Chapter 300
[ 491 words ]
Chapter 300:
She carefully combed her gray hair back with her bare fingers. She arranged her head gently on the hard metal block.
Only when the task was perfectly completed did she step back. She dropped the basin onto the cart. The metal hit metal with a loud, sharp clatter that echoed in the silent room.
She stood rigidly at attention beside the table. She stared straight ahead at the blank white wall. She refused to look down at the body again.
Julian watched her chest rise and fall in shallow, controlled breaths. He realized she was entirely trapped in her own mind. She had locked away a grief too massive for her nervous system to process.
𝘔о𝘴𝗍 rе𝘢𝗱 t𝗁𝗂𝘀 𝘄𝗲е𝗄 𝘰n 𝗀a𝗹𝗻𝗼𝘷elѕ.𝗰o𝗆
The digital clock on the morgue wall ticked past three in the morning. The red numbers glowed harshly in the cold room. Caroline had been standing rigidly by the steel table for hours, her posture never faltering.
Julian pulled up a hard plastic chair. He sat a few feet away from her. He watched her with bloodshot eyes, refusing to leave her alone in the freezing basement.
He softly begged her to sit down. He offered to go up to the cafeteria to get her a warm blanket or a cup of hot tea to raise her core temperature.
Caroline didn’t blink. Her eyes remained locked on a specific spot on the blank wall. She completely ignored his presence, her breathing shallow and perfectly even.
The heavy morgue doors swung open. Brenna rushed into the room. Her blue scrubs were wrinkled, and her face was puffy and red from crying.
Brenna had been called by Julian an hour ago. She ran straight to Caroline. She threw her arms tightly around her best friend’s rigid shoulders.
Brenna sobbed into Caroline’s neck. She offered broken condolences and begged Caroline to please just say something, anything.
Caroline remained as stiff as a wooden board. She didn’t return the embrace. She slowly reached her right hand into her scrub pocket and pulled out the encrypted satellite phone.
Without acknowledging Brenna’s tears, she pressed her thumb against the screen. She hit the single pre-programmed speed dial button for Jarrod’s secure line.
She lifted the heavy device to her ear. The line clicked once, immediately followed by the cold, mechanical hum of an unreachable signal.
The scene briefly shifted halfway across the globe to an active, classified war zone. Jarrod was currently deep in a concrete command bunker, his comms completely jammed by a massive sandstorm and localized enemy signal disruption. He was entirely unreachable.
Back in the morgue, Caroline slowly lowered the phone. She stared at the dark, silent screen. The absolute silence from Jarrod was the final, devastating blow to her psyche.
The realization hit her physical body. She was truly, utterly alone in this nightmare. The mental firewall she had built over the last few hours finally breached.
A violent tremor started in her hands. It rapidly spread up her arms, vibrating through her shoulders, and crashing into her core.
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