“Well, what do you want me to do? It’s not my fault my boss went crazy.”
“No,” said Jamie. “Of course not. And what you’re doing...It just seems so hard. So difficult.”
“Hold still.”
Another needle plunged into Jamie’s arm. This time, it didn’t go into the stent, or whatever it was, that was already stuck into her arm. She felt it pierce her skin. It stung, but the pain was nothing compared to what she was already feeling. Just a fraction of a percent of what she was already feeling.
“What are you giving me now? I thought you were just taking my blood?”
“Just something to make the tests work better.”
The plan to become Lily’s friend wasn’t going as well as she had hoped. So she tried to take another tactic.
And it was then, with the unknown drug pumping through her veins, that she realized she had a second option. Good old-fashioned violence.
Lily was close to her. Perilously close, for Lily.
She was within arm’s reach.
Sure, Jamie was strapped down. But not as well as before. She had realized upon waking this time, that the straps hadn’t been done up quite as well as before. As a consequence, Jamie was able to move her arm. Not from the shoulder, since her bicep was strapped down. But she found that she could move her arm at the elbow.
She reached out. She was tired, but she moved as fast as she could. Incredibly swiftly. Her hand was like an iron grip. Somehow, she was able to summon up a strength that she didn’t know she had. Despite the pain she felt, despite the exhaustion that wracked her body, her hand seized Lily’s wrist like an iron vise.
Lily yelped and tried to turn and twist away from Jamie.
But Jamie wasn’t letting go.
She had nothing else. No other plan. It was either this or nothing. Either this or stay here forever. Die here, probably
21
Brian
Brian hadn’t wanted to stab him, but he’d had no choice.
That’s how his whole life had been. No one had ever given him a choice. Never. Not once. Everything he’d ever done he’d been forced to do. There were bad people out there who made him do things. None of it was his fault. After all, he’d never wanted to hurt anyone. If he could have had his way, he would have never hurt a fly.
But they just kept pushing him. Pushing him relentlessly. Never ceasing. It’s what had driven him crazy. It’s what had put the madness in his eyes. It’s what had started the voices, the delusions that he could never really sort through, never knowing what was real and what wasn’t.
In the end, it had been easier to go with it all. Assume everything was true. After all, he had thought it, so how could it not be true? It was his own brain, right? And it didn’t seem to make sense that his own brain would lie to him. No way. It wasn’t possible.
Brian had retreated back to the house where he’d met the impostor Brian. He was stressed and he’d needed a place to lie low. A place to rest. The sight of ‘Brian’, the impostor, though, sent him into a mild rage once again and he found himself dashing into another room just to get away from the sight of him. He’d spent at least an hour crouched in a corner of the mudroom by the washer and dryer with his head between his knees, trying to close his eyes harder than he’d ever closed them, just to make it all go away.
Everything bothered him. The state of the world bothered him. After all, how could it be that someone would go so far as to imitate him? How could someone be so dastardly and evil as to actually steal his very name and identity, especially given what was going on in the world?
It was horrible. Too horrible to think about. Too horrible to confront. So he retreated into the recesses of his madness, of his malfunctioning mind.
He stayed there, hiding from himself, from the world, until he heard someone enter the house.
Brian didn’t want to confront them. He didn’t want to face anything, let alone another person.
But what choice did he have?
They’d been attacking him practically since the day he was born. They’d never left him alone, and now was not going to be any exception.
What could he do? Lie down and die?
No. No matter what, he was going to fight. He was going to fight for himself. For his identity.
He was his own man. He was Brian, and this was his house. No one could take that away from him.
“I’m Brian,” said Brian, stepping through the threshold of the doorway.
He could see the man now. A young man. Not much more than a teenager.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“This is my house.”
“No, it’s not. What did you do to my parents?”
“I did what I had to do. I was just defending my house.”
Brian was in such a state, so tangled up in his delusions, that he actually at this point believed that this was his house. There was nothing in the world that could have convinced him of anything else.
“This isn’t your house.”
“You’re making me mad,” said Brian. He could feel the anger coming up, filling his chest, making him feel like he wanted to hurt someone, making him feel like he had to do something. Like violence was a need. Like violence was necessary.
Sometimes, after all, there was no path but violence.
Brian had no weapons with him. Nothing in hand. That was okay. He was strong. He’d use his bare hands.
The young man had a knife in his hand. That wouldn’t be a problem. He could take him. He could wrestle the knife from him. It’d be easy.
The young man looked like he might have been strong at one point, but Brian could see the weakness in him. He could see the fatigue.
Brian had that crazy strength. He had that old-man strength, the sort of strength where his muscles hadn’t swollen from hypertrophy, but the fibers were dense and intense, a twisted sort of strength that resided deep in the tissue.
“What did you do to my parents?”
The kid was saying something else, continuing to talk long after it was necessary. The game was clear to Brian. It was going to be a fight to the death. There was no point in wasting any more words on what was already known. There was no point in wasting his energy. Let the kid tire himself out.
Brian waited until no more noise came out of the kid.
His mind was a whirlwind of energy. A whirlwind of energy. It was a strange state. One that he hadn’t existed within many times before. It was as if his insanity had amped itself up, had doubled over and over on itself, becoming as intense as it possibly could.
Brian dashed forward. He dug into the floor with his toes, driving with his powerful leg muscles, leaning forward, lowering one shoulder like he was going in for a tackle.
Brian didn’t take his eyes off the kid.
The kid was trying to get ready. Trying to dodge. Trying to ready the knife. Trying to do too many things at once.
That’s where Brian’s strategy came in. A simple strategy. Attack. Do nothing else. Too many things at once just weakens them all.
Brian may have been crazy, but he had a good strategy for attack.
Brian’s strong powerful shoulder slammed into the kid before the kid could do anything with the knife, which clattered loudly to the floor.
The kid fell back, his head hitting the floor loudly.
Brian fell too, and now the two of them were wrestling together, both looking for the upper hand.
At first, Brian thought he had it. But he got cocky. He had the kid pinned down, both arms on his shoulders, his legs wrapped around his torso like a crab, in an attempt to emulate a move he must have seen once in a mixed martial arts competition on television.
It took all his muscular strength to hold the kid like that. Maybe he didn’t have the hold quite right. Maybe his technique was off. He didn’t know. Maybe he was relying on his craziness too much as the source of his strength, with the tension in his muscles reaching disproportionate levels, quickly tiring them out.
With a sudden grunt, the kid was able to shove his arm out from under Brian’s grasp.
A fist smashed into the bottom of Brian’s jaw. He went a little dizzy. Lights flashed through his mind’s eye. It was a weird feeling.
He felt himself react slowly. Too slowly. Slowly enough for another fist to smash into him.
Maybe he was too exhausted. Maybe he’d been too tense. Maybe he’d taken this all too far.
It was over quickly.
The last thing he saw was the young man’s face, full of rage and intense concentration, as the knife that he’d retrieved from the floor plunged into his stomach.
He felt the knife. Felt its sharpness. Felt its point. Felt it cutting his insides.
It was a curious sensation. He felt the pain, but he felt detached from it all, as if it were happening to someone else.
He vaguely remembered one of the doctors as the mental institution telling him that he was always feeling detached because he had some kind of depersonalization disorder on top of everything else.
That was his last thought before everything went black. Not a profound one. Not anything noteworthy. Just a random memory in a sea of chaos and violence.
22
Matt
The pain was getting bad. Matt knew he wasn’t going to last much longer.
The only thing helping the pain now was that he was starting to lose consciousness. He’d lost too much blood, and as a consequence he was drifting from a dizzy haziness to outright blackout.
As a result, he was perceiving and interpreting the world in bits and pieces. It was as if he were looking at everything through the flash of a strobe light, as if he were at a dance party.
But there was no party. Nothing but the brink of death.
He was right at the edge. The edge of life. A strange sensation. A strange realization.
He didn’t have much longer.
His hand that clutched his wound had gone limp, covered in wet warm blood, unable to move.
He jolted awake, his head shaking. Something was happening. Something was going on. His body and mind were doing everything they could to keep him from teetering over the edge.
But what was happening? What did he need to be doing?
He felt himself starting to fade again. He didn’t have long.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something moving. Was it a person? His eye moved, tracking it.
It was a woman.
Judy.
It was Judy.
She was moving swiftly, moving to the side. Her gun was in her hand. Foot by foot, she was moving away from him.
Shit. He was supposed to be doing something. He was supposed to be providing cover for her.
He looked down, and was surprised to see his other hand on a handgun. He didn’t remember the handgun. Has Judy put it there? Was it just that he didn’t remember the gun? Hadn’t he had another gun?
Blackness swallowed up his vision, everything blinking away for a long, long moment. It seemed as if he might fall off into unconsciousness again, but he pulled himself back from it somehow with some superhuman effort.
Hand on the gun.
He just needed to get the gun up.
His hand with the gun felt as if it were made of concrete, and the arm attached to the hand felt like it was filled with lead.
Not just lead, but the heaviest type of lead that had ever existed, even if that didn’t make sense.
His thoughts weren’t making a whole lot of sense now. So he just ignored them. Didn’t even have the energy to push them aside. Just had to exist with them.
It was all over. It had to be.
He was fading. Heading into blackness.
Judy would get shot. It would all be his fault.
Somehow, from somewhere, a burst of energy came, and, as if working on its own accord, his arm shot up, the gun pointing more or less in the right direction.
Aim wasn’t paramount at that moment. Just had to do something. A distraction.
His finger wouldn’t budge. The prospect of pulling the trigger seemed a Herculean effort.
But somehow, the finger moved.
The gun fired. A tremendous sound that shook his horribly weak body to its core. The gun kicked, falling out of his hand.
Pain flashed through his hand.
Another shot from somewhere echoed out. And another.
Any second now, it seemed like he would lose consciousness. There was blackness around his field of vision. It was as if he were looking at the world through a tunnel, or the wrong end of a telescope.
Everything seemed smaller and farther away than it should have been. His ears were ringing, and the sounds he did hear had a nightmarish, feverish quality to him. It reminded him of a time when he was a kid and his mother had given him some kind of cold medicine that they didn’t make any more. He’d gone into some kind of strange delirium and hallucinated that elephants were stampeding around his room. His skin had felt strange and he remembered feeling the same peculiar feeling that he felt now.
He was already on the ground, but if he weren’t, he would have sunk down. If possible, he sank further into the ground than he already was.
His eyes, facing somewhere off in the distance, were unfocused, taking in only the blueness of the sky.
There were sounds off somewhere, but he only half-registered them as his vision faded into blackness and he knew no more.
But he wasn’t out for long.
It felt like only a few seconds had passed. Someone was shaking him violently. Someone was right in his face, yelling at him.
His eyes opened slowly. It seemed as if there was some kind of haze over his vision.
“Matt, get the hell up. You’re not dying on me now.”
“The sky...” he said, the words tumbling out of his mouth messily. He didn’t even know why he said them or what they meant. He was gone. Pretty far gone. Beyond making any sense at all.
Judy was doing something with his wound.
But he knew that it was too late. There wasn’t any point...
His thoughts turned vaguely to the sky, that beautiful blue New Mexican sky...
23
Jamie
Lily screamed out and flailed, trying to pull her body away.
But Jamie held on tight. And she pulled Lily closer to her, yanking her so that all of a sudden, Lily found herself losing her balance and falling toward and across Jamie.
Jamie’s other arm was strapped down effectively enough that she couldn’t move it. So she used the only other weapon at her disposal. Her teeth.
She craned her neck up as far as she could, opening her jaw wide. She waited until just the right moment, then she bit down. Hard.
Lily yelped and screamed in pain.
Jamie had bitten her breast. It was sensitive tissue. The most painful area she could have bitten.
Now, with Lily momentarily held in place by the pain, Jamie was able to release her vise-like grip.
Her hand, now free, shot toward Lily’s neck, which was easily within reach.
Her hand, extremely fatigued from gripping so hard, still managed to hold Lily’s neck firmly and squeeze.
It wasn’t easy to strangle somehow, surprisingly, with one hand. But she managed to do it.
Lily let out a strange little noise, spit coming out of her mouth in a dribble.
Jamie could feel Lily’s pulse against the palm of her hand, and she could feel as she swallowed, trying somehow to get air.
Lily may have been a scientist. She may have been someone who worked in a lab and wasn’t all that physically oriented. But she wasn’t going down without a fight.
And she had a lot of fight left in her.
And, what’s more, she was well-fed. At least in comparison to Jamie. And she’d slept somewhat recently, whereas who knew when the last time Jamie had gotten any sleep was?
Jamie pushed and pulled with everything she had. Her muscles were on fire. Her body was screaming out in agony with the eff
ort.
But it was worth it.
All of a sudden, Lily went limp. The oxygen supply to her brain had been cut off.
Jamie released her vicious grip on Lily’s neck. She didn’t want to kill her.
Lily’s limp body wasn’t supporting itself, and now it was up to Jamie to keep her body up. It took all of her effort to keep Lily off the floor. She yanked and pulled with everything she had.
It was a horrible, painful effort, pulling with essentially just one forearm and her teeth. But she got Lily’s body pulled up so that it draped over her own.
She knew that if she let Lily slump to the floor, she’d never have a chance to retrieve the key, or whatever it was, that Lily used to keep her restrained.
Craning her neck even more, enduring the pain, Jamie tried to get another look at what it was that bound her.
She could only really see what was around her biceps and that was mostly obscured by Lily’s body, which lay so heavily across her that it was difficult to breathe.
How long did she have before Lily regained consciousness? She didn’t know, but probably not long. She could feel Lily’s breathing changing, slowing down a little, as her lungs heaved and her chest pushed in and out against Jamie.
Just the corner of the bicep restraint was visible. It seemed to be made of leather. Was it just a strap? No, it seemed that there was a small metal lock on it.
It seemed to take forever just to fumble around Lily’s body, but eventually she found a set of keys that were attached to her belt with a strange sort of lanyard. It was sort of like a tape measure, with a retractable cord that kept the keys tethered to her body. It was easy enough to pull on, but somewhat difficult to sort through all the keys.
And it was nearly impossible, with her extremely limited mobility, to get the key into the lock. It was like some incredible gymnastic feat, something Houdini himself would have been proud of.
But somehow, she managed to do it. She managed to unlock every single lock. The real difference came once she got her right arm all the way unlocked; it made everything easier, especially because it enabled her to push Lily’s body off onto the floor, where it had fallen heavily.
Last Pandemic (Book 3): Escape The Chaos Page 15