She cried for ages. Her eyes felt sore and swollen and her cheeks were sodden. She wiped her face with her hands and dabbed at her sore eyes with her fingers. She called out Kate's name again but she was greeted with nothing but an eerie silence. The surrounding mass of floor and sky looked and sounded dead. She wanted to cry again but she so desperately wanted to be strong this time. She fought back the tears and began to walk on.

She became aware of a noise behind her, like breathing, but she didn't want to turn around.

"It's Kate", said a voice.

Her heart throbbed in her chest. Kate. She turned quickly around and uttered a tiny, strangled gasp. Yes, it was Kate, but not the Kate she knew. Her body was mutilated. Her entire body was a milky white in colour and the skin was swollen like it had been in water for weeks. Flakes of skin had begun to peel off and parts of the skin had dissolved and Emma could see yellowed bone in its place. Most of the hair on her head was gone and Emma could hardly recognise the face anymore. That, too, had swollen like a balloon.

"This is what I looked like when they pulled my body out of the water." She grinned, showing yellow teeth and her eyes were emotionless; holes usually were. There weren't any eyes, not really.

Emma tried to talk to her, to scream at her, but nothing came out. She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it, closed it again, like a dying fish out of water. She turned on her heels and ran but she would not move. Her legs were moving rapidly as though she was on a treadmill and it had been turned to full speed, but she was not going anywhere. A wet, swollen hand latched on to her shoulder and then a sickening, choked voice hissed "Welcome to hell, Emma."

There were flames now. They appeared suddenly; bright oranges and reds and yellows; hot colours, burning colours. The flames licked her body and she screamed out in pain as they burned her flesh. She screamed again and again and again as her skin burned off and she was now nothing more than a charred skeleton.

She yelped in pain and clutched her rib cage with her bony hands as if trying to protect herself. It seemed to have been working, too. The pain was dissipating Emma was sure of that. The flames dimmed and then shrunk. They were soon the size of candle flames and what surrounded Emma was darkness; sheer darkness.

"Emma?" called a distant voice. It sounded familiar to her but she couldn't remember who it was. It was in the back of her mind like a long forgotten memory that had been brought back to the surface when you looked at something or someone said something to you, only to bury itself back in the darkest area of your mind in a split second.

That voice.

"Emma."

She heard a bleep. It was high pitched and she was sure she had heard it before. Was sure. In a hospital. Now she could see bright shapes, human shapes. She could make out a white ceiling and a strange grey thing near the corner like a skyscraper.

She lay in her hospital bed for fifteen minutes, drifting in and out of consciousness. Her mother was holding her hand, teary eyed, thankful to God for bringing her daughter out of her four day coma. Her dad was sat in a brown old fashioned seat next to Emma's bed and was stroking her soft hair with his hand. He was teary eyed too.

As her eyes began to come into focus, Emma fixed her eyes to her mothers.

"Mom," she croaked. "."

"You're in the hospital, sweet-heart," her mother said gently. "You were in an accident. You're going to be alright now though. Dad's here."

"Hello Emma," he said. "Welcome back."

Emma turned her head slowly and looked at him. She smiled at him and he smiled back. He began to stroke her head again, just thankful to have his daughter back. The two of them thought they had lost her.

An hour had passed now and Emma was sat upright in her bed, a cup of water in her hand. She was very sore and had learned what had happened in the accident. Her mom had told her; hesitant at first until Emma said she wanted to hear. The skyscraper she had seen when she was awakening was a file cabinet. It looked so huge and alien to her before.

Kate drifted through her mind. Odd that her cousin should drift through her mind when she had been dead for seven years. She had died in a boating accident. Emma was young at the time and didn't really fully understand death at that age, so it didn't affect her as much as the older people, maybe. It was as though she had dreamed about Kate. She could sense when she had been dreaming of someone even if she couldn't remember the dream. Maybe she had dreamed of Kate, but she would probably never know now. She had no memory of a dream she could have had if she was comatose and she wasn't going to try and force herself to remember it, either. She was just glad to be awake, with her parents by her side. She was glad to be alive.

The end.