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  The girls suddenly turned to lead in Wren’s arms, dragging her down. The people that followed pounded on the doors in a flurry of arms and fists, screaming to be let inside. An electronic badge lock rested on the adjacent wall, close to a small nurses’ station. Wren pushed past the panicked group and set the girls down, searching for any key card that would let them inside.

  Wren ripped the desk apart, her fingers scouring every square inch until more gunshots echoed down the hallway, freezing her movements. The people clamoring at the doors quickly turned around as well, two of them sprinting back down the hallway in hopes of escaping the gunman, while three others collapsed to the floor, crying. The remaining five continued to pound the steel with their fists, their voices cracking from their piercing screams.

  A jacket rested on the back of the chair, and Wren ripped it off, searching the pockets. Her finger grazed the thin edge of plastic, and she yanked it from the white coat. Wren glanced at the picture but not long enough to examine it thoroughly, just hoping the badge would work.

  Wren seized Chloe and Addison by the hand and pulled them from behind the desk just as another bout of gunfire blanketed their hallway. The vicious echo triggered Wren to thrust Chloe and Addison back behind cover as she watched two of the people that followed her get gunned down. The others quickly jumped over their dead bodies, huddling behind the small cove of the desk.

  All nine bodies shivered in one collective unit as the hallway grew silent. Wren was in the front and watched the blood slowly drain from the bodies on the floor, staining the bleached-white tile red.

  “Yuhzir!” an angry voice shouted, his words bouncing down the hallway as violently as the bullets from his rifle. The light thump of boots sounded, followed by the click of metal. “Al khuruj kamu jahat mamamatik!” The voice kept the same virulent tone from before as the proximity of his words drew closer.

  Wren eyed the keypad. She had no way of knowing whether the badge clutched in her hands would work, and the moment she stepped out from the cover of the wall, she’d be shot down. She looked back down to her girls, both of them sobbing silently and clutching her legs as they huddled close, their tiny bodies trembling over one another.

  Wren kissed the tops of their heads, looking each of them in the eye as she said, “I love you both. So very much.” She grabbed the arm of the only person in the huddle who didn’t wear an expression that looked as if it would shatter into hysteria. “I’m going to make a run for the key pad. The moment you hear it beep, take my girls and run inside, got it?”

  The young man couldn’t have been older than her Zack. She noticed that he wore jeans with scrubs as his top. He took the badge from her hand, and for a moment she thought he was going to take her place, but he simply examined the plastic and handed it back to her. “It’s an ICU badge. It’ll work.”

  The badge lingered in the air between them before she took it, along with the fate she knew would follow. She crouched to the edge of the wall before her nerves got the better of her, and took one last look at her girls. She did her best to take in all of their features—the curves of their cheeks, the different-colored strands of their hair. She froze that image in her mind then sprinted to the keypad.

  It all happened so quickly. The moment Wren made it around the corner, the access pad looked closer than before, and Wren stretched out her arm, the terrorist’s shouts quick and unintelligible.

  Two steps into her leap, Wren heard the gunshot. When her outstretched arm made contact with the access lock, she felt her body go limp. She collapsed, her face smacking against the floor. She wasn’t sure if the badge had worked until she saw feet hurry past her line of sight.

  Gunshots and screams filled the air, and Wren was afraid to look up. She was afraid to see one of her children join her on the tile, but she had to know before it was too late. She strained her neck as she lifted her cheek from the cold tile. Two more bodies joined her on the ground, but the figures were big—too big to be either Addison or Chloe.

  And that was when Wren saw the two of them, carried by the man she’d left them with. She saw them only for the flash of a moment, their cheeks streaked with tears, looking down at her, their small arms and hands reaching out in desperation. Wren placed her cheek back down on the tile and smiled, knowing that her children were safe. Knowing that she’d done what she could. The cool of the floor was oddly soothing, and with her body numb, she closed her eyes.

  The screams and gunshots sounded distant, and she felt herself drifting off to sleep, her fatigued mind swimming in a pool of apathy. But something kept prodding her, preventing her from submerging herself in the welcoming basin. The light tug turned to pain, and Wren became aware of her shoulder aching, followed quickly by a splitting pang in her head. A warm sensation filled her mouth, and suddenly she was awake, the taste of blood on her tongue.

  A blinding white light hovered directly in front of her, and Wren knew she was lying down, her eyes squinting from the brightness. Shadowed figures penetrated her line of sight, and she heard their mumbled questions, but the piercing pain ringing through her body vanquished any attempts at answering.

  Wren’s body shifted and moved, though not by her own actions. Hands ran along her body, there were sharp pinches in her arms, her blouse was ripped open, and cold dots were placed on her chest. Voices drifted in and out of her consciousness, and Wren struggled to stay afloat in the churning sea of her mind.

  They were shouting at her now, and Wren desperately wanted to tell them to leave her be, to let her die in peace. She wanted to go back to sleep, drift off into nothing. She was so close, so close to warmth and rest. She hadn’t realized how much she needed it until now. Just let me go.

  But then a pair of names reached her, and the names were accompanied by faces she recognized. Blue and hazel eyes shone through the darkness of her fatigue. She knew them. She… loved them.

  “Ma’am, I need you to stay with me.”

  The voice penetrated Wren’s thoughts but didn’t match the eyes in her mind. They were children. They were her children. Chloe. Addison. The names struck her consciousness like lightning, and the wave of darkness was eradicated by the light of the room, but with it came pain—more pain than she’d ever felt in her life.

  “Just hang on, Wren!”

  Wren nodded, but suddenly she felt tired again. Except this fatigue was different. Her eyes shut, her dreams filled with memories of her daughters. Memories that she clung onto for dear life.

  Chapter 4

  A dull ache in Wren’s left arm disrupted her sleep. When she moved, it was as if every cell in her arm were slowly being ripped apart. A knife-like pain split her skull, and the same white light she remembered seeing before flooded her senses with brightness. She brought her right hand up to block the light and found a clamp on her index finger, a wire running from the end.

  Confused, Wren examined the rest of her body and saw that her clothes had been removed and replaced with a hospital gown and that her left arm was cradled in a sling. She ripped the clamp from her finger and tossed it aside, triggering a loud beeping from a machine. She flung her legs over the side of the cot, her feet dangling as she struggled to balance on the edge.

  Two hospital staff members burst into the room before Wren could stand and quickly ended the machine’s rant. One of them placed a hand on Wren’s shoulder. “Mrs. Burton, you need to rest.”

  Wren’s mind felt heavy, as though her thoughts were forced to walk through thick piles of mud. “I need…” she started but lost the thought. She felt dizzy, the pain in her left arm subduing her speech.

  “Mrs. Burton, do you know where you are?”

  The question was asked innocently, but Wren couldn’t help but notice a hint of condescension. She shook her head, steamrolling through the grogginess. “The hospital.” She slid from the side of the bed, her legs wobbling and the wires attached to her chest under the hospital gown pulling her back. “My children.” Wren yanked the wires out from the suction pad
s on her skin and stumbled to the door despite the nurses trying to restrain her. “Addison! Chloe!” She frantically spun in circles, the surroundings unfamiliar.

  “Mommy!”

  The voices came from Wren’s left, and when she saw Addison and Chloe running to her, she collapsed to her knees, hugging both of them with her one good arm and ignoring the searing pain her body roared in defiance. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes unexpectedly, and she kissed both her girls feverishly.

  Chloe gently touched the fabric of Wren’s sling. “Did you hurt your arm too?”

  “I did.” Wren smiled, positioning her sling next to Chloe’s cast. “Now we match.”

  “Not really,” Chloe said, frowning. “Mine’s all hard. Yours is soft.”

  “Sounds like you have a future doctor in the family.”

  Wren turned around and saw a man in a white coat hovering over them. He was tall, his hair thinning and showing streaks of grey and white intermixed with what stubborn brown refused to age. He knelt down beside the girls. “Hey, your mommy and I need to talk, so why don’t you go play with Nurse Malla for a little bit?”

  The nurse appeared, gently taking both girls by the hand. Both of them offered Wren one last hug, and she watched them disappear down the hall until they turned the corner out of view.

  The doctor led Wren back to the bed, where she required help to climb back on the thin mattress. Whatever energy propelled her to leave her bed had evaporated, leaving her drained and hungry for rest.

  “How are you feeling, Mrs. Burton?” the doctor asked, flipping through a few pieces of paper on a clipboard.

  “Hurt.” Wren laid her head back on the pillow, closing her eyes, but a gunshot wakened her. A brief rush of adrenaline surged through her, and everything came flooding back. The masked men. The blood. The bullets. Carrying her children through the stampede in the hallways until they ended at the ICU doors.

  “It’s okay.” The doctor put his hand on her shoulder, easing her back down on her pillow. “Those men are still in the hospital, but we’re safe here. The doors are reinforced steel. And that key card you found was the only one missing from our inventory after we locked the doors.” He returned his attention to the clipboard. “It was smart making a run for it here. You’ve worked in hospitals before?”

  “No,” Wren answered, shaking her head. “I designed one in college.” She cleared her throat. “I’m an architect.” Although the pain in her arm made her wish she’d remembered the security procedures for a hospital lockdown sooner. “Federal guidelines require that all hospitals constructed after 2010 have security features built into all of their critically weak departments in case of contamination or terrorist activities.” She looked at her arm. “I was shot?

  “Yes. The bullet nicked your humeral shaft, but it went straight through.” He aimed his pen at her head. “You smacked your head pretty good, though.” He gingerly opened her eyelids, shining a light in each of them. “You have a concussion.”

  Wren eyed the badge hanging from the front of his coat, and she squinted to read it. “Dr. Reyes, what’s going on out there? Have you heard anything? Have the police arrived?”

  “You don’t need to worry, Mrs. Burton.” The doctor’s tone was dismissive. “We have protocols in place for things like this. The authorities are doing what is necessary. In the meantime, you and your girls are safe. Now, get some rest, and I’ll be back to check on you in a little bit.”

  Before Wren had a chance to put in another word, Reyes was gone, and she was too tired to try to shout after him. Her mind raced with worry, but fatigue soon took over, and she drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  When Wren woke, her body still ached, but her mind had regained its plasticity. She flagged down one of the hospital staff and managed to change from the hospital gown into a spare T-shirt and pants one of the nurses had in her bag. Once dressed, she went in search of her daughters.

  Wren found her girls tucked away in one of the empty patient rooms, busy entertaining themselves. Chloe had stumbled upon a few of the toys the ICU staff kept for the children of any parents they treated, and Addison was fiddling with her camera, filming anyone that granted her access.

  The past few hours had seen the excitement of the hospital decrease dramatically. After the initial onslaught from the terrorists, most of the screams had ended, and only every twenty minutes or so was there another gunshot, the sound dulled by the tons of concrete and steel between Wren and her children. A chill ran through her as considered what those shots meant.

  The ICU had a few doctors and nurses on staff, some of them already in hiding. Doctor Reyes, who had been in surgery, hadn’t even heard the screams and gunshots until one of the staff came and told him. With his hands trying to save a man’s life, he told them to lock the unit down.

  Of the original ten that had followed Wren, only four remained alive: the man who’d carried Addison and Chloe inside, a middle-aged woman with dried blood still on her face who refused to speak, a young woman, and an older gentlemen with no hair except for the ring of white that stretched around the back of his head from ear to ear. Most of their eyes still held the same hollow emptiness, the shock of the attack fresh in their minds, torturing what shreds of sanity they had left.

  Once Wren was up and about, she heard arguments between small groups of people about wanting to leave, while others were hell-bent on staying put. Most of the staff felt it was their duty to stay with the patients to make sure they were properly cared for. Most everyone who wasn’t staff wanted out.

  Wren walked to the main ICU doors, keeping away from the windows on her approach in case any of the terrorists were stationed nearby. The closer she drew to the entrance, the slower her steps became. Each door had a strip of thick-paned glass built in. She placed her finger on the cracked glass, the surface still smooth despite the thousands of tiny fault lines the bullets had inflicted.

  It was nearly six o’clock, which meant she and the girls had been inside that hospital for nearly three hours. Despite Dr. Reyes’s assurance that help was coming, she thought it would have happened by now. And if the roads were still blocked as they’d been before, there wasn’t any guarantee the terrorists wouldn’t find a way into the ICU before help arrived. We can’t stay here.

  Wren found Dr. Reyes with one of the nurses, knowing it was his counsel the staff had listened to in the first place. “Could I speak to you for a moment?” Specks of blood still dotted the doctor’s coat and pants along with a few larger blobs on his chest. She wasn’t sure why he hadn’t changed.

  “What is it?” Reyes’s clipped his short as he sipped from a Styrofoam cup. Dark circles imprinted themselves under his eyes, which she hadn’t noticed before.

  “I understand your need to stay with your patients, but there are some of us here who need to leave. My son—”

  “Mrs. Burton, I assure you we are safe.” Reyes pointed to the front of the ICU, where the entrance had been redecorated with bullets. “The only way we go out those doors is when the police arrive.”

  “Doctor, I don’t think you know what’s going on out there. The city is gridlocked; I barely managed to get my daughter here in an ambulance. There isn’t a guarantee the police will come, and if these people want some type of ransom, then—”

  “Help is coming. Whatever’s happening in the city will blow over. There are procedures that we have to follow.” Reyes showered his wisdom like he was speaking to a child, the arrogance thick in his tone.

  It could have been the doctor’s words, the way he said them, the events that had unfolded over the past few hours, or the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything all day, but she shoved the doctor as hard as she could, despite only being able to do so with one arm. “Those men shot at me and my daughters. They put to slaughter everyone in the emergency room. I will not sit here and wait for some person five hundred miles away to give an order about a situation they know nothing about! These people aren’t taking hostages. They’r
e spreading a holocaust.”

  Reyes chucked his coffee cup against the wall, the cold, brown liquid splattering against the blue paint. “Lady, there are thirty patients in this facility who are in critical, life-threatening condition and need attention and observation around the clock. I need my staff to perform at one hundred percent, and given the fact that you and your girls don’t have the prospect of being in danger in the foreseeable future, I would have to tell you that I don’t give a shit about what you do or do not feel, or what you think or do not think. We’re safe where we are.”

  Wren noticed a crowd had gathered, drawn by the raised volume of their voices. “We’re at the gallows waiting for the executioner to give the signal. We are not safe.” She walked away, leaving the doctor fuming, and brushed past the hospital staff wordlessly. She didn’t care what she had to do. She was getting her girls out of that building before it was too late.

  “Hey.”

  The whisper came from a room on her right, and Wren saw the young man who had taken her girls inside the ICU. He motioned for her to step in, and she complied. He led her into a small room where one of the ICU patients lay unconscious, machines she’d never even seen before hooked up to the woman’s body.

  “You don’t think anyone is coming?” He kept his voice low, even in the privacy of the room. He was shorter than Wren, and the fact that he stood with a hunch only lowered his stature.

  “No. I don’t.” One of the machines beeped, and the nurse hushed her, waiting to see if anyone would come. But no one did. “And I don’t think whoever has control of this place is going to let anyone live. What happened in the ER, I…” Sudden flashes of bullets, blood, and screams pulsated like a strobe light in her mind. “No one is coming.”

  “I told the doctor the same thing. But he’s not all wrong. There are procedures for lockdown that we have in place, and we do have a procedure for hostage situations.”

  “This isn’t a hostage situation.”