Chapter 64th

"You got him, Susie!" I screamed. "You got him..." I panted. I could hear her crying, but I couldn't see her… not anymore. My eyes were closed tight, my forehead pressed against his shoulder, holding my stance… holding it as if I would crumble if I tried to move away.

"GO!" I screamed, ordering desperately… desperately hoping she would obey and give me that small splinter of a break… "GET HELP! GET DAD!"

She looked at me, scared at last… too scared to go. She hesitated a second time, moaned something…

"GO!" I yelled again, and finally heard her small shoes skip away, run off… the night grew darker. We were alone again, Chris and I.

I was too scared to look up… to scared to open my eyes… Chris didn't move, he didn't say a word either. Pain! I felt pain… it started with a burning sensation, then it grew in intensity, crippling me. My shoulder… I groaned.

"Why did you do it?!" Chris spoke at last, and I opened my eyes, looked into his – they were inquisitive, angry… almost offended. I wept.

"HEY!" he called back "Why did you do it, huh?" He pulled my head up, keeping it from falling. "HEY, Abby!" A series of small slaps to the side of my cheek. I didn't know the answer.

"It doesn't matter…" I opened my eyes to say, to stare deep into his, as my body grew heavy… tired… sore. Too sore to hold… but still smart enough to understand: I had taken that bullet for him. My shoulder burned, housing it still. It stung so bad, I drooled… but I also smiled: "You failed…" it turned into a laugh. "You didn't kill me…"

My head got heavy, dizzy… nauseated. It drooped ahead, landing on his chest, but he quickly seized me and held it up again.

"What have you done?!" he speculated, his eyes wide, as if disturbed. How laughable… I couldn't help but laugh, to see such a face!

"Do what you will now, I don't care anymore…" what a strange pleasure possessed me, to be able to cynically say that… to finally care as little as he did: "…only… you don't have that much time!"

And I collapsed again, landing in his arms – he pushed me back, his hands clumsily holding me, fidgeting, moving… then inflicting pain: Was it revenge? He squeezed my wound, it burned infernally, as if something was being pushed inside, and I screamed an animal-like, groaning scream. I drooled some more… nauseous. Almost as if I could vomit.

"You lose…" I said, making an effort to put those last few words in "…you didn't kill me. Even if I die here… it wasn't by you… All night long, all that torture… and finally you accomplished nothing!"

Chris's hands framed my face, pulled it up for him to see – for his disturbed, surprised eyes to behold. I couldn't see his face, it grew blurry.

"You don't… get to choose anymore. They're coming…" I chuckled wickedly – the shaking of my body made the pain worse, and I winced. "They're here!"

Chris held my head up again, against myself. "Why did you do it?" I heard his voice echo.

"Doesn't matter…" was my sleepy reply. "I'm gonna… I'm gonna die." My eyes grew heavy, dark. "…and they'll never know".

Chris laid me down to punish me with his petty retribution: he pressed my wound, its very center where the pain reverberated from… it burned, waking me to the worst sensations I would feel in my entire life, and I screamed, holding his hand, trying to pull it from me but failing to gather the energy. It felt like being pierced… as if he shoved a knife into my open wound, pressed something in. Overwhelming pain was all I experienced, until I couldn't see his face anymore – a mere blurry shadow against a dark blue room… but I heard his voice, when my arms collapsed at my sides, unable to sustain their own weight. I heard him assure me, with a degree of peevishness… of revenge:

"You're not dying, Abby."

My eyes grew dark… and I'm afraid I dozed off. But I remembered his words… somehow, strangely, they made me feel cold… scared: You're not dying.

They rang into my ears from a distant nook. My heart, which had found a comfortable position in which to beat slowly, suddenly ached, constricted, then expanding – violently tensing and relaxing, and beating so fast my chest might burst! I was in the dark, laid down on the floor in complete and total darkness, with nothing but the sound of those words, that ominous prophecy: I wasn't going to die. I felt his lips against mine – they were moist, soft and warm… they loved me. But they suffocated me, too! My heart ached, I gasped for air, and received too much of it: too much at once! It burned my throat, it burned my nostrils, hoarse like sand being funneled down.