MACHINE

17. O Here, I Will Set Up My Everlasting Rest

The loud noise of a gun going off reverberated in the small room. Oleander's hands grew limp. With some effort I managed to turn my head towards the door in time to see Jed, with Ezra standing behind him, lowering his gun-arm.

He shoved Dogbane and Oleander's corpses away from me and held my head limply in his hands. "Jeremy? Hold on there, we can get you out of here, kid."

"Where's Lucas." I choked out, rather pathetically.

"We-" Jed hesitated. "We found him in a small lab room near here."

"Bring me to him."

Ezra and Jed exchanged looks. "We don't have time." Ezra said aggressively.

Jed shook his head. "We owe him this much."

Jed carefully took my broken body in his arms and carried me down a couple of hallways, until we entered a room painfully similar to the one where Lucas and I had been experimented on.

Jed lay me against a wall, facing Lucas's metal shell strapped to the wall. His pink eyes were devoid of light, and his head hung limp against the metal straps holding him to the wall.

A feeling of hopelessness overwhelmed me. "He's..."

"Dead." Jed finished.

My head fell against my chest and I closed my eyes, their glow now flickering and dimming. "No point."

"In what?" Jed asked.

"Living." I said, now completely defeated. I began to succumb to the numbness overtaking me.

"Come on." Jed said. "We can get you out of here, it'll be alright." He began to pick me up gently, but I swatted his hands away.

"No," I murmured. "Leave me."

"Jeremy..." Jed said diplomatically. "We need to leave, the entire building is going to blow up."

"Exactly. And I'll die anyway before you have the chance to get me out of here. Take Ezra and yourself and whoever else you find and leave this place."

Jed stood up and stared at me for a moment.

Eventually, he spoke. "I'm sorry. We didn't find him fast enough. We failed you."

"It's alright." I said. "It was bound to happen anyway. My mission was hopeless. They probably offed him a week after they found him." I said, though I didn't believe it. Oleander surely kept his mechanisms functioning for as long as humanly possible without shutting him down, whilst torturing him. I knew it was a sly way to get back at me for 'ruining his career'.

Jed nodded. "Goodbye." He said, then ran down the hallway. I could hear his lone footsteps slowly receding as he wound through the maze of hallways.

I turned my head to look at Lucas. I crawled slowly to the other side of the room, and reached my hand up to clasp around his. I shut my eyes tightly and waited for everything around me to be obliterated in a blast of fire.

I heard a faint beeping originating from the bombs I had set earlier. They slowly speeded up, getting faster, and faster, until finally I had only the time to form one singular thought before the lab, and I with it, became nothing more than ash, rubble, and twisted, burnt, metal.

It's finally over.