I don’t know what shakes--the floor, or the ground. Something shakes, nonetheless. Maybe the air shook from the impact of the bullet. Or maybe it’s just me. But for a moment, everything is still, yet everything within me tremors.
As the noise of the gunshot fades, we wait for something to happen. Anything, really. I’m straining hard, so hard, to just keep it together, but slowly, those strings are spanning, like rubber bands finally giving after spanning the distance from the moon and back and to the moon again.
It all lets loose when I see who lays dead with a bullet in his chest. The man, the wretched man. His strings, too, have broken, and like a ragdoll he’s fallen on Elie. The final lamentation of a dead man. Or, maybe not quite so dead. His breath still stirs his chest ever so slightly, like a winter breeze tugging at the antenna of a dying wasp.
But, oh, the most interesting part? I can hear him die. The noise he makes when he breathes, the little gurgle of pure agony. Only, I just can’t bring myself to care.
It’s with thoroughly spent strings that my legs use to walk. My steps are surreal. My head is in a cloud, my feet are on the ground, my knees are magnets and the floor is too. I give into the magnets as soon as I reach Elie, and with hands made of fire I push the dying man off of him and gather Elie to me, away from the blood.
Elie’s shivering, but almost completely limp, His eyes are wide, shell shocked, and almost completely bloodshot. It’s a shocking contrast; blue with delicate vines of red, lashes of gold, crystalline tears. Not knowing what to say, I do the only thing that comes to mind and gently brush the tears away with one hand while the other is wrapped around his shoulder. I was never good with crying people. I never knew what to do. Was I supposed to ask what was wrong? How should I comfort them? Did they just want to be alone? It was always awkward at the least and I would always just stand there until the tears ceased, and pretend that it never happened.
But right now, I don’t feel any of that. I feel spent, I feel anxious, I feel scared, I feel sadness, and I feel angry that someone hurt Elie in a way he’ll most likely never forget. I feel something else too. It’s there, but just out of my grasp. I’m not sure how to place it, but I feel protectiveness, fondness . . . just something different.
“Ah, you must be Elie. Ahem. I am Mr. Dungworth. Pleased to meet you.” Dungworth says this like he didn’t just shoot a man, who is still dying on the ground, and like Elie hadn’t almost just died. “I presume that your friends are still in there?” He points to the room that Elie had come out of. And it’s then it hits me: freaking Dev and Bernie, like little nincompoops, had hid out in there the whole damn time while Elie was being held at gunpoint. I quickly figure out something else: Trevor is gone.
In the camera feed, he’d been sprawled on the floor, and now he’s gone. He hadn’t been kidnapped; the other guards had left from what I saw in the feed--wait a minute--there were three guards left standing, but four exited. Trevor left with the guards! That freaking traitor had sold us out! I allow myself to feel angry for a moment, before pulling myself together to give an earful to Dev and Bernie. I rise and crack my knuckles, because it makes me feel a little more confident, and step into the room. The door is pretty broken, so there’s really no chance of a dramatic entrance. I do my best anyway. I see Dev before he sees me--he’s under a table with one on the computers on the floor in front of him. He’s just using the computer like an oversized tablet, scrutinizing the screen.
“So, did you change the simulation?” Everything in this plan to stop the final simulation went so wrong but it would be worth it if at least the simulation was changed.
“Well, some variables I understand. Tree, for example, is easy to figure out. But some of the other variables are just so . . . time consuming to have to figure out because there’s just so much code. I mean, how’s someone supposed to do anything with this?”
I feel my hopes deflate, “It didn’t work?”
“Well, I mean, I created a bunch or syntax errors, but those aren’t too hard to fix. I made some runtime errors, but those aren’t hard to find either . . . I played around with it a little and maybe I created a semantic error, which would be great but I really don’t know at this point. There were just so many nested conditionals based on user response and--ugh! Bernie--that little pansy--fainted at the first sign of trouble. And I couldn’t just delete the whole thing! They probably have another copy somewhere!”
Gosh, is he just incapable of speaking normally. I mean, he knows that someone with no coding experience wouldn’t get this jargon. “Well, thanks a lot for helping,” I snap, “You really helped Elie out over there.”
He sobers immediately, “Is he okay?”
“Sure.”
“I would have come out to help, but if no one was in here to mess with the code, our mission would have been a total bust. At least now, we have a shot.”
Too tired to argue, I just walk out. When I do, I see that Elie, Jayne, and Dungworth are gone. Sheila stands waiting at the doorway. “They’re waiting outside. They took the other dude too, he wasn’t dead yet. Dungworth says he could be useful.” I nod and we start walking away, just like that. We walk and I realize that we haven’t really talked in a while. Everything has been so chaotic that we really haven’t gotten the time to talk or really do much of anything.
“How’s life?” I ask, part jokingly, but half serious. I couldn’t be the only one having a hard time dealing with all of this.
She manages a laugh, though it’s kind of strained, “What do you think Dungworth did to get himself his name? I mean, priceless.”
"Priceless.”
Her smile fades and she says, “It’s starting all over again. We’re being taken to some other organization, only this time, it won’t come with the comfort of home.”
“Where are they taking us?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
So, I get into the car, once again, with a stranger. A stranger named Dungworth who can shoot a rat’s ass from a mile away. And we drive. I don’t get to say goodbye to my mom. Or my dad or my brother. But I’m being told that it’ll be taken care of. Who knows anything anymore?
***
Author's Note:
Hello. Ah, it's been a long day. I literally woke up at five to get to a speech and debate tournament and I'M STILL HERE. I've only done two rounds. Most of my time has been spent writing this and reading. I finished a 280 page book and I'm still here. WHY? Plus, I sucked so bad in my rounds. EVERYONE WAS SO GOOD AND I WAS JUST SO AVERAGE.
Yeah, anyway, sorry for the rant. What did ya think?
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Lunar Virus ✔️
Science FictionElodie's life changes at the turn of a doorknob when she is forced into joining a secret organization that claims to be protecting the Earth from aliens. But with every step she takes, she finds the organization, or the facility, as they call it, be...
