A hailstorm of bullets. The shrill screams of women cut short to silence. The desperate shouts of men caught off guard by the ambush. Dollie, caught by the waist as a human shield. A flash of white hot pain punctures the flesh of her right thigh and further up slugs the back of her right shoulder. Blowing through in a spray of blood and plugging her captor in the chest at center mass. She falls to the floor with him in a hapless heap. The color of crimson burning into her gaze as the edges of her vision creep in and fill with blackness.
Somewhere in this black void there are the soft beeps of a monitor. Calling out to guide her back to consciousness with a gentle stir and pained flinch of her lashes. Bleary eyes open to a darkened hospital room, the same one she had seen before the opioids took her under. A nurse from the nightshift carefully peaked her head in before entering fully. Dollie expects her to do the routine check to make sure she was still in stable condition. Instead, she smiles down at her and whispers, โIt's against the rules because visiting hours are over, but he says he's awfully worried about you. I can't say no to a man worried about his girl, so I'm letting him sneak in.โ And before Dollie's doped up brain could even register what the nurse just said, she leaves with a chipper walk.
Very slowly, the adrenaline set in and creates a c*cktail of heart wrenching anxiety and a room feeling like it was spinning as her body tried and failed to override the heavy sluggishness. The door silently opens again, the nurse heading the entry and behind her a man whose face she couldn't see. Behind her head, the monitors beeping increased in frequency and tempo. What the nurse mistook for heart felt excitement, she softly beamed and stepped aside to let him in. It was the longest three steps of her life - and she thought she'd better enjoy them. Inside her thoughts raced. Spiking her pulse in a scribble of palpation on the ECG screen.
He was here. He was here to take her back home and when he got her there he was going to-.
He was not here. The man that walks into the room isn't him and while she's relieved there is a nagging feeling of caution still. The nurse steps away again, telling the โcoupleโ that she will be down the hall if they needed anything. Her gaze double takes between the two before she hesitantly nodded her head. It felt safer to play along. She is gone, and the space between Doll and the man at the foot of the bed fills with a thick silence. Squeezing down on her weak chest as her hand numbly reaches for the call button and draws it close to her side with her thumb resting on the red switch. All while not taking her weary eyes from him for a second.
She dryly swallows, waiting for him to say something, waiting for him to lunge forward. The familiarity of his face brings no name to mind but she clearly knows who he is and why he was here. The fear brings a fragility her face that matched the condition she was in overall. Her doey eyes feeling warm with the threat of tears as fragments of the night begin an endless loop that the narcotics had kept at bay. Her breath shallow and slow in the rise and fall of her chest while her heart kept to a quickened pace, broadcasted via the grating sound of montoned beeping.
