I lie still, trying to work it out.
There.
Footsteps. Soft, barely audible over the hum of machines. But I’ve spent years learning to listen for danger, and these footsteps are wrong. Too slow. Too deliberate. Not the brisk squeak of a nurse’s rubber soles or the shuffling uncertainty of a lost visitor.
These footsteps are hunting.
I keep my eyes closed, force my breathing to stay even, even though every instinct I’ve developed during my years in Atlanta screams at me to run. The antiseptic smell of the room sharpens, mixing with the terrifying scent of sweat, leather, the faint metallic tang of blood.
The footsteps stop beside my bed.
The air shifts. A presence looms over me, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off a body, hear the controlled inhale and exhale of someone trying to stay quiet. A shadow falls across my closed eyelids, blocking the dim glow of the machines.
Someone is standing over me.
My heart hammers against my broken ribs, each beat sending fire through my chest. I want to move—to open my eyes, to scream, to throw myself off the bed and run. But my body won’t cooperate. The lingering fog of medication has turned my limbs to concrete, my thoughts to molasses. I’m trapped inside my own skin, paralyzed by chemicals and fear.
A rustle of fabric. The whisper of an object being drawn from a pocket.
MOVE, JOSIE! MOVE!
I can’t.
The presence leans closer. His breath ghosts across my face, hot and wrong.
This is it. This is how I die.
CRASH.
The presence vanishes. A grunt of pain—male, surprised—a heavy thud that shakes the floor, the clatter of something metallic skittering across linoleum.
My eyes fly open.
My roommate stands over a man in dark clothes, a dented metal bedpan gripped in both hands like a baseball bat. Her hospital gown is askew, her IV ripped out and dripping blood down her forearm, her chest heaving with exertion.
But her eyes are calm. Focused. The eyes of someone who’s been in survival mode so long it has become muscle memory.
The man groans, tries to push himself up. The woman doesn’t hesitate—she swings again, a clean arc that connects with his skull with a sound like a hammer hitting meat.
He goes down and stays down.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe.
She stands there for a moment, staring at the body on the floor. Then she looks at me, and I see the first crack in her composure—a tremor in her hands, a flicker of wild fury behind her eyes.
“He was going to kill you,” she says. Her voice is steady, but barely. “I saw him through the curtain. He walked right past me like I wasn’t even there and he went straight for you. He had a weapon in his hand?—”
My heart is slamming against my ribs, and my hands won’t stop shaking. I can still feel the ghost of him above me, the desperate burn in my lungs to scream but knowing the sound was choked in my throat.
I never imagined I’d be the kind of person to freeze in this situation. But I did. I’m alive, because of her.
“You saved my life,” the words are raw and rough, ripping through the lump in my throat.
“I hit him with a bedpan.”
Relief crashes through me—so sudden and overwhelming that for a moment I can’t breathe. This woman. This brave, terrified woman who doesn’t even know me, who could have stayedhidden behind that curtain grabbed a bedpan and shefoughtfor me.
Gratitude doesn’t begin to express the onslaught of emotions I’m feeling toward her right now.
