"Family bliss."
Jonah put his head in his hands, elbows braced on his knees. What was happening?
“Maybe you want a few minutes to think it over.” The man pulled out the keycard from his pocket and checked it. He gestured and the giant pushed off the wall with a thud, stomping past where Jonah sat on the bed, sweat pouring down his temples onto his fingers.
Jonah’s heart rate increased threefold as the door clicked shut behind them and he allowed his eyes to drift.
The notebook was still lying on the table.
He inhaled sharply as a thousand thoughts became a million. The logical part of his brain shut down, giving way to the emotions that pushed and pulled this way and that, trying to make him do something. Their pulling resulted in a state of equilibrium that froze his body into a state of near catatonia.
“They left it there for a reason,” he whispered to himself. “Don’t touch it.”
A single faction rose above the rest and with its rise to power came an idea. Not a particularly good idea to be sure, but one he could not shove away. He wasn't exactly sure what they were talking about with their accusing voices. The only thoughts of drugs he had ever had were upon finding syringes on occasion littering the back alleys around his apartment building. What he did understand, the thing that caused the bile to rise in the pit of his stomach was the notebook on the table. If they had it, and if they allowed anyone to just start combing over it, it was only a matter of time before a word slipped out here or there and then…
The thought of it turned his insides to mush.
They might as well have left a bomb sitting in front of him.
“Don’t do it,” he whispered.
But what else could he do? Sit and rot waiting for his parents to make the five hour drive and bail him out while some technician exploded a few computer monitors while trying to figure out his notes? His mind came back to the point it was stuck on.
If the wrong person got hold of it…
He put his head in his hands as the spectre of what he was about to do came over him and its immenseness nearly crushed him. But what else could he do?
He moved fast, faster than he knew himself capable of moving. With one hand he scooped up the notebook from its resting place, with the other he heaved the chair that his bag and the book had been sitting on before they were defiled out of the way. He paused a mere microsecond as his brain called up the words that had ripped apart his apartment. He would never forget the sound of it. The final phoneme staggered on the tip of his tongue for the briefest instant and then…
Studs snapped, drywall broke, insulation flew like birds out of the wall, the flaking paint was obliterated entirely and Jonah McAllister thought his eardrums would rupture as he threw his arm up over his face. Split wires hissed like snakes and went silent. The lights in the room flickered and then went out. The whole motel shook with disbelief, quieted for a moment and then voices screamed with confusion into the darkness around him.
He drew his arm away slowly, peering into the gap he had just created. His eyes grew nearly as large as the hole itself. He had expected the cold of night to greet him, but instead what he heard were moans of pain and shock. Through the dust swirling around the opening he could see two people moving about the floor on the other side. He clenched the notebook in his hand while cautiously approaching the gap.
A man dressed in a hoodie and sweatpants sprawled on the floor in front of Jonah as he stepped into the motel office. He and another behind the motel desk in a buttoned shirt and slacks, flopped and rolled, each trying to recover, thin streaks of blood from superficial wounds covered their faces and arms. If they knew what was going on around them they were in no condition to do anything about it. Jonah found his breath heavy as he stepped past them, half a thought given to helping them, a full one given to running.
Behind him the door to the room he had just left was lifted nearly from its hinges as the giant lurched inside. His scarred mouth turned down into a scowl that made the floor quake beneath Jonah’s feet. Their eyes locked for maybe half a second before the monster was across the room and through the recently formed portal.
Standing transfixed before the rushing wall of flesh, Jonah bore the full brunt of the massive body, a force that knocked him clean off his feet and sent him sprawling to the floor a good six feet away, sliding until his head slammed into a nearby desk.
He tried to struggle wobbly to his feet, but a pair of monstrous hands laid hold of him, forcing him to the ground. The giant sneered as he pushed Jonah into the floor, almost trying to push him through, down into the basement. His small struggles proved futile against the gargantuan that held him down and in the throws of his thrashes he could hear—through the door to the room he had been occupying only a few moments earlier—a shout from the smaller man and a weapon being fumbled out of a holster and a safety being clicked off.
There was something about the hands on his shoulders and about the way the floor pushed into his back that caused a brief memory to surge forward in his mind, an intense desire, bordering on panic to get back up.
Jonah
