Slide by Garrett Leigh Read Free Book Online

taken much notice of hospitals before. This one looked more like a factory to me, but what did I know? I followed him inside and sat where he told me to. He left me in a row of plastic seats and walked over to the front desk. A woman he obviously knew nodded when he pointed at me and handed him a clipboard. Pete took it and came to sit in the chair beside me.
    “You need to register your details before they fix you up, okay?”
    “Register?”
    He nodded patiently. “Insurance, allergies, emergency contact, shit like that. Have you been to any hospitals in Chicago before?”
    I shook my head and wrote my name in the first box. “What’s an emergency contact?”
    That earned me one of his patented looks, the ones where he stared at me like I was a puzzle he couldn’t work out. “Who you’d want the hospital to call if you had an accident or something.”
    “Is that like next of kin?”
    “Sort of.”
    “I don’t have any of those,” I said. “Can I leave it blank?”
    Another frown….
    “What about Ellie’s family?”
    I shook my head and puzzled my way through the rest of the boxes. They’d done enough for me already, and besides, if Ellie’s father got wind of this, he’d be back on my case for sure. It was only recently he’d stopped staring at me like I was an unexploded bomb. I held out the clipboard when I was done. “What do I do now?”
    “Write my name in the box.”
    “What?”
    Pete sighed and pried the pen from my grasp. “Fucker, you’ve got to have someone.”
    He wrote his name and number in the emergency contact box and abruptly got to his feet. He walked back to the reception desk and handed over the forms. When he came back it was clear the subject was closed. Lacking the inclination to argue, I let it slide.
    A little while later, I found myself behind him again as he led me through a maze of bustling corridors to a dark room with the smallest window I’d ever seen. I hesitated in the doorway. He crossed the room, opened the window slightly, and gestured for me to get on the bed. I swallowed my building unease and did as he asked while he flipped the lights on.
    “Jane’s coming to fix you up,” he said, like I knew who he was talking about. “She’ll need to take your blood pressure, so take your sweatshirt off. Have you ever had a tetanus shot?”
    A what? “Um, I don’t think so.”
    I hoisted myself up onto the bed. The door opened. A woman in her forties came in and introduced herself as Jane. I watched suspiciously as she set a tray of weapons on a weird suspended table. Some of it I recognized from my work, but the rest of it looked like torture contraptions.
    Jane took what I presumed was my blood pressure before she finally pulled up a stool to look at my hand. She unwrapped the dressing Pete had put on and examined it. I didn’t pay much attention as she looked it over. Pete had already told me it needed fixing, and I was mentally prepared for the pain of it being stitched up. I didn’t pay Jane much heed at all until she picked up a syringe. “What’s that?”
    “Just something to numb you up, honey.”
    I forced myself to shake my head. Being numb all over, or even just a little bit sounded good, way too good. “No, thanks.”
    She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Are you sure? You’ve made a quite a mess of yourself.”
    I followed her gaze down my arm and found myself transfixed by the bloody, blistered hole in my hand. It didn’t look anything like the neat incision I’d been so fascinated by the night before. I felt sick. The sight of my scorched skin made my head spin until I was sure I’d fall off the damn bed.
    Pete moved. Suddenly, he was beside me. “Don’t look,” he said. “Just breathe.”
    He put his hand on my back and gestured for Jane to continue forward with her syringe. “It’s just your hand,” he said quietly. “You won’t feel it anywhere else.”
    The injection hurt, but after, with my attention thoroughly focused on the