by Riley Mason
She watched as his hand moved inside of her and pulled at the beating muscle in her chest ripping it out and then cutting the strings that was holding it towards the body.
Her body was running on impulse. It wasn’t moving but it was still interpreting. That was until the cleaver came down on her face and cut it diagonally down from right temple to left jaw.
Chapter 43
Samantha King stood in the apartment where her sister had been killed twenty minutes after the call had gone out. She had connected the dots quickly and matched the location to the description. It was her worst fear that it was Amy but when she was given confirmation of the floor of the building, she already knew what it was before she was up there.
As she walked in the door, she saw the chaos moving around the body of her sister that lay on the floor. “Sam?” an officer name Parker said to her. “You shouldn't be here,” he said.
As she looked at him, Parker seemed to get the idea that she wasn’t going to listen to him. He got close to her but she shoved him away, her eyes on the ground where her sister lay, the cavity cut into her chest.
The scream building steam in her chest seemed to get lost somewhere in her throat and she could feel her heart shredding inside of her like a pair of hands had cut into them and started pulling it apart.
All the professional blocks, the experienced eyes, all of it fell away as she stood there, her flesh and blood, her identical twin laying there on the floor.
A man came and grabbed her and that scream that was waiting patiently jumped out of her.
She fought him, resisted, but another two men were on her holding her in place as her arms and her legs went wild against the restraints.
Her body hit hard against the wall in the hallway and two of the men stepped back but Tom stood there, one of the other men in her precinct, his eyes were a cold grey and as he looked at her she could see pain inside of them.
“Sam listen to me, we need to get you out of here,” he said to her, his voice was calm and rational, the exact opposite of what she wanted it to be. She wanted to scream but he had put a calm in her that felt strange inside of her body.
“No,” she said, tears were already on her cheeks, she wasn’t even entirely sure when they had fallen down her eyes. “I need to go back in there.”
“Sam, no,” he insisted. “You can’t be here.”
“What the fuck are you going to do, arrest me?” she asked.
“I don’t want to but this is to close. They’re going to need your head straight. IA is going to come in once they make this connection and you need your facts right. I can’t have you walking around the scene, you know how they are.”
Sam slid down the wall, the strength in her legs had gone out. She watched as Tom called over to EMT’s that were standing by while the initial team was already in the room making way now that the forensic team had done their work.
“Give her something to calm her down,” he said to them and each of them, one man and one woman bent down, an orange tool box at their side, their smocks identical as they made some room on her arm and began to tie it off to plump one of the veins.
“You have to let me go back in there,” she said just as one of the EMT’s was rubbing her arm with alcohol.
“Sam, this one has to move by the book, I can’t imagine how your feeling right now but I can't have you in the scene. Nine of the guys in here are going to get interviewed tomorrow, all of them need to have the same story.”
She watched Tom bend down and look at the male EMT, the woman was sliding the juice from the syringe into her arm. “Get her downstairs, safe and sound and bring her down to the hospital. I want her checked out too.”
The man nodded his head and then Samantha broke consciousness.
Chapter 44
For a second, I have no idea where I am. I’m sure it's not the hospital anymore. There are signs of it all around me but it doesn’t have that same aesthetic and institutional shape and color that they all seem to have and share with one another. This one is grey and there is a fog moving over the floor.
The air is cold but it feels good against my skin and as I get up and out of bed, I can walk despite everything that’s latched to my body.
I look around me. There’s a lot that's different on me. My leg is in a massive black cast that is cut into my leg with screws and pins up to my thigh, my hand has something similar like the pins are holding bones out of place with one another like all the bone in my firing hand shattered.
My chest is where most of the surgery and medical work went from practice to theory. I can see the scars that they sutured up my chest as I lift my gown. There are literal zigzags up my body and staples that is keeping the skin closed. The dressings that are covering most of those wounds are doused in a thick blood that’s mixed with pus. It looks like my chest and stomach slid through a meat grinder. But none of it hurts.
As I get out of bed, with my one good hand I feel my face and I can feel dressed cuts there too, not as extreme as my stomach but they have stitches running through my skin on my forehead and my cheek and I can tell from the splint on my nose that that’s broken too.
I walk with a limp as I leave my room. The place looks lost, almost as if it was abandoned, like everyone that was working inside of it left it at the drop of a hat years ago and the place was left in neglect with patients in there.
There was also like a dust that was floating around the grey hall. Like snowflakes that were stuck from falling or rising with no wind to guide them and no gravity to pull them. They just floated through the air.
“Hello,” I say but I have no real expectation that someone is going to answer me. There is no one here, I’m more then sure of that.
As I turn one of the corners, I can see down a larger hall, this one connected to a reception station, some of the chairs are on the ground as I pass, some of them aren’t. The computer monitors are cracked and as I stroll passed, dragging the anchor on my leg with me as I walk I’m curious to know what happened.
I wonder how long I’ve been like this. There are memories in my head, they're scattered but they’re there. The boat that I was on that Gabriel had dragged me too. The three shots that he took into my chest. The air that I felt under me with the splashes as they threw me overboard while the boat was cutting through the water at high speed. I don’t know how I was found. I don't really know who would’ve done all this work to me and how it hadn’t healed in this amount of time.
“Is anyone there?” I ask the open hall again, my voice bounces around the hall and finally fades. There is still nothing that I can hear except for the sounds of my body moving itself and the click and scrape of everything attached to me.
Finally, as I turn one of the corners, I see something different. The lights on the ceiling, some of them are working nearest me but at the end of the hall they’ve gone so dark that I can’t see the lines of the wall beyond the shadow that’s fallen.
While I can’t see that, I do see something else. There is a figure standing there, facing me, watching me with its head sideways as if it’s just as curious about me as I am about it. Then it screams.
Chapter 45
The scream is enough to push me back and force my hand to my ears. I’m not scared but my heart starts to work over from the fresh reservoir of adrenaline that's now flooding my veins.
My hand reaches for a gun that my head knows is absent. There is no weapon on me and I doubt that my body is that useful in a fight right now. It wouldn’t take all that much to put me on my ass with my condition.
As the scream dies, I right myself up and stand there. I see almost pure white eyes looking back at me from across this distance. “Who are you?’” I ask it.
“I’m what you want,” It says back to me, the voice is dramatic, almost as if it's a stretch on a human voice being spoken through unpracticed vocal chords.
“Where are we?” I ask as I begin to move towards it, slow and patient as I slide myself.
“I'm here to hel
p you Arinna, I want you to have a second chance,” it says to me.
I know it at once, I can feel the change in the air, the gooseflesh that's rising all over my body. The scent of burning that fills my nostrils. It’s a demon.
“Demons don’t help the living,” I say to it, anger touches my tone.
“I want to help you,” it says.
I get close to it, it lets me. I can see the white eyes are nothing more than a cold blue, dulled but almost like mine. Her face is scarred and burned against a matte of ragged jet black hair that's hanging down from her head down to her chest. She’s thin and frail, I can’t tell how long she’s been walking or where we are for her to look like this. They seldom get passed shadow form.
“You’ve evolved,” I say to it.
“That’s because I’m different,” it replies through cracked and peeling lips. “I want to save you, I want to get you out of here.”
“And, where are we?” I ask.
I watch as it looks around. “The other side.”
“Are we in hell?” I ask it.
“Close,” it hints but gives nothing else.
“Why do you want to save me?”
“War,” it replies, a heavy breath stalls her voice as if she wasn’t allowed to say the word.
“The war that’s coming or the war that was fought?” I’m curious, almost intrigued, it knows something.
I can feel my eyes burning and there’s a heat inside of my that’s cooking me from the inside out. Now it’s my turn to scream and as I do I feel like it pushes so much air out of me that my lungs deflate and my heart moves faster than my chest can hold it.
I look up and I see the demon there, smiling down at me as I’m hunched over holding all the pain that’s in my body. “It’s done then,” it says to me.”
My eyes open. I’m in the hospital in a time and a place that I can recognize. As I go to move I’m sore but all the injuries that I saw on myself are gone now.
I get up off the bed and start peeling off all the dressings just to realize that there are no cuts or stitches or staples beneath the gauze pads. All of them are still soaked with wet blood but there’s nothing under them anymore.
I unstrap the block on my foot and the one from my arm. I need to get out of here, I have to get back to my apartment. I’m going to kill Gabriel and it’s going to be slow and painful. I haven’t really thought about the demon that’s getting comfortable in my body. It's making me disgusted with myself but I can't force myself to think about that, not right now at least. There is so much more ahead of me.
Chapter 46
I made my way outside of the hospital to the parking garage where I figured the doctor’s cars were housed since it said MD on every single plate and it was also the closest one to the main building.
My hand is holding onto a set of keys that were lifted off one of the doctors rushing by me as I left, the smile on my face was more than enough distraction for me to lift the keys in his pocket out, that and his wallet.
I touched the alarm sensor and disarmed the alarm on his Dodge Charger SRT8 and heard the distant sound of the door locks falling out of place.
I hop in, touch the ignition, letting the engine bleed life into the rest of the car, pull the panel for the tracking system in the machine and hear the sparks from strands of wire like veins that were now severed, and back out waiting until I’m about a mile up the road and the hospital is getting smaller in my rearview.
Once I’m on the FDR I start to pick up speed, I don’t care that I’m on a small highway or in a stolen car, I need to get back to my apartment, for the most part, as well as can be expected, Gabriel thinks that I’m dead and I want it to stay that way. I don't put it past him to have people watching the rooms at the hospital but I’m sure that if I got this far and he did then I would've known it, been shot, or been dead by now.
There’s a garage about half a block from my apartment on the other end of where I buy liquor and beer from. For some reason that seems like years ago rather than just days, my throat is dry I could use a few drinks now.
I park the car, handing the man on duty with his windbreaker jacket and crooked toothed smile the cash that was in the wallet, by the check on the price list it was good for a few hours, I didn’t plan on spending a lot of time at home. It would just be enough to get some belongings together and move on. I didn’t really trust my apartment at this moment.
I’m anxious as I walk from the garage back on the street that should be so familiar to me but it isn’t. Maybe it's that I’m distracted or maybe it's that everything is slightly off with one of those cancers infecting me from the inside out. I want to be home but as I get closer to it, it doesn’t have the same allure as it once did. That an after I grab the spare key that I hide in the incinerator room and start punching it into the locks, I realize quick that I’m not the first one that’s been here recently.
The place is trashed. There are things everywhere. My mattress is turned over, all six monitors of my computer are smashed and the hard drives were pulled from the wall and taken somewhere. “Shit,” is the only thing that I can say.
I go and sift through papers and what’s left in the trash trying to find something that I’m looking for but at this point my head is pretty focused on what’s not missing then what I actually need.
Going to my dressers, some of the clothes are sifted through but there is more than enough there, there was no reason to take my clothes. What they did take is the knives that were in the drawers and the handgun. My messenger bag is gone too and I know so is my shotgun.
That piece of shit I think. For now, I can’t even bother to shower, I have to get in and out of here faster than I even thought that I had too. I throw some clothes on and take the gown off and shove it to the bottom of the garbage, if someone comes back here looking for something they think they missed, I don't want to add something so obvious to the clutter. There is something else too, I go over to one of the drawers in the kitchen and find I’m in some luck, a handgun with a silencer screwed over the muzzle and a blade are still there hidden underneath the menus of Chinese and Italian takeout that stockpile in every single NYC apartment.
I check the clip and snapback the chamber and slide a bullet into the ready position. I’m wearing a white shirt, a V-neck, and black capris with a pair of all black running shoes, a mess, add to that I tie my hair back into a ponytail and tuck my gun into my back and the blade into the spare pocket of the long tailed black jacket that I throw on over myself.
Opening the wallet, I take a quick real look at the inventory of thing. It’s Gucci and its Alligator skin, I figure that I robbed the right one. Inside of it is another two hundred dollar bills, an Amex black card, and a Platinum one. There are three things that I really need. I need to get some food in my system, some McDonalds sounds amazing right about now, a new place to crash, and a laptop. There are worms hidden in those servers and their hidden well, they should be able to encrypt my data and maybe even tell me where it's being run from. I’ll figure out how to kill him soon enough but my patience is already thinner then I want it to be.
It’s not until I turn to leave that I see it. When they searched through my messenger bag it must’ve fallen out. Under my bed, I go to it and touch it, pull it out, and study it. It’s the envelope that had the coordinates and the key inside of it. I stuff it into my pocket, it’s important but I’m not entirely sure how important it is right now at least.
Chapter 47
Thank God that the Apple Store on Fifth is twenty-four hours. Within an hour I have myself a new Apple laptop, top of the line, and I’ve eaten two Big Macs and now I need to get myself a hotel.
There is a little place over on 1st that I know
of, it’s not the Plaza or the Waldorf Astoria but it’ll more than fit what needs I have with it. I’m still drinking some of the large coke when I get out of the car, there’s decent parking on the street over on first, most people are sickeningly devoted to the Subway. I
am too most of the time but something tells me that I’ll need something a little more reliable than subway transportation in the near future.
A man at the front desk of Lucky Inn greets me. He’s a small Asian man, hunched back and hidden behind stray grey hairs on his head and mole and wide glasses that strain his eyes, hideously large teeth and a mole with sprouts of hair blooming out of it. He greets me with a smile, I’ve seen him before and he recognizes me. I slip him a hundred and he hands me a key, that just bought me two nights. I’ll re-up the cash if he needs it or if it even takes me two days.
It’s not until I’m upstairs and drop the laptop down and the blade too, the gun stays with me, I’m more then sure it’ll be attached to some part of my body for the foreseeable future. I’m glad I have it because the second the door is closed, the lights start flickering. The cold breath steams from my lips and I hear something move before the lights turn back on.
There’s a man standing in the room, tall and broad at the shoulder but thin with long black hair down to his jawline and green eyes, very green like someone took jade emeralds and cut pupils into them.
“Who the hell are you?” I ask, sliding back the hammer on the gun. That little bit of patience I had evaporated and vanished.
He’s wearing a white shirt with an army jacket and dark grey jeans.
“I came to talk some sense into my sister,” he said to me.
“Sister?” I ask.
“The one that healed you, how do you think that happened?” he asks me in return.
I lower my gun, I don’t know why entirely, I’m sure he’s a demon but nevertheless it falls by my waist. “Why did she save me?”
“There’s something a lot bigger than those hounds out there,” he says walking around tucking his hands into his pockets. “Something that’s stirring us up and onto the surface in bigger numbers.”
“Demons don’t trade sides,” I tell it.
“My sister and I are different,” it tells me back. “Why would she heal you, why would she give herself to you like that.”
