Free The Abandoned Trilogy (Book 1): Twice Dead (Contagion) by Suchitra Chatterjee

scrunched up peach coloured paper and said in a voice that burned from the pain of the acid that had come up from my stomach, “No snide remark about me being a weak fucking cripple eh Seb?”
                  He didn’t reply, he just leaned forward and was equally as sick as I was, his vomit mixing with mine, splattering the toilet and the seat with equal intensity. I found myself leaning over him, grabbing more toilet paper and pushing it toward him.
    He grabbed my hand, still holding the bog paper, two vomit stained people leaning over a toilet filled with our sick, sharing toilet paper and the horror of what we had both just heard moments before.
                  Oh, this didn’t make me and Seb best of friends right there and then, far from it, but what it did do was cement an understanding between us about who we were as people on a certain level. We might never agree on another thing in our lives, but we knew something important about each other right at that moment and in the days to come this was going to help us in ways we would have never thought possible.
                  “I think I chucked up more than you Lady of Shadows,” Seb said as he let go of my hand, taking some more toilet roll from me and wiping his mouth clean of the debris he had just heaved up from his stomach.
                  “You always have to be first in everything,” I said. I leaned over him again and flushed the toilet, watching the contents of our stomachs swirl out of sight.
                  “First counts for everything,” he replied, “Coming second means nothing.”
                  “Even in a puking contest?”
                  “Especially in a puking contest.”
                  “Let’s go back,” I said and he nodded his head. We left the bathroom, heading back into the office where Adag was sitting at her desk, her head in her hands, and Mitch was looking out of the office window onto the normalcy of the beautiful wild land that Thorncroft was set in.
                  “Sorry,” I said in embarrassment, “My stomach…”
                  “You must have the constitution of an ox,” Seb said to Mitch as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand for the third time.
                  “Not really,” Mitch took out his cigarette packet from his shirt packet and lit one, inhaling long and deeply, no one in the office objected, “But I was in the army, I did three tours of duty in the Middle East, you see and hear a lot of shit that you try not to think about too much, you adapt,” he let the smoke out of his lungs, “Mind you there are some things you see that are seared into your brain for eternity.”
                  What Gregory had just told us would be seared into my brain for the rest of my life. Seb and Adag’s too I suspected.
                  The Gorilla was hunched in his seat, still holding his cup of tea in both hands.
                  “I always did like horror films,” Seb exhaled, long and hard, “Found them great fun, the gorier the better, nothing quite like the Night of the Living Dead.”
                  “It’s supposed to be imaginary,” I said in a faraway voice, “Not real…”
                  “It’s real alright,” the Gorilla mumbled from his huddled seat, “They ripped her apart, her own boyfriend, he bit her throat open, oh God, she didn’t know what was happening, her face, her eyes…they….”
                  “Stop it,” Adag spoke, she lifted her head up, her eyes were filled with horror and guilt. I had a good idea what she was thinking and feeling. She had allowed Shannon to go with Gregory to Thorncroft; she had played a part in the young Auxiliary’s death, “You’ve told us, we know.”
    Mitch moved from the window and held out his cigarette to the older woman.