Red Lighter ✧ John Murphy

LIV - Choke

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Bye Bye

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Chapter Fifty-Four

The grounders that pushed the wheel that lifted the elevator were exhausted, and Pike was able to catch them off guard. He shot both of them, much to Bellamy's discontent.

"Hey!" he shouted. "I told you, that is not how we're doing this!"

"They were in our way."

"These people are not our enemy. They're being controlled by ALIE, and we can save them."

"There's going to be a lot more of these people if we don't move," Miller said, as we all came into the room that held the elevator and gears that moved it. "Let's do this."

"I'll bring it down," Indra said, going over to a tall lever and pulling it back. I could hear the sound of the elevator coming back down.

"Once we're up, you blow the elevator, and then climb."

"Destroy the ladder behind us. On it," Bryan said, and ran over somewhere out of my line of sight. I was more focused on Murphy and Bellamy.

"You do realize we don't have a way down, right?!" Murphy asked incredulously.

"A problem for another day," Indra stated.

"Let's go," I told Bellamy, walking towards the elevator.

"You're going up there?!" Murphy shouted in surprise.

Bellamy pushed the doors open, and once we were inside, I turned to look at him.

"You don't have to come, Murphy. We can handle this."

He narrowed his eyes a little, then shook his head. "Hell no. You're not going up there without me."

I couldn't help but have that warm feeling within me as he came into the elevator with us.

"You coming, O?" Bellamy asked, looking at Octavia with concerned eyes. She was watching Pike.

"If anything goes wrong down here, they'll need my help. We got this," she insisted.

It wasn't them that we were worried about... It was only her and Pike that I was concerned with. I knew that she wanted to kill him, and she was completely capable of doing it.

We felt the elevator going up, and I gripped my gun a little tighter. I didn't want to use it at all, but I felt that I would have to.

Murphy was his usual pessimistic self. "You get that we're screwed, right? ALIE already knows we're coming."

"This will work, Murphy," I insisted.

Bellamy wasn't so willing to ignore his views.

"Why are you here?" he asked Murphy.

"Just trying to survive," he said, then looked away from Bellamy. He looked down at me, and I could tell that he was biting the inside of his cheek from the way that it sank in slightly. Then he looked back to Bellamy. "You're... You're not the only one trying to save someone you care about."

I knew what he meant. He was worried that ALIE still had a hold on me. That was proven when he laced his hand in mine, and I could feel it shaking in my grip.

His grip tightened when the elevator suddenly stopped, frozen in shaft. From the light coming out of the windows, I knew that we had reached another floor. And from the banging on the doors, I knew that some of ALIE's men were aware that we were here.

"Well, that's not good," Murphy muttered, looking up at the top of the elevator.

There was slamming against the doors, and Bellamy glanced down at my gun. "Don't use it until you absolutely have to, okay?" he said, then turned to the door. "We might need the bullets."

Hands slowly slipped the doors apart, and Bellamy tried his best to shut them. Murphy stayed back with me. He was taking out the baton, while I had my gun aimed at the door. I would use it if I needed to.

"Murphy, get the baton ready!" Bellamy shouted.

Someone appeared at the doorway, where the doors were almost far enough apart for him get in.

"Shock him, Murphy!"

Murphy did just that, sending the grounder back a few feet. He did this game to multiple others while Bellamy struggled between shoving them out and shutting the doors. We needed the people downstairs to hurry; we wouldn't be able to hold them off much longer.

One grounder tried to get through, and Bellamy hit his nose with the palm of his hand. He tried to force himself in, and instead was met with Bellamy kicking him in the chest.

Someone dove in, and was on Murphy. They hit me as they went by, and I went down too. I dropped my gun, while Bellamy managed to kick everyone out of the way, and shut the doors right as the elevator started to rise.

The man was choking him, to which I promptly kicked him the side of the head, right at the temple. He and Murphy were in between me and my gun, so I didn't have any other choice. That, unfortunately, didn't have much affect. I had forgotten that those that ALIE had under her control couldn't feel pain.

Bellamy pretty much threw him off, but the man came at him too. He punched Bellamy, and then Murphy tried to tackle him, but to no avail.

I got behind him, and wrapped my arms around his throat from his back. I jumped on him, my arms around his neck and putting him in a chokehold. I could hear him gasping for breath, but that didn't stop him from hitting his back - and in turn, me - against the wall as hard as he possibly could. He knocked the breath out of me multiple times, and I felt my head hitting the metal more than once. I heard the cocking of a gun, then another, and a moment later, two shots rang out. The man went limp in my hold, and I fell down to the ground with him. It surprised me that they had missed me entirely. The shots had both been put into his skull, and were shot at an angle that had avoided me completely.

I panted, gasping for the breath that I had been denied when he hit me against the wall so many times.

I looked up to see both Murphy and Bellamy holding a gun. Bellamy had his, and Murphy was holding mine.

They had both done something that they resented in order to save me.

"Ven!" Murphy called out, and while it took Bellamy a few seconds to snap out of it, he then got to me as well. The lifted the limp man off of me together, and Murphy helped me to my feet.

"Are you all right?" Bellamy asked, and helped to hold me up straight.

I panted a little more, the nodded. "Don't worry," I took another breath. "I'm fine."

My chest hurt, and it felt like I had broken a rib, or at least fractured one. But I could deal with that. I would have to if I was going to help them and everyone else I loved make it out alive.

"We can do this," I told them.

They both glanced at each other, then back at me. They seemed unsure, but I knew that they believed me.