Angela

Chapter nine

When I finally enter consciousness again my ears are ringing. The warmth that my tortured body feels driven from pain trickles down my arms and eyes. Agony screams inside me, exploding in fireworks of heat behind my eyes. The pain crushes me, hurting me like I've never been hurt, I want to search for Bianca and Elise- to hunt them down and confront them. But every time I try to stand up and see around me, my eyes refuse to see, my legs refuse to stand. I'm nothing, capable of nothing except lying in the thorns that pierce the side of my face like tiny needles stabbing my skin sending searing bolts of pain rocketing around inside my body. I'm disabled, I can't stand or see, I'm hoping that my blindness is just temporary. Just a side effect from the shock of my fall into the thorns, but when my hands search for my eyes, they catch the pointy jagged end of a thorn instead.

The feeling of dread and grief swallows me up, the fireworks go off inside my brain again. The shock rises up inside me, I start to scream, tears trailing down my cheeks from my mangled eyes and pooling into damp patches on my ragged school uniform. When somebody finally finds me, I'm sitting, screaming my head off in the thorns. Crying and letting out horrible dying animal moans, letting the rest of the thorns puncture my skin. Before I black out I feel several sets of arms lift me put of the thorny patch and I hear reassuring voices that I don't listen to. They can't reassure me, it's perfectly fine to be unhappy, I'm gonna be freaking BLIND for the rest of my life!

When I wake, a strange chorus of beeping and rattling fills my ears. I am naked, but the soft white sheets soothe my torn skin. When one of my arms manages to break through a web of wires and tubes, I trigger some sort of alarm, I run one of my hands down my body which is mostly encased in bandages. My body is thorn-free, I could almost forget this whole thing happened.
But then I remember.
I am blind.

I scream again, feeling the same feeling of shock that drenched me earlier on in the day. But no sound comes out, it's only then do I feel the pressure around my mouth and nose, some kind of mask. I lift my untethered arm to rid myself of it but then a hand clamps down hard over it, fastening some sort f strap around it. Horrified at this abrupt tethering, I squirm, but both my arms and legs are firmly held in place. Then some long buried monster inside me resurfaces and I lurch forward, tearing the bindings with strength I never imagined I possessed. But yet more hands hold me down, it's in their grasp when I transform into a wild animal, scratching and kicking to break free. I could keep it up forever, fuelled on the rush of adrenaline, but a sharp pain stabs the back of one of my arms and I fall into a haze of deep deep sleep.