The Final Showdown - The Moon Trilogy - Book 3

Chapter thirty-five:

   It wasn't long before the pounding on the door started up again, this time even louder than ever. Clarity's heart pounded along with the thundering beat, though she hardly even noticed the sound. She was kneeling over Johnny, searching him for an injury—something that might cause him to collapse. There was the obvious: the wound on his head, and while the injury did look swollen and bloody, it didn't seem like quite enough to cause him to just black out like that. Perhaps it was the combination of running and the wound that had caused it?

   Her heart skipped a random beat, like a sour note in the middle of a concert. She couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. She knew that Johnny'd endured worse—a hole straight through a lung—without passing out quite so quickly. This just didn't add up... she had to be missing something.

    She wished that he would wake up, then he could explain everything.

   The others were scurrying around in the background of her focus. She hardly payed any attention to what they were doing, but she caught glimpses of a couple guns out of the corner of her eye, as if they were preparing for a fight. Who were those people outside?

   Johnny was the only one who knew. Or maybe he didn't.

   She gave him another once over, tilting his head one way and then the other, picking up each arm and turning it around... there! A split in the skin. It was no longer than her pinky finger, and it was barely a hair wide. The blood around it was still fresh and apparently still coming out, though for such a fracture of a wound, it should have clotted long ago. The blood remained stubbornly thin, forming the start of a pool on the kitchen floor.

   She leaned in a little further and brushed her stray, falling hair away so she could get a clearer view at the hairline slice across the pale flesh on his forearm. She took a deep breath in through her nose to calm herself and her racing heart down, and that's when the smell hit her.

   Bitter. Something that clung to the back of her throat and made tears gather in her eyes. It was something that bordered thinly on sweet, and just as closely to sour.

   She drew back quickly, and when her nose stopped stinging from the smell, she leaned closer again. The smell's origin was either the wound itself, or something very near to it. She touched a finger to the slit, and was surprised to find the flesh around it impossibly warm. Almost as hot as a stovetop. She drew her finger away again.

   This had to be the missing piece of the puzzle.

   An idea occurred to her, and she sniffed the small blotch of blood on the tip of her finger. Sure enough, the bright red liquid reeked. Not quite the sort of smell to make her gag. She couldn't place the smell, but now that it wasn't so strong, she thought that it smelled slightly familiar. She wracked her brain for what it was.

   The harder she thought, the farther her thoughts seemed to stray. She couldn't think straight, and her vision started to swim. For a moment, she thought it might be adrenaline confusing her, but the beating of her heart was sluggish now.

   It took her a second to figure out that it was more than straying thoughts that was making it hard to think. It also took her a second to realize that the smell was all around her. Her nose was permeated with the stench, and her lungs seemed full of it, but try as she might, she couldn't seem to pull herself away from the wound. She blinked slowly and the world stayed dark for just a moment longer than it should have.

   Her fogged-up mind somehow put two and two together to discern that the wound, although small, was very deadly, because it was poisoned. Poison. The thought rang through her mind and managed to snap some sense back into her straying, quickly-emptying head.

   If she was getting affected just by the smell, then that meant bad news for Johnny.

   Her head started aching with the smell, and with that fact, her body finally started to cooperate, and she was able to pull away just far enough to escape the cloud of toxic fumes. She seemed unable to suck in enough air, and her breath came in short, shallow gasps. She coughed a few times when she'd been able to get a bigger amount of oxygen into her body, trying to expel whatever toxin the cut had spread.

   She didn't know how such a small wound, with such a small area of poison, could possibly affect her that much. Her head swam. What kind of poison could do this?

  She looked over, head clearing at a frustratingly slow pace. Johnny's chest was hardly moving. She had to act fast, but she didn't know what to do. How could she combat this? She had to think fast...

    She finally decided to just grab a rag, and try to wash as much poison away as she could. She stumbled slightly as she made her way to the sink, but she was rapidly recovering, which gave her hope. The sopping wet rag dripped all over the floor, but she didn't care. The room was doubled in front of her, shifting like a mirage.

   As she knelt next to Johnny again, trying not to breathe in any poison, she was dimly aware that what she was doing wouldn't do any good. The poison was already in his bloodstream, and washing the wound would hardly help, but once again, she couldn't be bother to care. She was pretty rough on the little wound, and when she was satisfied, the flesh around the slit was red and raw. Blood continued to rush through, welling up in the place of the stuff that was now on her rag.

   She leaned against the wall again, glad that there wasn't any more of the nasty stench in the room. She threw the contaminated rag into the garbage can, just barely making it in because she hadn't moved any closer to the bin.

   She was barely clinging to a hope that, because he was an alien, his systems would be able to fight the poison, but she knew that it probably wasn't true. Her head was barely clear enough to register that Johnny might die, but the thought was at the back of her mind, drowned out by her hope. She watched Johnny through heavy eyes, hoping for his breath to pick up, but when her eyes finally shifted back into focus, she saw that his chest was no longer moving.

   A flare of panic sliced through her peaceful thoughts of hope.

   She scooched closer in the hopes that, from her distance, his breathing just wasn't visible, but she got practically inches away, and she couldn't see any movement. She pulled him away from the wall and leaned her head against his chest, closing her eyes to listen closely for even the slightest sign of life.

   Of course he wasn't dead. She pressed her head closer to listen for even the faintest sound.

   Apparently, her head still wasn't nearly as clear as she thought, because it took nearly a full minute with her head pressed against silence to realize, finally, what had happened.

   It had been too long. He'd stopped breathing full minutes ago. It was too late...

   A lump formed in her throat, making it hard to breathe, and hot tears stung her eyes. She gasped over the sob that convulsed her throat, completely unbidden. Blood rushed through her ears. She heard a gunshot, but it sounded like it was coming from a place very far away. Her sobs increased in intensity, and pretty soon, the front of Johnny's shirt was wet. She couldn't even hear herself crying at that point, and the bright light streaming through the windows in the kitchen seemed to dim.