding internally, everything’s destroyed, and the healer is in pieces. The emergency medical supplies have been taken. There’s nothing we can do.”

I covered my mouth, as if I could stop the grief from sliding out. “Please. We have to try something, anything. Matthew, it’s Addy.” Tears were pouring down my face
, as everything tuned out and in. I could hear yelling outside, then Rash and Addy having an uncomfortable conversation on the other side of the partition.

“Garbage?” I heard Addy say
, and then Rash laughing at his own joke.

I knew if there
were anything Matthew could do, he would do it. And there wasn’t. There was nothing.

My home was
rubble, and they were telling me Addy was going to die.

*****

We walked back to Addy and stood over her. It felt wrong, like we were standing over her grave. She grimaced, pulling that wrinkly face together like purse strings in dissatisfaction. “Don’t just hover over me looking miserable,” she snapped. We shifted uneasily but didn’t move. She waved us away with effort. “Go and make yourselves useful. I can’t look at those depressing faces another minute!”

Matthew
was the first to move, falling into disaster-containment mode. He contacted everyone via handheld and told them to meet us at the hospital.