Page 5 of Missing Piece
“Stick her in your trunk and drop her off in a field, perhaps somewhere out in Secor,” Vincent said. There was a long pause, and a vague whispering sound, like Luka was speaking into the wind. “Well, if she makes it before dawn, then she earns her freedom. It seems fair.”
Adam couldn’t have looked up even if he wanted to. His eyes and nose were a mess of watering and snot, blurring his vision and making his head feel stuffy. He heaved again, making a face as only the bitter, chemical taste of stomach acid forced itself out of his mouth and joined the mixture of partially digested food and liquor at his feet.
Pull it together, man, pull it together. These guys just snapped a stripper’s neck in front of you.He slammed his fist against the lid of the dumpster, breathing hard through his nose as his mouth continued to water. He couldn’t let himself throw up anymore. He had seen some messed up things during his using days, but never a murder.
If I don’t want to end up in the trunk with her, I need to pretend this is no big deal. Play it off and get away. I can go home and drink myself into oblivion and forget this happened.He suckedin a deep breath through clenched teeth, using the sleeve of his hoodie to clear the remnants of tears, snot, and vomit from his face. He steadied himself against the dumpster.
“You gonna have to report that to HR or what?” he asked as he faced Vincent. He tried to hide his surprise when he saw that the body was gone, as was Luka, but he knew the sound of his nails scraping against the lid of the dumpster gave it away.
Vincent grinned at him and folded his arms across his chest. He studied Adam up and down, as if taking his time to evaluate every inch of him. Adam suppressed a shudder. It differed from when they were inside. It was hungry. And not the kind of hungry that was hot. It was unsettling, like he literally wanted to pop an apple in his mouth and roast him over a pit with pineapple slices.
“I am HR,” Vincent finally said when his eyes wandered up to Adam’s lips. “You’re interesting, you know that? For human.”
Adam’s face betrayed him, twisted in confusion. “What?” He tried to force the muscles in his face and neck to relax and stop giving away the mounting fear. He flinched at a sharp pain in his neck, his hand taking longer than he wanted to grab at the pained area. There was a small spot of wetness and a smear of blood on his hand when he examined it.
The hell?Adam looked up, surprised again to see Lukastanding beside Vincent, placing a cap on the end of an empty syringe.
Oh God no, what was in that?One of his eyelids drooped and a warmth spread through the muscles in his arms and legs as they went slack. He grabbed onto the dumpster as his knees gave out. Whatever the silent guy just hit him with, he had never put anything like that into his body. It wasn’t even enjoyable. He was just getting weaker and weaker by the second.
“W-what did y-you–” Adam started, trying to dig his nails into the metal.
Vincent cocked his head at him as his knees hit the ground. “You’re going to take a little nap,” he said as he closed the distance between them.
Adam planted his hands on the ground in front of him, struggling to keep his eyes open. He kept trying to tell his muscles to respond, to raise his brows and keep his eyes open, but it wasn’t working. His arms shook as he tried to keep himself off the damp asphalt. Nothing was working. It was like he was waking up in the hospital all over again, trying to get his stupid foot to respond.
“What was in the syringe?” he slurred, drool dripping out of his mouth.I’m not winning this fight.
“You’re a tough little thing, aren’t you?” Vincent asked. “Why do you care?” He pushed gently on Adam’s shoulder.
Adam’s arms gave out beneath his own weight, and he saw his world falling sideways. But it didn’t feel like he was in his body anymore. It was more like he was outside of it, watching himself tip onto his side. The cool asphalt felt good on his hot face. It made him want to close his eyes. He thought he could hear Robert calling his name, but he sounded impossibly far away.
Adam reached up, waving his weak hand and trying to grab at the blond man crouching beside him, his eyes closing. “No painkillers,” he slurred, his lips barely moving.
Don’t fall asleep! Stay awake! Fight!His hand connected with something soft, so he tried to close hishand around it, his eyelids fluttering as he tried to look at the blond. Now Vincent’s face was wrong, too. Instead of pure black, his irises were still that ice-cold blue, but the whites of his eyes were gone, enveloped in blackness.
“Why?” Vincent asked, lying down on the asphalt with him.
He was so close the tips of their noses were almost touching. Adam could smell his breath—a mixture of metal and whiskey. “Thirty days…I have thirty days,” Adam forced out as his eyes shut. Cool fingers brushed his bangs off his forehead, almost comforting.
Then he was falling.
Chapter Two - Adam
Adam saw a bright light when he opened his eyes.I’m waking up dead.
“That doesn’t make sense. How do you wake up dead?” a thickly accented voice asked.
Shit, when you’re dead, the other ghosts can hear your thoughts.He wanted to find that unnerving, but it was as though his emotions had clicked off. He kept staring up at the bright light, waiting for something to appear in it. Was it someone dead like him? God? Lucifer? Maybe his mom had been wrong, and it was the Indian gods that were the true religion.That’d be a trip.
“Ah, he does not realize he is talking again,” the accent said.
“Ketamine does that. You should have heard him on the car ride over here, absolutely bonkers monologue,” the second person said.
Ketamine. That was a drug he had been offered by a dealer once when the supply of oxy was running low in town. Why did he do ketamine? 99% of the time, he would have settled for a shit ton of Tylenol 3’s. Not ketamine. It wasn’t even the same class of drug.
He rubbed the sleepiness from his vision, squinting at the shadows moving in the bright light overhead. If he was dead,he certainly wanted to know it sooner rather than later.
He couldn’t help but be disappointed. When he dreamed of death during his withdrawals, it was always a fade to black and then nothingness. He wasn’t expecting this.
