The Things We Bury - Part 2: No Big Apocalypse [Completed]

Chapter 7: Bad as Me (Part 2 of 7)

Dawn cracked open Emily's head like a hammer. She cursed herself for not having the foresight to close the blinds last night. No, not last night: a few hours ago. It must have been four in the morning when they stumbled into the room.

They.

Where the hell was Nikki? The gun was gone too.

Shit.

Emily was on her feet much too quickly for her shaky constitution to handle. She pitched forward and rested her forehead against the mattress. It was soft and cool. She realized how ridiculous she must look bent over, knees jutting out in different directions, supported by her head, but it felt good to rest there until her stomach stopped reeling and the fissure in her head made some attempt to seal itself.

I am never drinking again.  

Once she felt fully transitioned from inanimate corpse to zombie, it was time to assess the situation and see if the car was still outside.

Emily made a wobbly beeline for the window, walking across her discarded clothes. Something sharp and metallic was hidden in the pile of fabric and it jabbed into the exact center of her sole. She hissed while bouncing up and down on her good foot. The rocking motion filled her gut with seasickness forcing her to stop and place her foot tenderly back down despite the pain.

At least she'd found the pistol. One mystery was solved. Now she just had to catch up with Nikki. She took a tentative step to the door and stopped as the sound of dry heaving came from the bathroom.

Emily went over and knocked on the door, "You all right in there?"

The only answer she got was a noise somewhere between a wretch and a sob.

Emily felt all the energy desert her muscles now the alarm was over. She plopped down on Nikki's bed not even having the will to make it back to her own. Her bladder was complaining and part of her felt that she should demand some bathroom time, but she just imagined that she would end up holding her Nikki's hair while she puked out final remnants of last night. It was better here.

Last night had come back to bite both of them in the ass it seemed.

Damn though, the woman really looked like she could hold her liquor, at the time. Nikki had joked it was part of her chef's training and nearly had put Emily under the table before midnight. Emily had switched to diet-cola but the damage was done. Flickering memories attacked the periphery of her consciousness. Line dancing with some oil field workers. Lukewarm mystery meat empanadas sold off the back of a pickup—that were so, so good. A karaoke duet of Stand by Your Man—somehow accomplished without a karaoke machine.

A crushing weight of embarrassment settled across her. She was definitely never drinking again.

At least when it came to regrets, Emily always had far worse things in her past than some drunken escapades. She could draw on those deeper more horrifying ones to make this recent mistake look trivial.

I'm just blessed that way, she thought bitterly.

Her mind was pulled back to that night in the hotel room on the central California coast, her skin ice cold, frantic with panic, blood everywhere. Then she drifted further back to the beginning and the racetrack. She could almost feel herself taking laps around the rain slick course. Or maybe that was just the room spinning.

After Lauren had rescued her from The Music Box by having a couple of murderous thugs kidnap her, they had gone to Salinas, California, where she was looking to fleece some millionaire attending an off-books tournament.