Miranda [Watty Awards 2013]

Chapter 8

The closest I'd ever come to death before was three years ago, when I was in a car accident.

            It's safe to say the situation had swayed from where I'd thought it go, but I should've expected it when it hadn't been an assignment. It happened during one of my brief reprieves, when I was in rural Louisiana. I'd been walking along the side of the road, knowing exactly where I was going, when a cop car began cruising by.

            A minute later he was close enough that I knew he was just another walking funeral today. It'd been the third one I'd passed in Louisiana within the three days I was there. I'm not sure why I'd made myself look like a lost child, luring his to stop. Maybe it was because I was tired of walking.

            The cop picked me up, a nice man named Jake. He was young, new at his job, but he had a lot to say. He told me I reminded him of his little daughter Meghan. She was his only child. She was his entire world.

            When he was telling me about her upcoming fourth birthday, the car was struck by a truck that had run a stop sign.

            The car rolled over four times and landed in a ditch, completely totaled. Jake had been killed instantly; his skull had cracked on the dashboard. The airbags hadn't deployed either, probably Grim's doing. I came around briefly at the sound of the sirens, help finally beginning to arrive.

            Jake slumped over the steering wheel, legs trapped underneath crushed metal and blood splattered across the cracked windshield. I had a similar situation with my legs, feeling that one leg wasn't twisted the right way.

            My arm was pulsing out blood and vision flickered in and out of my right eye. I'd rebounded off the dashboard, before falling onto it again, so that I was staring straight into Jake's blank eyes.

            I remembered feeling my heart squeeze, the tragedy physically making it hard to breath. It was one of the few times I'd ever cried.

            It was the first time I felt something for a man who had died.

            His daughter Meghan would never know him.

            She wouldn't remember him.

            But I would.

            It occurred to me that I should be in a lot of pain, and I was glad when it didn't come. There were men blocking off the road, voices far away and wispy like smoke. I could feel the paramedics trying to cut me out.

            The last thing I saw was a man checking Jake's pulse, then carefully shutting his eyes.

            Everything after that was a blank in my memory--the ambulance ride, the surgery that fixed my leg, the two days I spent in the hospital. Grim had bailed me out within the first hour I'd been awake, and a good thing, too.

            Hospitals equal death. Death equals pain. I am Death's daughter. I know their pain. I know their fight. But I cannot help them; nobody can.

            It's insanity. Pure insanity.

            It had taken me a long time to recover from this. Grim kept me with him for a few days, promoting my healing and throwing in a few lessons. Jake was not going to be someone I easily forgot, and neither were the lessons Grim would teach me afterwards. They were to become important, a warning of what was to come. I wish I'd seen that then.

            I wish I'd see that now.

            The first thing he'd done was take me to another hospital, this time a mental home. I had learned a lot time ago not to question Grim, but I was very unwilling to step foot in the building. He walked in without any hesitation, and I was left running to catch up. It didn't take long before I started to get strange feelings, like I was catching the diseases of the insane surrounding me.