Fractured (14 page)

Why the hell was she seeing something
now
?

As abruptly as it started, her vision went black once again. She wanted to cry out in anger at the unfairness of it.

Someone grabbed her, too roughly to be friendly, and it jostled her bad arm. Still, she hopefully turned to them, . “Seth?” she cried.

“
Her!
” an unfamiliar older man’s voice yelled, spittle spraying across her face. “She’s the...the...
witch
who did this!
She’s
the reason why we’re here!”

At first, she thought he was talking about her. Then he threw her aside, and she realized that they meant Lily.

“What?” she cried, her voice wavering. “What do you want with Lily?”

That only drew their attention to her. “She was with the witch!” another voice, this time a woman, joined in. “They even look like each other!”

“Tell her to stop this!” a third voice pleaded to Bash, joined by about ten other angry voices. While he sounded angry, he also sounded terrified. “She can stop this!”

Strange hands started grabbing at her, pulling at her clothes, her hair, scratching her face and her arms. She fought them, trying to get back to Lily, but they pushed her backward, roughly. She screamed for Seth again, this time more desperate.

Suddenly he was there, pulling her away from them, heading back towards Lily. She collapsed on Lily with a cry, thankful that she was with her sister again. She sobbed hysterically, reeling from the sensation of the group’s prying hands. She couldn’t see where the other people were, but it sounded like they weren’t about to go up against a trained soldier.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Seth yelled at the people, clearly shaken himself. “What the
fuck
are you
doing
?”

His voice was strained, defeated. He had just lost his two best friends, and now he was having to deal with crazies.

Are
they crazy?
Bash wondered.

“They started all of this!” the first man yelled. “They’ve trapped us, they’ll murder us one by one!”

“Fuck you!” Seth roared. “They had nothing to do with this!”

Even as he was saying it, Bash wondered if they did. The way Lily had talked before…

That’s just...insane...
she thought. She hugged her limp sister to her.

“Now,” Seth shouted, taking charge of the situation, “someone barricade that door to keep the fire out!”

“We’ll be trapped!” someone moaned. “We won’t be able to leave!”

“I’d rather be trapped than burned alive,” Seth roared. “NOW BARRICADE THE FUCKING DOOR! THAT’S AN ORDER!”

It was ludicrous, really to think that they could barricade themselves from the fire, but Bash heard the trample of feet and the scraping of the table. They had barricaded the door.

“You okay?” Scott whispered to her. He breathed heavily as he squatted right next to her. “Shit, Bash, they scratched the hell out of you.”

“They were trying to take me away from Lily,” she sobbed. “They think she’s behind it.”

Scott gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. In front of them, Seth was holding all of the crazed people off. Scott took a deep breath.
Trying to steady himself,
Bash realized.

“They’re scared,” he explained, his voice was wavering. “It was a freak accident in the kitchens. That’s all it was. We’ll figure it out.”

She nodded numbly. Truly, that was all it could really be, right? Otherwise, it didn’t make sense.
Couldn’t
make sense with what she knew about the world.

Her throat prickled, scratchy and dry. “Where’s Maria?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Scott answered quietly. She got the feeling that he was lying, but she couldn’t orientate herself enough in the break room to begin figuring out where Maria was. She probably blamed her and Lily for Rick’s death like the rest of the mob.

“What do we do?” someone yelled. “We’re trapped!”

She closed her eyes, feeling a headache coming on. What
were
they going to do?

Luckily, Seth had recovered from Darius’ death enough to command them. He took on that air of a trained and combat-ready soldier, and he commanded respect as only a trained leader could.

She shivered.

“We wait until help arrives,” he said, his voice going into a cold, calculated tone.

“And what if help doesn’t arrive?” another person asked, his voice mirroring Bash’s own thoughts.

“Has someone called 911 yet?” Seth asked, ignoring them. It was an obvious question, and Bash got the feeling that it would be a fruitless one.

“I couldn’t get reception.” This person sounded calmer, more professional than most of the people in the panicked mob. “No bars.”

“Me neither!” a more flighty voice screeched, obviously taking it as a bad sign. Someone else wailed as palpable pandemonium started boiling over again. Bash covered her ears trying to block it out. A panicked mob was a noise she’d never heard before. The movies didn’t do it justice. In real life, it was terrifying.

Seth whistled, a loud, piercing whistle, which cut through the pandemonium.

“Everyone!” he yelled. “We’ll be fine. Help
will
arrive. Surely they’ll see the fire at the Lodge and come to our rescue. We just have to stay put until then.”

“Is it safe?” someone else asked. “Is it safe to stay here with a fire...
there
? In the restaurant?”

“Do
you
want to try going outside again?” Seth asked pointedly. “Do you want to go out into that hallway?”

No one answered. Bash shivered, remembering the smell of Darius burning. He had just been trying to help them, to get them out of there.

“We just found out that trying to get
any
where could be dangerous,” Seth continued coldly. “No one leaves.” He paused for emphasis. “We stay put until help arrives.”

CHAPTER NINE

Scott didn’t know how long they had been sitting there. It felt like time had slowed to a crawl while they all waited in the break room. Everyone broke into their respective groups, most of them avoiding the area where Bash, Seth, Lily, and he had claimed. The others all looked at his little group suspiciously, like at any moment they would declare a witch hunt and burn Lily. Probably Bash too.

Seth wasn’t about to let that happen, but Scott started to believe that even if his older brother intervened, it wouldn’t matter. Everyone was tense, on edge, ready to believe anything to explain what was happening. A couple of people looked a bit more level-headed. They tended to those who were injured or burned in the restaurant fire, but even they stayed away from their little group.

There were eighteen people left alive, including themselves. Some were familiar, like Bash’s ski guide Rodney from earlier, whom Scott barely recognized from his rescue on the mountain.

Eighteen people. Scott had counted them many times to make sure that no one had run off and done something stupid. With nothing to do, he had memorized their hair styles, who they hung out with, and whether or not they looked like a threat. He was sure that Seth was doing the same, but it felt good to be prepared himself.

He felt exposed.

Maria wasn’t any better than the rest of the mob. She sat huddled away from them, tears constantly streaming down her face. She rocked herself, and no one bothered her. Gone was the world-owes-me-something attitude. Now, she was just scared out of her mind. Losing Rick hadn’t helped either. She kept shooting them dirty looks, like she was blaming them for everything.

Join the club
, Scott thought bitterly as he watched the other people in the room.

He shifted to turn away from them, but he immediately winced.
His arm ached like it had been flattened and then blown back up with an air pump. Darius dropping Lily into his arms had done something pretty bad to his broken bones, like the pieces the doctor at the hospital had carefully set were now out of alignment. The plaster seemed fine but he could swear that it wasn’t as straight as it had been. His fingers were tingling intensely, nearly driving him nuts. Every time he moved, even if he wasn’t moving his arm, pain wracked his whole body.

Something was dreadfully wrong with that. What was even worse, his pain medication had worn off hours ago, and he didn’t have any more. Was it going to get more and more unbearable?

“You okay?” Seth asked him, softly so that no one else could hear.

Scott looked over to his big brother and nodded, hissing in pain. “My arm really hurts,” he said, inwardly grimacing at how much it sounded like a whine. “Lily landing on it made it worse.”

Seth’s eyes were glassy, like he wasn’t really seeing what he was looking at, and his skin looked gaunt, transparent. He radiated a sense of exhaustion. “How long has it been since your medication wore off?”

Scott frowned. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Do you have a watch?” He just wanted to know that he wasn’t going crazy, that time was indeed passing, even if it was at a snail’s pace.

Seth shook his head, shaking his arm that had one of those fancy Army-issued watches on it. “Watch stopped at 9:02 p.m.,” he said bitterly. “I’ve talked to some others and their watches have also stopped. Phones too, all around 9:02.”

About when all this shit came down,
Scott thought. Maybe time wasn’t slowing to a crawl. Maybe it wasn’t moving at all.

“What’s happening, Seth?” he asked, trying to keep the tremor from his voice. He didn’t want to admit that he was scared, certainly in the presence of his older brother who had been to Afghanistan and had seen stuff that Scott couldn’t even imagine. The whole night terrified Scott. There were no rules to what was happening. The burning, char-grilled bodies; the people screaming; the fire following them like a caged beast; Lily acting crazier...

They were living in a nightmare.

“I don’t know,” his brother admitted at length. He chewed the inside of his cheek, a nervous tic that was a telltale giveaway of him being stressed beyond his ability to cope.

Scott recognized it, sighed, and then leaned back against the wall. After all the shit his brother had seen, for him to be freaked out, it had to be pretty bad.

“How’s Bash doing?” he asked, looking at her sleeping form. She was curled up asleep across Seth’s lap. Her hand clasped Lily’s in a tight grip, as if she was afraid someone was going to take Lily away from her while she slept.

“Tired,” Seth admitted. “I think we all are.” He idly played with Bash’s hair as he spoke. He looked out, a thousand-yard stare that made Scott shiver.

Do I look like that?
he wondered.

He winced as he shifted to a more comfortable position. How could his arm hurt this much? Some other people were whimpering in their pain, and while some of their skin and nerves were burned off, what was left was hurting enough. Deep down, Scott knew that he wasn’t a tough guy, so he knew that his own pain couldn’t be anywhere near that bad. He saw some badly burned people, their skin char-grilled in places.

What the fuck is happening?

Both Darius and Rick were dead. Someone had thoughtfully draped a jacket over Darius’ body. Rick was still in the kitchen, his body probably charred beyond recognition by now if the fire was still going. Scott hadn’t really been great friends with them, but their deaths were sudden and shocking. He couldn’t believe they were gone.

Scott noticed that Seth hadn’t talked about Darius or Rick yet. He just held Bash while she slept. Scott wished he could do something for his older brother, but nothing came to mind.

How do you fix something when you don’t even know what it is?

He stole a glance over at Lily’s still form. Her chest still rose and fell with her breath, but she appeared to be unconscious. The morbid scene wasn’t helped by the fact that red blood still stained the front of her body and all across her mouth. He remembered her crazy laugh seconds before she collapsed.

“You can never leave again.”

Her chilling words echoed in his mind. He wondered if she actually
was
behind all of this. A lot of the others seemed to think so.

Can’t think like that,
Scott told himself.
Can’t think like a crazy person.  Not when the situation you’re in is so fucked up.

“What...what’s that noise?”

Both brothers shifted their gazes as Bash stirred. She blinked her unseeing eyes a few times, and her eyebrows knitted together in confusion.

“What’s that noise?” she repeated. Her voice sounded hoarse. Strained.

“What noise?” Seth asked her gently.

Scott stole a glance around, trying to pick up anything that he saw among their group that could have been creating a sound. Everyone else was talking among themselves in hushed voices. They had stilted movements and took about twice as long as usual to do anything.