Paranimal

Chapter 6

Everything around me is white. Whiter than the school polycarbonate walls. Whiter than the domed buildings of the BucketCentre. There's a tall man somewhere closeby, tapping away at a digital board in hand, with a white stylus. He's wearing white and if it weren't for his dark hair, he'd probably have camouflaged right into the wall behind me. The papery curtains drawn around me are white and so are the crispy bed sheets draped over my limp body. I'm still wearing my school uniform. I sit up slowly, not hurting at all. Why am I in hospital. I'm not in pain. The only ache I can feel is the sting in my head from my school fight with Alexis. That's all.

And anyway, after that I was fine. I remember Tiger taking me and El to the woods and the FoodCentre. And then we had that long hard walk. Then we met that nice lady, Bonnie? And we all visited Vol.

I am hit with an enormous wave of pain, greater than any headache, migraine, burn or break. It is a pain so sharp it hits your heart like a thousand voltages of enraged electricity and I double up, clutching my stomach and sobbing, not caring who hears me. Tiger does.

He comes charging through the curtains and scoops me into his arms, for once not bothering to shush me because this time, he is crying along.

"Bertie, I was so scared." he whispers, tears streaming down his cheeks like the black lines on his cheetah's face.

"He's gone. Isn't he?" I weep, holding onto my big brother. It hurts me even more to see him so broken. Always so strong, so cool. Now just a shattered teenager, scared beyond the brink.

Tiger nods, pain etched into his handsome face and all we can do is cry.

______

"What happened?" Ma keeps whispering to herself over and over again, heedless to Pa's soothing words.

My parents had been contacted as soon as Tiger had rushed me off to the hospital. He and Ellen had strapped me to a wooden plank and galloped all those miles back to the Packs Emergency Centre. It must have been a sight to see a majestic cheetah and a fat golden retriever racing to the doors of the hospital with a limp girl strapped to a make-shift sledge but that is the least of my worries.

The news has broken all through the Habitats that the Pack's Felidae Volowskii is dead. The Vowels are all mourning but there haven't been plans made yet.

After being discharged from the hospital, Ma and Pa took the two of us home. Now my family is seated around the dining table, all trying to eat hot beef goulash but barely able to down a morsel, we soon give up.

Pa has his arm around Ma's shoulders as she sobs into his neck, Tiger is gripping my hand under the table, practically crushing my fingers. Tears leak into my soup whilst Tiger sniffs.

"I don't understand Roalph, you said he was just sick!" Ma weeps, clutching to Pa who simply looks as if someone has just burned down the entire village. His face is pale, his green eyes as dark as a fathomless lake as his auburn hair falls in his face. He has the strong yet shattered look of his tiger after loosing a kill. I can imagine Ma's golden lioness tail drooping under her chair and Tiger's tear tracing the ink-black lines on his cheetah's fine face. And then there's me; morphless and without the one person who could make me feel worthwhile when I felt I was the exact opposite.

My family is shattered and so am I. I am the last person to see Volowskii alive.

It's late now but no one wants to move. Tiger and I are still dressed in our dirty school uniform and Pa is wearing his official's Pack Council suit. Ma is clothed in a beautiful red dress, blonde curls bouncing on her shoulders; obviously back from a ladies cocktail party or something like that. Her lips are perfectly painted crimson but her black eye makeup has run down her pale cheeks in wavy ink-like lines.