@antiibow said: " we find something to close me up, and i keep going." cont'd.
the halls had not felt like the architecture of one's hatred. hatred emanated direction. intention. human intention. this place felt different from anything she knew.
what grace sensed in those corridors was something far more primitive—something that moved without thought, without judgment, without even the satisfaction of cruelty. it was horror reduced to its most mechanical state of conception.
disgorged mouths that were eager to snap at anything living. corpses that rose because the body retained the memory around the basics of standing and walking. but even that didn't have a human rhythm to it. she faced the faces of glaring pupils, inhuman pupils, driven with meaningless hunger and violence without purpose.
they had run through it anyway. they had to.
they past faces that were no longer faces, skin swollen and grotesquely stretched across bones that no longer had the capacity to hold themselves together. past eyes—so many eyes—some glassy and dead, others wildly feral with the intense brightness of things that couldn't in good faith be categorized as human. those pupils had followed them religiously through the halls, wide, black and bottomless, akin to the way starving animals watch movement.
the adrenaline had been so strikingly elevated that grace barely registered the floors crunching and squishing her boots.
she knew know, distantly, that she must have stepped through more than what she wanted to think about. the corridor had been crudely decorated in pieces of people. clumps of intestine dragged across the once prettily polished floors like thick knots of webs. the blood smeared in long desperate streaks where someone had tried to crawl somewhere safer and never made it.
at the time she had simply kept moving.
sheva needed her.
when they finally pushed through the clinic doors, the word safety had almost felt like a joke.
the room was eerily quieter than outside, but the same atmosphere of interruption was present all the same. like whatever had happened here had ended abruptly and gruesomely. the lights above the operating table flickered weakly, bathing the room in a sickly yellow glow that made everything look a little too pale.
grace's eyes landed immediately on the shape lying across the table.
a woman.
or what had once been one.
the face was barely recognizable now. the flesh was peeled and ruined into grotesquely smooth texture. the features erased beyond what surgical damage could do and infection that had spread unchecked. the body appeared swollen in places it shouldn’t be. her skin stretched too tight over flesh that had begun the slow collapse of rot.
grace swallowed the lump in her throat hard. there was no time to dwell on it. by how she was talking, sheva was already slipping and that couldn't help happened. especially when there was somebody able-bodied that was able to help.
grace tightened her grip around the other woman's arm and guided her across the room, stepping over bodies that thankfully would never wake again. her boots trudged through puddles that made that type of wet sounds she had hoped would be her last time hearing.
they reached the table. grace paused only a second. then she grabbed the corpse by the shoulder and shoved out the way. she meekly muttered her apologies as the body hit the tile with a heavy, lifeless thud that echoed through the room. she didn't look at it again.
instead she turned back to sheva, bracing her weight carefully as she helped lift her onto the operating table. the metal creaked under the shift of pressure, but it still strong enough to hold.
“ ee-easy, okay, ” grace stammered, her breath still uneven from the run. her lungs were on fire. but sheva's attempt to sit up given her a shot of energy she needed to instinctively push her back down before the movement could tear something worse open.
“ I can't. if i do— ” then, a bad memory flashed in her mind. she squeezed her eyes shut, keeping the face of her mother tightly in the recesses of her mind.
“ stop, ” grace cut in quickly, sharper than she intended. her hands moved with nervous efficiency now, already scanning the nearby trays for anything that resembled medical supplies. gauze. clamps. alcohol. anything. “ you're not dying here. th-this is a clinic. th-there's something here, i-i'm sure! ” her voice trembled, but the determination behind it was immovable.
she found a tray and dragged it closer. her eyes paid heed to the wound, forcing herself to focus despite the blood. so much blood. her glasses were sliding down her face, but she quickly fixed it back in place.
“ we close you up first, then we, uhm.. then we worry about the rest.. ok? ” she said more to herself than to sheva. her hands were already moving before sheva could say anything else. she was moving fast, yet careful. the rush of desperation riding her veins like lightning all the same.
