Mrs. Fields woke me up when we arrived at the hospital. After a bit of sleep, I felt a little better, but not by much. A hazy fog filled my head, and my mouth felt like a desert. The bright lights of the hospital stung my eyes. The building loomed over everything in the vicinity. Four floors of rectangular concrete slabs. The dark figures riding atop beasts the size of houses filled my vision for a second as I got out of the car.

We walked, mostly in silence, to the waiting area for the emergency room. It was filled with the people I’d grown up around. Dirt and blood covered most of their clothing, and most had wounds that had yet to be treated. Limbs looked bruised and broken, expressions looked empty and vacant.

“I’ll go ask them if we can see your father, dear,” said Mrs. Fields. “Just find somewhere to sit for now.” She walked off to the nurse’s desk, where it looked like she’d have little luck talking to anyone.

The hospital was extremely hectic. Aside from the waiting room, I could see people, mostly broken and battered, in the ER not too far away. The place was grossly underprepared for an entire town’s worth of people, even if it was extremely tiny. Sounds of pained groans and worried chatter filled the air with tension and people’s faces with grim anger. I recognized most of the people I saw sitting around me, but I wasn’t close with anyone here. 

My body felt empty when I sat down against a wall. My skin was sandpaper and my bones were concrete. Whirring lights and ringing filled my ears, providing a constant background to the already chaotic beeps and alarms filling the hospital’s air. I wanted to go home.

Why did this happen? I couldn’t read minds, but I could tell everyone else was thinking the same thing. The rage still hadn’t settled. This attack felt like an injustice, like cruel and unusual punishment. We all lived out in the middle of nowhere, and while we suffered from a slight lack of protection, we didn’t have the allure of anything interesting enough to attract a tragedy like this.

I glanced over the bitter and empty faces in the room and recognized a friendly one. Harvey. One of my childhood friends and an extremely kind person. Even he seemed a bit broken now. I started to walk over to him.

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Harvey was sitting with his wife, Lilac. Her arms enveloped a shape which I could only assume was her child. The legs of a little girl stuck out from behind a chair, probably Daisy, their daughter. Although they got married and had kids right after high school, Harvey and Lilac were normally one of the happiest couples I knew. Normally.

I plopped down next to Harvey. He turned his head towards me and I could see lines of clean skin etched into the dirty skin under his eyes. The corners of his mouth quivered as he tried his best to smile.

“Kian, thank God… You’re okay--!”

I nodded. “I’m okay.” I looked at Lilac’s face, buried in the blanket wrapped in her arms. “...How’s everyone…?”

Harvey looked solemn. “We’re alright. Barely out of the way of the war path. Briar got rough-handled a bit while we were running… though the docs say he’ll be fine. They’ve got more urgent things for now.”

I looked at the hospital beds. The staff didn’t have the time to clean the blood off everything. It almost looked like a living painting, or a scene happening behind a pane of glass. 

“How’re your folks?” questioned Harvey. “Lilac’s family… some of them aren’t in good condition…”

I shook my head. “My dad’s alive, I think. Mrs. Fields said so. It ain’t good.”

Harvey wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “Damn… this fucking sucks.”

I laughed a bit half-heartedly. “That’s an understatement.” I looked down at my fingernails, perfectly clean. “The farm’s gone.”

He didn’t say anything else, just squeezed me closer to his side. 

Harvey had lost his parents when he was really young. Raised by his elderly grandparents, he turned out really responsible. An only child. I’d never met a person quite as kind-hearted as Harvey. His grandparents passed while we were in high school, right before he moved in with Lilac’s folks. They settled down quickly, they’d already been dating a while. I’d met their kids before, the three year-old Daisy and the baby, Briar. If I had to think of a family to describe as perfect, it’d be them. Through thick and thin and every obstacle, they’d made it through. 

I looked over at Harvey again. He held me a bit tighter, a few tears falling onto his jeans. Lilac’s shaking figure was just behind him, wrapped up in his other arm. I felt fragile.

Another of those piercing beeps echoed in the waiting room.

“Mr. Sun?” I looked up at a nurse standing at the desk. 

I met her eyes and got up, patting Harvey on the shoulder as I walked up to her.

“Follow me, please.”