CHAPTER THREE:
INJECTED
“Mike? Dear God, Mike?” came a voice from ahead. The sound was muffled by the throbbing pain in his skull. It sounded like someone talking while underwater.
Mike looked up. Even his vision had begun to get hazy, but he could plainly see Cathy’s dad coming toward him. He was a hard man to mistake for anyone else. David Kennessy was portly and kind of shaped like a pear, with saggy jowls that shook whenever he spoke. His eyes always looked kind and often concerned, as they did right now as he looked down at the open wound on Mike’s side.
Mike only grunted in response.
“Oh, fuck,” he said as he picked Mike up and put his arm around his shoulder. “Let’s get you into the warm, son.”
The walk back to the house was both slow and rushed at the same time. With every agonizing step they took, David could feel the boy in his arms tremble. He could see the blood as it continued to soak through his shirt at an alarming rate, faster than he would have thought possible.
He’d never seen that much blood before, not in real life.
There was a sound behind them and David pressed forward, glaring back between them with eyes filled with fear. Mike kept up the new pace for only a moment, then let out a long grunt and slowed down. David obliged. It was like trying to run a three-legged race when the prize is your life and your partner was a toddler.
“M’sorry,” Mike hummed painfully.
“It’s okay,” David said, patting him on the chest.
It wasn’t.
They made their way to the house without incident, David opening the door with a firm kick. The latch had never been good, and opened with even the slightest force.
Cathy and her mother, Karen, were still on the couch crying. There were first-aid bandages in place on Cathy’s calf, and Karen had just hung up the phone with the hospital. When she heard the door open, she got up and yelled: “David? Dear god, did you find him?”
Then she saw him. She gasped at the sight of the boy she loved like her own son with his clothes and hands drenched in blood. She hurried Cathy upstairs despite her screams and cries of protest.
They laid Mike onto the couch, placing pillows under his neck and head to prop them up. David wrapped some makeshift bandages tightly around his torso to stop the bleeding, and placed blankets on him to keep him warm. They could hear the ambulance’s siren in the distance.
Cathy gave up fighting her mother and went into her room, slamming the door behind her so hard it rattled pictures all over the house. There was only a second’s worth of silent pause before they heard her scream.
All eyes in the room went wider than ever, a difficult feat considering the situation.
David looked from his wife to Mike and then back again before he rushed up the stairs, leaving Mike momentarily to see what was wrong. Karen followed.
He reached his daughter’s room and opened the door. He found his daughter curled into a ball on the floor next to her double bed, crying and holding her legs tightly against her body. She peered over her knees with panic stricken eyes, unable to pry her gaze off the foreign object in her room.
There was a long, double-edged sword sticking out of her floor. It had golden lining and a rubber handle in the middle, and was perfectly clean. No blood was on it.
David ran to the window and looked out. There was nothing there except the ambulance pulling up, its flashing red lights making eerie shadows on the street. He turned to his wife and daughter. “Did he hurt you?”
“There was nobody h-here. Just the... the thing,” Cathy stammered hysterically.
David turned and looked at the blade, put in so little time ago that it was still wobbling like a tuning fork.
“How could someone have sunk that in without anyone hearing?” he breathed to himself.
He ran back downstairs, leaving his wife and child in the room. He thanked God that his younger daughter was staying at a friend’s house.
He greeted the paramedics quickly and led them into the living room, where Mike was drifting in and out of consciousness. One of the younger medics lifted up the blanket and looked at the wound as they hefted him onto the stretcher.
“Fuck,” he mumbled so that only he could hear. “Gutted like a friggin’ fish.”
They rushed him into the ambulance and began work right away, giving him morphine for the pain as they tried urgently to staunch the blood flow. Cathy got into the van with him. She had wounds to treat as well. She started to bawl as she saw the blank look in her boyfriend’s eyes, which were faded and rolled back into his skull. The doctors began to stitch up the wound before they even arrived at the hospital. They rushed him into emergency as Cathy went into a smaller doctor’s office. It was the first time she wondered if she would ever see him again. And for a while, the only sound she could hear was her own heart breaking.
Xander woke up the next morning and stretched, scratching his sides. He heard the familiar crack of his bones and the creak of his bed as he got up, his skin still sticky and clammy from the warm night’s sleep. He went over to his computer, whose alarm clock program was beeping the “time to wake up” song
