Chapter 22 #2
It seems like he is in an intense fight with the effects of the drug.
“I don’t remember what I’m doing. Every time I gain control over my body, I find Paul in a worse shape than before,” Blake says in a very lost voice. “Kill me, Anmara.”
“What? No! No fucking way!”
It would be a good time to let me out. I can easily fulfil his wish. I only need to take his head in my hands and twist it.
“No!” I scream, taking a few steps back, and throw a punch at the first wall I see, and then scream because of the pain I inflicted on myself.
I cannot process how my hand is filling up with blood and how bad it hurts, because I see in my peripheral vision Lucas picking Paul up.
“What do you want to do with him?” I ask him, pointing at Blake.
He looks into my eyes, then at the blood that is dripping from my hand, and I can see how much he abstains from saying something about that.
Lucas turns his gaze to Blake, who is now slapping his face to regain control, and he sighs. Paul coughs again, the blood from his mouth getting on me, and he starts to tremble uncontrollably.
“Fuck him! Come on!” Lucas says, and then he runs with Paul in his arms.
I stand still for a second, realising how fucked-up the situation we are in is, only to remember that we only have one key that can get us upstairs.
Before thinking about my actions, I take Blake’s hand and run to the exit of the tunnel.
I just hope to have made the right choice.
?
“He’s not breathing!” I scream while I press on the wound from where the blood flows the most and check his pulse again.
While Lucas stayed with Paul, I cleaned the blood off the hand with water and bandaged it with a piece from a pink t-shirt of mine, while keeping my fingers out to also be able to use the hand I stupidly hit.
I also cleaned Blake’s full-of-blood face, not wanting to watch the beast inside of him anymore.
We took turns with Paul, who passed out in the meantime because of his pain. We checked his pulse regularly. Until earlier, it was just irregular, but now I am not feeling it at all.
Everything was fine until now. Why couldn’t it continue to be fine?
“Step aside,” Lucas says, and he softly pushes me from Paul, but my hand remains pressing his wound.
I would’ve cauterised it if I knew where the hell my first-aid kit ended up. I searched for it for an entire hour, but since I couldn’t find it anywhere, I started to panic really badly.
Lucas presses the device that was supposed to restart his heart on his chest, and Paul is lifted alongside it.
I put two fingers on his neck to search for the pulse, but it still can’t be found.
“Try again,” I tell Lucas with tears in my eyes.
“Let me help you,” Blake says.
I tied him up to the armchair in the room, from where he won’t be able to hurt anyone else.
From the way he spoke and the smirk on his face, he isn’t the one talking, but the asshole personality that the idiot drug created.
The blood from the bruises on his face starts to drip, perfectly combining with his venomous words.
“Go to hell!” I tell him acidly and get my attention to Paul’s body, who rises once again with Lucas’s device. “I thought you said it should work no matter what!” I scold Lucas, wanting to kill him to save Paul myself.
But, I know it isn’t the case to go too extreme. I would lose both of them, and that clearly isn’t what I want.
“It should, Anmara. I don’t know what he was injected with or why his body is rejecting the strong electric shocks. Fuck!” he says once he sees that Paul still doesn’t have a pulse.
He tries many times, but no result.
My nerves reach the maximum level when the device starts smoking, a sign that it is now of no good. Lucas throws him next to Blake, while he is screaming and swearing.
“I think it’s better this way. I didn’t even like him,” Blake says, starting to whistle.
You can kill him. It’s simple. Go near him with the penknife from the other room and…
“I won’t quit. We try the classical method,” Lucas says, interrupting my conscience.
He starts pressing his chest, but I stop him when I can feel more blood flowing from his wound.
“Fuck!” Lucas says, getting up and walking impatiently in the room.
He suddenly stops and goes to his backpack, then comes back with one of the vibrators I saw. He presses a colourful button, and the device opens from the middle down into four equal pieces like a flower with small, thin needles at its ends.
“This or nothing,” Luca says and puts it on his chest.
He presses the button, and the electric shock is so strong that it lifts the hair on my hands, but it still doesn’t seem to do anything about Paul.
My tears are flowing more and more abundantly on my face when I see that we don't manage to revive Paul. My sobs aren’t even letting me breathe properly at how strong they became.
“Why. The. Fuck. Don’t. You. Wanna. Wake. Up??” Lucas asks, strongly hitting Paul’s chest with every word he is saying, making Paul suddenly take a deep breath and stand at 90 degrees.
I feel like I can breathe again, like the air wants to finally come and oxygenate my full-of-pain lungs.
“Oh my God!” I say with my face wet from tears.
I jump in to hug him, getting whimpers from him. “Sorry,” I laugh softly and distance myself a little with my hand still pressed on his wound.
“It’s ok,” Paul says with a smile that I don’t get how he manages to put on his face after being dead for a couple of good minutes.
Lucas is also shocked, with his own face full of tears. He can’t process what happened, but he comes and does the same thing with Paul.
“You scared the shit out of us! I didn’t even think you would wake up,” Lucas says while hugging him shortly and strongly, then moving away. “If you do this again, I will kill you with my own hands," he says, making Paul laugh at his affirmation.
“Blah blah blah, reunion with a zombie, big deal. He looked better when he was dead. More peaceful that way. Now, does anyone want to untie me?” Blake asks.
“Aw, you want to help me? How nice of you," he says when I get closer to him, but I close his mouth when my feet strongly hit him in a painful zone.
“You bitch!” he says, lowering his head and trying to squeeze his legs together to get rid of the pain.
I watch him as he violently shakes his head and legs and starts to scream like someone is slowly killing him. I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Suddenly, I hear nothing and look at Blake as he sits with his head down. I remember his health problems and check his pulse. I notice it’s still there, so he just passed out.
“It’s not the first time he does that,” Paul says.
I redirect my attention to him, close the space between us, and sit next to him. He’s now standing upright, with a pillow on his back, his hand on the wound, and his face twisted with pain.
“What’s up with him?” he asks me.
“What do you mean? What is up with him?” Lucas snaps. “Are you seriously asking that? You didn’t breathe, you were the one who was not fine, and you’re worried about Blake? You were dead, for heaven’s sake… You’re fucking crazy, man.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to agree with Lucas,” I tell Paul when he turns his gaze to mine. “Who the hell knows what they injected you with that we weren’t able to…”
“Okay, stop. What did they inject me with? Who?” Paul asks. “Wait, hold on. How long have I been here?” he asks, a scared mask spreading all over his face.
“For two weeks,” I say, and I already feel like I wanna swallow back my words because of the realisation.
I see him turning as white as a sheet, and I don’t think I’m far from it. He’s still trying to speak, but no word is coming out because of his shock. I’m experimenting with the same thing.
“Bianca…” he sighs. “Where is she?”
“She’s fine, close to us. Calm down,” Lucas responds. “Nothing happened to her.”
“I’m not interested in what happened to her or not, I just want her to stay the fuck away from me!
” Paul growls with shuddering lips. “She said it was just to have a little fun before the wedding, to forget about the stress, and she did it with me, that fucking piece of shit," he says with hatred, frowning, making me extremely confused. “If I catch her, I will…”
He doesn’t manage to say anything because Blake suddenly screams and wakes up, scared, looking at us and at the rope around him.
“Really? Again? I’m already bored of waking up tied up,” Blake nervously says. “What’s up with the long faces?”
“Bianca modified it,” I say to myself, but Paul clearly heard me, his face turning red with anger.
“I will kill her,” he simply says, a profound hatred spreading on his face.
“What exactly is happening here?” Blake asks, but nobody minds him.
We are in deep shit. Deeper than I would’ve wanted to be.
“Why the hell didn’t I know that? How could I trust her so much?” Lucas asks, pacing through the room.
It’s enough for him to stare at the hole in the wall not to make another one, even if I can see on his face how much he wants to hit another wall.
“You couldn’t have known, and neither did I,” I say. “Her reaction from the motel seemed a bit exaggerated, but I never thought that she could betray us so badly.”
In that moment, reality punches me hard in the face.
I didn’t hallucinate. The small reactions she had… were fucking real.
“Then why didn’t I notice? After all this time spent together…” Paul says, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back.
“Believe me, I’m in a far more similar situation than you can imagine,” I say, making him open his eyes and look at me.
“What do you mean?”
I laugh at the situation, and he frowns even more when he gazes at me.
I tell him what we found out about Marshall, about the drug he created, and what side effects the stolen version has. I even tell him what’s under him just now. On his face are exposed so many feelings that not even I can keep up with them.
“Also, Bianca modified the dose she gave you, so who knows what kind of side effects it could have?” I finish the story.
Then I realise how big an idiot I have been. And not just me, because Lucas puts my thoughts into words, instantly making me jump out of bed.
“We left her with Marshall.”