Private Finished Genuine Worry

They were carrying her.

Chloe had a general sort of idea about who was carrying her. They were the people who had fought alongside her for survival, in the final confrontation with Jenkins. The fight ended when she drove her blade into Jenkins' neck, killing him. The spell was broken, and they were all free to leave his blood-stained deathtrap of a corn maze.

She was in so much pain.

Jenkins had done one last thing with his miserable life, and that was to cause pain. As Chloe twisted the blade in his throat, he must have known that he had one chance for revenge, and he took it, shooting Chloe in the stomach with his shotgun. And it probably could have been worse. The barrel wasn't aimed directly at her. She must have just been clipped by the spread of pellets, only suffering a fraction of the pain and injury that man meant for her.

But a fraction was more than enough. And so they were carrying her. And so she thought that she was going to die. She had seen this much blood before, but never her own blood before. Other people's blood. Dying people. She was panicking, and they were carrying her. She didn't want to die.

They emerged past the corn and there were flashing lights. Different people began to carry her. They were taking her into an ambulance. She turned her head and saw a familiar face.

"Dad?" She turned her head even more, craning her neck and evading the oxygen mask they were trying to put on her. She tried to sit up, and this was a horrible idea. Her abdomen wouldn't allow it. She lay back down, muttering four letter words into the oxygen mask over her mouth.

@Poppy

Chloe's panic began to fade away. She was still in a lot of pain, of course, but she wasn't terrified anymore. She wouldn't be like that boy at her last school, lying on the tile floor as she futilely tried to staunch his bleeding with paper towels. They had a lot better stuff than paper towels here. She was going to live. Her father would make sure of that.

The paramedic was a large woman with bright orange skin, bald except for a patch of long hair at the back of her scalp tied into a bun. Her nose ring would have looked right at home on a door knocker, Chloe thought. Now, door-knocker was cutting the clothes off of Chloe's upper body so she could see the gunshot wounds. There were four of them, and one was losing blood much faster than the others. Chloe lifted her head to see, then quickly decided to lean back again. She didn't want to see any of that.

"Did you really just say, 'Dear God?'" Chloe asked her dad. Despite all the pain, she seemed a little amused. The irony was a good distraction.

The paramedic was already applying bandages and pressure. Then, she took Chloe's hand. "You're going to feel a tiny pinch, okay honey?" Before this point, she had been working in silence. Chloe barely had time to nod before the IV needle went in. Soon, her arm felt cold from the fluid flowing into it. Now, door-knocker was moving on to the stab wound on her shoulder, and trying to assess all the other cuts and bruises and bite-marks.

The sirens blared as they sped past red lights. The hospital wasn't far now. Chloe didn't have any idea what to say about her time in the corn maze, or where she could even start. "Arach... um, she died trying to save my life," Chloe said. "Can we summon her again? Or, is she just..." The words gone forever were lost between the oxygen mask and the sound of the siren.

"Zombies." said the paramedic. "And she isn't cursed. I checked." The paramedic had not done anything which looked like checking for a magic curse. They would have to take her word for it.

Once Gabriel started talking about Arach, Chloe looked more agitated. That was about as much as one could tell, through the oxygen mask and through the pain of her wounds. "She didn't die in the fight where this happened to me," Chloe said, angry, nearly sitting up. "It was hours ago. I wouldn't have even made it that far if she didn't..." She groaned in pain and let the paramedic gently push her back into a laying-down position.

"Don't move like that," said the paramedic. "You'll make it worse." Despite everything, she sounded very calm, matter-of-fact.

"This happened to me because of a decision I made after she was gone." Chloe said. "So, really..." Chloe didn't know where she was going with that statement. So she just stopped talking. Talking was a little painful, too.

The ambulance doors opened, and it sounded like hell. Several people were screaming in pain, and everything was chaos. People in scrubs put Chloe on a cart. They allowed Gabriel to follow along to the entrance of an area labeled "Trauma Bay," where a nurse diverted him to a waiting room, away from most of the chaos. The nurse said they would call him when he could see Chloe.

He would wait here for almost an hour. The corn maze situation was blowing up on the news, which was playing on a television set in that waiting room. They kept playing the same clip of what it looked like when the illusion fell, taken from a news helicopter. The image of a normal corn field seemed to collapse, leaving behind a field full of corpses. Emergency services flooded in from the perimeter, and many of the still-moving survivors limped towards them. Preliminary reports suggested that Jenkins, found dead at the scene, was involved in some sort of human sacrifice scheme.

Chloe was mentioned by name as the one who killed him, ending what some eyewitnesses described as a 'hostage situation' within the maze. The reporter said Chloe went to the hospital in "critical condition."

Eventually, a doctor would arrive in the waiting room, asking for "Mr. Baltimore." His daughter's condition had stabilized, she would say. She would need another medical procedure, but for now they had a room for her. She was awake, and she had been asking for her father.

The room was a few floors up, well away from the emergency wing. Its window had a wonderful view of the other tall building directly across the street. Chloe had all sorts of wires and tubes attached to her, filling her with lungs with oxygen and her veins with various fluids, keeping track of her heart and lungs. She looked tired. She gave her father a weak wave.

"One of them almost hit my spine," Chloe said. "Apparently I'm very lucky." She smiled like this was the punchline to some sort of joke. She didn't feel very lucky.

Chloe caught the implication alright, but she was sure it wouldn't come to anything. Her dad would be sure, too, once he heard what had happened in there.

"I wouldn't be sure about that," She said.

"I'll start with, ah, the beginning. Arach and I figured out it wasn't a treasure hunt when we started seeing, uh corpses and pieces of corpses lying around. We tried to leave, but there was a spell that prevented us from leaving or calling you or calling 9-1-1. So..." Chloe sighed. These painkillers were getting her a little woozy. "Arach and I found some people I knew who were trapped here with us. Safety in numbers, you know. That war god, Malara, was there; I think I told you about her, so we were in pretty good shape. There were a lot of idiots who were just running around and killing people who were alone, other than Jenkins. Like those... animal-headed serial killers. They were around. Jenkins was planning to get us all to kill each other, I think. He had a scarecrow thing that ran around and told us something like, the only way one of us could leave is if everyone else was dead."

Chloe took a sip of water from a flimsy plastic cup.

"We found out how he was keeping us in, eventually. There were some underground tunnels that led to a, a big ritual circle. And he had the kinds of human sacrifices going on that I'd never even heard of, like, columns made out of human flesh. He was trying to get us all to die violently so that we could power some kind of immortality spell. So we destroyed the circle and ran out, and... Well, Arach and I thought we could leave at that point."

She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head. "We couldn't. And when we were separated from the rest of the group, that's when we got attacked by the undead. Some of them grabbed me, and Arach helped me shake them off, but then she was... just, getting swarmed, so I had to run. And that's the last I saw of her. I managed to find the rest of the group I had been with, and we just... fought for our lives against all those corpses Jenkins had animated. Jenkins showed up, and he did this hostage situation thing with Shay Rosales, and I was already messed up, but I, uh..."

Chloe began to realize that her dad was going to get mad at her for this last part. "Well, I talked him into letting go of Shay. He knew I was your daughter, and that I knew about Goetia. He said that he'd kill everyone and nobody would leave if I didn't fix his ritual and help him start over. So I... I pretended to agree to it. And when we were about to shake on it, I stabbed him in the neck and he shot me"

Chloe laid back in her bed. She was getting tired. The doctor's said she'd nearly died about half an hour ago, and she'd barely slept over the last few days. If they hadn't used a little bit of magic on her already in the trauma room, they might have called it a miracle she was still conscious.

"Do you really think we're going to need damage control, though, dad? I saved Shay's life. They might even call that heroic, or something. Shouldn't that... make it all less bad for us?"

She was barely clinging to consciousness now. After everything else, even continuing this conversation was exhausting for her. She would close her eyes.

"I'll need my phone and laptop for the DSU stuff, anyway," she would mumble.