Chapter 3 - Behind Double Doors
Trauma Room Three was dead silent except for the rhythmic, terrified gasps of eight-year-old Josie and the shallow, wheezing respirations of the baby.
Lauren locked the interior deadbolt, killed the overhead fluorescent strips, and flipped on the warm-spectrum examination lamp. The yellow light pooled over the stainless steel gurney.
“Josie, sit,” Lauren ordered gently, pointing to the vinyl swivel stool in the corner. “Don’t touch the floor. Your feet are verging on frostbite.”
Josie obeyed instantly, curling her filthy, bruised legs beneath her. She still clutched the yellow rubber gloves against her chest, her knuckles bleached white from the pressure. Her large, hazel eyes tracked Lauren’s every movement with an uncanny, adult vigilance.
“Is Eli going to die?” Josie asked, her voice a fragile sliver in the sterile room.
“Not on my shift,” Lauren said.
She laid the infant onto the warm pad of the radiant warmer. Eli weighed no more than nine pounds, far too light for a baby who appeared to be roughly four months old. His skin had a mottled, grayish cast, and his sunken fontanelle told a desperate story of severe dehydration.
Lauren tore open an alcohol swab, snapped a 24-gauge butterfly needle from its sterile sleeve, and began inspecting the tiny veins in Eli’s arms. But when she pushed back the thin, threadbare swaddling blanket, the breath caught in her throat.
Across the infant’s left clavicle was a neat, two-inch surgical incision, closed not with medical sutures, but with heavy black thread. The exact same thread that held together the thumb of the yellow glove Josie carried.
Lauren’s hands began to shake—not with fear, but with a visceral, dormant rage she had buried four years ago in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Josie,” Lauren said softly, keeping her voice even as she swabbed the baby’s arm. “Where did your mother get this thread?”
“From the box under the floorboards,” Josie whispered. “Mommy said the needle was yours. She said you gave it to her the night the barn burned down. She told me... she told me if the men with the grey cars came back, I had to take Eli and run to the harbor. She said, ‘Find the woman who sewed the glove. She’s the only one who won’t let them cut him open again.’”
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Lauren closed her eyes for a single heartbeat. Sarah. Sarah Albright was still alive—or had been until tonight. Four years ago, Sarah had been the lead biochemist at Vanguard Therapeutics, the private defense contractor that Lauren had fled after discovering what their experimental trials were doing to unhoused mothers. Sarah had helped Lauren escape with her life, handing her a pair of heavy industrial yellow chemical gloves to clean out the toxic traces in the lab before they set it ablaze.
Now, Sarah’s children were here. And Vanguard had tracked them to the water’s edge.
