I Unintentionally Became Her Kitten

Chapter 66: Shatter

The office building was quiet. The three of us got into the elevator and the elevator went up. As the doors parted we got back out. The secretary was staring at the camera feeds. Alisha looked at him quizzically, but he gave her a nod and she dismissed the question. She started to go toward the hall of frosted glass panels and similarly frosted glass doors.

I finally smelled it as I was starting to break away from them to wait on a chair across from the secretary.

“Alisha,” I said, concerned and she gave her guard a nod to go ahead and proceed before turning back to me.

She waited as I figured out what had sent up a red flag in my brain.

“It smells bad,” I explained. “Like …”

I knew the smell. It wasn't gas… and kind of smelled like garbage. It had an unpleasantness to it that I associated with– 

“Death,” I realized. “It smells like something died.”

“Death? Like a corpse?”

I nodded.

She looked up at where her guard had gotten to the usual door and was turning the handle.

“Wait. Bre–” but that was when the shockwave destroyed everything.

It was hard for me to piece together exactly what happened. One moment I was talking to Alisha and then I blinked and I was on the ground with her on top of me. My ears felt strange and a ringing gradually crescendoed into the worst tinnitus I had ever heard.

I felt Alisha moving on top of me and once her weight lifted started to sit up. My hand landed on something that bit me and I looked down to find the entire floor covered in frosted glass shards.

A small bead of blood started to ooze from where one stuck into my palm.

Alisha put a hand in front of me and her mouth moved but I didn't hear what she said. A finger gestured again and I understood. Stay here.

I didn't argue. My head hurt real bad and my hand now too. I reached with two fingers and pulled on the glass, feeling the burn as it pulled free. More blood dripped down, but it was slow enough I didn't worry about bleeding out.

There was another bang, but it was, as everything else, severely muffled. I found the source as I craned my neck and I saw Alisha behind me holding her gun in both hands. There was blood on her already.

More neck craning and I saw the secretary man downed, trying to hold blood inside his chest but that was a losing battle.

The wheels continued to turn in my head.

A bomb?

I realized. But where had it been?I looked forward again. At where her guard had been.

He was down, too. But there was blood.

A lot of blood.

And he wasn't breathing.

I started to reassess myself. I was okay, I thought. Dizzy, my head hurt terribly and my ears were still ringing. My hand was bleeding but not badly.

I was more worried about my dress, which, at another look, I had gotten blood on already. There was more than I expected though.

I started to push some of the glass away from me so there was a spot to put my hand down and support my weight. Even if my dress was ruined this guy needed help. A hand clamped down on my shoulder though, making me flinch and I looked up. Alisha stepped past me again, making another gesture for me to stay put and went to her guard. She put her fingers to his neck, feeling for the pulse with some amount of hope.

And then she sighed visibly and hung her head a bit. Her fist planted itself firmly against one of the window frames that was now empty other than a few shards still clinging on.

That wasn't good news, I grasped.

I should give her a hug. I started to stand again and managed to gather my legs underneath me.

As I stood though, my body swayed and I couldn't find the ground beneath me until my hip planted itself back down with all of my weight behind it.

I blinked, slowly. How was Alisha standing? She had been in front of me so if anything she should be the one with the worse injuries.

She was bleeding, I saw now as she stood again. There was a darker spot on her dress at the back. The stain was very slowly creeping downward.

She was ignoring it, of course, and instead came over to me. She helped me upright, crouching in her heels and examined my face. 

Her voice was incredibly distant as she spoke to me, like I was hearing it from across a canyon or through water, but at least I could hear it at all. 

“Kitten?” I saw the word on her lips more than heard it. “You have…” I couldn't make out the second part.

“Huh?” I asked. My voice sounded even stranger.

She took a breath and spoke slower and louder. “You have a concussion,” she repeated. “Let me…” and the words were lost on me again but she pulled one of my arms around her shoulders and braced her other beneath me before standing, pulling my weight up.

I followed, doing my best to find my footing but my feet felt so far away.

She got me away from the hallway and flicked a piece of glass off my dress before sitting me down on the same chair the secretary had been on.

And then she was messing with her phone.

I sat as the images started to sink in. This place was utterly destroyed. I knew the glass had all shattered but it didn't register just how much there was until I wasn't sitting in the middle of it. Every surface  beyond the desk had glass either on top of it or embedded in it. It seemed Alisha and I had been fortunate to be standing just a bit away from the main part of the hallway. But her guard…

I felt a bit sick suddenly. Her guard was not in good shape. I tried not to look too closely but I could tell one of the larger shards had taken a good chunk of his face off and whatever remained was still shredded with fine lines of blood and deeper gouges.

If only I had said something a bit sooner. Or a bit quicker.

My heart beat started to pick up with the familiar feeling of panic. I took a few deep breaths, but that was surprisingly painful. I wasn't bleeding from my torso anywhere. But explosions caused a lot of concussive damage didn't they?

I did my best to not panic but it was hard when Alisha was pulling her dress off, revealing a slit in her back that was letting out a wanton stream of the red. It was like she'd been stabbed… but I could still see the edge of the glass where the liquid was oozing around.

I heaved suddenly and shifted to lean forward and threw up on the floor.

There wasn't any way for Alisha to treat that injury herself so I started to get up again but she stopped me, putting a hand on my shoulder and pushing me back against the chair.

“Wait,” she enunciated and then pointed at her phone.

She… had called for help, I guessed. Which meant someone should be here soon.

At the moment she was shredding a clean part of her dress into long strips and took my bleeding hand in hers and started to wrap it tightly.

She was ignoring all the blood… and my puddle of vomit.

It was then I realized I had absolutely no sense of smell. I couldn't smell the puke or the blood or that gross corpse smell that I’d noticed before. There was just burning in my nostrils and down my throat.

Within a minute or so, Alisha was still wrapping my trembling hand and another person came up the elevator, skidding to a stop at the sight of us.

Tye, with Matteo on his heels and a large duffel bag over his shoulder. He dropped it on the desk where I was still sitting and said something… but again I couldn't understand the muffledness.

He pointed at Alisha and repeated what it was.

Alisha made a gesture with my hand in hers. He frowned and said something to Matteo who came over and took over for her, putting pressure across my palm as Tye made Alisha sit down.

She resisted at first but at a second glare from him, she listened. She sat on a clean part of the floor, away from the blood and the glass. Tye opened that duffel bag and pulled out some medical supplies.

Matteo moved on from the palm of my hand to checking me over for any more bleeding then pointed in my face. “Stay here,” he told me.

“But I want to help,” I protested.

“You are injured,” he enunciated. “And in shock.”

Shock? I was aware of what was going on. And then it sank in. I should be more afraid, not just a bit of panic. I had almost died, didn't I?

I looked over to see Alisha grimacing badly as Tye extracted that piece of glass from her back. Her flesh clung to it as he pulled with some pliers. His hands were gloved at least so when the blood squirted they stayed clean.

The shard finally pulled free and Alisha shuddered with a gasp.

Tye’s fingers simply replaced it, sticking into the bloody gash. It took three of his fingers to cover the width and then he fumbled around to grab a bunch of gauze.

Alisha was doing this all without painkillers. Her pain tolerance had to be extraordinary. She was reacting to the pain, I could see that, but she wasn't fighting against the treatment.  I didn't think I had the self discipline. Matteo was keeping his eye on me so I didn't try to get up and I wasn't the one having a two inch long, very deep wound messed around with.

This was kind of surreal, actually. Part of my brain still wasn't working quite right since the sight of blood was oscillating rapidly between kinda pretty and absolutely grotesque.

I felt sick again, but my body didn't try to throw anything else up. 

Another individual came up to join us and he went straight to Alisha, pulling on surgical gloves.

He took over routing around in the medical supplies bag and pulled out suture equipment and a bottle I guessed was disinfectant.

Alisha stayed still as he did the extremely painful looking process of stitching her wound closed. She ground her teeth through most of it and I could see both fists clenched on top of her legs.

When the doctor-like man had her mostly taken care of, Tye came over to me with another suture kit and more disinfectant. I swallowed down the fear of pain as he took my hand and started to unwrap it. He was talking… but I didn't understand him. I was starting to hear a little more. Although it was hard to know if that was because I could hear better or because my brain was starting to filter out the ringing.

He pulled the strips of fabric away revealing the cut there. It was far deeper than I had initially thought and long. Tye shook his head and doused the injury with that black liquid. I braced myself for the sting but it wasn't so bad.

He then pulled my hand closer to him. I watched as he ever calmly threaded the needle.

“Painkiller?” I managed to ask. He looked up and then back at where the bag was sitting over to the side. And then he reached over to pull out a bottle of acetaminophen.

They must not have anything stronger. That was probably why Alisha didn't bother with it. Acetaminophen would take time to take effect and even then it wasn't made to cut out surgical pain like getting stitches. Still he gave me some and waited until I got comfy to start making a plan to stitch my hand shut.

These stitches hurt. There wasn't enough numbing and it took every ounce of my willpower to not rip my hand out of his grasp. My heart was beating too fast again and I did my best to control my breathing.

He quickened his pace, doing his best to tie off and cut the threads without pulling on them too hard. Even looking at it made me squeamish, never mind the burning. 

I looked up to see Alisha pulling a loose fitting shirt on over her bra and bare skin and the blood immediately starting to soak into it here and there.

Tye finished the stitches, giving me a neat seam right across the palm of my hand and he rewrapped it with a proper bandage.

His mouth moved again and I thought he said, “alright, we need to get out of here,” and looked at Alisha but she looked blankly back at him. I realized she couldn't hear much of anything either.

Tye helped me up keeping an arm under my shoulder the entire time as Matteo and the doctor threw the used medical supplies out of the way and packed the unused stuff back into the duffel bag.

I struggled a little bit as Tye kept almost all of my weight supported with his one arm but he didn't let me go as I was more or less dragged to the elevator. Matteo was standing with Alisha, but she was allowed to support her own weight while my arm was hurting. I thought we'd take the Escapade but Tye pulled me away when I started to go that way and instead sat me down in the back of his car. He shut me inside and I simply sat and looked at my hands. There was just a little dampness under the bandage that I could feel.

After some discussion outside the car, Alisha came around and got in, sitting very slowly in the back seat. That wound had to be painful, and she hadn't even taken any painkillers of any kind.

Tye handed her a water bottle from the front seat and she settled down with it, staring intently without feeling. I reached over and brushed my hand across her shoulder, making her flinch, which turned into a pained scowl.

Maybe now wasn't a good time to try and be cuddly. Instead I settled to rest my uninjured and somewhat cleaner hand on the seat between us. She waited a bit but finally took it and gave me a sad smile. I tried to return it, but I still felt pretty out of my body other than the pain.