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Ash
Iwake up in a hospital examination room, wearing someone else’s flannel shirt, the left sleeve rolled up revealing a pristine white bandage covering my left forearm. A man is standing with his back to me by a counter under a small, rectangular window near the ceiling. He’s wearing a white lab coat, tinkering with something.
“Where am I?” I ask as I sit up. The room sways side to side, but then rights itself once I’m sitting.
The man turns to me with a grin. “That was quite a cut on your arm. It took ten stitches to close it.”
His wavy hair is well streaked with grey, but his eyes are mirthful and alive. He continues smiling as he walks over and offers me his hand. “I’m Doc.”
I shake it, introduce myself then repeat my question.
“You’re still at Sanctuary,” he says.
“And Fuse, where’s he?” Something tugs at my right palm as I stand up. Doc steps forward and catches the IV stand I’m attached just in time before it crashes to the floor.
“You should rest some more,” he says, but I’m already pulling the IV needle from my arm. The trick is to do it slowly so the blood doesn’t start squirting everywhere. “I’ve been through worse.”
He clucks his tongue and takes over taking the IV out, then tapes a gauze square over it, muttering, “You soldiers are all the same,” as he does it.
“I’m a Marine,” I say automatically, but I think he already knows this. My dad told me all about Doc too. He’s an ex-Army doctor who, if my dad’s to be believed, can patch up any wound.
“Fuse is in the interrogation room,” he says. “I’ll take you.”
I follow him out of the examination room and into a hallway lit by bright fluorescent bulbs running the length of the ceiling. It’s lined with five more stainless steel doors, all closed, and I figure there’s more examination rooms like the one I just left behind them. Or maybe rooms with actual hospital beds.
“So Cross didn’t just let Fuse go after I passed out?” I ask as we ascend a set of metal stairs leading out of this basement.
“You drifted in and out of consciousness just long enough to tell us why you brought him to us the way you did,” Doc says. “Now, I’m not saying Cross won’t want to get the answers for himself, but I think he believes you.”
We’ve reached another level of the basement and instead of walking another flight up where I can just see the edge of the grand staircase in the lobby, he leads me along another hallway, this one not as brightly lit.
I can hear raised voices growing louder and louder, and I recognize Fuse’s voice as the loudest as we stop at an oak door.
“The kid’s got I all wrong, Cross,” Fuse is saying, as Cross tells us to enter.
All eyes turn to me as Doc opens the door. Fuse is sitting at a desk, his head covered by a bandage as pristine as mine, but more padded. The shadows on his face are now even darker because of the bruises my beating gave him.
Cross is sitting opposite him, and next to him is the VP, Tank, who is still as bulky and formidable to earn his road name all over again, despite pushing fifty.
Hawk is leaning on the wall in the far corner, standing next to a man who would sometimes feature in my nightmares when I was a kid. Scar. The name says it all. One entire side of his face is mangled by a jagged scar he got from a knife when he was a kid. Age and wrinkles have only made it appear more sinister.
“Why is he walking around?” Fuse barks. “He attacked me. Lock him up.”
“You tried to kill me,” I counter. “You wanted to stab me a bunch of times, like you did that guy Bea is accused of killing, then leave me in the woods to rot. And for what? Because she dared to date us.”
I strode into the room and directly to him, so I shouted the last few sentences into his face.
“You made her life hell,” I add. “Stalking her, frightening her, because you’ve been in love with her since she was a kid. A child. You make me sick.”
The burning fire of hate is back in his eyes as he jumps to his feet. “She is mine! No one else’s mine.”
“And what was your next move?” I ask. “Kill her when she refused to be with you.”
The thought makes me sick. I’m as sure as I can be that he would’ve gone straight back to her house after killing me to pack her up too. And then, in some dark, deserted, forgotten place he’d reveal himself to her as the stalker. The mere thought of it makes me see red. I’m ready to kill him right now just to erase that possibility from the future. I don’t care what Cross does to me after that.
“Is this true, Fuse?” Cross asks, his voice hard and measured. “Did you stalk Trigger’s daughter?”
Fuse is still glaring at me. “I watched her. Made sure she was safe.”
