They Fed Me to the Dead, So I Woke Up Before the End novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Day Three

On the third morning we went back to St. Anne's.

We had spent two nights in Keaton's gym with the shutters down and the treadmills pushed against the doors.

My coworker had left on the first morning, in a borrowed car with her brother.

I had given her a bottle of antibiotics and a promise I could not keep.

Nobody asked why I had stayed.

They were too busy watching me.

Bridget brought me tea and sat so close our knees touched.

Keaton slept on a mat beside mine, one arm over my waist.

Every time I woke, somebody in the room was awake too.

"It's still down there," the captain said at dawn, laying a hospital floor plan on the weight bench. "The dock. Rear corridor. We go in quiet, we get it, we come out."

"Get what?" I asked.

He gave me a patient look.

"You'll know it when you see it, Reese. Trust me."

I nodded.

In my left jacket pocket, wrapped in a tissue, was a pale lump the size of a gumdrop.

It was compressed calcium, the chalky kind we kept in the pharmacy for acid reflux.

I had picked it out of a bin on the fourteenth, while the world ended outside the cage.

It was the right size and the right color.

I had planned that trick for twenty-four days.

*

The corridor smelled of old blood and bleach.

Two of the dead lay at the far end, both stopped for good, and a third paced in a slow circle by the dock doors with its back to us.

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