Emmy Laybourne - Savage Drift

“Now, you heard the doctor,” the nurse says to me.

“Hey!” a man from the head of line calls in. “When’s my turn?”

“I’ll need your help in a moment to set this fracture,” says Dr. Quarropas to the nurse. “But you can bring in some patients so the line doesn’t go nuts.”

The nurse puts her hand on the small of my back and shows me out of the room.

“You got what you wanted,” she says to me. “Now get out of here.”

Our backpacks were gone—they’d been in the truck.

Jake didn’t have a suit, but since he was type B, that hardly mattered.

The rest of us had our suits.

Drawing air through the mouthpiece was awkward, but it worked, even at a sprint. And the fact that you were basically holding the mask to your face by having the mouthpiece in your mouth meant the whole face mask/visor didn’t jar around too much. It was surprisingly stable. Even at a full sprint. Japanese design.

Jake was in the lead. He led us across a low field of brown grass into a residential neighborhood.

I ran behind Astrid and I did it on purpose. I thought I could block a bullet if the guy shot at her. Probably dumb, I know, but that’s what I did.

Small, nice-looking houses were on either side of the street.

Jake dodged behind a minivan and waited for the rest of us.

“Everyone okay?” he asked.

We nodded, all of us catching our breath.

The thing was, those mouthpieces made it hard to talk.

“You okay, Astrid?” he asked her. She nodded, clutching her belly.

She bent down and at first I thought she was going to be sick, then I saw that her sneakers were untied. She had pulled them on over the feet of her safety suit without tying the laces.

Thank God she hadn’t tripped.

“Follow me,” Jake said. “We’ll just, uh, we’ll find a car.”

He started edging down the street.

There was screaming, from one of the houses. A horrible, nerve-jangling sound.

I looked to Niko, Should we help?

He shook his head and followed Jake.

Then we saw a young woman in the street.

She was in front of a small white house that was nestled between two larger houses made of brick.

She was muttering to herself and carrying an armload of stuff, miscellaneous stuff to an idling Mazda sedan parked at the curb. She wore exercise clothes and her brown hair was coming out of a ponytail and sticking to her mouth.

There were things on the ground behind her—a picture frame. A tub of mayonnaise. Straw hat. Couch pillow.

She threw the armload into the back of the car and scrambled to retrieve the fallen items and shove them in, too. Then she saw us.

“Stay back!” she screamed. And I saw a big knife in her hand. A chef’s knife.

She’d been carrying it while she held the stuff, which was why she was dropping it everywhere.

Also, she was clearly type AB and fully, wildly paranoid.

We were a hundred and fifty feet away.

“No! No! No!” she cried. She backed away from us—from us —and then we saw a man behind her, moving fast.

I spat the mouthpiece out and shouted, “LOOK OUT!” and I rushed forward, trying, I don’t know, to save her.

But the man got her before we did.

He was broad shouldered, bald with a pot belly, and he was O.

He stalked toward her from behind, his arms and white button-down shirt splattered with blood. Head down, eyes gleaming with the call to murder.

O, O, O—I recognized it.

“Shoot him!” Astrid screamed, screaming to Jake.

But the O man had his hands around the woman’s throat, crushing the life out of her. Crushing her throat.

Her eyes bulging and it was awful, awful, awful.

I cried out in anger and wanted to fight him, then, but Niko was pulling me back.

The man got a hold of the lady’s knife and stabbed her in the chest.

He stabbed her again and again, like a kid lost in play.

Niko dragged me away, Jake was helping him now, and they got me back to the woman’s Mazda.

The man looked up at me. He was grinning madly, licking at his chin, where some blood had sprayed.

Astrid revved the engine of the car and then Jake pushed me into it as Niko hopped in the front passenger seat.

Astrid put the car in gear and we drove away.

Jake struggled to pull the door closed.

We were sitting on the woman’s stuff. Crammed in on top of piles of odd items.

I looked out the rear window of the car and saw the man resume stabbing the woman with her chef’s knife.

I shouted in despair.

I stumble back out into the hallway filled with the waiting sick.

A cut across the face. A woman holding a sprained arm.

Human beings, needing help. Dirty and scared and beaten down.

Locked up because of a blood type.

Mario is going to be okay. That’s good. I don’t know what I will do if Mario doesn’t make it.

What are his chances? Alex could tell me. Alex could calculate it for me if he were here.

I cross through the courtyard, going back to our room.

The thirty or so bodies at the gate are laid out in rows now, sleeping it off. A guard stands leaning against the gate, making sure that no one robs the bodies of the sedated prisoners.

They will wake up in three or four hours, eyes dried and bloodshot, heads pounding.

They’ll drink lots of water and feel groggy for the rest of the day.

Tonight they will go to sleep and have wild, vivid dreams. We will all hear them hollering in their sleep tonight.

The day I got shot—the same day I blocked the blow Venger meant for Mario, Mario and the kids dragged me inside. They babysat me in the rec room until I woke up.

That night I dreamed I was waiting for my parents in a train station.

Vaulted ceiling, marble hall—a classic train station. And I was skulking about, trying to stay hidden as shop vendors, with their little stores set into a colonnade against a wall, set out bottles of water in trays of ice and placed food in display cases—pastries, scrambled eggs, yogurts.

In my dream I stole a bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll and I was eating it, ducked down behind a trash bin and then there were these loud train whistles and suddenly the station was full of busy, bustling crowds.

I saw my parents there, dressed up for traveling like from a black-and-white movie. My mom wore a long coat with velvet buttons and my dad had on a suit and a fedora.

And I wanted to call out to them.

But I was so dirty and I had stolen food—I was ashamed of myself.

And they had Gram with them, and she was shuffling along as fast as she could. She walked like Mario walks. Mom and Dad were patient, as they are, but I could tell they were all in a great hurry.

I couldn’t go to them. I knew they wouldn’t want me anymore.

I enter the downstairs hallway of Excellence. I know the kids will be waiting in the room to hear about Mario.

I hurry through the Men’s hall.

The last thing I need is to run into one of my attackers from the night before.

I am relieved that I don’t.