Headsets For Fear

PRESENT 05 : MAVERICK

Nora was the first one to get panicky and suspicious. I was the first one to see the bloody body.

Speak of the worst days in your life.

I knelt down, and - staining my palm in the process - checked for his pulse. For a moment, I couldn't locate it, and I panicked so much that I scratched my own palm. Then, I found it. It was faint, but he was alive. Though, the alarming amount of blood he was losing was making me doubt how long he would remain so.

Nora had followed a few moments later, and called the 911. A few people heard her words over the phone, and rushed to check in. As if it was a fucking circus. Or a dinosaur egg had been discovered. A few started screaming, speculating how and why he did this. Some of them actually went to Nora to ask her what happened. She would've probably shot them if she had a gun.

The manager bad slowly crept beside me, muttering something about how this would ruin the reputation of his hotel, and how much he would have to spend on sanitizing the bathroom. I asked him for a big napkin which I could coil around the would to stop the bleeding. He went outside, promising to bring one from the kitchen. Before he did get one, though, the ambulance had arrived.

I somehow resisted the urge to kick the manager in his balls.

As they lifted him up, the blaring horns of the white vehicle reaching me from even the inside of the restaurant, I saw how pale his face had grown.

I looked at Nora. Both of us blinked at the same time, and somehow, in a moment of telepathic glory, our thoughts were communicated.

We were too late. We couldn't save him.

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"Why did he do it, you think?" I mustered up th courage to ask, as the silence between us was becoming far too heavy.

"How am I to know?" Nora replied. It sounded like a whimper. "He was having financial trouble, but that can't be the only reason."

"Why, can't the game use that?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No, it can. But I can't shake off this feeling that there's something else," she rubbed her eyes to wipe some tears away. Then she looked at my feet and frowned. "Stop doing that."

I looked down. My feet were shaking like crazy, so much that my ankles had become pink with fatigue. The sound was like the pitter-patter of rain drops on the roof of a car, only more solid-sounding. I decided that I liked hearing it.

"Stop it," Nora insisted again. I sighed and my legs stopped.

My mind kept buzzing with the same question - why the fuck did he do it? The commotion in my brain stopped when it finally realised that I had nothing to draw an answer from. A few seconds later, it started again.

"What do you think will happen if he dies?" I asked. As if you don't know that, my mind probed.

Nora didn't answer, though I desperately wanted her to tell something. I asked her again, "What will happen if he dies?"

"That's not even the question to think about. Shouldn't you think more about why he died how we could have prevented it?"

Even though she was logical, my mind didn't want to think about it. After all, Nora had been trained to think of the reasons. I wasn't - I could only do so much to prevent my mind from collapsing when something terrible happened.

I was about to open my mouth again, but she stalled me. "I'm going for a walk around, alright?"

I nodded.

I looked at the door of the ICU where Benji had been taken. He had remained there for a hour already, without any notification from the doctor. The white walls of the chamber smelled of death to me, even though death was not supposed to have a smell at all. It only was a sensation, the abnormally cold touch of a person when they had left this world.