Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 70628 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 283(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70628 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 283(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
They make it to my ears, but there’s something unreal about them. Maybe I’m underwater.
Maybe…
Did he drown me?
No.
They’re not allowed to kill us.
There aren’t any pools deep enough for them to hold us down and drown us, not on the hunting ground.
Still…
If I were drowning, would I be able to breathe?
Am I breathing?
I’m numb. So numb.
Can’t move my leg.
My left leg.
There’s a searing pain.
Searing pain all around my right breast.
“She’s coming to.” Not Diamond’s voice.
An image emerges in my peripheral vision.
A woman. A woman in scrubs. Green scrubs.
“Garnet. Garnet, can you hear me?”
Yes.
But the words don’t come out. Only a soft squeak.
“She’s trying to talk,” Green Scrubs says.
Then Diamond’s face. Her kind and wrinkled face in my field of vision. She’s blurry, but I recognize her.
She’s the only person I recognize.
“Garnet, you’re going to be here for a couple of months. It’s a respite.”
I try to open my mouth.
“It’s okay. Don’t try to talk. Your tibia and fibula on your left leg are broken. Shattered. You’ve got some damage to your right breast. But you will be fine. Your bones need to knit together. You’ve had surgery. It will take some time, but you will be good as new again.”
Where am I? Is this person a doctor? Am I still on the island?
I lose consciousness then.
Maybe Diamond’s right.
Enjoy the respite.
I’m so tired. My arm hurts from holding the gun on Nancy.
But I never waver.
I learned one thing on that damned island, something even more important than what my athletic training taught me.
Sometimes you have to run.
I don’t know if I would’ve been worse off if I had done what the man asked. If I had run when he told me to run.
I was just so tired of being told what to do.
I knew he would eventually catch me because the odds were always in the man’s favor.
And this man? He was as ripped a man as I’d ever seen. Made me wonder why he never wanted to get in the sun. Even a little bit of sun would’ve made him less pasty white. There was not an ounce of fat on him. He was all muscle.
So I fought. I fought by not giving him what he wanted.
And damn, I paid the price.
That’s why I’ll never play volleyball again.
I healed. It took several months and a lot of physical therapy, but I healed. Turned out the island had top notch medical care for all the women. Those physicians and therapists must have been well paid to keep quiet about what they saw. They had one job—to get us healed and back to work. After all, if I hadn’t been able to heal and get back out on the hunt, I was nothing more than garbage to be thrown out.
So I was determined, and I healed. I got my strength back, I learned to run again, I kept my muscles in shape.
But I knew I would never again be a professional athlete.
I could run, but I could no longer jump.
I look down at my left leg, at the scars on my left calf from the halo device that kept my bones in place while they healed. Not all the scars are from the men on the island.
But they were the result of what I endured on the island.
“Can you just put the gun down, for a minute?” Nancy says.
“Absolutely not.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
Yes. “Absolutely not,” I grit out.
“I didn’t know. Please. You have to believe me. I didn’t know.”
I do believe her. She’s a nasty-ass bitch, but I don’t think she’s truly evil. Or at least she wasn’t then. Now? She’s a certified sociopath.
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
“I just… It was a lot of things.”
“Right.”
“You just walked in, took the position from Gloria. Bumped me into third place.”
“You were a setter, Nancy. You had a place. I’ve heard all this bullshit before.” Then something dawns on me. “It was you and Taylor, wasn’t it? You and Taylor were the two people that Gloria heard talking.”
“Yeah.”
“I knew she was lying. She told me she didn’t recognize the voices, but she would’ve known Taylor’s voice. They were dating.”
“Gloria was a little screwed up,” Nancy says. “And it was all because of you.”
“Yeah, whatever. She couldn’t stand the negative feelings she was having about me. Such a good little devout girl, who was having horrible feelings about the person who took her position away. Cry me a fucking river.”
“It was more than that.”
“Really? I don’t care.”
“She didn’t stay on the team long after your disappearance. She felt a lot of guilt about it.”
I roll my eyes. “Really? She told me she got injured. That’s why she left the team.”
“She did,” Nancy says. “But she could have stayed on the team. She left. The guilt was killing her. The injury was just a convenient excuse to leave.”