HOOKED ON ZERO

THE EXTRACTION

Chapter Three

Alex

I stretched tiredly in the back seat of my Lincoln Navigator, lulled by the movement of the car. I closed my eyes and tried to get some sleep. Just ten minutes would do, at least for now. As I closed my them, I was plagued with visions of a pain-filled Aretha. She had not been able to sleep at all last night. She had tossed and turned, holding her stomach and groaning in pain. Even the strong pain killers given to her by the doctor had not worked. I felt helpless as I had sat beside her. I couldn't even hold her close anymore as her body temperature was through the roof.

Her fever had broken sometime in the early hours of the morning and she had finally stopped clutching her stomach, but the worst was not over. As doe-eyed as I was and as much as I wanted it to be so, I couldn't hide away from the fact anymore.

My wife was dying.

The truth grabbed me by the hair and slapped me in the face. That was when the hysteria came. I lurched out of our room, the same room we had spent many nights making love and planning for the future. I didn't know when I stumbled into junior's room, a room that had never housed a child. A child that was killing my wife.

I knew what rage meant at that moment, or maybe for one hour. I started with the wooden cot fit for a king's child. It sat grand and majestic, mocking me with its emptiness. I didn''t know where I got a hammer from, but I rammed it into it until it was but a wooden pile of crap on the carpeted floor. Next, I went for the fittings on the wall and wrenched all of them off. Nothing escaped my wrath, nothing was spared. By the time I was done, the room was in a mess, and that eased my heart, but only for a few minutes.

After that, the pain came back in full force. Worse than before.

The car jerked to a stop, breaking me out of my reverie.

"Boss, we have a situation upfront."

I groaned and opened my eyes to see chaos. A short distance ahead of us a crowd of people had gathered, but try as much as I craned my neck, I couldn't see anything. I checked my time. I only had ten minutes to spare. I couldn't not make the meeting on time.

"Stay!" I said to Eric, and got down from the car.

I had only gone four paces forward when I stopped and looked down at the clothes I was wearing. Blue tailored pinstriped trouser suit with gold cufflinks worn with pure leather crocodile loafers. I looked around the neighborhood we had stopped and thought better of my hair-brained idea of going to check out what the problem was.

As I still stood, pondering over what to do, an ambulance arrived and the crowd opened up to allow them carry the stretcher through. I caught a glimpse of a woman lying on the ground, her head twisted in an awkward angle, and then blood, so much blood, it put Aretha's problem to shame. And then the crowd was closing in on her once again.

It didn't take long before the police came next, blaring their sirens to my consternation. They cordoned off the area around the woman.

I waited. I don't know why. It wasn't like I hadn't seen blood before, but just watching that woman lying inert on the ground brought something to life inside of me. To my left was a long haulage trailer. All the huge containers on it were on the ground and their contents had been spilled all over the ground. Oil. That made passing this route impossible.

I turned and walked back to my car, but something caught my attention and I stopped and turned back. Underneath the trailer, a woman's purse lay. A few meters beside it lay some other items scattered in the dirt, obviously spilled from it. I knew the purse belonged to the woman who was lying bleeding out on the ground.