Her hands ached with the cold, the tips of her fingers fading to a soft blue that reminded her of late-summer clouds. They were tied tightly with rope that snaked around her wrists, across her bare chest and beneath her in tight knots. It had been so long since she had been in the woods, having surrounded herself with buildings and people and noise. Silence frightened her and now it wrapped her in its stiff, chilly arms beneath a sky painted with stars. She counted them, over and over, as her teeth had begun to chatter too hard to continue singing to herself. She wanted to be held, but in real arms, to feel the weight of another body against her, to feel the warmth of another's skin against her own. With the thought came faces, swimming and gliding through the darkness; Abby's caring eyes and dimpled cheeks, her mother's thick blonde hair and freckled nose, Patty's eyes glinting from behind a book, and Erin. Erin. Erin. Her delicate features played like a shuddering film reel, swooping again and again across her vision, the dark tree tops swaying behind her translucent image.
"Erin." Her jaw involuntarily clamped down hard onto her tongue and a wave of what should have been a sharper pain shot down her throat, her mouth warming with blood. Her eyes narrowed as all at once fireworks burst to life in the distance behind Erin's ghostly face. No, fireflies! She thought, her face too cold to form the smile she thought she was making.
"Erin, look." The sound of her voice was garbled in thick blood.
Holtzmann tried to focus on the lights darting between tree trunks but they moved too quickly for her to follow. When she brought her eyes back to Erin's the physicist was gone.
"No. No. Erin? Erin!" Her chest heaved, droplets splattering her pale cheeks, the snow that dusted her neck and chest staining red. Her teeth bit into her tongue a second time.
Something cried out in the distance and suddenly the fireflies closed in on her, quickly growing to the size of oranges, weaving and crunching through the forest. Instinctually she slammed her eyes shut and behind the pink, veiny illumination of her eyelids voices and flashlight beams bounced around in the night.
"Got her!" someone called.
"Radio for a bus!" another.
"She doesn't look good." A third.
"Is she breathing?"
"She's bloody."
"Castlewick, notify the captain."
"I don't know."
"I got it."
Holtzmann had been holding her breath but blood tickled the back of her throat and a cough came bursting out of her, spluttering and painful. Eyes flashing open wildly they landed on a shocked, but kind, round face, be-speckled in spit and deep red dots. Behind the man stood two more, each in a dark grey uniform, one holding a wool blanket. The younger stood slack-jawed in terror. Another cough erupted from her and she struggled to catch her breath.
"Roll her over!" the older man shouted. "She's going to choke."
"Jillian…I'm going to have to roll you over, but I have to touch you to do that. You're safe now. I'm not going to hurt you, but I have to touch you. We will get you warm and cozy real soon, okay." She focused hard on his brown eyes, his chubby face. He hadn't seemed to notice the blood that decorated it.
"Can I touch you?" he held his gloved hands out in her line of vision and a radio crackled to life behind him. A soft voice spoke into the electric hum but she couldn't understand what it was saying.
She tried to respond and was lost in another coughing fit. Tenderly the man placed one hand on her right shoulder, and the other on her right hip, slowly slipping them beneath her frigid body he began lifting. Her scream ripped through the woods like a crack of thunder, accompanied by the faint popping sound of her skin peeling from the frozen ground beneath her. She convulsed in pain, tearing more skin and suddenly her world went dark, her body limp.
"Jillian?" The man's breath fogged into the air. "Richard, she's out. Get that bus here fast and tell them we need warm water." He shifted to cradle her weight in his arms without shifting her any further.
"She's frozen to a puddle of blood."