The Sigma Asset 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022

65: The Angel

Shibal.

My head was fucking pounding. Dirty-clean hospital smell stung my nose, intense, burning, like it was making my nostrils bleed. It wasn't just my nostrils. Waves of agony beat back and forth across my face.

Struggling into a sitting position, I found myself in my underwear in a hospital bed. My knuckles were shredded, fingertips skinned. I felt around the throbbing wreckage of my face. My eyes and lips were a fleshy mass of oozing swollen lumps.

A bloody bandage was wrapped around my forearm. I unwound the dressing to find a deep and congealing knife-cut from wrist to elbow.

A pile of polythene-wrapped gray police victim clothes lay at the end of the bed.

"Finally." Raheem was sat in a chair next to the bed, dressed in police gray, his hand wrapped around an I.V. drip trolley. He looked fucking furious.

I lunged to take him in my arms, my head bursting in a flash of searing pain that sent me flopping pathetically back into the bed. Gripping my temples just about kept me from passing out from the agony.

"Woah! Stay there!" Raheem slid his arms around me, squeezing too hard. "You're a dumb fucking moron idiot. I could fucking kill you, Zeph." I whimpered in pain until Raheem released me. Maybe I'd broken a rib. "You are the stupidest motherfucker in the history of stupid motherfuckers." He was right about that. "You scared the living shit outta me. Thought I'd fucking lost you. Again."

"Sorry, bro." I tried to move more slowly, edging to the foot of the bed. "My head's fucked."

I crawled into a police victim T-shirt. Burning pain shot up my arm and radiated around my face as the fabric brushed at my weeping cuts.

"You doing OK?"

"Yeah. I'm good." Raheem looked a lot better than the ghost I'd found in the bilges of La Rosa. "Got me some glucose in here, electrolytes." He tapped at the drip tube. "I was a fucking mess."

The pain in my temples was stopping the images of the night from fully forming in my mind. Memories appeared and disappeared like fireworks on the black expanse of my headache. I couldn't remember much.

Noah had dragged me to a pontoon. We'd fought. Noah had killed me. Except, somehow he hadn't.

I clutched at my throbbing temples. "What happened to Noah?"

Not that it mattered. Noah was probably holed up somewhere in Sigma, licking his wounds. The main thing was that Raheem was safe.

"Got arrested. There was police everywhere, man. They raided La Rosa."

Holy fucking Maria.

La Rosa, Noah's pride, was full of evidence. The bridge was probably a makeshift office packed with fraudulent documents and data, the bilges were where Raheem had been held captive for days, and the engine room was currently hosting Jones's rotting corpse.

"Did they find Jones's body? Is Noah looking at a murder charge?"

"I couldn't hear what they arrested him for. I was kinda...semi-conscious by then," Raheem muttered, as if trying to keep thoughts of the night at bay.

"We gotta tell Miles you're OK, man!" I cried, pulling Raheem toward me for another hug. My head exploded in a glorious burst of pain. "Argh! Fuck!"

"Santa Maria! Just fucking rest, idiot." Raheem pressed me flat on my back, before clamping onto his precious drip trolley again like a limpet. "Miles is coming."

He said it so fucking quietly, like he wouldn't quite believe it until Miles was standing there in front of him. He and Miles were out of Sigma.

Raheem's subtle smile was worth every cut, every bruise, every moment drowning in the filthy waters of the harbor. "Coming to get me was the dumbest thing you've ever done, Zeph. But thank you."