Before Dawn

Amy’s reply arrived moments later.

Ur clearly sick!! Where r u?

Frustrated, Kate put her phone down on the bed beside her. She desperately needed to find Elijah and ask him what was going on. She was certain he would know.

Just then, she noticed the doctors approaching the bed. They’d found another one, an older man with white hair, and they were striding purposefully toward her. When they saw her sitting up, with the tube on the ground and the IV drip lying on the bed, they stopped where they were.

“Is this some kind of joke?” the new, white-haired doctor said.

The others shook their heads emphatically. “I was with her the second she got out of the ambulance. The paramedics said she’d flatlined but when she came out of the ambulance she was breathing.”

“She’d had two doses of propofol,” the other added.

“How is she sitting up like that?” the white-haired doctor said.

Kate started to get very frustrated with the way they were talking about her rather than to her. She was the one who’d just been through a traumatic experience and they were treating her like a circus freak show act.

“Hi,” she said, relieved to find the tube had done nothing bad to her throat. “I think I’m feeling better now. Can I go home? I don’t see the point in worrying my family.”

She started to get up but the doctors ushered her down.

“No, wait. I’m sorry but you can’t go until we’ve tested you. You might have brain damage.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t,” Kate said. “Want me to say the alphabet backwards or something?”

The doctor with the white hair looked at the others, astounded. Finally, he asked the question that was on everyone’s lips:

“What are you?”

CHAPTER SIX

Kate’s parents didn’t arrive at the hospital until several hours later. Her dad hadn’t been able to (or hadn’t wanted to) leave work early. Her mom, despite being the one to receive the initial call from the hospital, had been “too busy.” It was around seven p.m. by the time anyone from her family came to see her. The hospital had even tried appealing to Madison, who at eighteen was the closest thing they could find to an “adult” next of kin. But she was too busy with an “important” cheerleading competition after school – clearly far more important than her sister’s life – and she hadn’t come.

During that time, various doctors and nurses had been in and out to see Kate, each as baffled as the last. In the end they decided that she was playing some kind of sick joke, that she’d faked the accident to get attention, a sentiment her parents shared when they finally arrived.

“There’s nothing wrong with your daughter at all,” the doctors told her mom and dad. “Not physically anyway. But attention seeking to this extent is suggestive of some type of psychological disturbance.”