Impure

Twenty

I can only hope that her guilt eats her alive and that she changes her mind.

Sometime later, Miranda returns with a needle full of morphine.

"This should help," she says before injecting me. To my mind, she says, I'll help you escape. Most of my patients are far too gone to escape, but the five of you, you have a chance. Give me some time to come up with a plan.

"Thank you," I tell her, meaning it. I'm glad that after visiting all of us she felt the appropriate guilt.

I know she'll lose her job if she gets caught helping us, but she can find another one.

She leaves me, then, and just when I start to relax my door opens again. In walk guards and behind the guards, a small man of about seventy walks in.

"I'm here to cut your hair," he says. Just a trim. We want to see how fast your hair grows."

This I can handle.

I sit up in the bed and the man gets to work cutting my hair.

He chops off a good chunk, so my previous waist-length hair is closer to my shoulders.

"Thank you for complying," the man says.

He doesn't bother to introduce himself and his thoughts say he doesn't plan to. He just wants to get to the next patient.

He steps back, and the guards follow him out.

I'm left alone again.

I wait for sleep to take me, the morphine in my system making me tired.

I wake to the sound of a blaring alarm.

"What on earth?" I ask, confused.

There's no window in my room, so I can't know for sure, but it sounds like a fire alarm.

They'll have to evacuate the building.

My door opens and I'm shocked when I see Chris.

He's burnt all over too, and he's wearing the clothes he came here in.

"How are you here right now?" I ask, shocked.

"Hurry up and get dressed in your old clothes. I'll be back for you in a moment," he says. "I have to help the others."

He closes the door so that it's not closed all the way, and he moves onto the next door – I can hear him opening it and talking to Ash.

I get dressed fast, do my hair in two braids, and then head out into the hallway.

"Hello there, pretty girl," John says. "You might want to be on guard for well, guards. Miranda bought us a little bit of time by taking out Dr. Blais."

She took on the doctor himself. Damn.

Chris comes into the hallway, and says, "Now time to get Kat."

Ash emerges from her room, a relieved look on her face.

"Allie, John," she says. "You're relatively unharmed, good."

Kat emerges soon after, Chris behind her.

"We'd better get out of here," Chris says. "We don't have much time. Everybody become invisible and follow my thoughts."

Before we can do that, guards turn down the hall, aiming guns at us.

I raise my hands and call out a spell.

They fall over, like bowling pins.

"Now get invisible!" Chris shouts and we all turn invisible, one by one.

Follow me, he says to our thoughts, and we do, bumping into each other a few times since we're invisible to each other.

We manage to follow him down a flight of stairs and out an emergency exit and onto the lawn of the facility.

In the chaos of all of the evacuees on the lawn, nobody notices the five invisible people, making a run for it through the crowd.

We don't stop moving until we're about twenty minutes from the hospital.

Chris has us hop on a bus after that, and then we're headed to a bus terminal.

Once we get to the terminal, he has us go into the bathrooms, and once we're sure nobody is there we drop our invisibility.

We meet outside of the bathrooms. "Okay," Chris says. "I got us out of here. Now we have to brainstorm to find a way to contact Gregory."

"A library?"

"That's too traceable."

"There's always a payphone," Ash says. "We can ask people for the change. I know his burner phone's number."

"You're a genius," John says.

"Thank you," Ash says. "I know I'm a genius. And though payphones are traceable, they're less conspicuous than using the internet."

We find an easy target and ask an elderly woman for the change. She instantly feels bad for the five of us, looking as dishevelled as we do. She gives us the phone change and more to spare in to time.

"Thank you," we all say to her. "You saved us."

The old woman surprises us my thinking, I'm one of you. Good luck.

She leaves us, and we're all struck speechless by the kindness of the elder supernatural.

We move to the payphone and Ash calls Gregory's burner phone number.

He picks up right away.