Free The Hollow Heart (The Heartfelt Series) by Adrienne Vaughan

around the main entrance was a mass of bodies
pressed together, the crowd banked back into the auditorium. Violent struggles
were breaking out; teams of security guards in oxygen masks were trying to
maintain order. A man with a camera snatched a mask off one of the guards. A colleague
hit him with a truncheon, he fell to the floor. The guard tugged his mask back
on.
    Ryan led his crocodile of survivors towards the main
entrance and then turned, pushing against the crowd. Marianne was struggling to
hold onto Paul, they were being buffeted and bashed as they battled through.
Paul’s hand fell away and as she turned to find him, she could just make out
his head as a black patent shoe crushed into his face. She yanked Angelique’s
hand. Angelique tugged Ryan. He slipped back and helped Mike drag Paul to his
feet. Paul’s left arm swung uselessly away from his body, his elbow smashed,
his nose flattened in a pulp of blood. Ryan indicated to Zara to hold onto
Paul’s shoulder and they pushed on.
    There was a large group of people at a doorway, they seemed
to be passing through, not quickly but steadily when another explosion erupted
deep in the bowels of the structure. Directly above them, the walls and ceiling
of the marquee burst into flames, melting away to expose the night sky. The
influx of air exacerbated the inferno, the smoke intensified, Marianne could
hold her breath no longer, her throat was burning, eyes stinging and streaming
water. She started to cough. Angelique’s fingers were oily, they were slipping
away. They pushed on. She cracked her knee against what appeared to be a large
metal object, she was sliding as she groped ahead, sliding on water, or was it
foam? She could see metal shapes around her; they were in the catering area.
    Ryan must have guessed there would be exits here to the
outside world. It was becoming brighter. The crush of bodies was easing; they
seemed to be peeling away. She looked down at her right hand, Paul’s fingers
were no longer there. When had she let go of Paul? She felt a wave of panic
rising in her chest and then a rush of air, fresh, clean air flooded her
nostrils, gushing into her face. She blinked against the light.
     Marianne realised she was outside. Through blurred eyes,
she saw a woman in uniform, who put her face close to Marianne, feeling down her
arms, touching her head. Smiling grimly, she urged Marianne into a vehicle.
Marianne could make out Angelique ahead. They were wearing the same shiny,
silver blankets. The vehicle lurched. Through the window of the ambulance, she
saw Ryan helping Paul onto a stretcher.
     Her skin hurt. No-one even tried to talk. She and Angelique
bumped along beside each other in silence. Marianne’s shoulders throbbed where
the roof structure had caught her as it fell to the floor. She could see
Angelique’s blackened legs, burned where her evening gown had melted onto her
skin. They rattled through the streets in a daze, deposited with the rest of
the ambulance’s bloodied passengers at a hospital on the outskirts of the city.
    Once inside the building, bursting with trolleys and
wheelchairs, Marianne and Angelique were separated and Marianne found herself
sitting alone in a makeshift emergency bay for what seemed like hours. She
remembered a smiling, yellow-skinned man in a pale blue shirt, asking her to
count to ten beneath her oxygen mask, before she faded into the luxuriant
blackness of anaesthesia.
    Luckily, her collarbone was only dislocated, but the gashes
to her shoulders and back were dangerously deep and needed surgery to remove
pieces of metal and debris from her wounds. Once cleaned, patches of skin were
grafted onto the largest wounds, the remainder pulled together with a variety
of stitches and small metal clamps.
    When she came too, she felt fantastic for about thirty
seconds and then waves of nausea caused her stomach to tighten and she vomited
copiously into the dressing on her left shoulder. Struggling to sit up,