23
Fresh laundered sheets.
There was no better smell in the world, no better soft touch than crisp laundered sheets. I rolled into the pillow, yawning out sleep and awoke in a neat bedroom. Dark maple wood bedhead, a king-sized mattress dressed in a powder blue sheet set, the matching bedside tables had twin lamps, a well-stocked bookshelf, buttery light willowed in from the window.
I was freshly bathed, my hair washed and dried, my skin moisturised. Donning new cotton underwear and an oversized men’s black t-shirt. Fresh bandaging coated over both of my wounds which were healing.
A glass of water sat waiting for me on the bedside table, including a pair of pink fluffy slippers on the floor.
From under the door crack came a waft of classical music.
Oh, yes, I was dead.
It was an apartment. Like a show home. Everything matched. The paintings were meaningless, but the apartment was clean in shades of warm white and smooth grey and drops of blue accents. It seemed recently built except for something that gave away its age. There was a soft scent, like dead, stale air. As if this place had been in incubation. Bits of dust hung in the corners, thefurniture half-faded from a window that had stayed open perhaps for too many years.
“Hello?” There was no blood, no screaming.
Had I been rescued from the Battle?
Me and my fluffy pink slippers followed the classical music to a door. It was not Mozart behind it, but a man.
He hung naked, upside down from the ceiling, his cries muffled by a gag in his mouth, his wrists tied. Tears dribbled down his forehead along with his blood which oozed into a children’s plastic pool underneath him.
Dig Graves judiciously needled sewing pins into the man’s testicles.
Ah, nope. Still here. Still in the Execution Battle.
The floor creaked under my next footstep.
Dig Graves jerked and spun around.
He wore a pair of slutty grey sweatpants hanging low down his hips, letting all the world know he was without underwear, and a plain white singlet stretched taunt against his muscles.
Holy freckles, he had muscles. The singlet arced into the fine definition across his chest and abdominals, and his naked arms rolled with the gentle hills of muscle. Tattoos sprinkled over his arms and up onto his shoulders. A tapestry inked onto him. And scars. Oh, a constellation of scars marked into his arms and shoulders from seven years of fighting for his chance to continue living. Now that he was without a jumper or jacket and hoodless, I was able to see his hair.
Black hair, like fine silk. A little messy, as if he had been running his hand through it. Long enough to flick under his chin. I could imagine hair like this breezing back on a motorcycle or on a ship chopping through perilous waves.
He wore his heart-shaped sunglasses and for once, disappointment hit me.
I had hoped to see his eyes.
I was about to map out the rest of his face when he moved too quick and twisted and hunched down, as if trying to hide. He snatched a grey jumper off a chair and tugged it on, pulling the hood over his head and promptly turned back around.
He became Dig Graves again.
A man who hid his face in shadow, who wore a permanent glower like a predator always on the hunt. His shoulders arched back, his chin a little high.
Holding onto the wound on my side, I was about to take another step forward when he promptly lunged for me.
“Stop right there, Princess. You shouldn’t be walking around.”
When he scooped me up in his arms I winced as was my only instinct. I had thought he was about to push me, punch me, kill me. There were hundreds of people attempting to do so just before.
I grabbed onto the collar of his jumper for balance, bunching it up in my hands, squished into anguish. The faces of the people standing on the other side of the red line hit me down in memory.
I had never been so close to death before.
The taste of it still lingered.
