Better Off Dead

Chapter Six: Don't Leave Empty-Handed

It was a very surprising experience. Briefly painful, but mostly just surprising. He looked pretty surprised too. He shot me with the rest of the bullets and we both just stared at each other wondering how we had reached this moment in our lives.

Then he collapsed.

Liam moved past me, took his gun away, and rolled him over.

"Did you kill him?" I asked.

Liam looked genuinely shocked. "What? Of course not. Tranq dart. He'll wake up soon. Device says... nothing else in the house. Just this guy. Check his pockets... wait."

I joined him and looked at the motionless body. I didn't get what was so interesting. He was just... not him.

"This isn't Dr. Moore." Liam said.

"Great. Device malfunctioned and we got in a firefight with some random person." I was still not over being shot. It was not a nice experience. But I put that on hold.

"Not exactly. Look."

The guy's hand was a chunk of raw muscle. Like Bobbi. Like me.

"No point leaving empty-handed." He said, pulling out a pocketknife. He cut a small chunk of flesh off of the guy's meat hand and stuffed it in his pocket. Tissue samples. Sure. We could just run around sedating people and chopping off their flesh. There was nothing wrong with that.

"So... now what?"

Liam thought about it and shrugged. "I guess we head back to the car and call Taylor. The serum isn't here, so..."

I had no better plan, so we closed the front door, hid in the car Liam thought was invisible, and called Taylor.

"You found it?" Her voice was so excited and upbeat. It was weird.

"Uh... not exactly. We found... someone. Who isn't the scientist. But used the serum." Not exactly eloquent, but he got the point across.

"I guess that's not surprising. Let's just figure out who they are and we can keep an eye on them. And take some blood and tissue samples. The kit I gave you has needles."

"Yeah, we can do that. Night."

I wanted to stay in the car and not get shot again, but was physically dragged out of it, so what I wanted wasn't very relevant. Just go back and take a blood sample. ID the guy. Don't get shot. Everything was fine.

We went back inside and he was gone. Completely gone. We looked around, and I saw that the wall behind me had six little holes in it. I wasn't going to win any awards as a bullet-proof meat-shield. The back door was left open. He'd knocked over a kitchen chair and there was a little slime on the floor. The kind that leaks from my raw tissues. He must have been crawling away. He was probably pretty wobbly after being sedated. We peeked out the back, but he was just gone.

"Should we check the tracker?" I asked, hoping the answer would be no.

"Nah, he's not who we're looking for." Liam paused, giving his tranq gun a suspicious look." He shouldn't have woken up that fast. I guess I'll have to check this thing..."

We couldn't get any blood samples, but we took some of the slime. Isn't that basically blood without the blood cells in it?

I ditched him to go back to the car and internally freak out about getting shot repeatedly. In a way, it was kind of underwhelming. You picture being shot as this dramatic event that instantly downs a person, and maybe it usually is, but if your wounds instantly heal it doesn't matter that much. It's briefly unpleasant and then it's like it never happened. But it definitely did, and someone actively decided to shoot me, and that's not exactly comforting. But it was fine. I was completely fine. Totally calm.

Actually, I wasn't fine and I wasn't calm and I wasn't a quiet passenger.

"He shot me. You threw me into the line of fire and he shot me."

"That's why you had to go first." He said, like that was all the explanation needed.

"What the hell?"

He blinked at me. "What? You're okay."

I'm not sure if the words I said made much sense, but I said it all very loudly which felt like the way to make up for a lack of coherency. "I am not okay. I do not feel okay. That was not okay. None of this is okay. How could you possibly think that I'm okay?"

"Not a scratch on you." Liam said, having understood nothing.

There's really nothing to say to that, and I just glared. A little heads-up that I was going to be murdered is just common courtesy, right? On the drive back I decided that I hated food processors and all of the amazing things I'd learned they could be used for.

Obviously the only cure was to eat an entire container of ice cream. And some potato chips. And some really great sandwiches made by the object of my disdain, which made for some emotionally complicated comfort food.

Just when I thought the day was out of surprises, Liam walked into the kitchen all dressed up and dapper in a suit.

"What are you doing?" I asked, mouth full of sandwich. I realized that him seeing me eat the sandwich was like a compliment, and I did not want to compliment this guy. I set the ice cream on top of the empty sandwich plate to hide it. He'd never even notice.

"Looks like someone liked my sandwiches!"

I just shrugged because, you know, it totally wasn't me who ate all of them.

He gave me a look. He knew. "I bet it was Taylor. You know, I think she secretly takes home the extra sandwiches."

I nodded. Totally all Taylor. That was it.

"I'm just so glad to know that someone appreciates my work so much that they ate all the sandwiches I made. I'll have to thank Taylor someday for really validating my life dream."

Not only did I fail to insult him, but I had to listen to how happy he was. But at least I didn't have to suffer the embarrassment of him knowing it was me.

Looking back, I can't believe I fell for that.

"Anyway, there's a party at the hilltop neighborhood."

"At 10:30 at night?" I didn't care what he did, but it was kind of strange.

"It goes until 6." That didn't make it any more reasonable. "See ya."

Okay... I was surrounded by weirdos.

I tried to be reasonable and go to sleep, but was in too much of a state of shock to calm down. Yes, I know, I was essentially unharmed, but I had just been shot repeatedly. My mind was not as indestructible as my body. A person can only take so much.