Red

Chapter Four: Doubletap

I wake, but my eyelids are too heavy to lift. I try to orient myself anyway, but I can’t. The air around me smells damp and dirty. I don’t know why or even if I’m still alive, but I need to know so I put as much effort into opening my eyes as I can. I blink a few times slowly, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. I can make out a shadow a few feet away, but its the low moan that snaps me back to myself.

I know that moan.

I push myself up slowly, the world spinning a little, my eyes crossing for a minute and showing every shadowy outline two or three times. My head is throbbing, but I know that moan so I slide out of my cot and slowly shuffle in the direction it came from. I stop when I see the huddled shadow in the corner.

A dark curtain of tangled hair frames Kennedy’s face. A large but well-healed scar runs at a diagonal across her face from chin to cheek, crossing her pale lips. She stares ahead blankly, her eyes empty except for fear.

“Ken?” Her lip trembles, but her eyes continue to stare past me. I lower myself to the floor, ignoring the pain that spikes through me as my knee hits the ground.

“Kennedy.. can you talk?” Slowly her eyes scan the wall until she’s looking at me, but there’s no reaction. No dilated pupil, no glimmer of recognition. Her skin is pale, nearly white, and peppered with small, circular scars. They look like cigarette burns, like the ones I have crossing my ribs. I’ve only got three. Gable used to hit me in the same places over and over again, refusing to let his marks heal, like he somehow thought if they healed I wouldn’t be his anymore. Even fully clothed I count dozens on her. She shivers, the hair on her arms prickling up around bruises and cuts. I look behind her, already knowing what I’ll see, and wince at the lines of blood streaking across her shirt in the shapes of the welts beneath it.

Her pain runs so deep that I can practically taste it on my tongue, bitter and stale. I did this. I told them what she knew; I may as well have snapped the whip across her back over and over again myself. Every drop of blood she’s spilled is on my hands, and I lean away from her as I get sick, my stomach twisting up with guilt deep in my gut.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper to her with a choked sob. She doesn’t give any indication that she can even hear me, not a flutter of the eyelashes or a single breath out of rhythm. “What did they do to you?” She doesn’t answer, of course, but she doesn’t need to answer.

Just as I feel myself bubbling over with guilt and regret so strong that it threatens to consume me, I hear the familiar moan again and it’s a sucker-punch in the gut. I stand, shaking, and approach the sound slowly, wanting to be wrong more than I’ve ever wanted anything else in my life.

A bit of light reflects off her hair. She’s curled into a ball on the cot, whispering to herself and I can see blood soaking through the white sheet wrapped around her. I can’t believe it, don’t want to believe it.

“B?”

The form under the sheet gasps and jerks with fear as she rips the cloth off herself, scrambling off the cot and shrinking back against the wall; then I gasp. Her face is pale and gaunt and covered in gashes, a line of stitches stretching across the side of her forehead and past where her hair line would have been if they hadn’t shaved it to stitch her. Tear tracks streak paths through smudges of dirt, and her left eye is puffy and purple and half swollen shut. Her bottom lip is bloodied and she sits against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, staring at the floor. She rocks herself almost imperceptibly and whispers at a volume only a Slayer could hear.

“It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.”

I crouch a foot away from her, moving slowly and whispering her name again. She stops rocking; stares at me like she doesn’t recognize me. “It’s real,” I say quietly. “I’m sorry, but it’s real.” She just stares back at me, her face a mixture of terror, confusion, and fear.

“It can’t be.” she whispers plaintively.

“Why not?”

She blinks slowly, staring at me dumbly, but her voice is matter-of-fact when she answers.

“Because you’re dead.”