Rustles

Part 17

When Nathan was taking her home, she felt really sick. Her stomach was convulsing and her head was throbbing as if she’d smelled some seriously bad exotic perfume. At first she didn’t think she’d even make it up on her floor, but somehow she found herself far up, nearly going past her own apartment and she didn’t bother her thinking with much more.

She had no doubt that those symptoms came from touching that bottle. The only problem was she couldn’t tell if they were from her own mind or were really there. The first thing she did, after getting in the door, was to go straight to the sink and relentlessly scrub her hands up to her elbows and then her face and anything else she thought she might have touched. She boiled some water in the kettle and repeated the entire process with the hottest water her hands could tolerate with vinegar. It didn’t make her inside feel much lighter, but it rested her sole that she had done everything she could think of to get rid of the possible stains.

Then she called emergency medical line and asked what else she could do if she thinks she had contact with strong spray poison.

Wait, was the only answer she got. Probably whatever she could inhale through the skin was already in her system, but because it happened nearly an hour ago and she wasn’t too sick, then it would probably pass like a stomach bug.

She felt like saying something seriously frustrated to such round talk, thinking on the men in the basement with far more severe symptoms than mere stomach bug.

She hanged up and went to bed, folded her knees up to her chest and just waited, warmed by the blanket and hoped to wake up in the morning alive and not with anything that would remind of them, when she looked into the mirror.

Her mind played tricks on her and she fell asleep seeing nothing but fire everywhere with canisters falling and Alex’ image mixing together with the rest of his team. She was always far away and some time from the middle, she saw herself digging through the graveyards filled with bones and dinosaurs and bottles falling from the sky like blue snow on Pluto.

She woke up at lunch with those blue bottles stuck in her head and body tangled in her bed sheets. She may not know all the chemicals, but it didn’t seem like a normal air freshener standing on those tables.

“All that is missing is a gas mask!”

Is that what he meant the longer they spent there, the worse it got? They were feeding them with it, spraying it in their cells! Oh yes did she understand!

She got out of the bed and went to the kitchen to wash her face. Then she called Matteo and told him she was sick and couldn’t come in. With anxiety echoing through her every word, it was convincing enough.

She knew she had to get them out now, not tomorrow or day after, but now – before Alex was lost and she was left alone forever doing nothing else but capturing them from all over the town. If there was a better facility somewhere out there, where they would be kept, she was willing to get them there, because with the increasing madness they presented, she wasn’t sure she wanted to even live in the same country after a month.

She had to have a reason to get back in the house and she needed to talk to Alex and get the info how to contact his friend. And get a trailer – something big and strong to get them there. The only one she knew she could get her hands on would have been the animal trailer at the circus. Yes, she was sure the Black Swan could lend her a hand.

Jameson called. She saw his number blinking on the phone, but it only buzzed. She turned the sound off yesterday after she got back.

She picked it up and pressed it between the shoulder and her ear while drying her hands.