Chapter 441
[ 516 words ]
Chapter 441:
His words, meant to be a release, were a spark on dry tinder. She whipped her head around, glaring at him through the gloom. Tears tracked clean paths through the grime on her cheeks.
“That’s not funny!”
She turned back to the slab, her anger fueling another desperate shove. But she could hear the change in his breathing. It was getting weaker, shallower. A cold panic began to seep through her adrenaline-fueled determination.
The darkness was absolute now. She couldn’t even see his face clearly.
She let the rebar fall. It clattered against the broken concrete, the sound echoing in the dead quiet. The useless effort was over. She dropped to her knees, her hands scrambling across the debris-strewn floor, searching. Her fingers brushed against canvas. Her medical pack.
She ripped it open, her hands shaking as she fumbled inside. Bandages, antiseptic wipes, a small bottle of water. And then, her fingers closed around a hard, cylindrical object. An emergency flashlight.
She clicked it on.
A single, harsh beam of light cut through the blackness. It illuminated their tiny prison of rubble and steel. It illuminated Sterling’s face, now a ghastly, waxy white. And it illuminated the dark, glistening pool of blood spreading from beneath the slab, soaking into the dust and turning it into a thick, black mud.
Her stomach dropped. She knew what that kind of blood loss meant.
𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘬 𝘰𝘯 𝘨𝘢𝘭𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘴.𝘤𝘰𝘮
Her panic receded, replaced by a cold, clinical calm—the automatic stillness of a nurse faced with a hemorrhage, a reflex drilled into her during long shifts in the trauma ward. She took a steadying breath and began a mental inventory of the pack’s contents. A few protein bars. The small bottle of water. Disinfectant wipes and some gauze. It was next to nothing. Not nearly enough.
Caroline uncapped the small bottle of water, her movements deliberate and steady. She poured roughly half of its contents into the cap and held it out to him.
“Here.”
He shook his head, a small, pained movement. “You drink it. I don’t need it.”
“You need to stay conscious,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. It was the voice of a nurse, not a victim. “Drink it.”
He looked at the resolve in her eyes, the hard set of her jaw in the flashlight’s beam. He finally took the cap and drank the small amount in a single swallow.
She took a sip herself, the lukewarm water doing little to soothe her raw throat, and then her mind turned to the next logical step. Communication.
She began patting the pockets of her scrubs. Empty. She must have lost her phone in the fall. A new wave of cold dread washed over her.
“Your phone,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “Do you have it?”
A bitter, humorless smile touched Sterling’s lips. He reached into the pocket of his ruined suit jacket and pulled out his phone. The screen was a spiderweb of shattered glass, completely dark. It wouldn’t turn on.
The last, fragile thread of hope connecting them to the outside world snapped. The cold in the cramped space felt like it was seeping into her bones.
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