Survive the Night by Riley Sager
INT. HOSPITAL—DAY
It’s quiet inside the hospital. Everyone from the nurses to the clerks to the volunteers in their candy cane pinafores works in a subdued hush, even though it’s not very busy. There’s only one other nonemployee at the help desk—a middle-aged man slumped in a chair by the door with a vacant look in his eyes. Charlie hopes he’s just tired, but she doubts it. He has the appearance of someone backhanded with bad news. Charlie suspects she looks the same.
She had been here earlier, before being taken to the police station. A frantic ambulance ride straight from the Mountain Oasis Lodge—the speed necessitated by the other person in the ambulance with her.
Charlie’s injuries were minor. Some scrapes, bruises, and a broken nose from when Robbie elbowed her in the face. Now a fat strip of medical tape sits across the bridge of it. When Charlie first saw it in the mirror, she couldn’t help but say, to no one in particular, “Chinatown. Roman Polanski. Nineteen seventy-four. Starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.”
The nurse who’d done the taping didn’t get the reference.
“You need to see it,” Charlie told her. “It’s a classic.”
Then it was off to the police station, where she described her long endurance test of a night—leaving out the bits she didn’t think the cops needed to know. They weren’t particularly concerned about the details of why Charlie was at the lodge and how it caught fire and what the others were doing there. All the cops really cared about was that the Campus Killer had not only been identified but that his corpse was found drifting in a sunken Volvo, handcuffed to the steering wheel.
Charlie didn’t fudge the truth about that. “It was self-defense,” she said, and she meant it.
Mostly.
In return for her information, Charlie was told how someone driving along Dead River Road saw the lodge in flames, went to the diner, and called 911 on the same pay phone Charlie had used earlier. When first responders arrived, they found her drenched and shivering on the side of the road leading up to the lodge.
Charlie ended up being the first person they found. She wasn’t the last.
It’s this last person she’s here to see, having been driven back to the hospital from the police station. She’s dry for the most part, although Maddy’s coat is still damp and in dire need of dry cleaning. Charlie could use a good cleaning herself. Her hair is a mess, swimming pool swill still sticks to her in spots, and she smells like a wet dog that’s rolled in something dead.
Now she’s at the door to a hospital room, taking a steadying breath before entering.
Inside, Marge lays in a hospital bed, looking ten times smaller than she did mere hours ago. She’s hooked up to an oxygen tank. A clear tube runs under her nose and loops around both ears.
Charlie had hoped she’d be asleep, but Marge is wide awake and propped up by several pillows. Beside her is a tray table, the breakfast on top of it untouched.
“You should have pulled the trigger,” she says when Charlie steps into the room.
Charlie stops a few feet from the bed. “Hello to you, too.”
“I mean it,” Marge says. “I’m probably going to die in this place. I might never leave this hospital bed. That’s what the doctor said.”
“Doctors have been wrong before.”
It wouldn’t surprise Charlie if Marge stuck around for longer than two months. She’s still got some toughness to her. She must, or else she wouldn’t have lasted through the night. Firefighters found her still sitting by the swimming pool, long after the lodge had collapsed in on itself. Although suffering from smoke inhalation, second-degree burns from flaming debris that hit her during the collapse, and the onset of hypothermia, she was still kicking.
“I’m assuming the police came by,” Charlie says.
“They did. I was surprised by what they had to say. I didn’t know we went to the lodge just to reminisce. And that the fire was an accident. And that I apparently hadn’t shot anyone, let alone two people.”
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Charlie says.
Marge starts to reply, grasping for the right words. When they refuse to arrive, she simply says, “I’m sorry. What I did was—”
“I’m not here for an apology,” Charlie says. “And I’m sure as hell not here to seek your forgiveness.”
Marge peers up at her, curious. “Then why are you here?”
“To say that we’re square.”
Charlie approaches the tray beside the bed. She reaches deep into her pocket, pulls out something small and ivory, and sets it down on the breakfast tray.
Marge stares at Robbie’s tooth, the corners of her mouth twitching upward into what Charlie can only guess is a smile. Sinking back into the pillows, she closes her eyes and lets out a long, satisfied sigh.
“Good girl,” she says.
