Eighteen Weeks After: A Short Story

Part XI

The prongs of the staple bit into the tender flesh of his leg, a wicked shriek tearing at the chords of his throat as his body writhed with pain while his mind screamed at him to keep still. It was a debate that tugged at him from within – a battle of instinct versus logic – and I wasted no time in discovering which would emerge as victor before realigning the gun over the fault of his wound and pressing my weight into the lever once more.

With each passing second his screams became increasingly damp with desperate sobs, his voice turning weak under the ruthless strain of such vicious agony, and I prayed he would forgive me come the clear of the storm as the third staple pierced the raw skin of the gash and a whip of thunder cracked overhead.

His cries were like no other I'd heard before, filled to the brim with an emotion so rich and so raw one could never dream of imitating the guttural pleas as they resounded off the thick walls of the building, begging for the pain to cease and peace to finally enfold the dreadful suffering.

His sticky skin was hot and fevered under my trembling hands, the panic and pain that coursed through his veins like the fiery rapids of a river seeping into my own through my quivering touch, my fingers painted red in the blood of the boy who writhed beneath me.

Kael's body shook with tears that were too thick to tumble from those mesmerizing deep brown eyes, his breaths morphing into a stream of sporadic inhales and exhales I knew could only lead to one thing.

I pushed in the fourth staple, and the fifth and sixth without stopping, his pleads and wails and howls of torture melting into the sounds of the rain and the wind and the wrath that God released from the heavens. Everything began to slow, and it was like the very hands of time had been brought to the staggering pace of a losing snail as I became painfully aware of each and every aspect of my grave surroundings.

I could hear the patters of every minute droplet of water that fell from the sky and pelted the building and the streets from above; I could see the strobing flashes of lightening as they split the windows with their blinding glow, each strike flickering and shrouding us in a shower of dancing white light; I could feel the pulse that raged through my limbs – the pounding drum that beat my chest with a barbarity that almost broke my body into the fragments to which it so desperately wished to collapse.

I could feel the panic that tugged at my throat like a strangling noose, stealing from me the oxygen I so viciously needed to fuel the growing franticness that numbed the world around me until nothing was left to keep me from falling completely useless to the life that rested in my hands but instinct.

I could feel his body, hot and soaked in blood and sweat, squirming and thrashing beneath my own. His deep brown eyes – so innocent and so pure – were squeezed tight against the unbearable agony that seemed to never cease, his face contorted in a grimace more raw and vile than any I'd seen plastered over the face of another human being.

With each passing second I spent glancing at the flow of harrowing pain I wished so furiously to end – watching the thick heavy tears spill from the corners of his tortured eyes that bled with the agony that wracked him from deep within – the tone of a high-pitched ring blared loud in my ears, deafeningly so. It was a sound that overrode all others, dragging with it a sudden serenity that washed over me like a shower of cold water from the most pristine of lakes on a blisteringly hot summer's day.

It numbed me; dulled the fire of the chaos that swam on in my head in an endless roar of white noise.

It felt as though someone had submerged my head in a pool of the Earth's purest, most calm of waters, and no longer was I weighed down by the madness of the outside world. Instead I was underwater, plagued only by the single pitch that rang loud and clear in my head.