City of the Fallen by Diana Bocco

feet of her bedroom door, he quickly turned left, confusing her for a second.
     
    And then he pushed the wall and a panel slid open. Belle’s heart skipped a beat. More secrets , she thought. So that was how they were all able to move around and turn up in different places unexpectedly. Suddenly all the extra space in the long, empty corridors made sense.
     
    She had been looking for answers in all the wrong places.  
     
    The passageway behind the door was narrow and dark. Claustrophobic was an even better word for it. At any other time, she would have had trouble breathing because of the walls closing in on her. Right now, she could barely keep up with Marcus, so she had no chance to think about anything but trying not to trip in the dark and fall flat on her face.
     
    The corridor went on forever, and while she couldn’t exactly tell, it seemed like the floor was slanted downhill. Underground. She was going underground.
     
    “Marcus?”
     
    “We’re almost there,” he answered from a few feet in front of her and she picked up the pace.
     
    She was about to ask how much longer when she heard a soft click and then bright lights blinded her. She hurried into the new room and waited for a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the brightness. A soft metallic tang hung in the air, mixing with the smell of… antiseptic?
     
    As the blurriness slip away, the first thing she saw was the gurney in the middle of the room. Her gaze swiveled around, stopping for brief seconds on the metal instruments and the oxygen tanks. Where the hell was she?
     
    Marcus placed the girl on the metal table and drew back a couple of steps. She reached for the girl’s neck, searching for a sign of life.
     
    “She’s still alive,” Marcus said.
     
    “I can’t find her pulse.” She frantically probed with her fingers on the girl’s cold skin.
     
    “It’s there, I can hear it.”
     
    She searched for scissors in nearby drawers and started cutting the girl’s clothes as soon as she found a pair. She could hear her own heavy breathing in the quietness of the room. It was such an alien sound, it made her uneasy. To her, emergency rooms had a heavy buzzing to them—doors sliding, the squeaking and beeping of machines coming to life, the rattle of metal instruments hitting the trays. Here, it was just her. Lori was too far gone to make any sounds, and Marcus was breathing softly, no other sounds coming out of him as he observed her work around the table.
     
    “Can you tell where the blood is coming from?” she asked him.
     
    “Abdomen,” he responded, and she could hear the heaviness in his voice again.
     
    The thick smell of blood permeated the room.
     
    She reached around for rubber gloves and slapped them on, then slid her fingers over the girl’s pulsating stomach. There. A gash at least five inches long. Maybe more. She cleared the blood as best as she could, then examined the opening. It didn’t seem deep enough to have reached any organs, but without the proper equipment, it was impossible to tell.
     
    Lori’s breath was slowing down. She was slipping through Belle’s fingers and there was nothing she could do about it.
     
    ~*~
     
    Marcus couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He had been hoping for a glimpse of the real Isabelle, the one she had been before coming to the compound—and this was a bright flash into her world. Truth was, he was a lot more interested in what she was doing than in the girl on the gurney. Probably because the girl on the gurney wasn’t going to make it.
     
    The smell of blood held many clues. It could tell you when somebody was sick or full of life. It could give you clues into a person’s past and future.
     
    In the case of the girl in the room, the smell said death was close.
     
    Maybe a massive blood transfusion would save her. Maybe. But blood was in short supply and he wasn’t about to share what little they had. He didn’t know the girl well, but that wasn’t the reason