Wither With Me

CHAPTER 34 - BUGS

Claire gasped.

"Oh, my goodness...! S-She doesn't look healthy...!" she said, stooping down to get a better look at her.

The girl sat in a corner, tucked against the machinery, staring at Claire with mournful eyes.

"I've been feeding her over the last few days. She refuses to go down and get her own stuff..." Ethan approached her, and placed a can of sweet corn by her side. "Here, this is for you."

Claire kneeled down to get to the girl's eye level.

"Hey, sweetheart... Is that true?" she said, in a soft voice.

The girl appeared to relax a bit. Her stiffness faded, and she stopped hugging her legs and burying most of her face into her arms. Claire got a clearer view of her features. Somehow, she felt familiar, as if she reminded her of someone. But she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

She nodded, in response to Claire's question.

'This girl... she's way younger than Lilian. How did she even make it this far!? Poor thing...'

"Are you two related?" asked Claire.

"Huh...? N-No... I just happened to stumble upon her up here. All she's told me is that her mum went somewhere..."

"I see..."

'And he simply decided to look after a complete stranger? You don't see that kind of kindness too often... Should I trust him...?'

Claire had no intention to lower her guard. Untrusting by nature, she knew appearances could be misleading. However, her gut was telling her to be at ease. Those two youngsters might actually be the first strangers she had met since the beginning of the pandemic that didn't give her unsettling vibes.

"What do you usually do around here? Do you just keep her company up here...?"

"Well, uh... I guess? I don't like being down there with all the others. Too much noise... I just hang around here, or explore the other floors."

"Explore? What do you mean?"

"Oh, there's lots of cool places down below. You can't really get there using the stairs, they keep them blocked at all times. But there are other ways to go down, like the elevator you guys came from."

"Cool places, right... For example?" any bit of information she could get about the hospital might be useful in the future. She encouraged him to talk, and listened.

"Most of it is just waiting areas and offices, but there's rooms full of strange machines and computers. I found one that looks like a bed, but it was inside some kind of cylindrical machine, like a tunnel. Weird. There's also a room with lots of shelves full of medicines and bottles full of liquid. Some of them smelled really weird."

'You shouldn't be sticking your nose in bottles with unknown chemicals, jeez... But a stash of medicine sounds useful. Did they not loot the entire place? Perhaps they didn't have time to do so? This hospital is massive, after all...'

"There's also this other room with, like... lots of glowing bugs in jars. I don't know what was the deal with that, it kinda creeped me out. Oh, I also found..."

...

"Wait, did you say glowing bugs...?" Claire interrupted Ethan's monologue. Her brain had stopped paying attention to his words, and was instead trying to make sense of what she had just heard.

"Eh... Y-Yeah...?"

She had something in mind. Nothing but an idea, a remote hypothesis that had been bouncing around her head for a while. And what Ethan had mentioned made that idea resonate with more intensity than ever before. Was the boy telling the truth? Why would such a thing be there? Was it relevant? Lots of questions, and lots of coincidences.