“It’s okay. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I feel terrible about what happened. When I heard, I rushed down here as fast as I could. Did Amy really take off somewhere?”
Paige looked at Karen and saw more than a friend dressed in new jeans and a faded peasant blouse. She saw a girl who still lived in the world that might as well have stopped existing for her a few nights ago. It was a warm, friendly place where the worst things that could come after you were other human beings. Even those tended to keep their distance more often than not. There was an openness to Karen’s face that looked like a childhood home as seen in the rearview mirror of a car speeding in the opposite direction.
“You just now heard about this?” Paige asked.
Karen folded her hands and nodded timidly. “I … I never liked those kinds of parties, but I wanted to be with you guys. I stayed for a while, but it just got to be too much so I left early.” Lowering her head only lined up her eyes with more of Paige’s bandages, so she turned to the side as she said, “I snuck out and had someone drive me back home. When I heard about what happened, I felt horrible. I should have been there with you.”
Before Paige knew what she was doing, she had Karen wrapped up in a hug that strained several of her bandaged wounds. She couldn’t remember the last time she cried, but felt the tears coming now. Clenching her eyes shut against the bitter droplets as she loosened her hold, she said, “Don’t apologize for missing out on what happened. I’m just glad one of us made it out of there as … as the same person that went in.”
“You’ll be the same too, Paige,” Karen replied while gently embracing her friend again. “All you need is time to heal. I’ll help any way I can. You and Tara will be better.”
“I don’t even know where Tara is, sweetie.”
“She’s in a room on the second floor.”
“What?”
Karen nodded. “She’s being examined.”
“Examined?”
“They were looking at some marks on her neck.”
Holding Karen at arm’s length, Paige asked, “What marks? What did they look like?”
“They were just lines. I couldn’t see much, but her skin was pale. The nurses were looking at her then, so the doctors are probably with her by now.”
“What room is she in?” Before Karen could answer, Paige spun her around and pushed her toward the door. “Never mind that. Just take me to her.”
“Hey! Watch what you’re—”
“You need to take me to her!” After nearly charging through the door before allowing it to open, Paige asked, “Did you see some other guy with her? An older man with rough skin and—”
She stopped as soon as she saw Ned at a nurse’s station farther down the hall. Karen was headed in that same direction, walking toward a bank of elevators a few paces away from Ned’s spot. Grabbing her once again, Paige redirected her almost hard enough to send her staggering into a wall. “Not that way.”
“Should you even be out of bed?”
“I’m fine. There’s the stairs. You said Tara was on the second floor?”
“Right, but take it easy!”
Paige didn’t let her go until they’d gotten past the heavy metal door leading to the stairwell. They had a few flights of stairs to negotiate, and Paige descended them as quickly as she could. The first time she stumbled, she felt Karen’s hands on her back and shoulder for support.
“What’s the hurry? Tara’s not going anywhere. You probably shouldn’t either.”
“Just take me to her, okay? Please?”
Karen’s sigh echoed within the concrete stairwell, and Paige kept up with her. As they approached the second floor and she heard the slap of her feet hitting the floor along with the sound of Karen’s flats, she realized her feet were bare. Looking down, she prayed she wouldn’t find one of those terrible, backward paper gowns wrapped around her body. Instead, she saw lilac pajama pants bearing the hospital logo and a plain gray T-shirt. Someone put her in those clothes soon after she’d gotten to the hospital, and she didn’t even remember it.
The door at the next landing was a heavy one that opened to a hall similar to the one they’d left behind. Rows of larger windows to her right looked in on examination rooms filled with families going through either the best or worst days of their lives.
“She was over this way,” Karen said as she marched down the hall. Most of the people they encountered had enough on their minds to overlook the two young women. “But we might not be able to see her. The man outside her room said she wouldn’t be able to have visitors.”
“What man?” Paige asked. “Was it an older guy named Ned?”
“I don’t know,” Karen replied.
“His name was on his shirt. He works here. Did he try to inject you with something?”
Karen didn’t know what to say to that, so she slipped into a soothing tone as she assured Paige everything was all right. That tone couldn’t have had a less soothing effect as Paige stomped along beside her. The hall bent around a corner, widening into a row of doors being visited by several nurses, orderlies, and people in street clothes trying to find their relatives as quickly as they could. Karen stopped to check a few of the rooms and eventually found the one she was after. Before she could step inside, however, the door opened and Paige was confronted by Tara, although her friend’s face was only vaguely familiar.
Tara’s skin was pasty and had a wet sheen that glistened beneath the stark hospital lights. Thin black markings stretched up from beneath the collar of a shirt bearing the hospital logo and stopped a few inches under her ear. They weren’t nearly as large as the markings on Wes, Hope, Evan, or Hector, but were just as dark and trembled excitedly beneath her flesh.
“Tara?” Paige said. “Are you okay?”
“There were doctors,” Tara replied drearily. “They wanted to tell me something.”
When her friend’s voice faded into a strained version of the one she knew, Paige got frustrated and anxious. “What’s wrong with you? What are those markings? Talk to me!”
Karen peered over Paige’s shoulder and tried to say something but was overcome by sobs that made it difficult for her to breathe.
“Not now, damn it!” Paige said as she wheeled around to deal with her. “We need to think before—”
But Karen wasn’t looking at either of her friends. She stared past them both, through the doorway and into Tara’s room. There were four bodies in there, stacked like bundles of soiled laundry between the two beds. Paige only saw the heads and feet at first, so she stepped farther into the room, to stand next to Karen, who had wandered in to look down at the gruesome find with both hands clasped over her mouth. Two of the bodies were dressed in white coats and the others wore baggy scrubs. All of them were covered in blood, un-moving and staring at different angles through eyes glazed over and frozen in an expression of terror.
Tara wandered past the other two girls and knelt beside the bodies. Reaching out to swipe her fingers against the coat of a woman who had a thin face and stringy blond hair, she scraped off some of the blood that had dried there and brought it to her lips. “Paige,” she said as she opened her mouth to reveal a set of fangs sprouting from her upper jaw. “I think I’m in trouble.”
Chapter Twenty
Paige’s story had been interrupted several times with road trip necessities such as stops for gas, a pause to pick up some fast food, and the occasional phone call. Despite all of that, it seemed to Cole as if her voice never stopped. When she wasn’t speaking, Paige switched between refusing to look him in the eye and showing him more emotion than he’d thought her capable of displaying. She wasn’t finished when they reached Chicago but seemed to have run out of steam for the moment.
“So that woman you followed to Miami …?” he asked.
