(Continued from 2/3 - READ FIRST TWO PARTS)
I ran my hand across the jagged textures of the workshop’s front wall. I made sure to only brush it lightly enough for my fingers to dodge the jagged-edged-tetanus-traps all over this thing.
When I was done hate-viewing the surrealist structure itself, I worked up the courage to even stand in front of the entrance. I planned out the deep breath I was to take the second I’d hear the doorknob jiggling in response. I was really good at mouth-breathing without looking too much like a troglodyte (or so I thought). Bite one side of my lip down, don’t get too greedy with pulling air out the other. Then of course, the particles that would’ve alerted my nose would just end up in my lungs that much quicker, but ignorance is some kind of bliss. I… think that still works for me. I don’t know, check back later.
I steadied myself and raised my hand to the door, which of course was also made of the same clusterfuck mashup. I changed my mind, lowered my hand and kicked it a couple times instead.
I heard an immediate metal clang from the inside that set a ginormous ten second timer for me to run for my life. Ten seconds went by in two, and I inhaled way too sharply, coughing on a lingering part of my dead lung as Vernon opened the door. I tried to force out the tickle as he stared at me from inside. I finished up and breathed through my nose and mouth simultaneously, immediately forgetting my training.
“Can I help you?” He said.
I had briefly neglected to care that Vernon was a member of the miscellany I brutally accosted yesterday as I internally retched. I felt a small jolt of desire to apologize, and if it wasn’t at war with my ick, I might have solemnly agreed to its demands.
“Hey, can you… *cough cough*… help me charge my phone?”
I retrieved it from my pocket, holding it out to show him, but close enough to myself that he didn’t think I was handing it to him. He eyed it up suspiciously before looking me up and down. I’m not exactly sure why he needed to do that, but…
“Did you steal that?” He asked suspiciously.
“ Steal it? No, Natalie gave it back to me.”
“Why?”
Because blue scatters more than other colors.
“Because… I asked for it.”
“And if I asked her that, she would confirm it-“
“-if you can find her then yeah, she would, but she’s busy right now and she told me to come here. She’s also expecting me to be done some time today, so it would be cool if we could make it quick.”
He squinted and scratched his wet… oh my God, why is his beard always wet? Is it self-lubricating? I bet dehydration would have never been in a scare if I’d shared a Warehouse visit with Vernon.
“Well, she wasn’t exactly in the mood to reward you yesterday, so forgive me for not being so eager to believe you.”
“I don’t get it either, man. Not really asking you to believe me, just asking you if I can charge it? And to be honest, I’m not really asking.”
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“Whatever.”
Did I just threaten him? I don’t even know what that was. I felt gross.
I was prepared to feel much more gross stepping foot into this place, but as he stepped back from the doorway, offering me the passage I was hesitant to take, I was surprised to find that it… actually smelled… really nice in there? Like pinewood. I genuinely took a deep breath as I stepped into the workshop. I looked around to see a million pieces of small furniture and technology ripped to shreds. Wires and shavings everywhere across the floor. Random saws, hammers, screws and screwdrivers on every surface. If I didn’t get tetanus from the wall outside, I think there were more nails in this room than there were Nitrogen particles. Everything else I could see seemed like the essential mechanism of whatever it had been ripped off of. Whatever was left of the scrap was probably on the walls outside.
Vernon whistled to me as I turned in time to catch a long white cord. The cord itself was as thick as rope, and the block on its end was the size of a polaroid. He threw a finger towards the far wall of the room. He was already looking away from me as he crouched down the back of a littered desk. I followed his finger to a two-foot tall rubber box with some kind of giant machine sticking out of its center. As Vernon kept rummaging, I walked over to see it closer. There were three sockets sticking out of the top of what was a total mess of wires and porcelain. I stuck the end of the charger in my phone, and shrugged as I went for the middle socket with the block. A hand appeared on my shoulder, immediately pulling me away. I staggered around to see him (not to mention… you know) standing right behind me wearing ridiculously large gloves.
“Bad idea.”
Scared shitless, I quickly shrugged his hand off my shoulder. I hadn’t even heard him walk back up to me.
“W-what? Why?”
“Feel free to try it. Just saying, it will kill you.”
Blunt. Elijah had mentioned the same thing before. I was amazed, yet not surprised, that I wouldn’t remember that kind of information.
He took the block out of my hand with a glove that was thicker than a fireman’s, but looked like it had been stitched out of a thousand different oven mitts.
“Put it down,” He said.
My hubris was quelled by the mental image of what might have happened if I had just stuck the charger in. Ironically, I could smell that image as well. I placed it down on the rim of the rubber box. As Vernon brought the plug down into the socket, barely holding it with the tips of the gloves, I could hear the surge of it making contact. The hairs on my arm stood a little. Vernon jumped back quickly as I saw the small illumination of an empty battery lighting up in fractals on the screen of my phone. Vernon slipped off the gloves to the ground, and I noticed that the tips had a wealth of old burn marks on them. Exact little circles all over.
“What… is this thing?”
He went back to his desk and sat down, picking up the remains of a smoothie blender he was torturing.
“It’s a limiter,” He said. “The phantom circuit breakers here are somewhere inaccessible to human geometry… or so I think, maybe they don’t even exist. A typical outlet should normally be pumping a current of around 240 Volts, let’s just call it 250 it to be funny. The outlets here… well… Natalie won’t let me really run tests anymore… but I’d say the lower bound is likely about 18,100 at any given moment. There’s no way it isn’t fluctuating though. The theoretical capacitance it would take to keep that static… Jesus, I mean-“
“-so… is it just gonna make my phone charge really fast, or is it gonna make it explode?”
He slowly looked back at me like I had rudely paused his audiobook.
“That’s what the limiter is for… so your phone doesn’t explode, and neither do you.”
He looked back to his deconstruction.
“… well… there’s always the one in 600 or so chance that it could just explode the second the current is disrupted at all.”
My tongue was suddenly incredibly lovesick for one of the open sockets.
“… so… ten minutes?”
He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t look away from his work.
“Are you going somewhere?” He asked.
“Yeah… Natalie told me to start it and catch up with her.”
I lie as smooth as my brain (I think that’s close to being a paradox).
“Alright… I guess…” He began. “I’ll keep an eye on it, but it has to be taken out before it’s full or it’s definitely going to catch on fire, so it would be nice if you stayed to monitor it. I’m a little busy.”
If you leave, he’s gonna touch your phone. Is that worth you avoiding ten minutes of sharing a room with-
-Yes, Jesus Christ, is that rhetorical? I can get a fucking moist towelette.
“Yeah yeah, I’m sorry I just… I really gotta go see her before she thinks I’m causing trouble or something. Can you pull it off for me? Or… can you… can you take the phone off when it’s done?”
That fake urgency was the only time I would ever let myself say “sorry” to Vernon for anything.
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“Sure, I suppose.”
“Cool, I’ll be back.”
I almost sprinted to the door.
“Oh, before I forget…”
He did that on purpose. I stopped right before the door in defeat.
“So, you’re Elijah’s new buddy, right? She assigned you to him?”
I doubted Elijah wanted to be my “buddy” anymore after yesterday.
“… yeah, that’s me… why?”
“Tecca and I are supposed to be integrating you into the watch schedule with him. Did someone teach you how to fight?”
I saw the start logo on my screen begin to glow across the room.
“With a weapon against monsters, or with my fists against humans?”
“Monsters. And I wouldn’t use that cute little word for them.”
“Cute? Is the word ‘monster’ cute to you?”
He fully stopped what he was doing and turned around in his chair to me.
“Have you seen what they do? Those things will rip you apart like it’s nothing.”
Those “things”? I guess that’s a harsher word than “monster”, you semantic asshole? I certainly wasn’t hugging one anytime soon, I believed the hype, but rip me apart like it’s nothing? With what muscle?
“Has someone told you that I’m sheltered?” I said. “I’ve seen like five-hundred of them… killed at least like twenty now. If I can defend myself against them, I don’t wanna say they’re not that dangerous but…”
He glared at me.
“I know that’s not what you’re saying, because you’re wrong about it, and that’s the first thing you learned here, isn’t it?
I glared back.
“I didn’t see it,” I hissed. “What the hell are they? You know? Like what do they even do if they catch you?”
He shook his head.
“We are bags of meat,” He said as he turned back to his table. “Just barely well held together bags of meat. It does not take a lot to turn us into pilesof meat.”
That didn’t exactly answer my question, and in fact, was a pretty annoying avoidance of it. It helped me realize that I didn’t care much at all what Vernon thought of me.
“And yet everyone here seems to have survived just fine,” I said. “Maybe anyone else was just too incompetent to handle what isn’t that big of a threat.”
He paused what he was doing, but didn’t turn around. I doubted he was scared, but it had certainly struck the nerve I’d hoped it would.
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“At least you’re helping make up for the loss instead of letting it be,” He seethed.
“Mother f-“
He looked back at me as I bit my tongue. Whatever dialogue path ends the torture of having to be in the same room with this fucker, it can’t be any less desirable than addressing that.
“Whatever, I’ll be back.”
Thanks for the useless paranoia.
“I’m sure you will…”
He resigned to muttering to himself.
“Goddammit,” He gibbered . “Where has that lighter gone…”
As I turned to the door, my eye caught a small glimpse of reflection on the counter next to it. Before Vernon could turn around, I strolled smugly through the exit, swiping the lighter off the shelf on my way out.
Enjoy the minor inconvenience, you fucking freak.
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I checked around every corner of town before I took each turn. I snuck around with the imaginary consequence that every citizen of R&E was going to be walking around with an assault-rifle, safety-off, ready to encounter and pepper me with a tsunami of bullets. I chewed on my cheek as I slid around the walls. It had happened in three different alleyways at this point, and I was taking an unbelievable risk to step foot anywhere near this place without the assurance that it was the right one. But there I was, peeking around a corner to meet the view of Natalie’s house (… our house, I think). This was such a dumb idea. I shouldn’t have involved myself in any way shape or form, but I just couldn’t believe it wouldn’t come back to me without my intervention anyway, and then it would be so much worse than I could ever imagine. I needed this as much as he did.
I crept up to the house. I didn’t know where Natalie was, but from the direction she’d headed earlier, I knew it wasn’t here. I actually very much did not know that, and of course continued without the consideration of how horrible it would be if I was wrong. I wasn’t wrong, but I just shouldn’t have been so stupid to even take the risk. I had to though. I had too many nights where it had kept me awake, spiraling in worry.
I stepped around the corner and into the dark alleyway between our house and the next. I stood there silently, listening.
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How had this continued so long? It’s so obvious.
I stepped further down in the alley.
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“It’s me,” I whispered. “I’m alone.”
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“I don’t believe you…”
I sighed.
“Well then you probably shouldn’t have responded to me at all, moron.”
No response that time. Genius.
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“If I come back there, can you promise to not run away or kill me?” I added.
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“I don’t even know where I would run to…”
That didn’t answer the second part, but it was good enough for me. I made my way to the space behind the neighboring house to find Nick curled up in a ball, staring up at me from the ground.
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He looked horrible. I could smell him.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “How have you not been found yet?”
He looked to the ground.
“I learned how to be a ghost down there, Cody. It’s pretty safe up here when you aren’t trying to channel your inner Dennis The Menace.”
I leaned against the wall next to him.
“I guess you’ve been hearing what these people are like then, right?”
“I’ve heard what they’re like around you . I knew you were a little opinionated, but Christ… I’d wanna punch you in the face too. She let you off easy.”
What, yesterday? He thinks that’s the worst she’s done? It wasn’t even the worst she’d done that day .
“Yeah, that punch was more about reminiscing for us.”
He shot me an eyebrow.
“What does that mean? Are you suggesting that physical violence is your love language?”
OKAY, CHANGE THE TOPIC!!!!!!!
“Do we know each other well enough for me to ask you if you shit your pants?” I asked.
He looked away.
“I… I think I did it while I was sleeping last week… I couldn’t control it.”
Poor bastard.
“Where have you been pissing?”
“I wedged a little hole in the south wall.”
I wanted to make a joke so bad. I think he needed one too.
“Wait… south wall?” I said first . “I don’t think cardinal directions still exist in this place.”
“Of course they don’t, I just consider the gate to be north because it’s the front or something, I don’t know.”
His voice sounded hoarse. I wanted to sit down next to him, but he was really rivaling the notion of ten minutes in a room with Vernon.
“What about food?”
“Kanata…” He said dejectedly.
I knew, I just needed the setup.
“You ate Kanata?!”
He barely reacted to that at all. Maybe he didn’t need jokes.
“Sorry, that was a… yeah, I know she’s been feeding you,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you’re surviving.”
“Well… I was.. but…” He added. “She’s stopped finding me… maybe it’s because I smell like pure evil. Either she’s lost my scent, or she’s totally repulsed by it.”
“Oh, right… I don’t think it’s because of that. She’s been under an ultimatum of behave or be had. I didn’t even think but… she’s probably not going to be able to sneak out to you anymore.”
“So… it’s not my smell?”
“Nick, sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel insecure about that, it’s just-“
“-because I overheard you saying one day about how a lot of people smell pretty bad here. Would anyone even-“
“-well hang on, don’t get too self-secure, because that is not the same. The smell of must and feces are a great deal different.”
He looked back away in shame.
“… you smell lovely, Nick.”
“Stop, Cody. I’m fine.”
Then what the hell am I ?
I kneeled down to his level.
“What about hydration?” I asked as I handed him the rest of my bottle of water.
He took it bashfully.
“What are you, my mother? This place is Heaven compared to what I thought I would die stuck with down there.”
“I’m just asking. Everybody needs water.”
He chugged down the rest of what I hadn’t finished and set it aside.
“You don’t think Kanata has the ability to grab a water bottle?”
“I think she has the ability to grab the Higgs Boson, but what have you been doing without her?”
“Sneaking into your Café. Drinking out of the sink. Nobody watches that place at night after the food is gone. Seems like an oversight, no?”
“Yeah, no , not an oversight. Have you been going in there at night? Because I heard you really shouldn’t do that.”
“From where, The Washington Post?”
I rubbed my face in my hands, enjoying the break of smelling my palms instead of his surrounding aroma.
“Listen dude, you can’t live like this. I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell Natalie about you-“
“-the angry girl?! No!”
Nick was certainly allowed to be funny, though I’m absolutely sure that was not intended to be comedic.
“You can’t tell anyone I’m here!” He gasped desperately.
“For how long? You can’t possibly think this is sustainable, right-“
“-again, do you not remember where I was before?”
That’s not fair. You’re not there anymore. You survived. You shouldn’t have to live the same miserable “life”. That’s not fair .
“No,” I said. “I want better for you.”
His head fell back against the wall.
“…why?”
I felt my head tilt in confusion, but I understood what he meant before he said it.
“I’m… sorry I ran.”
Despite the fact that I really wanted the best for Nick, I didn’t want to accept that apology.
“You didn’t forget about that, did you?” He added.
“…no.”
And I hadn’t. It had made me more angry than most people here had ever made me.
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“But… well… you came back.”
He met my eyes again.
“Yeah but… what if it had been too late when I did?”
I rubbed my arm, wanting to punch him a little now that he was bringing it up again.
“Nick, I know that you’re sorry… didn’t you like… already apologize for this?”
“You didn’t… say it was okay… you told me to shut the fuck up.”
I do remember saying that, yes.
“Pretty sure I just didn’t have the time for a heartfelt makeup in the middle of that nightmare. And even if I did, I definitely would NOT have told you that it was okay…”
He squeezed his face between his knees.
“But…” I continued . “I would’ve like… accepted your apology… because you did come back… and it wasn’t too late… so who cares?”
He slowly looked back up to me.
“I just… don’t want you to think I’m some kind of sociopath.”
“You’re not a sociopath, dude. A sociopath would’ve laughed in my face before running. You’re just a bitch... but… who do you think would blame you? I certainly don’t anymore.”
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“You mean that?”
I smiled slightly.
“It takes a bitch to know a bitch.”
I saw his face shiver like he was trying to produce a smile to return to me, but he continued his petrified smolder, settling his face back between his knees.
I smiled a little, trying to be comforting beyond my ability.
“Listen, man,” I said. “I’ll earn you, I will. I’ll build up enough good karma to break the news of this, because I need to. I don’t care what you say, you can’t keep this up, it’s torture. Obviously way more for you, but for me as well. I don’t want them to kick you out after finding you when it isn’t on your own terms. I tried to tell you down there that my insistence is not very valuable to them, and I’m gonna have to pull off some serious fuckin’ stunts to make my word mean anything , but whatever I need to do, I’ll do it.”
He didn’t respond. I ignored the smell, and moved to sit directly beside him, cringing through putting my hand on his shoulder.
“You survived, Nick. I’m not gonna let you keep yourself in Hell … it will be okay, I just have to keep my head down for a while.”
His eyes drifted up to me.
“Guess that makes two of us,” He said, muffled by his squeezed cheeks.
I smiled and stood up.
“It fucking better,” I said. “If you get yourself caught before I have the chance, I will kick your ass to the curb myself.”
He huffed.
“Heard.”
I nodded and began walking out of the alleyway.
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I turned back to him.
“Nick,” I said as he looked up. “… I’m sorry about Wyatt… even if we weren’t in the place we were down there… I’m serious… I wouldn’t have blamed you for running… I’m sorry.”
He paused and thought about what I said.
“I’ve been dreaming about him,” He said.
I nodded softly.
“Me too.”
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“He was a dick…” He said. “I know he was… but it shouldn’t have been like that… I just… I just wish things had been different… sorry they tried to kill you… and then… you know…”
I did.
“Let’s just… blank the slate,” I said . “And try not to be a part of any horrible event that happens to the other anymore.”
He nodded.
“… I’m glad you’re okay…” I added.
Face back in knees.
“…I’m not .”
Yeah… I know.
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I had been making my way from Natalie’s house to the bathroom, immediately breaking my “head down” resolution in the interest of sneaking a piss in (and washing my hands after touching Nick’s shoulder). Knowing I had already been gone for too long, I was wary, but had been successfully sneaking for long enough that I thought I was too smooth to be caught, so I got stupid. I had just remembered my goal of hiding from Natalie when I accidentally did something that was not good for my goal of hiding from Natalie.
I found Natalie.
She was standing in front of the door of a building I’d never seen the tenants of. I quickly draped myself back around a corner to spy on her, my heartbeat immediately going triple-time. There was a raised, wooden porch, attached to a small canopy over the door she was soliciting. I watched as she scratched her arm, peering through the window off the side of the porch for a moment, before stomping back up to the door and pounding her fist against it.
“Amelia!” She yelled. “ AMEL -I shouldn’t yell- this is unbelievable… are you… alive in there?”
I raised an eyebrow. Had she been waiting at that door the entire time I’d been gone? Surely not. Sounds like she took her own last-minute detour, just like me. Incredibly unprofessional.
She stood with her arms crossed, sighing deep as her eyelids slid down. I stared as she breathed in and out slowly, noticing the way she was rubbing her own arm with her fingers. Self-soothing, like she was being crushed by some unimaginable stress. Not really a unique number for her, but I would normally assume she’d rather shove it away, bottle it up and take it out on me later. Something was stealing her from me.
… sorry. I’m getting really bad at hiding that emotion from myself.
I didn’t know how to remember where my fake-spine was. I stepped out from around the corner and began walking towards her.
New objective: Calculate Natalie
“Hey.”
She jumped. That was unnatural to see. I hated it, but I’d guess she hated it much more after she saw who had caused it.
“Yo, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you-”
“-YOU FUCKING-… didn’t… you just-…… why are you here?! Where is your phone?!”
“Well… Vernon… told me to leave it with him and grab it again before we leave, so I came to find you-”
“-yeah, well did you-… whatever, go back, just wait with him.”
“I mean… it’s probably done by now, so you should probably go too. Also, I don’t think I have to tell you about this, but that dude creeps me out.”
“And?! I don’t care. If I wanted you here, I would’ve asked you to come… you should enjoy some time away from me anyway… before the rest of today.”
Whatever that means aside…
“I guess, but… you… smell a lot better.”
Natalie’s cheeks sank into a strange contusion of emotion that made me really wish I hadn’t said that. Was I flirting? What was that supposed to be?
She looked away as I childishly thought it had turned out to be a good move.
“He has ablutophobia…” She whispered almost to herself, but it wasn’t to herself. “You… absolute fucking asshole…”
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I don’t know what that is, but I do know that it probably does make me an asshole. Hearing her say it like that, instead of just screaming it at me…
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“Hey,” I began. “I’m um… look-“
She spun back around as I jumped instead. She noticed it, and smacked her teeth a little, probably feeling like the dynamic was back to where she preferred it to be.
“How the hell did you find me?”
“Oh, I…”
Okay okay okay, non-incriminating honesty first, give yourself time to think of the white-lie divergence that covers up the important part.
“… I wandered. I’m sorry-“
“-yeah but why are you even over here? Like this direction? I told you to go to the-…”
She suddenly stopped as we both heard a sound from somewhere inside the house. We both looked towards the door, staring at it silently in wait. Nothing came.
“Listen,” She said without looking back at me. “Just go to the gate, we’ll talk about this later.”
Listen to her, please.
“This is Amelia?” I asked. “That’s the woman that takes bleeding children from the arms of outlaws, right?”
She put her face in her hands.
“My dreams, Cody. You remember the dreams I told you about?”
“Yeeaaaahhhhh… can I tell you that I’m sorry?”
She ripped her enraged face out of her hands at the same instant the door opened beside us. We both looked at it as Lizzie stepped out onto the porch.
All three of us stood silently, as I waited for Natalie to rip my throat out in front of her without a care.
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“Cody!”
Lizzie lunged forwards and wrapped her arms around me, burying her face in my stomach. Natalie audibly let out an angry sigh. I held back a belly laugh as I patted Lizzie’s head.
“Hey Liz… it’s… good to see you.”
“You too,” She mumbled into my shirt.
Lizzie stepped back from me with a smile, before turning to Natalie as it slipped awkwardly away.
“Hi, Nat-… I mean… um-“
“-He knows my name, Beth.”
“Really? When did you tell him?”
“ Jesus Chri -Where is Amelia?” Natalie pressed without the niceties.
“Uhhh, hidunno. She told me she had to run an errand.”
“An errand ?”
“I guess you’re not the only person who has those, huh?” I whispered to Natalie.
I saw her face wrinkle, but she didn’t even give me the acknowledgment of a side-eye.
“Why?” Lizzie pressed. “Do you need her? I can try and-”
“-no, Elizabeth, please stay here. I was just wondering why the adult is not the one answering this fff-… door.”
“Oh, right… well… then are you guys here to see Max and Ira?”
I looked towards Natalie. She was silent for too long a moment, losing her direct edge in the conversation, knowing that I was now looking at her, knowing that I knew what her pause likely meant. To be honest, calculating Natalie is hard, and I don’t know if she actually had any of that running around her head, or if she was just ordinarily pissed. I was ever-urgent to prioritize her anger (as I’ve made so unbelievably clear by my acquiescent actions today), but seeing Lizzie for the first time in ages had brandished my stupidity with a beautiful new sharpness. I’d surely get mutilated for it later, but I let myself disregard that future. I wanted to learn something that Natalie didn’t want me to.
I was probably gonna die out there anyway, right?
“Yep!” I said. “Natalie wanted me to meet them.”
Now her head finally shot around to me. She was a great actor when she wanted to be. Her face suddenly read indifferent for the sake of Lizzie, but her eyes read something that made me feel a thousand-degree knife shaving up the back of my neck. Those fucking eyes. I got incredibly lucky, as Lizzie said something that, remarkably, stole her attention.
“Oh, right. Well, Ira just woke up, but they’re both here.”
Natalie’s face returned to her.
“They are?” She said pressingly. “ Without Amelia? She just left the three of you here? How long did she leave?”
“I don’t know, an hour maybe?” Lizzie said as Natalie almost tossed herself off the balcony. “Somebody knocked on the door to talk to her and then she just told me she had to leave really fast.”
“I can’t-…”
Natalie stopped and sighed, closing her eyes for a moment before ebbing herself back down to earth.
“They’re here?” She said much more calmly to Lizzie.
“Yeah… you want to see them?”
“… yes… thank you.”
Lizzie smiled a little, still obviously scared of Natalie, but she politely turned and entered the house, leaving the door open as Natalie entered. Natalie had chosen to reluctantly act like the choice was Lizzie’s as to whether she was coming in or not. I followed her inside, wondering how long that energy would last as I closed the door behind me. I followed the two of them around a corner. We climbed a set of stairs as I blushed, and stared anywhere that wasn’t up at Natalie walking before me. We came to the upstairs hallway as Lizzie stopped.
“They’re in there playing. I’m… in here if you need me, chief.”
Natalie nodded.
“You’re fine, thanks… when you see Amelia though, tell her to talk to me.”
Lizzie wrinkled her face.
“Is she… in trouble-“
“-Yes. Obviously. Make sure she knows that.”
Natalie coldly walked away down the hall. I shrugged my shoulders to Lizzie as she rolled her eyes and walked the opposite direction. I ran to catch up with Natalie. She heard me and turned around, stopping with wide eyes as she saw me. She swung fully around and punched me in the arm.
“OW dude!-“
“-Oh my God, you followed me inside? I didn’t even know you were behind me-why did you come inside?!”
“What? Why would I not follow you-I thought that’s what I was supposed to be doing-“
“-you know I’m already gonna kill you in a minute, right? ‘She wanted me to meet them’? Are you out of your actual damn mind? What are you trying to get out of me? Of course I don’t wa-…”
Her face flushed suddenly.
“You… were following me up the stairs-”
“-I DIDN’T LOOK!”
She grabbed my neck and shoved her other hand over my mouth.
“Shut. Up.”
I nodded rapidly as she backed away and pointed back the way Lizzie had walked.
“Go wait with Lizzie until I’m done. Do. Not. Fucking. Follow me. You being in this house at all is strike one. Hell, and a-half.”
She began walking away before I could find the words to ask if leaving now would expunge that strike, or how the weight distribution of future strikes would work now that we were breaking them up into fractions. I sighed and turned to go find Lizzie instead.
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Natalie’s hand smelled nice.
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I knocked on the door at the other end of the hall. Lizzie opened it a lot quicker than the front door.
“Hey,” I said. “I got… um-“
“-I heard,” She said as she walked inside. “Kanata! Look who’s here!”
I stepped inside a little more as Kanata jumped around a corner in front of me.
“Hey, asshat,” I mumbled, kneeling down to ruffle her neck. “Sorry, one more rain check on us…”
She pouted. I moved to her scalp, waiting for her to accept my apology by panting. She did. I looked around the room. It was a bedroom almost as sparse as my own. It one-upped mine with a tall mirror, a maroon futon, and a disgustingly gaudy lamp that looked like it should’ve belonged to Austin Powers. Lizzie hopped onto the bed and grabbed a notebook and pen that had been laying on it. I looked out the window, thinking about how badly this room was putting me off. I flopped Kanata’s ears as I thought about the house in general.
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“So, you know her name now?”
My attention was snatched back to Lizzie as I had stopped petting Kanata. I had to think for a moment before zoning-back-in.
“Who?” I responded. “The big bad wolf? Yeah, she told me…”
Lizzie looked back at her notebook, making a weird face that I didn’t know the meaning of.
“You know,” I began again. “You’re a good secret keeper. Remember I was trying to get it out of you down there?”
Lizzie didn’t respond for a moment.
“Yeeaaaaahhh,” She said, not entirely focused anymore. “She yelled at me about it once. I came up to talk to her around someone that had just got here, and she put her hand over my mouth and dragged me away… told me: ‘Liz, we don’t say each other’s names around new people’. ”
I hid my smile from her Natalie impression, swinging my head back and forth.
“I mean, it’s a good rule,” I said. “I get it, ya know?”
She actively frowned, still not looking towards me.
“It’s dumb,” She said. “Nobody follows that rule with her. Didn’t Elijah tell you his name before the gate was even closed?”
I smiled a little.
“I think Roman follows it,” I joked. “I had to make up a codename for him after a while. Maybe it’s just for the sake of the reveal. I mean… I remember thinking Natalie was a really… pretty name on the day she told me… I guess it’s still a little cool now, but the mysterious element is what did most of the work.”
“Yeah… her name is whatever.”
I did a triple-drum on Kanata’s stomach and stood up. I went to stand behind Lizzie.
“Watcha writin’ there?”
Lizzie was drawing in a graphing notebook, creating a maze of squares from the top to bottom. Blue pen, the page looked like a beautifully gridded mosaic.
“Oh cool, dude!” I said. “Can I try it?”
“It’s not hard, it just looks cool. It’s all the same path, not really any beginning or end.”
“Hm… wish it was like that out there, right?”
She stopped scribbling her current square.
“… why are you talking to me like that? Did you forget I’m not a kid.”
What? No… and if I had, I’d be quickly reminded the next time I fell asleep.
Kanata hopped onto the bed as I looked out the window.
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“Is this Amelia’s bedroom?”
I knew the answer to that question.
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“…no,” She said as she started scribbling again. “Hers is downstairs, so she can hear us moving around at night.”
I stepped away from the window. If nobody wanted to tell me, I guess I’d ask her myself.
“I thought you lived with Robert.”
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“I did.”
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I sat behind Kanata on the bed, placing my hand on her stomach. I stared at Lizzie until she finally made eye contact.
“Do you want to talk again?” I said. “I know you said you aren’t okay, and I get it… if you want to talk, we can talk.”
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“ He doesn’t want to talk.”
“Why not?”
“… he does,” She added. “He just… doesn’t understand.”
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“What… that you’re not a kid anymore?”
She silently looked back down at her one-path maze.
“Did you tell him what happened?” I added.
She began scribbling again.
“… how am I supposed to tell him about that? He… he would hate me.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“He’s not my dad. He doesn’t have to love me-“
“-stop that, please.”
She looked back up.
“What, are you mad at me?” She said.
“No, I’m just telling you to stop talking like everyone else here talks. It’s hard to forget that they’re not kids. Don’t become one of them, it would be fucking depressing-“
“-Cod-…” She stammered as she put down the notebook. “If you think I’m a child, you can’t keep swearing around me. You have to choose what side you’re on.”
I must have stepped over a line of reminding her of Natalie. It seemed the fence of adults to Lizzie had a very harsh two-side categorization. You were either Natalie, a little girl who’s cold heart stayed the same demented shape as she became an “adult”, or you were Robert, a little boy who surely was forced to be an adult far too quickly to ever learn how to cope with his fear of death and loss. Both are far too presumptuous to properly understand that an actual child’s emotions should still be treated with the same weight of severity as an adult’s. Lizzie doesn’t know that only one is actually attempting to understand.
“You know what he looked like when I brought you back?”
“Hey,” She ignored me, patting her lap to urge Kanata to come drape herself over it.
“It was embarrassing, Lizzie. He cried like a little-… have you ever seen a parent grieving? Do you know what that’s like-“
“-can you stop? I barely remember my…”
She suddenly rubbed Kanata’s back almost furiously.
“No, I haven't seen that,” She said. “I haven't seen him feel anything."
I scooted closer to her.
“Elizabeth-“
“-Oh my God, I’m listening. Don’t do that.”
I sighed.
“You’ve known him much longer than I have. You should know that he doesn’t express himself very well…”
She genuinely growled as Kanata’s head shot up to her.
“I shouldn’t know that! I should be the only person in the world who doesn’t know that! He can’t have a daughter just because he wants to feel like… like he’s still in the real world! He can’t use me as a decoration to make him feel like he’s home!”
She began to sit up as Kanata jumped down to the floor.
“…it’s not fair,” She said as she stood and turned away.
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Fucking Robert. Didn’t I already save your daughter once? Why do I have to keep doing it every other week?
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“Dude, I’m not calling you dumb or anything… but have you tried telling him that?”
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I stood up.
“Like… before you ran away… had you ever asked him if he would miss you if you did?”
She huffed.
“Why would I ask something insane like that?”
“Because it’s not insane. It’s vulnerable… you’re a family. You should trust each other with your emotions. I know he’s an adult, and that should mean he’s brave or whatever, but… adults don’t get the balance of being too strong sometimes… I’m just sayin’…”
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“How can he trust you with his emotions, if you won’t trust him with yours?”
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Kanata was rubbing against her leg. She turned around with her arms crossed.
“I hate when you talk like that,” She said.
I knit my brow.
“Yeah, well no offense, but you’re kinda making me do it, jerk.”
She smiled a little.
“Also,” I said without smiling back. “ You need to decide what side you’re on. Do you think you’re still a kid?”
She looked away, opening her mouth slightly.
“And don’t… answer me right now… just… think about it on your own… and… talk to him… please.”
She nodded as she looked back at me. I fought very hard to keep frowning. I was glad my voice could reason with Lizzie, but until Robert decided to grow up, I needed to put myself on a side of that fence. Right now, I needed a good note to stake that out on.
“You know what? Screw this,” I said as I turned to the door. “I’m going to get Natalie.”
I walked out the door.
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I quickly paced back in, bent down to ruffle Kanata’s head, and gently pushed Lizzie’s in the way that mom used to do.
“You two are a lot,” I said as I paced just as quickly back out of the room.
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It was worth it to try and motivate Lizzie to seek a different figure to look up to, but Jesus Christ this was a dumb idea.
I heard faint voices deeper into the house as I crept down the hall. I felt like I wasn’t making any noise, but I remembered what Lizzie said about Amelia hearing the kids walking around. They probably chose the house with the creakiest floors to be the foundation of the halfway-orphanage. There was only one other room in the hallway, and I saw the door was halfway open. I sank against the wall outside, listening for a moment.
“Can I take off your ponytail?” I heard a girl’s voice say. She sounded much younger than Lizzie.
“Uhhhhh,” Natalie’s voice groaned playfully in return. “I’m not feeling very hair-down pretty right now-“
“-NUH UH NUH UH NUH UH-“
“-Shhhheheheh, okay okay-“
“-It makes you look like a princess!”
“A princess can still wear a ponytail, babe.”
“Yeah yeah yeah, but then you’re like… you’re like ummmm, you’re like double princess. You’re like two princesses!”
“Two?! That sounds creepy.”
I’d heard Natalie speak softly a couple times before, but I’d never heard her speak so happily. I felt myself smiling a little.
“It would only be creepy if you had another face growing out of your face!” I heard a young boy’s voice say. “Like Frankenstein!”
“Frankenstein didn’t have two faces,” Natalie said. I could hear her smile.
The children both laughed as I took the risk of peering around the corner of the doorway. Woah. Okay, look, obviously it is horrible for a child to be here in ANY capacity, but look, I would’ve killed for this room as a kid. From what I could see, it was half boy, half girl, and each side with its own loft bed for each child. One trillion of the toys that had probably been skimmed from outside displays were all over the floor that was completely covered in a giant carpet of… uh… you know those town road map things? Whole room is one giant beautiful town carpet. One of those giant LED pencil lights? You ever seen those at IKEA? The whole nine yards.
It was, without a doubt, the coolest kid room I’ve ever seen. I mean, again, horrible tragedy, but dude, it was really fucking cool. From the side of the room I could see the boy, who I’d seen before around R&E, sitting in a gaming chair. He was looking at a computer monitor that wasn’t on, but holding a controller and pretending he was deep in the trenches of a firefight.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Hey, where’s that drawing you made?” I heard Natalie say to the girl. “The one Lizzie helped you with, I thought you were gonna hang it up?”
I leaned a little into the crack in the hinges of the door. I saw the girl, Ira, who I also recognized, sitting on the couch under her bunk. Natalie was knelt down on the ground in front of her, rubbing her arm with… I… sorry, I’ve never… her hair is so pretty when it’s down.
“Uhhhh… I was, but Max said it looked stupid.”
I saw her slowly turn to the boy. I fully expected her to speak to him like she usually spoke to me.
“Did you say that?” She asked him calmly, still smiling.
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Jesus… okay, focus.
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Max looked up from his action scene.
“Duh,” He said as he turned back to her. “It isn’t better than the last one she did. You’re supposed to get better as you go!”
“That’s not realistic, Max.”
“Yeah! That’s what Amelia said!”
Natalie’s view finally hardened a little.
“Amelia said that to you?” She asked Ira.
“No, she said it to Max,” She replied. “But she said it.”
Natalie sighed as she rubbed her cheek and stared at the floor.
“Hey,” Max said. “You can still hang it up, even if it’s stupid.”
Ira giggled.
“No, I’m gonna make a better one! What if I drew Nattie with two faces?”
“Shit yeah!” Max yelled, slamming his controller down.
“Hey!” Natalie said, trying to hide her giggle. “Don’t say that! Who even said that around you? And please please please don’t say Amelia.”
“Nooooo,” He said. “It was you I think-“
“-I have-heheheh, I have definitely never said… sheesh yeah.”
“You’ve said the… you know… the first word,” He said.
“Yeah!” Ira said. “But you usually say holy-“
“-Woah woah woah!” She said, spinning back to her. “New rule, anyone who says that word isn’t cool.”
“What?!” Ira said. “But you’re cool!”
“I’m super cool, that’s why I’m gonna stop saying it.”
“Lies!” Max objected.
Natalie groaned.
“Uh, speaking of cool,” Natalie said. “Can I request having two heads instead of two faces? Having two faces is… not as cool as it might sound.”
“Two heads, you got it!” Ira said happily.
“Thanks miss Shelley… and whenever you’re done, just remember that Max doesn’t own your half of the room. You can hang up whatever you want.”
“But I want Max to think it’s cool too.”
“Max will think it’s cool, even if it’s stupid, because he’s cool, and he knows you made it. You are cool as sheesh .”
Ira smiled extremely wide.
“Cool!” She squealed.
Natalie rubbed her arm and looked to the floor.
“Okay,” She said as she looked back up to her. “I uhhhh… I gotta go.”
“Huh? You just got here!” Ira whined.
“I know, I’m sorry. I just have to-“
“-she has to go sheesh herself!” Max exclaimed.
I exhaled a little too loud in response to that. The same way the Staff member had barreled back towards me in the armoire, Natalie’s eyes immediately barreled back towards the crack in the door. Ira burst out giggling as Natalie’s eyes met mine through the crack with a completely blank expression. Blank, but it did NOT feel that way. As Max and Ira laughed wildly, Natalie stood, retrieving her hair tie from her pocket and beginning to put her ponytail back up. She stared at me the entire time.
“Yeaaahhhh…” She said in a wobbly tone. “I really have to go sheesh.”
She ripped her eyes away from mine to look at Ira, stroking her hair softly.
“But I’ll… be back soon… okay?”
“You promise?” Ira said with an undying smile.
Natalie stared at her strangely.
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“I promise.”
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“Alright,” Natalie said. “Duty calls-“
“HA!” Max said. “Because-“
Natalie shook his chair as she walked past him.
“-Quiet.”
Her eye-line raised back to me as I heard Max and Ira immediately conversing about the tabooed word. Natalie stepped outside and ever-so-gently closed the door, barely making a sound. She sighed and closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead as she passed me to walk towards the stairs.
“Hey,” I said. “That was… kinda adorable. I um… didn’t know you were so good with-“
She immediately turned around, grabbed me by the shirt and slammed me against the wall.
“I told you to fucking wait.”
Should I keep pretending like I’m not saying it to you here, or should I just tell you that I have an erection?
“I… I thought you were done.”
“No, you didn’t.”
I mean, she’s right, but how would she know? Is she telepathic?
“I’m sorry, I know that was out of bounds, I just… we don’t have a lot of time so-“
“-I want to make something clear to you. If I ever see you alone with either of those two, especially-“
“-nonono, I… I get it… I get it, Natalie. I’m sorry. Can we… can we just get out of here?”
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She shoved me hard enough to bounce as she stepped back and rubbed her mouth.
“Two and a fucking half.”
I nodded, completely agreeing with the penalty system now. She quickly breezed forward to the staircase as I followed.
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I didn’t say a word as we returned to Vernon’s to retrieve my phone. She had me step outside as she spoke to him about something that I felt much too seasick to even attempt eavesdropping on. I tried to keep my mouth shut as she came back out and began leading me to the gate.
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“Did you-“
“-I don’t really wanna talk to you right now, Cody-“
“-I know, I know… I was just gonna ask if you were talking to Yukon Cornelius about me being in the ummm… the gate formation.”
Haha.
“I told him to stop thinking about it, because I’ve already thought about it. That’s why I made Elijah your partner.”
“Okay… just not… sure if he knows that.”
“He does. And even if he didn’t, who told you he needs to know about our assortment?”
Stop talking.
“Do… do you say ‘partner’” I asked. “Because everyone else says ‘buddy’.”
“I’m not saying that word.”
Cliche holier than thou fucking wannabe Sarah Connor looking-
“Wait a second. Did you just say our assortment?”
“Yeah.”
“Like… you’re in it too? I thought I was replacing Patrick.”
“You are.”
“Oh. So, are there gonna be nine of us?”
She stopped walking and turned around.
“Wankoff, Connor is a temp. I’m replacing Jen. You think she’s in any mental state to be on a cleansing squad after what happened? She saw it happen right in front of her.”
I suddenly felt disgusting. More disgusting anyway. Jen had given me some solace in her own attempt at healing, but hearing Natalie describe it like that made me feel like I didn’t deserve the forgiveness that Jen was fighting to grant me.
Natalie turned to begin walking again.
“Also, anyone ever told you that you’re not funny?” She said.
I stopped talking.
Natalie’s probably wanted to before, but to be honest, no. No one had ever given me that direct feedback. I kind of just assume people are thinking it. Actually, I’m just gonna go ahead and revoke that Haha from myself up there. I don’t know if I’ve made this clear in the past couple entries, but I’m not really having the best time doing those anymore. I’d assume if I was getting the same feedback on this journal as I was from my verbal dialogue, most people would probably agree that it is not a very enjoyable practice. Have I ever done it gracefully? I’m just trying to cut back, so I only use it when it’s earned. Let’s see if I can figure that out. I’m displaying such social prowess recently that I’m sure there’s no way my perception of what’s appropriate would not be up to the challenge.
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Arriving at the gate on a leash was harrowing enough. Seeing Sean and Carolette there was worse. Seeing Elijah and Connor did not help. Seeing Roman… yeah.
Sean (luckily) and Connor were posted up at the observation deck as we arrived. Elijah was chatting up Carolette and Roman at the hooks. All three of them went silent (two of them had already been silent), as we approached them. None of the five of us spoke a word, and the sound of footsteps descending the ladder were the only thing I heard over my heartbeat. I wanted to make eye-contact with Roman, I wanted to try and apologize silently before he said something out loud that made it clear to Natalie that I hadn’t. That would be strike three-and-three-quarters for sure. I fought to make eye-contact with Carolette first, just to break my own ice. I almost threw up as I met the look of shame that she wore. I genuinely put my hand over my mouth and cleared my throat, trying to settle my stomach. Natalie turned around to me with an eyebrow, as I held up my hand, trying to say that I was fine. I saw her rubbing her forehead tiredly as Connor hopped off the stairs.
“Hey gang!” He said. “You guys uhhhh… you ready to move this thing?”
Roman and Elijah both stared at him blankly.
“Uh, I’ll handle it today, Connor,” Carolette said to him, still sounding as sweet as ever.
“You sure? I’m pretty psyched up right now, ya know? I got that adrenaline pump going on, and uhh-“
“-Connor,” Natalie interrupted. “What the hell is that?”
Connor looked down at his waist to where Natalie was pointing. There was an almost comically large butcher’s knife “secured” in Connor’s belt by the handle, with the entire blade freely hanging out on his side.
“Oh!” He said excitedly as he awkwardly unsheathed the hilt. “I think this is gonna be my weapon! Nikko let me have it!”
He proudly stuck it up in the air.
“It feels really good to swing. You wanna see-“
“-no. Please,” Natalie replied dryly. “I do not need to see that right now. I’m sure it looks… really cool.”
Connor’s smile faded a little, but he tried to hide it as he nodded. Something told me that Natalie’s confidence in replacing Jen had not been communicated to Connor yet.
“ Ughhhhh , alright,” Elijah groaned as he clapped to Natalie. “You stealing my buddy today?”
I practically pinched my arm to not let myself say “Partner”.
“Shut up, Elijah,” Natalie said. “Let’s go, open it.”
“Sure,” He said. “Here, hold this.”
He reached behind him to the wall of the gate and brought my pole around to hold it out to her.
“No. We’re not bringing that,” She said.
“You sure? I think it would help wi-“
“-Shut. Up.”
“Hey…” I let myself say. “I can’t really use it without Kanata anyway, but… it’s good to have… I forgot to ask you if we could bring Kanata.”
“That might help too.” Elijah said.
Natalie angrily snatched the pole from Elijah, glaring at him before turning to me and shoving the other end into my chest.
“Sure, if you’re okay with her not coming back in,” Natalie hissed to me.
I winced before taking the pole and shaking my head.
“Great,” She said. “Gate, please.”
“I’m coming with you,” Roman suddenly said.
Natalie’s head spun around to him much faster than mine could.
“Natalie, have you told-“ Carolette began saying.
“-CAROLETTE!” Natalie suddenly screamed whilst still looking at Roman. “WAIT YOUR TURN TO PISS ME OFF PLEASE! ROMAN IS TAKING HIS RIGHT NOW, SO YOU’LL HAVE TO FUCKING WAIT POLITELY!”
Carolette rolled her exhausted eyes and shook her head. Natalie held enraged eye contact with Roman for a moment before turning away from him.
“Honestly, Roman,” She said as she walked up to Connor and snatched the butcher’s knife out of his hand. “You can go with him alone if you really want the steps that bad, but I am not stepping outside of that fucking gate with you.”
She walked up to me.
“You ever held a knife before?” She said. “Or did your parents have to keep a lock on the drawer until you were out of high-school?”
I scowled and held out my empty off-hand. She shoved the handle into my palm.
“Try to hold it like you’re not a vegetable,” She added. “Roman. Open. The fucking. Gate.”
Elijah and Carolette took their places, looking back in worried expectation as Roman stared at Natalie. I was suddenly eager to expose myself for not apologizing, as it seemed my decision had triggered the possibility of a far more destructive fight around me.
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Roman silently turned around and took his hold of a hook. The wrenching began as I tried to look up to Sean at the top of the gate. As much as I valued my relationship with Roman more (not that I act like it), I had also not left things in a place I liked with Sean. Yes, even Sean is not enough of a growth on my ass to help me ignore how much of a child I was yesterday. It was a bad day.
“CODY!”
I spun around.
“Sorry, before you even say it, I’m sorry,” I stumbled, before bringing myself back to the biggest cleanup priority:
Natalie.
“Come on, this can be quick if you stop being yourself for a couple hours.”
I don’t know if a couple hours is quick.
“Yeah, yeah okay. I’m here. I promise… unless you’re gonna kill me the second I step outside.”
She sighed, following me as I began stepping backwards out the gate. I mostly did it to avoid Roman and Carolette’s eye-contact.
“Let’s go,” She said. “I just wanna get this over with.”
The figures of the three scrolled through my peripheral as I kept my eyes locked on her.
“Sure… even though I don’t really like the way that soun- OH MY GOD WHY? !”
The second that my peripheral had passed the edge of the gate door, that shade, the one shade my brain had been hardwired to go absolutely feral at the sight of, was leaking into my path. A Staff member was suddenly standing right in front of me. I made another sound that I don’t even know how to spell the onomatopoeia for, as its head focused directly towards me. Natalie suddenly dashed forward. She pushed me onto the ground, slipping the butcher’s knife out of my hand on my way down. She quickly stepped between us and chopped its head clean off. The body fell to the ground as the head landed in my lap. I quickly tossed it away from me in disgust.
“WHY DOES THAT ALWAYS FUCKING HAPPEN?!”
The other four dashed outside, looking around to make sure there weren’t any more solicitors waiting.
“You okay?!” Roman asked to… one of us.
I couldn’t really tell which one, but it wasn’t both of us. Natalie ignored him either way, as she stared angrily at the body for a second. She suddenly stepped back to look towards the top of the wall.
“What the hell, Sean?!” Natalie called.
His head popped out from above.
“I didn’t see it!” Sean replied. “It must have been in a blind spot!”
“A blind spot?!” She screamed. “There are no blind spots, what are you talking about?!”
“I don’t know, I just didn’t see it!”
She opened her mouth like she was going to say something else, but I interrupted. Looking back, I would love the option to shut my own mouth and let her talk.
“It’s fine, I’m fine,” I said. “I would’ve been fine anyway. The bastards aren’t as fast to realize in the daytime, right?”
She looked back to me with an even angrier expression.
“Yeah, maybe if they aren’t provoked! If it had bumped into you… I…”
She stared back at the body for a moment, losing her words. Elijah awkwardly stepped up to me and offered his hand. I didn’t have the time to process my current relationship status with him. I took it without even looking at him, as I stared at Natalie. Hopefully distracted by my higher content of mental deficiency, she rubbed her forehead and angrily kicked the head into the gate. It somehow bounced back perfectly into her hands. That was surprisingly… less hot and more… intimidatingly creepy.
“Roman!” She yelled without turning around.
“Yeah,” He affirmed immediately. “I’ll handle it.”
Natalie blindly handed Roman the head as he gripped it under his armpit and grabbed the Staff by both of theirs. He huffed before proceeding to drag it… into town?
“Hey,” I began in such disbelief that I forgot who I was talking to. “What the fuck are you-“
Thankfully, before I could continue, Natalie’s heel pressed into my foot as she grabbed me by the shirt. That was a perfect mix of hot andintimidating.
“Don’t worry about what he’s doing. Pick up that useless pole and let’s get the fuck along with it. Maybe pay attention to your goddamn surroundings from now on.”
I looked back over to see him disappearing behind the gate. I looked back to Natalie, raising my hands in surrender. She shoved me back away, and I kneeled slowly to grab the pole.
“Yeah, sure… but maybe um…” I began. “Maybe you should hold the knife for now…”
She shook her head and walked away, going to stand alone in the clearing. She idled for only a moment before striding up to the nearest display and scaling its kitchen counters. She stared out at the infinity that surrounded us. I was about to go speak to her before Carolette put a hand on my shoulder. I turned to her.
“If I forgive you for yesterday,” She began. “… can you promise me to take care of her out there?”
I wanted to hug her, say I was so sorry for being such a horrible son, say that she shouldn’t ever have to dream of apologizing, that penitent was nothing compared to what I was, that I might not be able to say it properly now, but eventually, I’d find the words to properly eradicate the damage I’d done the past week. I wanted to say it to her and Elijah. And Sean. And Roman. And Tecca. And Robert. And Sandra.
And Natalie.
But I didn’t say that. I just shook her hand off my shoulder.
“I have to go,” I said. “Bye.”
I began walking towards Natalie.
“Cody!” Elijah called as I didn’t turn around. “If I forgive you for yesterday, can you bring me back a new book?”
I could hear he was already turning away before he finished the taunt. I reached the display and looked up at Natalie as she continued staring. I waited until I thought Elijah was definitely gone to turn around. I saw Carolette still standing there, watching me sadly. I kept chilling eye-contact for as long as I could. Eventually, she turned and walked back inside. A moment later, I heard the giant scraping, beginning to isolate Natalie and I.
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I sighed and turned back to her.
“Okay… I’m um… ready whenever you are,” I said.
She ignored me for a moment, before silently making her way down from the display. She couldn’t seem to re-center her gaze. She kept looking around, but I could tell that her eyes weren’t focusing on anything no matter where they looked. She rubbed her upper lip and brushed her bang away.
“Walk ahead of me,” She commanded.
I scrunched my face a little.
“You scared of me and my TSA-threat?” I said sarcastically, but trying to at least get a teeth smack out of her. “I thought you said this pole was stupid-“
“-it is,” She said as she finally focused on me. “I wanted you to use the knife.”
“Okay, well hopefully we won’t need it… ya know?”
She stared at me silently.
“You wanna… tell me what we’re doing today?” I asked.
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“Alright then,” I said as I began walking towards the Café.
“Nope.”
I turned and shook my head at her.
“‘Nope’? Can I get a command or something? Operator?”
She rolled her eyes and pointed to the far left side of the R&E “north” wall.
“That way,” She said. “We have to go around.”
I squinted.
“Where the hell are we g-actually, sorry, I know you’re not gonna answer that. Guess I’ll just keep walking until I get to the place I don’t know we’re going.”
I breezed past her, hearing her scowl before her footsteps mirrored mine. I couldn’t tell if I was convinced that I was truly being led to my death. I guess if Natalie wanted to succumb to the desire of her brutality, she’d very well rather do it far from R&E. Once she was done, she could just leave me in a closet somewhere and pretend that none of it ever happened, without having to live anywhere near the reminder of what she’d done. She could do whatever horrible sadistic things she’d been dreaming about for the past month, and afterwards, tell herself it was just that. A dream. A bloody, wet dream.
I stopped walking the second I reached the edge of the wall.
“Jesus, Cody-what the fuck is the issue?”
I turned around.
“Sorry, can I… can I take a piss really quick?”
She crossed her arms.
“Sure. I’m gonna watch you do it, though.”
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Ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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“Y-… yeah… okay.”
Natalie followed me into a beautiful kitchen as I approached the sink. I gulped as my finger nervously tapped the waistband of my sweatpants.
“Today-“
“-shut up for a second-“
“-excuse me-“
“-I didn’t say that, sorry just… okay.”
I pulled down the front of my pants and… slipped it out into the open.
She’s standing behind you, not to your side, she can’t even see anything.
Yeah but… Jesus she’s close.
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“Cody…”
Way too goddamn close.
I stowed it back away and turned around awkwardly.
“I’ll um… wait until it’s a little more dire…”
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We walked for an hour before my urethra was under too much pressure to care about performance anxiety. Natalie signed off the event with a slow clap that would probably go into a horrible dark corner of my memories. As we walked on, Natalie and I were both silent besides from her occasionally telling me to cut around a row of aisles to the left a little more. Somewhere around twenty minutes after my supervised relief, I began trying to fill awkward silences.
“Can we try to find a telescope for Tim?”
“No. I know what he wants it for. Don’t ask again. If I ever catch him with one, I’m beating you to death with it.”
Sorry Timmy.
“Okay… can I at least grab a book for Elijah really quick?”
She ignored me for a while.
“Natalie.”
“Maybe later… I’ll grab one, you can just say it’s from you… I don’t really want you thinking about Elijah right now.”
“You’re not really giving me much else to think about… everything else I’ve got is… kinda everybody back there.”
I heard her slightly blow a raspberry.
“Is that your way of trying to pretend you feel bad about yesterday?”
Control yourself.
“… yes… I mean wait… I’m not pretending-you phrased that weird.”
“I said it pretty clearly.”
I rubbed my arm nervously.
“What book would you pick out for him?” I said.
“What?”
“Like… do you know what kind of reading he likes?”
“He doesn’t like any kind, Elijah hates reading. He does so much stupid shit in his free time with the goal of constantly being too occupied to read. Whenever he does, he’s barely paying attention, he’s just killing time.”
What other activities are there to even focus on? Annoying me?
“What else does he do?”
“… I… don’t know. Board games or cards or… something. There’s a kind of serious Poker ring in there that I heard he ruins all the time.”
“Heard? Do you not play po-“
“-what are you doing right now? Are you small-talking?”
I just realized how embarrassing I probably sound.
“I’m not… trying to make it small… I’m just talking.”
“We don’t need to be talking.”
“Well… yeah we don’t need to do anythi-“
“-I don’t want to be talking.”
Right.
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“I don’t know how to play poker either.”
“Cody…”
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Usually anything I said past that point resulted in a response from Natalie that made me not want to talk for the remainder of the day, but I continued to make a damn stubborn effort.
“Pretty sudden back there, huh?”
She typically stayed silent for the first thirty seconds, hoping I would just give up again and stay silent.
“With the… Staff coming out of nowhere I mean.”
“… yeah.”
“I mean, it was like RIGHT next to me, the exact next step around the corner from-“
“-yeah, I was there.”
Talking to a wall was less embarrassing than knowing she was watching me piss, but it was basically just as difficult of a transaction to work through.
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“I realized… I don’t really… know how they work. I… told Vernon today that I’ve killed so many now… and… I still don’t know really anything about them.”
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“… you know how to kill them… that’s… really the only important thing.”
“Yeah… through the invisible brain… is it like… all connected? Is their whole skin their brain? Like all their guts are just an entire membrane?”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
We’re walking through the aisles of the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Yeah I… I’m saying I don’t know. Where else would their brain be?”
“They don’t have a brain,” She continued. “They’re just matter. They don’t have organs.”
“Nowhere? How do they function?”
“Jesus Christ, you want me to get out a whiteboard? I have no idea, I didn’t create the fucking things. I doubt it’s something that we’re capable of understanding.”
There’s a lot of things here like that, and most of them live in the same neighborhood as me.
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“… they don’t have a brain… so… can you outsmart them?”
“No, they’re smart. Pretty goddamn smart. They’re not very diligent though.”
I waited for a while, seeing if she was willing to continue. She sighed.
“If you think you can’t fight, just find a way to escape their line of vision and hide. If you stay quiet, they’ll get bored and give up pretty easily… ya know, maybe.”
I remembered the first time I was running towards Return and Exchange, and I didn’t know how much I believed in that being a viable option.
“That doesn’t sound like it makes them very intelligent,” I responded “That sounds like a badly coded video game enemy.”
Wonderful combination of words to say in front of the girl that already thinks you’re a loser, Cody.
“Yeah well, they aren’t exactly gonna sit down and play chess with you to verify their I.Q., so I wouldn’t try outsmarting one anytime soon. Getting out of their collective line of vision is the hard part. Their ability to pin you is what makes them smart. I’d love to see you try to outsmart one, though.”
I let myself laugh a little.
“I mean, I’ve been doing it for almost two months now.”
“What, hallucinating? How many have you even seen out here on your own?”
That made me kind of angry. Natalie’s comment about the one hour break earlier made it clear that she, or the rest of the assortment, had been watching me at some capacity. I was about to challenge her about the day I encountered three in the span of sixty seconds, but I dared not approach the possibility of bringing up Trent.
“Fucking… plenty.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said a little too short.
I decided to accept the break of silence.
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“They’re attracted to each other.”
I stopped walking and turned around.
“Excuse me?”
“Keep walking, dude, please… love of God.”
I slowly turned around and kept walking.
“… they’re attracted to their dead,” She continued.
“What the absolute hell does that mean?”
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“It means you can’t just be leaving their bodies around after you kill them. Have you been cleaning up after yourself with these ‘hundreds’ of Staff you’ve supposedly been slaughtering?”
“Cleaning up how ? Do you want me to be shoving them into the trash can like a grade-school bully?”
“No. First of all they’re probably a lot harder to do that to than you, so don’t be unrealistic.”
Control.
“Second of all,” She went on. “I’m trying to say that you probably don’t see that many Staff on that strenuous pilgrimage of yours, so if you could just try to avoid them without killing them, I would appreciate it. They’re just gonna snowball if you do.”
Natalie is speaking about my future as if she’s not going to snuff me out in a laundry room. Apparently the dead bodies of Staff members attract more Staff members, and me defending myself is possibly making it worse for my aforementioned future self.
“I’m not very good at sneaking. And like I’m saying, sometimes they just come out of nowhere, doesn’t matter how stealthy I’ve been.”
“I’m not giving you a performance review, I’m just telling you that killing them isn’t the good idea you think it is. You should only do it when they’re a moment away from killing you .”
“Oh sure, sounds like a super safe idea to try and let dispensing of the insane threat be my last re-…”
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“Are we still talking?” I said.
She sighed.
“Whatever.”
“… okay… what do they even do? Because… I’ve never actually… seen one kill.”
“… you… haven’t? How?”
“I don’t know, I just… have never been right there. I’ve always been running. I mean the only times I can even think where I’ve been so close to it was down there with Anthony and Anne Marie-“
“-Anthony and Anne Marie?” She repeated mockingly. “That’s who you were down there with? You expect me to believe that you didn’t just pull those names out of your ass?”
The image of his hands on Anne’s neck flashed between my vision of Natalie’s on mine. I stopped and turned, speaking before she could yell.
“Why are you still doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Being a fucking brat.”
She narrowed her gaze.
“Is it still because of what you said?” I said, trying to bite the hyperbolic shit out of my tongue. “Because that’s the only other time I’ve been so close to it happening-“
“-Cody. Walk… I believe you about the names. Just walk.”
I had in fact, not , bit my tongue. I turned around and began walking again.
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“If you have to know… I’ll die before I let someone teach me Poker,” She said.
I couldn’t tell what kind of Natalie I was walking with.
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“Alright,” She said after the longest silence we’d had yet. “Let’s stop for a minute.”
I turned around as she walked into a foyer and slid open the mudroom closet. She threw her head from me to the jackets that resided inside.
“Get in,” She said. “I have to piss.”
“Natalie, I have no reason to run away. You can leave me for a second.”
“You have a lot of reasons to run away.”
“Great, you wanna finally tell me any of them?”
“Please get into this fucking closet.”
I squinted at her, threw the pole loudly on the ground like a cat tipping over a vase, and maintained eye contact as I stepped into the closet.
“I’m watching the door,” She said. “If I see you peak out for a second, it’s over-“
“-wait, you’re maintaining a view of the door? Are you gonna piss in the middle of the hallway?”
“I’m gonna piss in a place you won’t have to step on it, is that enough for you to give me the courtesy of not concerning yourself with how I piss?”
I accidentally laughed.
“Sorry, is that supposed to be funny after today?” I said.
She slammed the closet door closed an inch away from my nose. I stood awkwardly in the closet like a voyeur, trying to pretend that I didn’t hear the stream beginning. I covered my ears for a moment before finding that feeling like a four-year old was worse. She opened the door about a minute later.
“Ask me if I washed my hands, dare you.”
I bit my cheek to keep from smiling, and stepped out as she pushed my shoulder behind me.
“I mean Jesus, dude- you said it,” I said.
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“Hang on,” She said before I could keep walking. “Let me see the backpack.”
I slid it off and handed it to her, thankful that I didn’t currently have the notebook in there. My diary was safely hidden in my room where Mom wouldn’t find it. Natalie laid the backpack on a nearby dining table, and reached into it, pulling out two objects wrapped in separate pieces of stationary. I could see small droplets of grease leaking through the cover of both.
“Have they… been in there the whole time?” I asked.
She shook her head as she sat down at the table.
“You skulk around the whole town looking for me, but you never looked inside the backpack?”
“… I guess that didn’t feel as rebellious.”
She unwrapped one of the packages to reveal a BLT wrap. She grabbed the first half, about to take a bite before looking up at me.
“You gonna sit down?”
I crossed my arms.
“What are we doing out here, Natalie? I thought we were going to a Café.”
“You still thought that after this long?”
“Yeah, I thought we would eat there.”
“Why would I care about accompanying you on a Café run?”
“DO YOU THINK THAT ANYTHING YOU DO PROVOKES AN ‘OH YEAH, I GET IT’ OUT OF ME?!”
“Stop yelling. Sit down and eat.”
I shifted my weight awkwardly, wanting to ask about what I really thought we were doing out here. I looked at the gun on her hip, and looked at the butcher’s knife on the table behind her elbows.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Evelyn?”
“Sorry? Is that something you think I owed you? Is that really what you wanna decide to be mad about? You seemed cynical enough to me, I assumed you already saw her as a patch of soil the day you fucking met her.”
I balled and un-balled my fist, trying to kid myself that she was out of line to say that.
“… I thought we were getting better,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
“Oh puh-fucking-lease, Cody,” She said. “Any bit we’ve ‘gotten better’ before this week has not been your intention in any goddamn sense of the word. Get off that horse and stop irking me while I’m trying to eat.”
She held her hand out towards an empty chair. Now I kind of wanted to run. I walked to the chair opposite of her and slowly sat down. She grabbed the other package and tossed it to me. I caught it, kind of, and began unwrapping it to find the same sandwich.
“Thank Margo for packing two when I asked her to pack one,” She said before beginning to chew.
My brow hurt too much to glare as I tiredly began chewing as well. Neither of us said a word as we ate. Scared as I was, I didn’t believe what she just said.
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I finished before Natalie and laid my head down on the table, running my fingers through my own hair.
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“Get up,” She said after what felt like ten seconds of rest. “We gotta move.”
I ripped my skull out of its warm pool and began to stand. I looked around, slightly disoriented, before finding the pole where I’d thrown it.
“Check your phone,” She said as I picked up the pole. “What time is it?”
I slid it out of my pocket and taped the screen, facing it towards her without speaking.
1:54 PM.
She tilted her head back and forth, thinking for a moment.
“Good enough,” She said as she pointed. “Let’s go. That way.”
I looked in the opposite direction, seeing how distant Return & Exchange had become.
“We’re getting a little far, aren’t we?” I offered as I looked back. “Are we like… halfway?”
“Yes. And even if we weren’t, we’ve got time. That’s why I asked. It’s gonna be fine… don’t ask me any more questions today, okay?”
Haha.
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I felt thirsty. We continued to walk after the sandwich had given me a cramp. I refused to let myself complain about either of those things.
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“Natalie… Natalie?”
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“It’s not a question,” I said.
“… what ?”
“Don’t say it like that… I’m… trying… dude, I…”
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“I just wanna say-“
“-shut up. Stop. This is not the time.”
“Wait, I just wanted-“
“-I don’t want to hear it.”
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“I’m sorry-“
“-GOD DA-… shut up!”
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“Can I… talk to you about something else?”
I heard her chuckling deliriously, waiting for the butcher’s knife to appear in my nape.
“Why are you acting like that?” She said. “You scared?”
I went silent again for a long while.
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You don’t fear death, you fear Hell. Once you’re dead, you don’t have to be scared anymore.
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“Oh shit, my bad. It’s this way.”
I heard Natalie suddenly dashing away behind me as I turned.
“Huh?” I called as I dashed to follow her. “Wait!”
“Yeah, here it is,” I heard her say from somewhere I couldn’t see. “Where the hell did you go-“
“-dude, you ran away from me! Give me a second to… find…”
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I found Natalie standing before the top of a pair of escalators. She turned around to see me behind her.
“Heh, you should see your face right now.”
I felt myself instinctively taking a step back.
“What… what’s going on?”
I felt my vision blurring slightly at the sight of the cyclical handrails.
“Well… I’m gonna show you what you should be doing with the Staff once you kill them.”
I felt every vein in my legs pulsing.
“Ideally,” She added.
I appreciated how healthy my body was in that moment. The last time I had been around any physical presence of The Warehouse, I had been in such an active state of decay. Now, I imagined every single muscle shift that would need to occur from the point of me dashing away to the moment I reached the front gate of R&E again, and it seemed to be trivially easy in comparison to what taking a single step had felt like down there.
“Don’t run,” She said. “I’m going down there with you.”
“Where… how did… these…”
“Talk. Come on, it’s gonna be fine.”
“… I… I didn’t know there was more than one entrance.”
“In infinity? Did you think about that mathematically?”
I’ve been trying to think about this place as little as possible.
“Natalie… I don’t want to go down there…”
She looked away.
“Neither do I… you’re gonna help me with something… I need to show you The Pile.”
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The Pile.
I’d heard that title referred to in R&E before Tecca had mentioned it yesterday, but I couldn’t remember where. I just remember that it was referred to in far too cryptic a manner for me to have known that the next time I’d be hearing it would be in this kind of horrible mental catastrophe.
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She held out the butcher’s knife to me.
“Put down the pole. Leave it here. Show me how you hold this.”
Whatever luck I had used the last time I was down there was beyond an overdraft. I didn’t want to go down there again. I could see the edge of the light disappearing on the stairs. I didn’t want to go down there again. My memory couldn’t be dark enough to recreate how dark it is down there. The dark makes it so much easier to see the things that the light is hiding. Almost every important thing that the light was hiding from me had come from down in that motherfucking Warehouse. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there. I did not want to go down there.
“Cody.”
I put down the poll. I walked up to her, about to grab the knife before looking past her, down into the pool of black. I felt a lurch in my stomach. Natalie bridged the gap and grabbed me by the wrist.
“Cody, look at me.”
I couldn’t. My eyes were being sucked into the darkness. What’s happening? I’ve never felt this before, not even with so many tiny needles. There’s no more air. I just can’t. If I breathe, I’d breathe it in. I can’t let it have me.
Natalie’s hand left my wrist and suddenly appeared hard across my cheek.
“Cody!”
The sting turned my head. My eyes met hers for just a moment from shock. It was enough. The purple ocean of her eyes weren’t quite as powerful as whatever was screaming up that escalator, but it was a close fight. I stared into her eyes so deeply in that moment, that I hadn’t realized it had been closer to sixty seconds until she took my hand and forced the knife into it.
“… I need you to help me with this, okay? It’s important. If you do, I take you back, we don’t talk, I pretend you don’t exist, you can move out of that house if you want, I don’t care. Any other problems you have will feel like nothing compared to this.”
I nodded silently.
“Hold it. Show me.”
She backed up. I let the usual stress of my balled fist go into my grip on the handle. I held it forward with the same grip.
“How high is their neck?” She asked. “The edge of their collar…”
I raised it to the height of my scalp. She nodded slowly, taking the gun from her waist.
“You’re gonna stay behind me, silently. Seriously, don’t say a word until I say it’s okay. You have the flashlight on your phone, don’t use it unless I tell you. It doesn’t matter what time it is up here, and it doesn’t matter what you think is going on in your surrounding, you need to be-“
“-silent… I know… yeah…”
She stared at me, as her eyes did something I wasn’t familiar with.
“Let’s just….” I said. “Let's just go…”
“I know where we’re going, we’re not just wondering.”
I had a conclusion that I’d immediately come to the second I’d seen where Natalie was taking me. I wanted to scream it in her face, but I felt like it didn’t matter. Mostly because I had a suspicion she already knew I had come to it.
“Yeah.”
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I found myself crouching with Natalie, halfway down to the threshold of Hell. She turned to me, as the look of suspicion she’d shown to me all day was replaced with her panic of my impending breakdown. The darkness was slowly swallowing the details of her face, her eyes the last remaining element of familiarity, still swirling with that unfamiliar emotion.
“I’m alright. I um…”
She stared for a moment, waiting for me to convince her, before realizing I couldn’t on my own.
“Just shut the hell up, idiot.”
Thank you.
Natalie’s eyes disappeared. I felt her hand appear on my left wrist. I felt her arm extend as my foot reached the floor of it all. I fought as hard as I could to breathe without causing an earthquake. I forced my legs to stand.
Alright, back to walking.
Alright... okay…
I trusted Natalie. I really have no idea why. She had every opportunity to fabricate what was going to happen.
Opportunity isn’t a good word, reason is better.
I still had no idea why we were down here. I didn’t know what I was helping with. I didn’t know how to even begin to think about it, as my attention was completely abstracted by the intimate wet impacts dotting every degree of the 360 around us. Closer or further, there wasn’t a single hair of direction that I knew wouldn’t eventually lead to one of them if we walked it. I guess that’s always true in an infinity, but it still would’ve been true if this room was only one square mile.
I shut my eyes, and tried to pretend there was light outside them, but refused to open them to confirm if it was true or not. Schr?dinger’s daylight. I wanted to squeeze Natalie’s wrist back more than anything I’ve physically wanted in my life. If you read the list of all the things I’ve physically wanted in my life, you’d burn this journal. I couldn’t risk her disgust convincing her to drop the string of my arm. The silvery, green aurora squishing in my eyelids was so pretty. I felt cold. A pair of two staff ran behind me so close that I could feel my shirt rustling in the breeze. Natalie squeezed my wrist. God was that pressure on the thin little bones of my wrist. It was warm, even if I think it was meant to hurt me, and demand my focus.
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Natalie stopped walking and let go of my wrist. The same hand appeared on my back, gently pushing me forward. My foot brushed the wall of a carpeted step.
“Up,” She whispered in my ear. “Three steps.”
At the top of the three soft steps, I reached my right hand out to find the feel of a comforter. Pieces of the fabric flaked off into my fingers, as it felt like it had been previously lit on fire. I had a theory about the furniture down here. It’s like Hell, for furniture. Upstairs is just purgatory. Any piece of long abandoned piece of furniture in the real world ends up here or there, depending on whatever condition it’s in when a human being sees it for the last time. Something takes it and gives it a new home.
Natalie reappeared behind me.
“Not the full flashlight, just use the screen to help you step here.”
I felt her presence move past. I took a moment to get enough confidence into my lungs to open my eyes again, and just like that, the darkness was confirmed. I quickly tried to dispel it by tapping my phone screen. I turned down the brightness as low as it could go and held it to my feet. I saw the kind of couch so long you’d only find it in the lobby of a banquet hall. All its legs had been screwed off, and it was anchored by the bed I’d been feeling, the other end resting somewhere higher that Natalie had climbed up a moment ago. I carefully began trekking up the cushions, feeling it creak under my weight. Better than hearing it. I found the end of it on the high roof of the neighboring display. I almost screamed as Natalie’s hand stopped my shoulder.
“It’s stable,” She said . “Don’t worry.”
I was worried. I barely trusted stepping on the floor let alone some crumbling “roof”.
“Cody? You with me?”
“… yeah… I’m here.”
“Good, turn around.”
Natalie quietly unzipped the top compartment of my backpack, taking out my actual flashlight before zipping it back up.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Distance… you’re a bad whisperer.”
“Distance?”
“… listen, I can only show you this for a second, and then I want to do what we have to do, and get the fuck out of here. So just look, understand, then do what I say.”
“I don’t want to see it-“
“-one second, not even. I need you to know what it is. At least the half of it.”
She turned my head in the direction she wanted me to look.
“Please don’t,” I said, but I kept looking.
I kept looking, and I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had ignored that order, I would’ve done anything else she wanted today, and everyday for as long as I lived, but Jesus Christ I wish I hadn’t looked.
I wish I’d never looked at that pile.
Natalie flicked the flashlight on and straight back off. It was like opening my eyes and slamming them back shut again. It was only a second. Less than a second, just like she said. It was enough. It’s on the inside of my eyelids forever now.
Mountain. A fucking mountain is what it was. Pile isn’t a good word and all that. I couldn’t see the top, but I knew where it was reaching to. The ceiling. Not hundreds, not thousands, maybe not even tens of thousand. A towering mountain of what must have been at least one-hundred-thousand empty figures of gray. The clothes removed. Just overflowing limbs of gray. I remembered my bedside table, destroyed in my bedroom. All these bodies were the makeup of a lattice that had been previously holding up a piece of the Heaven’s. While the entire screaming scaffolding came crumbling into this faithless mountain, the Heaven’s were dragged down right along with it. Flaming in gray. A mountain of gray flame that swallowed Elysium. Heaven gone. Only gray. It obtained the entire range of my vision. For just that second, there was no IKEA, no real world detached from it. Obviously no Heaven, but no Hell, and no in between. There was nothing but gray. Like the entirety of whatever existence had previously sprouted was only made to eventually build this thing. It all ended here. It was all just gray. It’s all just so gray. A gray that wraps its hands around your throat. A gray that digs its teeth into your flesh. A gray that slowly floods your vision until you disappear.
“They feel it for miles. If there isn’t something immediately attracting them, they just drift down here.”
Is that why so many of them are down here? The reason why this hellhole is so much more condensed than it already would be?
“But that’s the goal, that they drift down, rather than wandering around up there, but… it looks like it’s reached the ceiling again. This pile is covering up another set of stairs, completely. We would usually throw them down here from the top. Anyone we had to kill, Roman would take them to the back wall and throw them a fair distance behind Return. It gets enough attention that they usually walk right by us without the distractions of sound. After that, they just keep walking. The only trip me and… the only trip I usually have to take is just bringing them from that general area to the top of those stairs, just so they don’t stick around town for too long. Toss them down, forget about it… but they’re overflowing now. They’re traveling in from the other direction up there, coming to see what’s going on with what’s barely ten bodies above sea level. They’re just breezing right past that little thing, and heading straight towards us. It’s only a couple every once in a while but… before too long…”
What a joke. This thing would fill up the entirety of R&E like a bathtub being poured into shot glass.
“Am I supposed to grab a fucking shovel?”
She put the flashlight back into the backpack. I heard her shakily breathing in.
“We need to make a landslide.”
I had to control myself from laughing out loud.
“Are you messing with me?” I said. “… Natalie?”
Did she walk away? I didn’t hear anything. I tapped on my phone screen and held it up to where she should have been. She was still there, but I nearly retched at the almost inhuman face that stared back at me.
“Na-… Natalie?”
“I’ll be completely honest with you. If I had decided differently, you would’ve been going down that hill with your arms tied behind your back… day one… there’s still plenty of time for you to prove that’s the right decision.”
I assumed that was the location of strike three.
“… I… okay”.
I’m sure I didn’t do a great job of hiding the shiver that sent me into.
“Alright. You ready?-“
“-you don’t… want the flashlight?”
“I don’t need it. Put the knife in the bag, you need both hands.”
I needed a logistically viable way to throw up without setting off an alarm. I put the butcher’s knife into the backpack and zipped it up. Did she just make me hold it so I didn’t feel naked? I guess she knew I wouldn’t have made it here naked without breaking down completely.
“What do I need to do?”
She looked away.
“We’re gonna pull from over that direction. The sound should confuse them enough to not draw them directly towards us. We’ll have to let it fall in little pieces a couple times before we do enough for this to be worth it. Once we do, the escalator should be exposed. We’ll scale whatever’s left and get the fuck out of dodge.”
I didn’t… I didn’t believe that was going to work. And Natalie… she… goddammit.
“Okay.”
“Good, no more talking. Turn off that phone.”
I did as she asked, slipping it back into my pocket before she took my wrist and guided me back to the couch. She descended alone, and I followed before her hand found me again on the other side. She led us to the floor, and around the bend, heading closer to the foot of the monstrosity. I tried to pay attention to the way Natalie’s body was moving, and only step the same moment that she did, because eventually, we were surrounded.
Eventually isn’t a good word. Instantaneously is better.
I struggled to continue the will of moving my legs at all. It was a very familiar feeling. My muscles were in the grips of a very serious episode of PTSD. Natalie gripped my wrist harder, as I felt the presence of a gangly horror in every direction, mere feet from each of us. A giant sopping sprint began somewhere behind us, and I felt Natalie quickly shifting one of her feet to multiple different positions, before choosing the best one, and ripping my body and hers into that small pocket, absent of any other caretaker. As the mass sprinted past us, I could feel some of the bodies around us follow just as quickly. It was like a tornado around our pathetic huddle. I felt an arm bash against my backpack. I almost screamed before Natalie’s hand appeared over my mouth for the third time today. I took my other hand and forced hers away, demanding I was fine. I wasn’t. Natalie took a moment before continuing to guide us in the direction they were all running, but she did so now with a slower reservation, as if she was following the cadence of my movements instead of providing the rhythm. She seemed like she was keeping herself together well, but I had no clue what was going on below the surface.I was too focused on keeping myself below the surface. If I had been at the front of the duo, Natalie would have been traipsing around an oil slick of my sweat. She began pausing more often. We were still just as surrounded, but that wasn’t what she was being decisive about. She finally locked us into one place, paused for a moment as another couple galloped past us, and gently guided me down to the ground with her. She guided my arm as my hairs stood together on my neck. I felt the vicinity of cold, false skin reaching out to my palm before she finally let go of my wrist, and my hand mashed into the rough ankle of a Staff’s corpse. I think I had whimpered the moment I felt it. My palms were so sweaty, like I was a leaking factory of butter and oil.
Me and fucking oil.
A moment of parallel memory brushed my pitch-black surroundings, as Natalie’s lips brushed my ear.
“It’s gotta be quick. Three seconds. Both hands. Pull as hard as you are absolutely able to. Then just climb. Whatever way is up, just get there.”
Three seconds. I let it have me for three seconds.
“I’ll follow your go. Three…” She whispered before backing away to somewhere a moment away from me.
I didn’t respond. I was surprised she’d even taken the chance to speak to me, but everyone here except me seemed to be a world-champion whisperer, so forget it. I was suddenly so tired where I hadn’t been the rest of the day, but this darkness had pierced a hole in me somewhere. A hole where my vigor was sloshing out of me with every breath.
Two seconds.
This was so ridiculous. I mean yes, I’ll pull, but what if I do it wrong? I was given almost no detailed explanation of what was expected of me. Now I’m somehow here, and I can hear, goddammit, feel , that I have an audience of these stringy demons standing all around me with their missing mouths foaming over, just waiting for one little sound, one little brush of the dinner bell.
I brought myself back enough to take my other hand to the ankle. I steadied myself against it, letting my suddenly five-hundred pound body lean into the support. I felt my obsidian lungs in my chest. Filling them seemed ridiculously fantastical, I’d been living off little pulls for the past twenty minutes. Something about the air here didn’t feel right. I didn’t trust my body to confirm that. I was in a saucepan of nocebo. It was fresher than the hole had been, but it wasn’t fresh. It was like the closest to the vacuum of space that a place could be whilst still pretending to have some sort of oxygen supply, but I knew what it was doing. I could feel its hands under my ribs.
One second. I let it have me for one second.
What if I ripped ass when I pulled? It’d kill the tension, at least I might laugh a little on the way out.
Cero.
I forced my entire weight into my legs, a death grip on the ankle of the gray. I ripped my body backwards, as an almost identical sound followed a mere millisecond after me somewhere to my left. Our sounds were followed by many. First, I heard the double-back footsteps of whoever had been patrolling the area turning to investigate. Before they could focus in on us however, our sounds were quickly contested by the ones that had been set into motion. Slipping, followed by tumbling. I thought I was so immediate in my response, but as I was about to forget my instructions and dash away, a pile-driving cadaver slapped my legs out from under me. I fell to the ground as another sickeningly cold mass landed on top of my back. The throng around me was suddenly three times as threateningly loud as it had been about two seconds ago. I felt two hands grab my leg, saddened to die without warning in the sudden confusion, before realizing the hands were too warm to be one of them. Natalie ripped my body out from the Staff sandwich it had been resting in, the same as the corpses we’d extracted from the Jenga pile. Her hands appeared on the back of my shirt, as she ripped me up. Oh yeah, I forgot, up. She didn’t have to even say it, I knew where we needed to go. I was still hearing a wealth of tumbling and pounding footsteps. Somewhere far above us, an indiscernible molecule of light appeared. It was barely anything at all, but it felt like a knife through the black that had drenched my eyes so long. I was transfixed by it for a moment before a body smacked against my side, throwing me into Natalie. She handled it a lot better, refusing to fall as she steadied us both, planting her foot into the pile. She immediately began clawing her way up as if she’d planned on being shoved with me. I threw myself to follow her. The ground of the mountain was slipping away with every grab and step I tried to secure. As if my hands weren’t already repulsed by every object they landed on, every surface was just as repulsed by me, giving way the moment I tried to scale it. I felt like I was in a ball pit of carcasses. Did we even need to do this pachinko stunt? I feel like somebody could have breathed on this thing and achieved the same result.
Natalie’s hands appeared on my shoulder.
“Ah!”
I couldn’t help it, I had been holding myself under for far too long at this constant velocity of pant-shitting.
“SIR!”
I could barely see Natalie’s furrowed brow.
“Goddammit,” She said. “Pull. Pull fucking anything.”
She turned and grabbed the first body that wasn’t held down, grunting slightly to toss it behind her as quickly as she could. I heard the cascade it had caused before she continued climbing, dusting me behind her. I tried to follow her, but the “ground” suddenly took a massive dip beneath me. The light grew above. I turned to see that the Staff behind us were attempting to crawl up in pursuit, practically excavating the foundation of the pile.
Goddammit indeed.
I began climbing with more fervor, trying to combine the act of stepping with the act of pulling. I was using every limb I could get a hold of like a belaying rope, and slamming down every body below that my feet could reach. I, uh, really couldn’t tell if I was achieving any progress with either.
“Look,” I heard Natalie say.
I looked to the light. I could see the edge of the escalator wall had been exposed.
“We can squeeze through,” She added. “This thing is going to destroy itself and bury us. Let’s go, now.
Her voice was shaking out of her throat like she barely meant to be using it. It was scaring the shit out of me. Ugh, get in line.
I continued my sad excuse for “ascent”. Natalie was moving so fast. I was sure she’d had to do this before. I imagined that if I wasn’t keeping up with her the way she needed me to, she was just going to leave me. I wouldn’t be surprised or blame her. I would be very unhappy though. I felt my lactic acid building up as that fear sent my limbs into overdrive. The more light that was revealed, the more I saw the pile around us folding in on itself. Every falling body was animated enough to trick my eyes into thinking they were living. Like a ball of fire-ants. Not fun, but it helped. Climb, dude.
I incorporated my elbows. Natalie became a little closer as my lungs began to make their grievances known. I apologized to them, and promised it would get better soon. It was an empty promise, but I didn’t have time to think about them. I heard a slide above me as I looked up, expecting a giant falling mass to smack me down to the bottom. Instead, Natalie appeared, offering me her hand.
“Come on! We need one more!”
I didn’t hesitate to think about my embarrassed apprehension. I clamored my hand into hers, and pulled against her weight, bringing myself up to her level. The shape of the pile at large was beginning to reveal the ridiculous scale of the escalator. Natalie and I made an advancement of about fifty feet before she stopped me.
“Okay, here. It’s gotta be deep. Save me if I get swallowed.”
“If you what ?”
I saw her secure her feet between two torsos before submerging almost her entire upper body into a mess of limbs. I heard her grunting as she slowly emerged again. I felt the pile shaking as two bodies fell towards Natalie.
“No!”
I lunged towards Natalie, grabbing her by the waist and ripping her out of the burrow. Her body resisted, as I discovered it was connected to an arm deep in the haystack. Natalie came up for air as I felt both of our feet sinking into the bodies.
“Up!” She yelled. “Up fucking now!”
We both scrapped at the quicksand. As always, Natalie made quicker work than me. I was still struggling to surface my ankles when she grabbed me by the strap of my backpack, planting her foot to rip me up with her. It sounded like an earthquake. The light was practically spilling as quickly as the bodies. I barely turned, but my peripheral was squirming with extremities, flopping up the beach to drag us down.
“Don’t look back!” She yelled as she pulled my leash again.
I returned to climbing as the pile stayed steadfastly crumbling in. A body moved to the side as my hand brushed the rubber railing. The light washed over my face. My pupils probably turned to pinpricks. The movement of the couple bodies ahead of us were from the toppling of the escalator steps. All the pile’s gravitational movement seemed to be below us as my foot found an honest to God step. I looked behind us. The Staff didn’t have nearly the control of their superfluous limbs to scale the speedily decaying mountain. I watched them do nothing but aid to the already rapid unraveling. While it definitely was a significant shift that had taken place, the pile was still an unbelievably head spinning nightmare to see, as from this angle, it was more like a sea. I could almost hear its collective disembodied voice groaning underneath the sonic mess of crumbling. The souls of fallen gray Heaven.
“Hey,” She said, panting behind me. “You alright?”
I reeled around at that question. I thought she was being sarcastic before Sparta-kicking me down the drop. I saw the image of that occurring as she… didn’t do what… seemed like a really good idea.
“It’s enough,” She added as I didn’t respond. “Let’s get the hell-… Cody?”
I turned back around and looked back at the mess. The way it moved, the way it pulsed, there was no doubt it would haunt me once I left. It was down here, but it was behind my eyes forever. The same as the last pulsating mass that I left down here.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t have any more dreams. I couldn’t let this infinite dead sea of black live in my fear of continuation. If I continued as R&E’s expendable pawn any longer, there would undoubtedly be a day where I was forced to return here. That wouldn’t be living. I didn’t want to ever see this place in my attenuated lifetime again.
I just wanted this wound to sleep.
I took the butcher’s knife out of the backpack.
“Cody!”
I really need to examine my route of “critical thinking”.
“You better fucking trust me after this,” I said without turning around.
“What?!”
I held my breath and vaulted clear over the side of the railing.
“CODY GOD DAMmi-,” Natalie’s voice flew away from me as my body plummeted through the air.
I brought my knees to my chest. It was my fall into the pit times twenty or so. I wanted to cry. I begged for the ground to take me out of the median of regretting my decision before my punishment arrived.
My wish was granted as I cannonballed straight down into the mess of bodies, instantly dropping the knife as I was buried six feet deep into the filth. I could immediately hear and feel that my insanely stupid action had worked. The sliding of the incredibly fragile pile swept me up in its tide. My skin was being tossed in a blanket of thousand-leggers, screaming to crawl off my body and away from this spin-cycle. Every inch of my being was swimming in this disgusting gray. Thrown through the waves, I only slowed when I was too deep down in the layers to be affected by the landslide. I went to hastily push a leg away from my face, when I realized I couldn’t move my arms. It was followed by the realization that I couldn’t move my legs. Or my head. I couldn’t move. I started getting a feel for the amount of pressure that was restricting every single one of my limbs, and my body as a whole. I was having trouble even deciding which way I was facing from the ground.
I felt the pressure exaggerated on my torso as I started hyperventilating. Every breath out became a small whimper. Every small whimper became a groaning cry. Every groaning cry was beginning to turn into a light wail as I felt a large impact rippling like a shockwave through the pile.
“MA’AM!” A demonic excuse for a voice called somewhere above me.
That was a new one. I didn’t even know they did that, are they progressive beyond that? Doubtful.
I heard a ridiculous amount of footsteps tripping over the vicinity of wherever the hell my body was. I think I knew what they were chasing after. I had no way to help what was such an undeserved rescue attempt. I remember what somebody had done for me once.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!”
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Every footstep around me stopped, almost simultaneously. I waited in anticipation, trying and failing to hold my breath. They couldn’t find me, couldn’t tell how to reach the place where the bait was coming from.
“Hello?” I called again.
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I heard that sound again, from what must have been almost every Staff member in the immediate area at once. That deep, horrible, banshee-like shriek. The one I’d heard outside the gate with Nick. I think it was anger, frustration if anything. The sound of their realization that something was outsmarting them. Do they have emotions? Maybe they could be progressive. There are plenty of humans that are less complicated than that.
Admirable, but it’s truthfully never a good time for things to be complicated.
I barely heard a multi-staged clanking sound far in the distance like a pin-drop. The giant herd of footsteps began again, immediately running to chase it. They were close as they moshed in their search, but eventually grew dimmer, as I heard another sound above me. Heaving and tossing. After a minute of ruffling somewhere above my face, the pressure on top of my body began to be alleviated. I found myself being able to wriggle my limbs ever so slightly.
I screamed as a hand grabbed my elbow. I heard the wet footsteps shift.
“Come on!” She said. “Fucking pull yourself out!”
I followed the tugging on my arm, as my torso breached the light. We’d created light again. An oasis of illumination around the now almost uncovered top-half of the escalator. Natalie had jumped down after me to follow my action. We’d mitigated The Pile.
“Come on, we gotta run!” She said. “I threw the knife!”
I reached my feet shakily, smiling as we began to run.
“So you trusted me?” I said.
“Yeah,” She sneered sarcastically. “Because doing some Die Hard move like that with no warning is gonna make me trust you. Don’t ever do that shit again. Anything… adjacent to that shit.”
Natalie had abandoned the butcher’s knife the way I’d abandoned the flashlight with Nick back then. Maybe she was just as dumb as me. We clattered onto the escalator and began crawling up it like flames. I made the mistake of looking through my peripheral to see the crowd beginning to file back into the light to follow us. We were halfway up when I began feeling the vibrations against the bottom of the handrails. The whole reason my previous Warehouse crew had claimed to be “stuck” here was because of how quick the Staff could scale this thing. Were we just running to convince ourselves we could? Natalie turned around.
“MOVE!” She yelled.
I scrambled past her and turned.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” I demanded.
The quickest Staff was barely a couple feet away.
“You’ve got some nerve asking me that,” She said.
Right when it was about to reach her, she threw herself down, skipping five stairs back-first, blasting into the creature’s chest. I ran to catch her arm, keeping her from falling all the way down, the way everyone else did. Her first victim created a domino effect, as they all tumbled over each other the same way I just had at the bottom. I pulled her up to her feet.
“That was so fucking cool-“
“-Shut up, run.”
We continued vaulting up the steps. I gauged my forearm on the serrated edge of one of the stairs, barely feeling it in the moment.
“Come on, come on,” She said.
I don’t think she was talking to me.
The banging behind us was becoming less jumbled, more militant. They hadn’t stayed tangled for long. The mass of the disbanded rat king was basically right behind us. But this time, they were too late.
Natalie and I practically RKO’d each other at the top of the escalator, both trying to pull the other off into a different direction. Natalie won as she ripped my body away from the entrance and dashed around the edge of a display. She threw me into an alcove, pulled her gun out of her waist and looked out the window, pushing me down with her as we watched through the cracks. We saw the overflowing gray mass spilling out onto the floor.
“No,” She said as she grabbed my collar again.
But she stopped, unsure. I took my turn to help.
“There, under.”
I pointed at the king bed. She responded by dragging me under the bed with her, throwing me onto my stomach and slipping onto her back. I looked to her to see that she had slammed her eyes closed. She held the gun to her chest, as it rose and fell, heavy with her mild version of hyperventilation. It was almost completely silent. She’d trained herself to lose her mind inaudibly. I looked away as the gray footsteps began swarming through the bedroom. Some ran past, and surely plenty of them were running around in other places. We had only seen the beginning of the efflux. From the sound of it, there were probably a hundred up here already. I controlled my breathing as we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Natalie had a small moment where her panic became audible. I felt and controlled a desire to yell at her. Successful hero move or not, we could’ve been out of this already if not for me.
The sounds of the footsteps were just beginning to get quiet when a pair stepped right up to the bed, each foot directly in front of either of our heads. We both held our breath. It stood there for a full minute, motionless. I realized I was feeling a small vibration on my back as I turned. Natalie’s hand snatched the flashlight out of the bag as she threw herself out from the bed, and up to her feet. Before I could even say anything, I heard the smash of wet flesh. The body fell forwards with Natalie on top. She bashed the base of the flashlight into the thing’s head repeatedly, grunting as she moved way too rapidly for such a taxing physical exertion. It didn’t even remind me of Lizzie at the time, Natalie was a different animal. Still, the sound of its head caving in was quite similar. Maybe we’re not so different after all.
I couldn’t even be scared this time. I was tired.
Natalie finished after an amount of time I was far too zoned out to focus on. She stood, looming over the body with expectation. When it proved to be finished with its coil, she seemed satisfied.
“Alright… come out…”
I waited a moment before allowing myself to follow her. I brought myself out to the murder scene. She didn’t even look winded. I looked around at the light of day in the bedroom. She looked over to me, turning the flashlight on. It worked, but it was flickering slightly. Guess it wasn’t made for phantom-skull-crushing.
“That… did that really go off that easy?” I asked. “Are we actually done?”
She wiped her upper lip and walked up to me. She flicked off the flashlight and shoved me around. She stowed it into the backpack.
“… I believe you’re sorry,” She said. “… I just hope you know that almost everyone that was in that church feels the same about you as I do now, and I bet everyone they know will follow soon. That’s gonna take a lot of work to fix. You can’t half-ass your way back from that. You need to repent.”
She zipped up the backpack as I slowly turned around to her.
“What, you… think I should start going to church-“
“-I didn’t mean religo-… whatever… you’ll figure it out if you really want to… what time is it?”
I looked at my phone, turning the screen to show her 5:09 PM. She nodded, before turning to walk to the doorway, stepping over her effortless execution. She stopped to see I wasn’t following her yet.
“Let’s um…” She began. “Let’s go get your pole back, okay?”
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The presence of the pole made me feel secure again, as I gradually exhaled more and more of our expedition. I tapped it on my shoulder, feeling a little satisfied with myself, but not too happy to feel that way. It wasn’t quite the same sensation of survivor’s guilt, but it was definitely a present feeling of missing out on the brutal death I was supposed to have today.
I didn’t want to yell at Natalie much anymore. The more I relaxed, the more my anger grew about her withholding this event this general, but I was trying to save that for another time.
I… felt like I’d helped today, and I almost wanted to thank her for that feeling. I’d felt almost… cool with her today. I don’t think I’ve ever felt cool for more than five minutes. I imagined a universe where what we just did was an attraction at a theme park, and I could playfully ask her if she wanted to go again.
She strolled behind me silently. I could hear her rubbing her arm.
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I wanted to tell her about Nick. I felt like it was realistic to believe that I would go back after today and continue to make things worse for myself like I always do, the only thing that changes are the methods. I think I liked doing it too much. Right here, right now, was likely the closest thing to “okay” that Natalie would be with me for the foreseeable future.
The longer I waited… it wouldn’t make it any easier to drop the bomb. The longer I kept it from her, the more I’d be scared of Nick having his extremities broken upon me breaking the news. If I told her out here, and she freaked out, I had so much open space to try and calm her down about it before she could get to him.
I began to piece together the sentence structures.
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Natalie beat me to voicing her own internal monologue before I could begin.
“… you found Elizabeth down there?”
I wanted to stop walking, but I’m sure she’d curse and shove me forward.
“Yeah… just… sitting in a hole.”
“What was it like?”
Natalie’s voice was still a little softer than I was used to, as I could hear her walking slightly closer to me.
“W-… in the hole, you mean?”
“… how bad was it?”
“I like… I told you. It was… pretty bad.”
“… so bad that… you think she won’t recover from it?”
I kept walking, but turned my head to the left a little.
“Ya know… I wasn’t exactly looking for her. I was serious before. It was just a total coincidence that she was there when they brought me down.”
She didn’t answer.
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“Why wouldn’t she recover?” I asked in her silence.
Elijah said she probably would. He had convinced me pretty well…
“… Ira told me she’s been screaming at night.”
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I had an awkward sting in my chest hearing Natalie say that. I never truly got over what had happened to Elizabeth, even whilst probably not knowing the half of it.
“I… I think they were feeding them to her.”
Her hand practically teleported to the back of my collar as she spun me around.
“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THAT BEFORE?!-“
“-Woah Woah Woah!-“
“-ALL THE WORTHLESS NOTHINGNESS YOU SAID IN THAT FUCKING CELL AND THAT NEVER CAME UP?!”
This was not the time to tell her about Nick.
“Dude calm down. It’s fine, it was ages ago. She’s not infected or anything, something would have happened by now-“
“-OH SO NOW YOU’RE AN EXPERT?! YOU’RE GONNA TELL ME HOW THEY WORK?! WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN ‘INFECTED’?! I SHOULD’VE CUT OUT YOUR FUCKING TONGUE BEFORE, THEN YOU’D HAVE A REASON TO NEVER BRING IT UP IN THE CONVERSATION-“
“-Natalie stop yelling at me. That ‘conversation’ was never anything. I thought you were going to eventually ask about it again, since we both know we said nothing of value that day-“
“-I CAN’T-… I can’t believe you, I just can’t believe you.”
She put her face in her hands as I continued.
“I thought you would maybe talk to her yourself, since you’re the fucking Sheriff and all. Did you ever even think to ask her what actually happened? Do you even know if anything I said about that event was truthful? Do you even care if Lizzie’s story was truthful?”
She ripped her face out of her hands.
“SHE’S A CHILD YOU MORON! NO! HER WORD DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING! IT JUST DOESN’T! THEY BLOCK THINGS OUT! THEY LIE TO THEMSELVES AS A DEFENSE MECHANISM WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING THEY’RE DOING IT! FOR YEARS! FOR FUCKING YEARS ! WHAT IF IT DOESN’T DIGEST CORRECTLY?! WHAT’S IF IT’S LINING HER STOMACH AND THEY CAN SENSE IT INSIDE OF HER-“
“-That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard-you sound stupid-“
“-HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?! HOW WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT’S STUPID-“
“-You’re the one saying ‘what if’! You’d know better than me if that would actually happen! You’re just fear-mongering-“
“-I AM, CODY! BECAUSE YOU SHOULD BE SCARED! YOU DON’T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON HERE-YOU SHOULD BE TERRIFIED-“
“-I FUCKING AM, NATALIE! YOU KNOW I AM! WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH LIZZIE-“
“-GODDAMMIT, NOTHING GOOD EVER HAPPENS AROUND YOU! WHY DID YOU EVEN COME BACK HERE-I DON’T GET IT! AND I DON’T GET WHY THEY LET YOU BACK IN! OH WAIT! YOU’RE RIGHT! MAYBE IT HAS TO DO WITH LIZZIE! ANY CHANCE THAT COULD BE IT, CODY?! YOU’D THINK THAT IF SHE WAS THE REASON YOU WERE ACCEPTED THAT MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, YOU’D GO FURTHER OUT OF YOUR WAY TO HELP US PROTECT HER!”
I glared at her angrily.
“You’re spiraling.”
She pushed me away angrily.
“UNBELIEVABLE!”
She turned around, rubbing her forehead. She wasn’t even saying anything, she was just blowing off steam at me. Still, I was panicking. I was worried about making Natalie do something about Lizzie that she’d regret.
“Listen Natalie, it was weeks ago. If they swarm towards themselves like that, they would’ve done it by now, right? That one by the gate was the first one I’ve even seen in like-“
She spun around.
“-shut up! Just shut the fuck up and keep walking before I beat the shit out of you!”
I turned around willingly, I couldn’t even look at her. All it took was one moment of that kind of disagreement, and I was back to having lost every desire to be civil with Natalie. I was disgusted. It was so pointless, and I was so tired of saying that. I didn’t want to think it was pointless. I didn’t want to talk to her for the rest of the day. I wanted to walk back in total silence, and if she tried to ask me anything, I wanted to stay silent until she shot me. Enjoy your stretched out pile, I hope throwing my body down there takes at least one more day off the time you have left in this shithole. Glad I could help. That internal fuck you was the last thing I ever wanted to say to Natalie Shachiro. But alas, she was quick to decide she didn’t want to let me have any peace.
She said something in a really weird voice that I couldn’t make out, like a REALLY weird voice. It was like an impression or something, it sounded so fucking stupid, and it pissed me off. Was she trying to make jokes? Or was she just that annoyingly far off the deep end? I immediately went back on my allegiance to silence as I stopped and turned around.
“Listen, what the fuck did you just say?” I demanded.
She didn’t even stop walking until she was an inch away from me, grimacing in my face.
“What, dude? What is it now?” She shot back.
“I heard you mumble it, I want you to stop being a pussy and say it out loud.”
“Huh? The hell are you talking about-I didn’t say any-…”
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The lights went out.
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I shakily slipped my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight, pointing it to Natalie to see her face gone completely white, looking off in some other direction. Her pupils still dilated from the light. I looked in the direction she was looking, just in time to hear the gun slip from her waist. I swung back around to see it aimed towards my head. The safety clicked off
“Lying asshole-I should’ve known you were trying to do this-“
“-WAITWAITWAIT! THE TIME IS OFF, I SWEAR TO GOD! LOOK AT IT!”
I tried my best to non-aggressively, as not to be shot immediately, show her the glow of the phone screen.
5:51 PM. My time was off. I didn’t even know how that was possible, I thought it was always permanently synced in here. It ticked to 5:52. It was still running, how did it get that far off without me noticing? How had we not noticed how long we’d been out there? It hadn’t felt like the whole day at all.
“I swear this is the same time I’ve been following this entire day! It’s the same time you looked at this morning! I don’t know how it-“
“-Stop yelling. Turn your flashlight off.”
I did as commanded. I immediately regretted getting mad at Natalie just now. I felt absolutely helpless as we both silently waited. The ideal result was silence. The actual result was almost heartbreaking. So many footsteps from so many places. You couldn’t possibly tell which one was the closest. We’d brought so many back up with us, and they’d just been wandering around since then. Our entire point of adventure today had done more harm than good. I struggled to get the other flashlight out of the backpack silently. It wasn’t silent. I felt around for Natalie’s hand, slipping it into hers. She didn’t even respond. I couldn’t hear her breathing.
What the hell do we do?
Already, there was no more time left to think. I heard Natalie mutter a curse under her breath, as a bookshelf smashed only a couple steps away from us.
“Fuck it, get it back on!” She yelled.
I listened and turned the flashlight on, Natalie doing the same. Mine was steady, hers was a strobe, but they both did their job just as well: Illuminating the porous incursion of gray faces from every direction.
“Don’t let them touch you!” She screamed as we ran from each other.
“Wasn’t planning to!”
I ducked to escape the reach of two Staff that were coming from both right and left, threading myself between them. I looked in the direction of R&E. It was far. So hopelessly far. It was still a two hour walk at minimum. Running? I don’t know, maybe an hour-fifteen if we were superhuman? There was just no way we could make that trek in the dark, even if we weren’t currently being hunted. I could see Natalie’s light pirouetting around the darkness somewhere now fairly far from me.
“WHAT DO WE DO?!” I screamed.
“SIR!”
“I WASN’T ASKING YOU!”
I dipped around another close-encounter, smashing my shoulder into the edge of a closet door. I cursed colorfully, trying to keep my hand on the phone and sustain my pace.
“NATALIE?!”
“I DON’T KNOW DAMMIT-JUST FIND YOUR WAY OVER HERE! NO, FUCK IT, RUN TOWARDS RETURN! I’LL MEET YOU THERE!”
“WHAT?!”
“JUST GO IN THAT DIRECTION! WE CAN’T CONVERGE!”
“LISTEN, WE SHOULD GET UP HIGH SOMEWHERE!… NATALIE?!”
She stopped answering me. I still saw her light moving, still flickering on the edge of going dark from a broken bulb. I think she had decided it was not a valuable mental-drain to keep arguing with me. I couldn’t disagree too much, but it made me angry… and scared. I didn’t want to be alone… and I didn’t want her to be. I heard a smack that was way too close as I realized I had almost run directly into another gray hug. I panicked, shoving the pole into its chest and pushing myself in another direction, stumbling just enough to bash my knee against the handle of a cabinet drawer. I growled angrily out of both the unbelievable pain that I had to ignore to keep running, and the anger of letting myself run into something that hard that soon again. My body was slowly working its way back to feeling the way it had on my previous run back from The Warehouse.
“GODDAMMIT!” I screamed, simply to psych myself up.
“CODY! SHUT THE FUCK UP! THEY CAN HEAR YOU FOR MILES!”
I knew she was right. I turned to see her flashlight was a little closer. I dipped through a bedroom, seeing twice as many figures passing by the window across from me. I hated this feeling, but I’d been worse. I could do this, I could run. I was, in theory, the healthiest right now that I’d ever been in this place since my initial abduction. I wasn’t about to let that go to waste. What happened downstairs was a warm-up. As dark as it is right now, our heads were above water. We weren’t in their domain, I had to tell myself that, even if it seemed like it wasn’t true. I had to believe this was neutral territory.
As I vaulted over a bench like I was Kanata, I caught a glimpse of a main trail. Okay, okay, alright. I dashed forward, breaching into the clear and setting myself on a straight line. Natalie’s location was flashing in the woods to my left. We were parallel, and even in the mess of a labyrinth she was traversing, I was struggling to keep up with her in a straight line.
“Ah!” I heard her yell.
A large wet impact was layered with a mangling of plaster. I looked behind me. I had seven on my immediate tail from what I could glean without slowing. That’s fourteen feet. The army in Natalie’s direction made fourteen sound like tea for two.
“Natalie!” I try to yell without being a total beacon. “There’s a clear path here, get out of there!”
She didn’t respond.
“Natalie, please! Come over!”
Nothing.
I moved my flashlight away from my path, but kept looking forward.
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I remember exactly what I pictured in the canvas of the dark. The image of her and Sean.
Right now. I couldn’t even focus in this kind of life or death scenario. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d softened for him.
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“This is such a bad idea.”
I focused the flashlight again, and jumped off the trail, diving into the forest to find her. I caught myself directly before smashing my ankle into a coffee table.
“You thought.”
I briskly squeezed through two walls of neighboring displays that were way too close for the entourage to follow me. They would find their way around pretty quick, but I’d shaken them for a moment as I emerged on the other side of the paper-thin alley. I was close enough to hear Natalie’s footsteps. She was supernatural, she wasn’t even heaving. She had competition though. I was used to chasing after Kanata. Not to brag, but I had to slow myself down a little to reach her.
I reached her.
I sidestepped the oncoming traffic of one Staff as I broke off the aisle to reach hers. I stepped directly in front of the one that had been closest to following her. I heard it make a sound like a beluga whale trying to hum gently, as I think I had genuinely surprised it enough to be stuck between Sir and Ma’am. I made a small distance in its confusion, and heard my previous following begin to filter in, tripping the ginormous storm that Natalie had accrued. They flailed wildly as Natalie and I finally gained some ground.
“Come on!” I called. “Let’s get back to the clear path-“
“-Why the hell did you come over here?! It is like the one thing I needed you not to do!”
“It’s dangerous running through here, you need-“
“-I don’t need anything, Cody! I’m better at this than you! I don’t want to be, I just am! Stop trying to be creative, and just do what I say! None of this would be an issue if you had just-“
“-Hey!”
Ahead of me, two Staff barged out from the left, smashing a glass-screen door to the ground before sliding directly into Natalie’s path. I lunged forward to grab her arm and pull her back. She made a sound like a gasp that her throat was too embarrassed to properly let resonate. The Staff dashed forwards to us.
“Come on!” I yelled as I ripped Natalie to the right.
“Cody, no!”
I forced us through the wilderness, hearing the tirade growing louder than ever behind us. The smashing of furniture was beginning to rival my ability to hear my own voice, let alone Natalie’s.
“Cody, we can’t be here! It’s a fucking trap, they know how to-“
“-what?! Did you say trap?! From who?!”
“No one! It’s them it’s just-“
We broke onto the clear path, despite Natalie’s protests. I ripped her in the direction I’d been running before letting go of her arm. I couldn’t hear her footsteps behind me, but of course I couldn’t, it had become too loud.
Right?
I turned to see Natalie had stopped. I fucking wigged. I dashed back towards her.
“NATALIE! WHAT ARE YOU-“
I reached her the moment I heard the shift. The noise had been so loud that I’d lost track of what direction it was primarily coming from. I turned back to see the path completely flooded in the direction I’d been trying to take us. Turning back to Natalie, I saw the same incredible wave coming up the other side.
We hadn’t outrun them, of course we hadn’t, that would be ridiculous. They were just toying with us. Natalie knew that. She hadn’t been trying to outrun them, she’d been trying to find somewhere to hide. Did that mean abandoning me? Maybe, but she wasn’t trying to. They’d all been following her, even though I was the one screaming.
I’d fucked it all up.
“Natalie, tell me what to do! Tell me how to help you!”
She didn’t move. She didn’t speak, she just stared for a moment.
“NATA-… fuck me sideways-okay, um…”
I stash my phone in my pocket, cocked back, and punched the shit out of her arm. She woke up, turned to me, and raised her gun.
“Back in the alleys, now!” She yelled. “We can’t-“
Before we could move, both sides of the woods gave way to volleys of Staff. I turned with two free hands and smashed the poll into the leg of the closest as it fell to the ground. I heard a gunshot go off behind me, as I sank the end of the pole into the soft tissue of its head. They were confident on their feet, despite how flippant their limbs were. It was hard to trip one when it was focused on you. Kanata was smart to use her advantage of flying below their radar.
There were too many, and I wasn’t fast enough. There was absolutely no way that we could stay where we were.
“We can’t fight!” I yelled. “We just have to-“
My heart sank as I looked over at Natalie.
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I lived in fear, but I’d gone a long time in here without seeing what The Staff do once they catch you, how we apparently might as well be made of paper around them. I wasn’t sure how that was possible. They were just tall faceless gray humans after all. Scrawny ones at that. Sure, that was putting it lightly, but they shouldn’t be able to tear apart anything without a weapon. I thought they didn’t have a weapon. I thought they would just strangle you or something, maybe crush your skull. My imagination of the unknown had done a lot of work to paint horrible images for sure, but I guess I thought that… maybe… just maybe… they weren’t as bad as everyone here made them out to be.
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I wish I still thought that.
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Everything seemed to go quiet to make way for the advancing footstep placed right behind Natalie’s back. As she spun herself around, the look on her face immediately showed it: She knew something horrible was about to happen.
She struggled to flail herself backwards, trying to escape the moment of conflict, and give herself another second to think, but… it just wasn’t enough. The right hand of the Staff standing over her swung down like a pendulum. It should have only smacked her side and kept going. Well, I suppose it did keep going, but it didn’t go alone.
As the hand made contact with Natalie’s left side, its form seemed to rapidly morph into something sharper. A claw. Talons. As the trajectory continued, it dug a hole. Three of them, one for every finger that made contact. As the hand exited, it left three giant gashes across, and more accurately inside, Natalie’s stomach, immediately gushing with fluid down her waist. It was a lot of blood. A lot. Easily the most I had seen come out of a person in real life before, but it wasn’t enough to cover up what was behind it. Past the waterfalls, I could see that Natalie’s innards were almost completely exposed.
The silence of the entire infinity sustained, just long enough for me to hear the small croak float from her mouth. Her eyes became immediately distant. Her left hand clutched at the gashes, barely even covering one as the crimson tides bubbled over her fingers. Time was diluted, as it felt like she had been in the air for hours whilst the event slowly transpired in front of me. The flashlight flicked on, and off, and on, and off. Frames of complete emptiness flashed back and forth, like I was repeatedly slamming my eyes shut, trying to wake up from the nightmare that just kept being real when I opened them up again.
One second just kept going forever.
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One second. I let it have me for one second. I became a little boy, and cried over everything that had happened over the past two months. I cried for my mom, I cried for my dad. I cried for Leo. I cried for Hannah. Then I stopped crying for Hannah, and I stopped thinking about the blood.
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Natalie fell backwards onto the floor, the gun and flashlight slipping from her hands, as the Staff member wasted no time dashing towards her body.
I screamed so loud it hurt.
“HEY!”
Its head darted towards me. That was all the time I needed, just to keep it from finishing her off in that brief moment. I ignored whatever was behind me and ran towards it, swinging the pole the hardest I ever had.
“YOU FACELESS MOTHERFUCKER!”
It smashed directly into where the Staff’s eyes would have been, as its head snapped back, stumbling into and over the bureau behind it. They supposedly didn’t have brains, but I certainly rattled something inside of there with a hit like that.
I dropped the pole, more threw it away from myself, as I quickly ducked down to the ground, scooping Natalie up by the legs and back, just barely fiddling the strobing flashlight into my hand beneath her legs. I wasn’t exactly sure whether or not Natalie was already past the point of saving, but I certainly couldn’t help her here, completely surrounded.
So I ran.
I slipped into the opening I’d created, having no option but to take the chance that I wasn’t walking directly into five more. I fell back into the forest, barely escaping every wall I was about to run into as the flashlight sputtered wildly. I could hear the pounding army of footsteps immediately trailing behind me. The familiar cacophony of discordant voices and tumbling furniture. I didn’t know where I was running. Without Natalie’s directional awareness, I was just as lost as when I’d first arrived. Whatever place led me away from there.
If Natalie was really correct, I could shake them and figure out how to keep her alive later, but that was a task much easier said than done. For one, I’d quickly been humbled of my pride in my speed. I had barely escaped the Staff with my pace before, and now I was carrying another entire body with me, one that I began to notice was draining fast due to my bouncing. I could feel the warm humid liquid occasionally spraying up onto my cheeks as if I was jogging through a bloody ocean breeze. The flashlight was beginning to have longer and longer periods of total dark. The light was becoming the outlier the longer I ran. I couldn’t take even one of my hands off of Natalie. I just ran and ran and ran. I felt Natalie groaning in my arms.
It was just like before. A trip to The Warehouse had left me scampering through the dark with an unconscious body in my arms. Natalie was a lot heavier than Lizzie, and as much as I hated to compare like this, I was far more reluctant to let Natalie die.
Not like this.
Not before she gets to see Ira again. Not before she trusts me. Not before she tells me everything she’s keeping from me. Not before I understood her. Not before I get help for Nick. Not before I get better. Not before we get better. Not before I apologize. Not before she helps me apologize. Not before I win an argument against her. Not before I win. Not before I get to rub my existence in her face for another couple of years before I die. I die first, that’s the rules.
You die on my fucking terms, not in my arms.
Not now. Not like this.
Not like this.
I tightened my grip on Natalie. I let go of the flashlight.
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(Part ten coming soon!)
