The Other Harry #Wattys2015

Chapter 24

-Chapter 24-

Stumbling blindly, I turn around and get another glance at the prone form of Olivia. I am hit by a terrible clawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, unable to look, unable to tear my eyes away thinking, no, no it isn’t true, this isn’t real. I wish that the world would just fade away into a dream, hating the solid feel of the earth beneath my feet, of the bricks that graze my hands and how vivid red and exact the blood falling onto the ground is. Behind me, the guards are watching, in front of me two more stand between the narrow passage and my exit. I’m boxed in, and the only option for me now is to flee sideways, over the fence.

The grunt that falls out of my mouth feels more like a sob and there are tears in my eyes as I pull myself over the fence. With my vision obscured by water, the dingy back London yards seem to have a soft focus haze to them and I might have been able to pretend that this was a dream I was about to wake up for at any moment if it weren’t for the lumbering motion of my body and the ache in my arms. She was so graceful. So competent and yet so staggeringly naïve. If anyone was supposed to come back from this mission alive, I would have put money on Olivia over me. The guilt is a poison chewing on the soft flesh of my insides.

I can’t leave them. I can’t leave her, left up there on the fence; stuck like a ragdoll pierced by a pin but once I hit the other side of the fence, my feet hardly notice the pain of impact and they just keep on moving. It’s as though I might run so fast I take flight, before falling to earth with one of those bone splintering kinds of crashes. I was always good at running. Especially the kind of running where you can’t afford to look back. Trick taught me that, and we filled his pockets full of stones and dumped his body in a canal. Olivia taught me that it doesn’t matter where you come from or how you were made- it’s what you do with the life you’ve been given that counts.

She was so happy when Harry let her paint his nails that ugly shade of purple. There might still be chipped polish on the nails of her corpse.

Clambering over another wall and into more yards, I hit a narrow line of streets and can’t hear the tell tale heavy footsteps of men chasing after me anymore. I keep on running though, until there is an explosion of pain inside of my lungs, my breath comes out in shallow rattling breaths, while a stitch slices down the side of my torso.

Unable to fight it, a small scream slips out of my throat while I push my palms against the wall, slapping the bricks until the soft fleshy skin on the inside of my hand is ripped and peeling and bleeding. Shutting my eyes, my hand closes into a fist, I hit the wall once and the anguish is replaced by pure and simple agony. I can deal with that though. It’s just bone and flesh. It’s just something physical as opposed to the way down deep feeling that’s brutal and indescribable. Sliding down the wall, I pull my knees into my chest and claw at my hair with my hands.

One minute she was there. The next she wasn’t. How the hell could it have happened like that? And I know what I’m supposed to do, what they’d do in the movies. I’m supposed to go back and liberate those girls to make sure her death means something. But the place will be crawling with security guards by now, as far as I know it could have already happened.

Olivia is dead. Melissa with the red hair and the braces on her teeth will never draw again- she’ll be too busy being empty of anything but fake bliss and obedience. They all will. I’ve failed, failed, failed. But then again, I always was a most spectacular champion fuck up extraordinaire.

Fumbling into my pocket for a cigarette, my fist closes once more around the little chewing gum camera. It could well have Olivia’s last moments on it, that final choked out sound that escaped her voice that could have been Niall or could have been just the noise that a soul makes as it escapes the body. If clones have souls… if anyone has souls…I wouldn’t know. But I doubt it.