“You stole my heart,” Alexander said. “You stole my father, my mother, my life. Why were you chosen over me? What was special about you?”
“I didn’t steal anything. Our heart was in my chest. I didn’t make the decision to cut you off from it.”
“You’ve been selfish with it too long. I need it now.”
Alexander carefully plunged the syringe into the side of his neck, and depressed the plunger, emptying the syringe’s contents into his body. He paused, hoping that the injection would provide an immediate report of effectiveness. Instead, he felt a terrible burning being pulled by gravity through his body. He cringed in pain as the fire reached his chest and abdomen. He dropped to his knees as the substance was pulled through his pelvis and into his thighs before finally collecting itself together in his feet.
Thomas stood, raced to his brother’s side and removed the revolver from Alexander’s limp hand. He backed away from Alexander, training the gun’s barrel on Alex’s head. When he reached Derek, Thomas reached down and was relieved when he felt Derek’s chest rising under the pressure of breaths. He glanced at Straus and knew without the aid of feeling for a pulse or visual confirmation of a rising chest that Straus was dead. He was slumped against the wall, his eyes were cloudy and partially closed, staring at nothing.. Seeing a dead body this close disturbed Thomas. Besides attending a few wakes of family members, Straus was the first dead body Thomas had ever seen.
“What have I done?” he asked himself. “What have you done?” he asked Alexander who had fallen to his knees in pain. “I told you that I would help you. I didn’t mean to help you kill people.”
“The help you offered,” Alexander said, “did not include specific forms.”
“You’re a animal. No, you’re evil. I should kill you now,” Thomas said.
Alexander seemed to collect himself, pushing the pain away from his thoughts.
“I still need to fill my prescription,” he whispered towards Thomas. “And to continue working on my list.”
When he stood as quickly and as authoritatively as he did, Thomas wondered if what Straus had put into the vial labeled “Plan C” really was the cure for whatever was killing Alexander. Thomas pointed the gun at Alexander’s head and though his hands were trembling, squeezed the trigger, and released the hammer.
“Out of bullets,” Alexander said, smiling his vacant smile. “I highly doubt that even if you brought additional ammo for your gun, that you can load the bullets and fire off a round before I tear open your chest and take back what is rightfully mine.”
Sensing no reason to hurry, Alexander walked towards Thomas, who was still standing still, repeatedly squeezing the trigger of the revolver. Alexander was just beyond an arm’s length away when he felt the barbs dig into his back.
“Now y’all had best move back a few steps.”
Alexander was all too familiar with the Taser gun’s barbs to wonder what would happen next.
“My name is Ralph Fox, Chief of Police in the town where you started all this ruckus. That man laying on the ground next to you is someone I consider to be a good friend. Now, I will admit to being tempted to just depress this trigger and see just how sensitive you are to electricity, but, being a man of the law, I’m gonna give you a couple of options. Option one is that you lay flat on your face with your hands in such a position that placing handcuffs on them would be a simple matter.”
“And option two?” Alexander asked.
“Well now, Alexander, seems I don’t really have another option,” Ralph said. “Kinda just hoping you’d take the first one offered.”
He could feel the acidic-like substance fading yet still burning in his feet. His vision was becoming disturbingly blurry, and he felt the sudden need for sleep wash over him.
“That there option I gave you does have an expiration attached to it,” Ralph said.
Alexander, sensing that Straus was truthful in his prognosis, felt he needed another option. An option that he needed to grant to himself. Thomas stood just out of his reach, his heart, pounding away in his chest. Alexander could almost feel the heart’s rhythmic pattern. Could almost feel blood surging through his body.
“I do have another option,” Alexander whispered then lunged towards Thomas.
The charge raced through the lines and the barbs and into his body. Immediately, his muscles constricted, then went utterly limp, though the current was still charging into him. There was no pain. No moment of regret or of remorse. Just a horribly familiar feeling, then nothing.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
When he again opened his eyes, it was the face of Ralph Fox staring back at him.
“Had me scared there for a minute. Thought we’d lost you” Ralph said, his voice sounding faded.
“Black. . .Thomas. . .” Derek struggled to say.
The area around him was brilliantly bright and sterile. Ralph’s face was certainly familiar, but the others around him, those ushering orders, were wholly foreign.
“Don’t worry about them. Old Ralph took care of things for you. You just need to hold on there for a bit longer. These fellas will get you fixed up and running like a horny colt in no time flat.”
Derek drifted, thankfully to a place where his pain wasn’t allowed.
Again his eyes captured light and his ears, sound. Ralph was absent as others, unfamiliar but comforting, darted in then out of his field of vision. Each offered something, some to him and some to others. His pain reemerged, and then was muted.
“I saw her,” he said through a voice that sounded much too distorted for his own comfort. “She saved me.”
“Relax and take a deep breath,” a comforter said to him.
“She saved me.”
Derek awoke to the sounds of dinner plates being placed onto a cart and wheeled away. There were sounds coming from a television hidden somewhere in the room that he found himself in. It wasn’t the appearance of the room, the sounds he heard, or even the fact that a nurse was taking his blood pressure that let him know he was in a hospital. It was the person sitting beside his bed that made him fully aware of where he was.