Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
LIAR
“Roger?”
“Shh. That shouldn’t have happened.”
My heart started beating more rapidly as I cowered in my hospital bed in the dark. I was stuck, hooked up to so many tubes of who knew what. Hooked up to machines that needed power to run.
“Roger, is this going to kill me?” I whispered. “Because I can’t die. I promised Nix I wouldn’t die until after the Three-Hundred.”
“Yeah, keeping a promise to Nix is clearly the priority. Not that you live for, you know, yourself. The backup generator should come on soon.”
The lights flickered and then the emergency lights produced a dim blue glow while the machines started humming again.
Roger looked at me with an interesting frown, like he had to do something unpleasant.
I’d never seen that look on his face no matter what he did to me.
Was this going to be something that killed me, or something I liked? I had no idea.
He flipped his tablet around so I could see the screen. Guys in black clothes with blue head lamps creeping down the hall.
My heart beat too fast while his eyes studied me with that weird look.
He shrugged then edged towards the window.
The door burst open and half a dozen guys poured in.
They shot taser bolts at Roger, but he wasn’t there anymore.
Nope, I saw an electric buzzing dart bounce off the sole of his shoe as he leapt out the window, abandoning me.
Ah. That’s what that look was for. So sad to stop torturing me, but he had lazing to do.
The intruders had black caps pulled low, holding their taser guns, turning them on me.
I stared at them stupidly, my heart racing painfully in my chest, but my voice was calm. “Oh, good. You’ve come to rescue me. Hopefully you have arrangements about how to move me. I’m delicate cargo.”
Seriously, couldn’t DuPre wait until after my treatments to kidnap me?
One of the guys nodded at the others, and they fell back, leaving me alone with him, closing the door after them. I had a really bad feeling as he started towards me. When he got close, he raised his head so I could see his diabolical, perfectly symmetrical eyes. Michael DuPre in the flesh.
“No way,” I said, shaking my head. “There is no way that I’ve been surviving torture for months only to be forced to see you in my last moments. Fate wouldn’t be so cruel. You’re going to start talking, aren’t you?”
“Ma Cherie,” he said in a low voice as he walked slowly towards me, eyes burning with an inner psychotic light that I’d been so happy to leave in the haunted dungeon.
He turned his face and pointed to a deep scar down his face.
“You left me helpless in the Pit of Macao. You betrayed me after I loved you so loyally.”
My heart beat so fast in my throat as he came closer, knife raised, expression clearly past madness, fury married to obsession that created a real cocktail of unhappy accidents. I was getting a total murder-suicide vibe from this whole situation.
I smiled brightly. “That’s true. I definitely betrayed the stalker who shot my husband and busted my favorite board. You never paid me back for that.”
His eyes flickered with rage as he took another step closer, the pretty knife in his hand glittering.
“Do you recognize the blade? It’s the one you used to kill the Crocodile.
Flowers make the prettiest poison.” He ran a hand through his hair and glanced to the side, considering flowers and poison.
When he looked back to me, his eyes were dead.
“You and I can’t live together in this world, so we must go to another one. Together.”
He was completely insane. Like really, really gone. He was going to kill me, and Roger had jumped out the window. I was dying over here, but my obnoxious stalker wanted to hurry it up for some reason. Because Romeo and Juliet needed an encore. Lame.
“It’s not going to happen,” I squeaked as he kept coming closer.
“You can’t kill me. I’m the Ultimate Weapon.
I mean, they call me Sunshine Ray Death-Hammer.
I’m against violence, but I’m not going to let people kill me without defending myself.
” Right? Because me, hooked up to all of these machines could totally accidentally kill him too.
He shook his head, expression dark. “My family is gone. Flowers destroyed them. There is no place in this world for us, but I’m not going to leave you alone. We’ll be together. Finally.” He raised his knife and took another step closer.
I shrieked as he brought down his knife towards my heart.
I also blocked his strike with my water bottle.
Well, that was lucky. He roared and slashed me across the throat.
Again, my water bottle came to my rescue, deflecting the blade so it sliced through my arm instead.
Ow. Except only a distant kind of ouch that didn’t intrude on my disbelieving horror.
Maybe this was a hallucination. I was heavily medicated, after all.
He ripped the water bottle out of my hand and threw it, clanking against the tv screen. My arm burned while I reached out panicking, needing a weapon of some kind, but on the table, all I found was my sketch papers and pencils.
“We’ll be together forever, my love.” He shifted his grip on the knife while weird memories pulsed in my brain.
I’d been in Middle School, running over to stop Beastie from beating some kid to a pulp, holding my pencil and notebook I’d been drawing on when shouts had interrupted my daydream sketch.
In the middle of my yelling at him, Beastie turned and frowned at me, then grabbed my pencil and fixed my grip on it.
“You have to punch hard. Deep. Straight, or the wood will shatter. Like this.” He demonstrated on his own chest, like I’d ever want to stab someone with a pencil. What was his problem?
Back in my hospital room, Michael raised his knife, giving me the perfect opening. I shifted my grip on the pencil and then punched it hard, deep, straight into his chest, all the way to the eraser, and it was a new pencil.
Michael gurgled and slashed the knife at me, but his aim was off. I raised my hand to block the knife and cut a bunch of tubes instead of me. They were officially not helping me anymore. At least not as far as medication and treatment were going.
I threw off my light blanket and kicked him back, sending him stumbling and sliding on my water bottle.
I frantically ripped needles out of my arms when he came back at me, his face a weird color while he struggled to kill me even with a pencil stuck inside his chest. Shouldn’t he be dead?
It was like Nix’s mother all over again. Twitching, but he just wouldn’t stop.
He lunged at me and I side-stepped and grabbed his wrist in the move that Nix had taught in that self-defense class so long ago.
I disarmed him and gave him a throat strike, just like Nix had demonstrated, only my throat strike wasn’t gentle, and he went down, gasping.
He grabbed for my ankles, but I kicked him back, stumbling into the hospital bed.
Finally, he went still while I gripped the knife, my heart pounding, every one of my nerves screaming at me to do something. Fight or flight. Roger had jumped out the window. I hurried over and peered out at the drop to the courtyard far below. How in the world had he gotten down?
The doors burst open and two guys came in, eyeing their fallen comrade and me.
“You killed him,” one of the black clothed men said as they spread out, reducing my chances of getting past them. “Nothing could kill him, not even the beast and the pit of Macao. But you did.” He made me sound so special.
Don’t look at the body. Don’t look at the body.
I raised the knife and my chin. “Yeah. I’m the Ultimate Weapon, so you should leave now if you don’t want to die like…
” I glanced at Michael and then threw up.
It was only dry heaves. I’d killed him. I’d killed him so dead.
He was even more dead than the Crocodile of Alabama.
They came at me while I was hunched over.
I backed up against a metal shelf that held a lot of medical apparatus, including needles.
I’d always been really friendly with needles.
I grabbed a big one and then when they came at me, I spun away, slicing greasy-hair through the throat and stabbing the other guy in the eye with the large syringe. Um. I’d throw up about that later.
The one gurgled, the other screamed, but I wasn’t done.
I grabbed another needle, this one full of Roger’s diabolical drugs, and rammed it into the shoulder of the guy who’d just yanked the needle out of his eye.
So gross. What was wrong with me? I must be hallucinating.
None of this was really happening, otherwise, they wouldn’t be so slow, and I wouldn’t be so fast. I was so, so fast. On.
Better than my best day at the skate park.
Needles screamed as whatever I’d injected him with hit his system, then he dropped. I refocused on greasy hair, but he wasn’t moving, and his blood was pooling around him, spreading towards me. I took a quick step back and bumped into the metal rack again.
I stood there, heart racing while the lights flickered and came on again.
The bright light showed the massacre. My cut tubes were spilling fluid all over the floor around Michael with a pencil sticking out of his chest. He wasn’t moving.
Probably because he was dead. Yep. That pallor was really not very life-like.
He was so dead. Just like greasy-hair, only now it was more like bloody-hair, because reasons.
Like that he was missing half of his throat.
I shuddered and picked my way carefully through the room, around and over the bodies. I’d killed them. Not all of them. The guy with the needles was probably just unconscious. Unless the drugs had killed him.