Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 97275 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 486(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 324(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97275 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 486(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 324(@300wpm)
“Okay, I’m going to the next room. Jodie, Tina, Jacklyn, and Aida are probably in patient rooms as well. I know where Cheyenne is. You need to call 911 on the patient phone.” I ordered and then crawled out the door.
I don’t know where all my bravery came from. I just know Max was boosting me just with being on the phone with me. Except now that I think about it, I forgot about him as soon as I entered the room. Putting the phone on speaker, I dropped it into the front of my pants and crawled to the next room.
“Max. Can you hear me?” I whispered.
“Yeah, I’m on the second floor, but all the doors are fucking locked. How do I get in?” He whispered back gruffly.
“There’s an emergency code that will get you inside, but it also sets off a silent alarm, which wouldn’t be a bad thing right now. There is a keypad beside the door, punch in three-five-six-five-pound.” I explained.
I went to three more rooms, told them to get into their showers. The next door I came to I could hear an infant urgently crying, so hard that it was making my insides hurt.
As soon as I pushed the door open, the whimpering of the young mother could be heard. “Stacy?”
Stacy was all of fourteen, and had a C-section just four hours ago. She was also on psych watch because she tried to kill herself, which in turn led to the C-section two weeks before her due date. I’d walked out on an argument between her and my boss about when she would get to see her child. “I can’t move to get her. She fell off the bed, and I can’t get her.”
I felt sick to my stomach just thinking about why the baby was on the floor. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me. Where was the sitter that was supposed to be in this room? The woman was a silent watcher every time I had come in to check on Stacy today. She rather gave me the creeps, and I’d tried all night to stay out of the woman’s sight, but alas, duty called and I sucked it up.
“Stacy, honey, where is your sitter?” I asked quietly as I checked the baby.
The baby calmed as I placed my hands on her little chest. The infant was tiny, a little over six pounds. I was concerned that the baby might have something wrong with her. Sadly, there was nothing I could do with the power out. Not to mention there was a psycho bitch on the loose.
Scooping the baby up in my arms, I grabbed a sheet from the closet and tied the baby to my chest in a makeshift sling. There was no way I was leaving this baby with a suicidal mother. The baby was sleeping now with little sniffles and catches in her breathing every so often from the fall she took.
I reached the door when it was silently pushed open. I quickly stepped to the side and crammed myself into the corner so the door would open and conceal my body. The footsteps were nearly silent except for a slight clicking sound that may have been from a rock or a pebble stuck in the grooves of their shoe. I put the phone from my pocket to my ear and listened, but couldn’t tell where Max was since no sound was coming from the earpiece even though I could see I was still connected.
I called myself ten times a fool when I realized that the light from the phone would be like a homing beacon to the person who was in the room with me. The baby’s sniffles continued, and my head dropped in despair. Surely whoever it was would figure out we were hiding behind the door, but I was wrong.
The slight clicking every other step exited the room and walked away from the door. Letting out a breath I’d been unaware that I was holding, I eased out from behind the door and peeked outside when I was grabbed from behind. A hand covered my mouth, and I bit down instinctively before the smell and body made me aware of who it was that was holding me.
“Motherfucker.” A very deep voice said from behind me.
I went limp in Max’s arms. My legs threatened to give, and Max cursed again as he readjusted his grip. He snaked his arm around the front of my abdomen, just above my belly, and right below the infant I had strapped to my chest.
The baby felt the motion and gave an experimental wiggle, but quickly found comfort and dropped back off to sleep. “You scared the piss out of me.”
“You should have stayed behind the door.” Max countered.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
I was confused. If he was still in here, then who had come into the room, and why did I only hear one person’s set of feet enter? “Who just left?”
“I don’t know.” He said nearly silent. “I want you to stay in here. I haven’t found Alpha, and I’ve already made one round. He’s stalking something and staying on the move.”
For once, I didn’t argue with him. My bravado fled the instant I felt his body against mine. Moreover, there wasn’t much I could do with an infant strapped to my chest. I didn’t want to get us killed just because I wanted to stay with him. He didn’t need to know that I was so terrified that I could barely keep the shakes under control. That my heart was pounding a mile a minute. That I was on the verge of puking. If he didn’t leave, I was sure I would cling to him and never let go. Somehow, I found the will, and forced myself to tell him that I would stay and not move.
“Okay.” I said nearly as silent as he did.
He gave me a soft kiss on the lips, and then left the room so silently that I wouldn’t have known that he left if I hadn’t felt a shift in the air as he passed. I said a silent prayer to myself that he would be all right, and then went to my original position in the corner of the door.