Burned Ones

Chapter 21

Cameron.
16 years old.

I woke up in a hospital room wishing I was dead.

Hospitals meant paperwork and paperwork meant my dad could be contacted or worse, find me.

Never step foot inside a hospital, he'd told me countless times.

There was no one in the room with me. I had a hospital gown on and wires taped to my chest that were attached to a monitor beating increasingly faster by the second. I glanced over my body to find nothing else stuck to me and carefully peeled the wires off.

In the corner, my clothes were neatly folded so I hurried to change into them while I glanced out of the small window. The sun was rising which meant it had been a few hours. The last thing I remembered was miniature golfing with Hannah, at night.

I really shouldn't have been surprised I woke up here. I had known from the moment she handed me the list of burn supplies to get and gotten a peek at her homework on the top of the page that we were built differently. Her set of rules and my set of rules weren't the same. Hers were to call emergency services when someone passed out. Mine were to drag the body to a secluded spot and then throw them in the car.

I had my pants back on and leaned over, slipping my socks on because I didn't know how well they cleaned these floors but I knew how well some of the Casey rooms were so I didn't really want to take a chance. Right as I slipped my head through my shirt, the door opened with no knock. I rushed to pull it down the rest of the way and instinct had me scrambling closer to the window. There was no lock on the window. It was one big pane of glass that led me to believe there was no chance I could escape from it. I didn't like not having an escape.

The man entered, looked at the bed with a startled expression, and then found me. He didn't look entirely too threatening. He looked polished, standing there in professional clothes, a lab coat, and his dark hair parted to the side. Everything about him looked precise. But aside from the lab coat and the way he parted his hair, everything else about him were things my dad replicated on a daily basis. Just because someone wore a button up shirt and cuff links didn't mean they couldn't smash a person's head into a door.

"Mr. Casey," the man said, with an accent I couldn't quite place.

I was going to die. They knew my name. They knew who I was.

My dad was going to kill me.

If they had changed me into the hospital gown, it wouldn't have been hard for them to find my ID. While the only thing on it that was true was my first and last name, that was enough to get a bullet in my head if the wrong people heard. I glanced out the window. I was a few floors up and contemplated if it was worth taking my chances now. I could throw something through the window to break it.

I tapped a knuckle against the glass, testing how thick it was.

The man cleared his throat, as if he didn't have my attention. He was wrong. He had too much of my attention. "I'm Dr. Martinez. You may be familiar with my daughter, Hannah Martinez."

I was suddenly overcome with the curiosity of how quickly this man could kill me and how easily he might be able to make it look like an accident. Or how easily he could let me slip under the radar. People died from the Casey's all the time and they never got reported. He could do it, there had to be a morgue here. If the steps on how to get rid of my body without a trace in a hospital were so glaringly obvious to me, I'm sure they stood out even brighter to him. He worked here and knew every inch of this place. He had to know.

"Mr. Casey?"

My eyes snapped to his as I wondered if I would be put in the morgue or the dumpster.