Page 63 of A Series of Rooms
He didn’t see the kick coming until it crashed into his side.
Jonah fell flat off the mattress, a ragdoll against hard cement, and he didn’t get back up.
Still, the assault didn’t end.
He closed his eyes and saw himself on the ground outside a park bathroom, parting with his last three dollars. He saw himself at the kitchen table with his parents and his pastor in his childhood home. He saw himself on a supercut of hotel mattresses, and he thought: Was this death? Was this the only way out he was brave enough to pursue?
When Shepard grabbed him by the shoulders, turning him onto his back, Jonah drove the nail into his own coffin.
He looked the monster in the eyes and spit in his face.
Hands closed around his throat. The crush of fingers cut off his air immediately. Jonah scrambled and scratched, but the hold was unyielding. Black spots danced in his vision, growing and growing until he could barely see the glaring eyes looking down at him.
A sickening realization settled into place—that those eyes would be the last thing he ever saw.
Jonah’s death would be a silent one, confined within the walls of the same basement that had hosted his original descent into hell. It would likely be covered up, buried along with him, another disappearing statistic. A hapless ending to a tragic story that would never be told.
He hoped his mother and father might think of him again, someday, and regret what they had done. He hoped Liam might remember him and smile.
Everything went black. The only sound in the room became a ringing in his ears.
He was dying.
He was dead.
And then.
And then.
A blast so powerful he would have recoiled from the sound if his body had any life left inside of it. He could breathe again—just long enough for one desperate pull for oxygen—and then he couldn’t, as a heavy, immovable, weight dropped onto his chest.
The weight was gone as soon as it came, and suddenly everything felt lighter. Fuzzier. There was something wet and sticky on his skin. He still couldn’t open his eyes.
The noise faded out again, the ringing even stronger than before, and when it trickled back in, there was somebody else there with him.
“Jonah.”
A voice. One he recognized. There was a smell, too—faint, but present—of cigarette smoke and coffee. A smell that felt like leather upholstery and the rumble of tires on the freeway.
The voice called him by his name, telling him to “wake up, come on kid, open your eyes.”
Marcus,he thought. But the puzzle piece didn’t fit. It couldn’t have been him, because the hands on his neck, on his face, were gentle. Because the voice spoke like it wanted him to live. Because the voice introduced itself to someone as,“Agent Ellis... need a bus to the house... dead...”
Was he talking about Jonah? Was Jonah dead?
That didn’t make sense. He was still in too much pain to be dead. Trying to piece the fragments together was too taxing, and Jonah didn’t see the point anymore. He felthimself slipping further underwater, the world around him growing more and more muffled until—
A bright flare of light shone directly into his eye. Jonah tried to make a noise of protest, but the effort lit flames down his throat. A woman with blue gloves hovered over him, just past the light.“Don’t try to speak,”she said from somewhere a million miles away. When his eye snapped shut again, he realized she must have been the one holding it open.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“Sir, please take a step back.”
Jonah slipped under again.
In his next lucid moment, Jonah was somewhere else entirely. The air around him was cold like the basement, but the light on the other side of his eyelids was bright enough to make his head pound. The concrete beneath him had gone soft. He was... moving.
“Male, age nineteen. Significant trauma to the head and abdomen.”Another voice carried somewhere far above him.“BP is seventy over forty... pupils are responsive but delayed... Patient lost flow of oxygen for an unknown period of time.”Then, softer,“Hon, can you tell us your name?”
