Wolf Running Read Online Free

scattered like dandelion fluff. Drifts of paper led down towards the nurses’ station, a trail of white spotted with red. She couldn’t see any people, either living or dead. She looked left, towards the elevators. It was the same - furniture tossed about, no people to be seen.
    Which way? Nurses’ station? She turned right and headed down the hall. The silence, the stillness lay like a blanket over everything. She checked other hospital rooms as she passed them, peering cautiously around the door frame if the doors were open or looking through the window if the doors were closed. Most of the rooms were empty, although they all looked recently occupied. And abruptly deserted, to judge by the tangled sheets on the floor and the beds knocked askew. One of the rooms had two patients, lying with open mouths and trailing limbs on their beds. A cautious tap on the door elicited no response.
    She approached the nurses’ station carefully. It was a large, well-lit space that faced a waiting area and wrapped around the corner where two halls met. The station hadn’t escaped the chaos. The computer monitors were smashed on the floor. Clipboards, pens, pencils and other office supplies had been thrown about. Blood was everywhere, streaks on the floor and smears on the walls. Gore pooled on the counter-top and trailed off the far edge, leading her around to where a heavy-set nurse in green scrubs sprawled on the floor. A blue-handled pair of scissors had been jammed deep into the woman’s right eye. The other eye was closed, as if to not see any more.
    A soft sound drew her to a door marked ‘Utility’. She approached it carefully when suddenly it swung open and a woman leapt out, brandishing a mop.
    “Stay back! I mean it! I’m not afraid to use this!” the stranger shouted, waving the mop around. She was young, with disheveled blonde hair and wide, shocked blue eyes. “I’ll jam this right in your face! Wait...I know you. You...you’re the Jane Doe. Right?” The halting voice was familiar. It was the same one, the young-sounding one, she had heard talking when she lay semi-conscious in the hospital bed.
    The young woman stepped out of the closet, still clutching the mop. “Yeah, that’s right. You came in with the blood...all...over...” Her voice trailed off as she took in the destruction around her.
    “Who are you?” Her raspy words cut through the strange woman’s daze.
    “My name is Jamie. Jamie Woodley. I’m a nurse here, on the medical floor. My God, what happened here?”
    “Who am I?” she said.
    Jamie looked at her. “I...don’t know. Don’t you know who you are?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t even know where I am.”
    The other woman sighed. Well, you’re in the hospital. Exeter General. How about your name?”
    “I don’t remember anything. Anything at all.”
    “Well, I guess I can call you ‘Jane Doe’.”
    She thought back to the words she had heard while she was drifting in and out of consciousness, and what she had taken for someone’s name. “No,” she said, “call me...Nowen.”
    The nurse cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. “Ok, sure.” She looked around the trashed nurses’ station. The mop, which had been slowly dipping towards the floor, rose up again. “Did you do all this?”
    Nowen shook her head. “No. Of that, I’m sure.”
    “Oh, that’s reassuring. ‘Cause you look kind of scary.” Jamie stared at the drying blood on the counter front. “Where is everybody?”
    Nowen motioned back down the hall that she had come from. “There’s some dead people in my room.” She decided against describing the state she had found them in. “Also there’s a dead woman behind the counter.”
    The mop fell with a clunk as Jamie looked over the countertop. She gasped and covered her mouth with one hand. “Oh, no! That’s Marcy. Oh, God, who did that to her?” Tears ran down the nurse’s face. “She was so nice, always helping me find where things were around here...”