The Way Back Home

Chapter Thirty Six: Sleeping Beauty

CHAPTER SONG: "Sleeping Beauty" by A Perfect Circle

And I sincerely thank my good friend snowdropsdream for making for me these lovely collages of Michael Fassbender and Emmy Rossum as Erik Baumer and Emmy Hunterson!

January 10, 2020

Richmond, VA

Emmanuelle dreamed as she drifted in and out of a feverish delirium, having called out sick from the library after catching a cold that progressed into pneumonia. Her skin felt like a heater turned with the dial at maximum temperature, sweat soaking her pillow, lying on the small sofa in her living room as she shivered with chills under her thin blanket.

As much as she disliked missing work, blemishing her spotless attendance record, at least she was away from the reach of vile and brutish Erik Baumer and his harassing her...

Her cynical thinking faded away as she was pulled back into her fever dream, her lungs aching as she coughed with a hoarse crack to her voice, stabbing the inside of her throat as she tried to swallow with no saliva at the back of her mouth, a weak moan escaping her lips...

Her hallucination dream progressed as she struggled to open her heavy eyelids as she felt herself floating on a hard surface, wooden and rectangular like a crate, barely keeping from slipping off as it rocked back and forth on the chaotic waves of water.

The smell of oil entered her nostrils, the flammable liquid having spilled onto the water's surface... then the approaching flames ran along the oil trails crawling along as the crate carried her inch by inch to an uncertain demise by either being burned or drowned...or both.

Emmy's fever and pounding blood vessels in her head kept her dream self from being fully aware of the danger, lying limp and spread-eagled upon her stomach, one of her arms dangling on the side of the crate to where her fingertips skimmed across the water, her leg also hanging overboard dangerously close to where her toes were already underneath...

A frightened male voice called her name... and she wanted to raise her head and open her eyes to find who might have come to save her.

But she was just too damn sick to move... Her head felt weighted as an anvil and her eyelids refused to open... She just had no strength, struggling to just keep breathing, each lungful of air made more agonizing by the smoke inhalation from the fire. All she could do was moan softly as the crate floated onward...

A ring of flames surrounded the crate keeping her afloat, leaving her trapped in her own personal inferno of hellfire. She would've been blessed by drowning in the water...

Emmy's unconscious form slipped closer to the edge of the crate, her arm hanging deeper into the water up to her wrist as well as her leg submerged past her ankle. The waves were bumping her nearer to falling off...

"Emmy!" The same voice called out her name.

The individual to whom that voice belonged dived into the water after her...

She wanted to call out to him, but her voice only provided another whimpering moan as a large wave tossed her over the edge, gravity pulling her down as she slumped off the crate and plummeted into the rancid water, immediately disappearing under the surface.

She sank slowly down into the black depths, thick bubbles emerging from her mouth as she could no longer breathe. The thickly polluted liquid flooded her nostrils and her esophagus, down to her tortured lungs, her gag reflex useless to expel the bile taste in her mouth...