Obscure Old Tales

Chapter 7: Run

That day her attire had consisted of a white raincoat, sweater vest, soft blue jeans, a pair of boots with a short heel, looking back on it, she should have picked the snickers instead, but now there was no running back home. Fortunately, she packed her mother's scarf in her backpack, her most valued position of hers, and turned out the best disguise.

The temperature was dropping by the minute.

She had no previous experience before with events like these, but she remembered reading about what had happened long ago to a Tzar in Russia and the destiny that awaited his children, she had read about how the sister of the fiercest queen in Egypt had survived her long attempts at striking her down. She knew this was the part she had to turn into a survivor.

She knew if she came back to the palace, she would be in more danger than the hypothermia.

Rain had stopped about half an hour ago. By now all the guards should be looking for her body.

She was long gone from the outskirts of Belon, far away from the nymphs, she had taken two tickets to different trains hoping to divert her capture, but with the beneficial gambit that one took her to old Mulhouse, from which she moved quietly to a rural road hoping to lose any traceable connectivity on her smart glass.

Now far from the storm, hell would have to await.

She found a dilapidated building, a service station of sorts, if she was lucky there might have been a medical cabinet inside.

Bianca moved swiftly into the maws of the ruined place.

"Anybody home?"

She thought it was polite to ask, and anyways a dryad or Oread could as well be living in the area, maybe something else, maybe something dreadful, yet no answer was a good sign.

Bianca let down her hood. Her flowy curls cascaded to follow.

Inside the old store there was broken glass and wooden barricades, the shelves half empty, half overrun by the wild plants.

She ran to the counter where hidden under stacks of bags and jackets she found a first aid kit along with a taser, no bistoury unfortunately, so she had to burn her tracking chip the hard way.

"Well at least there is enough medicine and band aids."

She looked for a pocketknife, there was nothing in her bag.

She rummaged the counter left and right, but no use came of it till a sudden clank resounded in the wooden floor.

A short Tactical knife, who knows how long it had been there inside a stainless sheet, she took it out glimmering silver, clean and unspoiled.

"Better than nothing."

The princess spoke plunging the knife into her shoulder.

Excruciating stings made her bear a gasp and a scream, she tore into her flesh until she reached the tiny little object, she gasped for air as the pain flowed and ebbed like moonlight at nighttime rain.

She scraped it out, held it in her left hand and stabbed the knife into the counter.

"Now remember, you must disinfect, with alcohol and cover up."

The words of her long-lost cousin came to surface.

She soaked her scarf with a disinfectant gel from her cleanness pack back at the research camp, wrapped it around the wound, took a bunch of pain killers and begged the "lord of miracles" to allow her to survive the night.

She shook to the ground wrapping her backpack against her chest, hiding inside the hoodie, curling as a ball on the floor begging the elder and new gods to take pity on herself.