𝘼𝙐𝘿𝘼𝘾𝙄𝙊𝙐𝙎 » 𝙟𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙘 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 ✓ [1]

XVII

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FOR SURVIVAL...

'Anything else you need at the moment, ma'am?' asks the short woman with blonde ringlets tying up the final dressing on my right wrist. She adjusts the cotton firmly over the skin, offering me a warm smile.

'I'm fine, thank you,' I mumble quietly, and I smile, but even the slightest one is a weighted effort. All I wanted was to be alone.

She rests a gentle hand on my shoulder before bundling the supplies at her feet and hurrying off to the next person in need of her aid. A man holding an ice pack to his eye looked up to her gratefully as she crouched down beside him.

The darkened warehouse in the Costa Rican airport was overcrowded. Humid. Excruciatingly loud. It ebbed through the throbbing pain in my head, a sponge collecting each rebound of shouting, crying and the hundreds of conversations blending together. Thousands of people packed tightly into the space, huddled together in the circumstance of surviving a near-death experience at Jurassic World.

I had been people watching for hours. I saw people sit in pitiful silence. I saw mothers nursing sleeping children. I saw patients come and go in wheelchairs and stretcher beds, hooked up to drips and plugs. I saw some cradling freshly bandaged injuries on limbs and sides. I saw people hand in hand, anxiously biting their nails as they scanned the never-ending crowd of people for their loved ones. I watched every reunion. People scooping each other up into their arms and squeezing tightly, smothering them with affection, blinking away tears of relief. I saw reconnected families leave the warehouse, presumably to board a plane, land and return to a place they could call home.

The trauma would linger uncomfortably for a month or two, and then lives would be back to normal. School, work, birthdays, holidays, dinner with families.

While the nurses had washed the layers of mud and sweat away from my body with a damp cloth, grains of it were still caked into grooves and tucked under my nail beds. I had taken my hair out of its ponytail, letting its tangled masses fall around my shoulders. I held a foil blanket tightly around my body, the fabric doing nothing to stop my shivering. I had never looked so vulnerable, nor had I felt it. Not like this. Unmoved from my spot in the corner of this warehouse for hours, purely because I didn't want to.

And because I didn't know where to go.

I had been in and out of hazy, unrestful sleep on the helicopter ride to Costa Rica. When I had found myself in bouts of awareness, I had squinted hard to find any detail among the pitch black scenery of the window. I couldn't help it. I'd never seen anything beyond the shores of Isla Nublar for a very long time. I had needed something that my own two eyes could harvest a fresh memory from. One that was very clearly a memory and not just a dream or a thread from a past life in need of deciphering to be able to pull it.

The landing pad operators had thought there was something wrong with me when Owen had to help me clamber out of the helicopter once we landed, asking if I had a concussion watching me lethargically slumped against his side. Owen had sadly joked that I just hadn't travelled in a while.