Immortal Mistakes

she rolled into a ball and waited

Gabrielle gestured towards the open doorway that led out of the red sand room. There were no doors in the compound. No privacy. "You are free to go," she said.

Chloe frowned. "But I'm a prisoner."

"No, you are a patient. As such you are free to roam around the compound as you please. The only mandatory activity is the weekly scan and checkup and we will send you a reminder for that."

Gabrielle stood up, crossed her arms and started tapping her foot. Chloe pulled herself up out of the chair. She felt like she was in a vacuum, like everything around her was far away, in another world. A loud buzzing filled her ears. Her legs and feet were heavy as she walked out of the open door.

Chloe followed the underground maze of red sandy tunnels watching herself move as a dot along the map in her head. She didn't need the map. She had grown up here. Along with Henry and Susan and Felipe and all her other friends. Gabrielle had not grown up here. Chloe had never met Gabrielle before. She must have been in one of the other immortal compounds as a child. Why couldn't one of her friends have been the Director of the CMA? Then everything would be okay. They would be safe.

Chloe let her feet follow the path until she came to a fork. The dorm rooms lay to the right. She could't bear the thought of being confined in a room while this thing attached itself to her body and grew inside her. While she waited for her friends to appear one by one. Arrested. Destroyed. Chloe turned left and followed the path up and around corners and out into the world. The sun and the heat hit her in the face with a force that made her step back into the shadows for a moment.

Then she kicked off her sandals and started to run through the desert as fast as she could until her lungs and her legs burned.

Out of nowhere rain started to fall. Big fat drops fell into Chloe's eyes and ran down her neck. The wind picked up, whipping sheets of rain and sand into her face and arms. She threw her arms up in front of her face and turned back towards the compound, slipping on a rock hidden under the sand. She fell and her head smacked against the rock and her hand landed on something that moved. She jerked her hand back. A brown snake slid away into the sandstorm. She pulled herself up and her head throbbed, black dots filling her vision. She squatted, shielding her face against the sand and the wind and the rain until the dots shrank and her vision returned. Blood ran down the side of her face mingling with the rain and dripping off her chin to stain the front of her skin suit. Pain flared in her left hip as she stood.

The map had disappeared. She tapped her right hand but it didn't reload. She turned around and around looking for something, anything that would help her get back to the compound but all she could see was sand. She took a step forward but stopped. She couldn't risk getting lost in the desert. There was no choice but to wait it out. She rolled herself into a little ball with her head between her knees and her arms over her face and waited.