Sleep Tight

[Namira]

((Shauna and Danny continued from Welcome to the Fucking Monkey House))

The easy way to describe this would be 'everything hurt'.

But that was easy and simple and nothing about this was either of those.

It wasn't everything. It was the specific way her breath wheezed some as she exhaled, it was the way that the lingering discomfort in her toes still hadn't quite gone away, that she still had a headache, that her mouth was raw and aching, that her throat was hoarse from when she screamed, the pain the shot through her arms when she adjusted position, the patches of skin which itched and wept where she'd got ropeburn, the way her eyes felt watery and irritated from emotion and wearing contacts for too long.

Just saying 'everything' made like it was one big pain. It wasn't. It was a whole mess of little and not so little ones that added up to agony. One huge everything, Shauna could maybe curl into a ball and block it out, stash herself in some other place and ride it out 'till things felt just a tiny bit better.

She tried to block out one thing and another came up, then another, and even in those brief seconds she managed to distract herself from the pain, it was because she was thinking about the reality of being five seconds away from death. Any second now, someone was going to kick down the door and finish what the ropes started.

Shauna didn't say any of that to Danny. One part cause she felt guilty talking to him, one part cause if she said it that would make it come true, one part cause he wasn't that great conversation right now. She might have given him some kind of concussion landing on him like that; one of her knees hurt way more than the other and she had this vague idea that she might have smashed it into his head on the way down. He was coherent some of the time, but Shauna didn't think she was much of any better either, especially when every time there was a loud noise it was everything she could do not to squeal or gasp or cry in panic, heart pounding a million miles an hour.

In that fashion, the night passed. The two of them burrowed up together in a corner of an abandoned building, shivering and shuddering at every sound, freezing up petrified, amplifying every noise into an axe murderer behind the door.

"I wanna go home," she mumbled to Danny. He didn't respond. He'd fallen asleep.

Shauna tried to cry quietly, so as not to wake him up.

((Shauna and Danny continued elsewhere))