The Truth Behind It All

Chapter 2

                                                                                                                                                        April 21 , 2007

            When Ana Marie woke up, she found herself in a hospital bed. She looked around her confused as for where she was, when sudden memories came back to her. The silence in mid darkness, the exasperation in Adam’s face. She sat up rapidly. Adam, she remembered. Where was he? Was he okay? She felt her head spin as she tried to stand, he had to be in the same hospital. Wait, she heard a faint sound of a gunshot. He was shot. Twice. Her hands started to tremble at the thought of him being injured. As she shut her eyes, she could feel those rough hands on her, holding her back as she screamed for Adam over and over again. He was being hit by three or four men, he was unarmed and defenseless. He was trying to fight back but there were too many of them. She kept screaming. Until, she felt a wet rag on her face with a strong stench that made her lose consciousness.

            Who were those men? She shut her eyes tightly trying to remember if she had seen them anywhere. When Adam urged her to scape, a big man blocked her track. He wore a black outfit, camouflaged in the darkness; he was a bald man, with a big diamond on his left ear. He wore a bracelet on his right hand, those medical bracelets that informed the public that he had some kind of disease. Diabetes, she recalled, Diabetes type A. His name was . . . she tried to remember as it happened. He blocked her and she tried running the other way but more men started to appear out of nowhere. She was yanked by her arm by the man with the bracelet, she felt his fingers digging into her skin, she looked down at her arm trying to get free, Jim, or Joe, something with the letter J.

            “Ana Marie!” she heard a woman cry out. “You can’t be up, you have to rest.”

            “Mom,” she said as her mother started guiding her back on the bed. “Is Adam alright? We were ambushed by a group of men. They started beating him and I tried to stop them, but other men were holding on to me enabling me to move. I tried screaming for help, until I heard shots being fired, two shots, and Adam was on the floor, bleeding and . . .” Her sobbing got on the way, as she saw those images in her head. He wasn’t moving, he couldn’t, he was losing a lot of blood.

            “Honey, you are okay now, you are safe.” Her mother tried to console her but she pulled away.

            “Where’s Adam?”

            “The doctor said that you inhaled a very strong drug and that was what knocked you out. You will still feel dizzy but the rest of the drug will wear off in a few days.”

            “Mom, is Adam okay?”

            “Sweetheart,” her father stood on the doorway of her room. “Adam had an accident.”

            “What do you mean?”

            He walked in calmly. “He died at the scene.”

            “What? You are lying,” she said but she knew that Adam couldn’t have survived such wounds. “No, not Adam,” she cried as she felt her world crashing down, like a city in an earthquake tumbling down to ruins.

            Jack. The man who chloroformed her was named Jack. He worked for her father. She remembered seeing him at his house multiple times.

            “You did this,” she realized. Her father froze. “You sent your men to kill him.”

            “I know you are angry with the world—” her father started saying.