Hinterland (The Aftermath #2)

Chapter One

PART ONE

THE SHARP SCENT OF anaesthetics and bleach filled my nostrils. A blinding white light pierced my vision.

I attempted to sit up, but a sharp stab of pain made me shake and fall back down-onto what? It felt soft and sort of comfortable... a bed? Where was I?

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The persistent noise sounded vaguely familiar. Like a heart monitor at a hospital... where had I heard a heart monitor before? I couldn't remember much. Not even my name. Everything seemed hazy, like a dream.

Then one voice registered in my brain. A boy's. Screaming. "April!"

April? That also sounded familiar... that was my name, wasn't it? April... April... like the month. The month I was assigned my job. Executor. That was my job. I hated it. What else had happened? That one male voice kept repeating in my head: "April! April! April!". Whose was it? Hearing the voice made me feel happy inside, but also scared. The boy's voice was scared, so why shouldn't I be scared, too? He was trustworthy. I knew what to be afraid of. I felt a warm sensation tingle in my neck. There was no one touching me, but I felt it. Fingers lightly grazing my neck and then... and then kissing...

Zenon. That was his name. A name that made me feel brave. Made me keep going.

"We have to get out of here," he had said. He gripped the jail bars of the cell. Cell... then a bunch of memories came flooding back. They hit me with the force of a brick.

Cells.

A boy and a young girl stuck in one.

A woman named Leanne with brown hair. Zenon's mom.

A gun. A prick in my arm. I thought it was a bullet, but it obviously wasn't. I was okay. Alive. Breathing. Right? Everything became a little more vivid. Physically and mentally. I could make out sharp corners in the room I was in, read labels on small little bottles on a cart beside my bed. Look at a tiny tray containing something red... red and silver. Small and pill-shaped. A name came to my mind: COM chip. That was in my arm. They took it out. I looked down at the wolf bite. It was all bandaged up, not even any blood seeping through. It was fixed up, at least a little. When I tried to move my neck, I couldn't. It was numb and stiff. I remembered the bite in my neck-not from a wolf, but a human being. My hands were also covered in bandages.

Everything seemed safe and secure. But there was a dark pit in my stomach. Telling me that I should be scared. Afraid. Angry. Zenon's voice came to me again, his own fear escaping into a scream. He was locked up in a cell. I should be scared. Why wasn't I in a cell now? I looked around the large, pristine room. White. Everything was white and very, very clean. There were a bunch of other beds just like mine in the room, too. Maybe about twenty. Ten on one side, ten on the other side. Only a few were occupied. After examining the people a bit, I realized that they were my friends. Zenon, Len, Erin and Shane. Their own heart monitors showed steady rhythms. They were alive, thankfully. Unmoving, though. I found it odd that Zenon was also in the 'hospital'. I thought that he'd been locked up in a cell.

I wrenched my neck to look further down the room. I winced at the pain, but managed to see a doctor at the end of the hallway. He had a clipboard in his hand, and was walking down the aisle, first heading toward Shane, who was the furthest away from me. He looked around the bed, scanning him, then at a folder stuffed with a few pieces of paper beside him on a bedside table. After scrawling some things down with a pen on his clipboard, he repeated the process but beside Erin's bed. Her folder was thick with paper, probably an inch or two wide. I remembered that Erin had her broken leg, so that would probably cause her to have more files than Shane.