Kim’s Earth: Bethany: Waking Up (part 5)
Feb. 17th, 2014 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I felt my face flush. “It was my job,” I said, trying to make myself feel a little less embarrassed and mostly failing, “but even if it wasn’t I would have done everything I could to help any way, because I don’t think I felt as bad as some of you did.” I shrugged. “Now I’m lucky enough, if being alive now can really be called luck, to have survived the injection when almost everyone else in the hotel died, and I’m guessing that the way I was feeling was a sign that my body was fighting off whatever it was that affected the others so badly.”
He shook his head, as I wished I could remember his name. “Maybe it was for you, but I know I felt awful after the injection. At first everything was fine, so I thought that all the reports I read about it not being tested properly were lies, the way the World Government said they were, and then I stood up. That was when the dizziness hit me.” He bit his lip. “I think that was the hardest part to deal with, because I still felt dizzy even when I was lying down, which made it hard for me to want to get up. When I woke up earlier I remembered how dizzy I felt and it took me a little while to convince myself that I was okay to stand up.”
“Dizziness wasn’t something I had to cope with.” I couldn’t imagine how I would have done if that had been one of the problems I was dealing with. “My limbs did feel a bit like they were encased in steel, but that was something I managed to work through.” I bit my lip. “I didn’t really feel, to begin with, like I had a choice, because I was being paid to look after you all, and then, as I came to the conclusion that things really were as bad as some of the reports said they were going to be, I decided that I was going to keep going. You all seemed so badly affected and I wanted to do everything I could to help.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Neither do I. I wanted to ring my parents but there was no dial tone and right now I don’t think I’m capable of walking to their house to check on them.”
Hearing that made me feel glad, for the first time in my life, that I’d been brought up by my aunt, who hated me, and it was that hatred that made me decide to leave home the moment I turned eighteen. There was every chance that my aunt was dead, the same as everyone else, which was, as much as I wished I it wasn’t, a huge weight off my shoulders. It meant I wouldn’t get phone calls every month from the woman, who still liked to pretend to the people around her that she cared about her niece, when I knew it was simply because she didn’t want to admit to the rest of the world that she didn’t like the girl she’d been forced to raise.
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.