Body of Scars

Chapter IV

Jared drops me at the thirty second motel we pass. I watch him drive through the misted dawn of a new day in the third stolen car. Jared was going to drop off the one we currently had and steal two more, making a false trail of stolen cars which would hopefully lead any group following us past the run down motel we were currently staying in. 

I know I must look like a woman who had stepped from the pages of a Steven King novel. My hair is matted and knotted with glass and blood, my lips are cracked, my cheeks burnt from the angry flames of the fire. My clothes are bloodied and torn and my face streaked with snot and tears. Wiping a clumsy hand across my face I begin a slow limp toward the fourteenth motel door, which Jared and I had agreed to meet at. I decide I’ll pick the lock and wait for him. 

Struggling with my thin lock pick, I stagger into the dim lighted, four walled room. The floors are streaked with grease and the room has an unkept feel. Closing the door gently behind me I make my gradual way to the undersized bathroom, stripping off my clothes in a cautious manner, avoiding the mirror and starting the water. I watch as it pools in the bath tube, the steam leaping from the rippling surface and filling the room. The burning of my calf has been replaced with an ache, the bullet having sliced through the skin, grazing a bone though not lodging itself in my body. I bandaged the wound in the car though now I breath deeply as I slowly begin to unravel the starch material from my calf, glimpsing the raw flesh which has begun to peel and scab. Sighing I carefully lower myself into the hot water of the bathtub, not bothering with soups or cheap fragrance bottles which spot the ledge of the tub. Settling in the bathtub I dive beneath the water, allowing all my senses to be muted. I am under water for so long my ears begin to throb, air slipping from my throat and surfacing in bubbles which freckle the waters surface. I blink rapidly, liking the intense pain which stabs at my vision with every movement of my eye. I am losing breath now, a great globe of tension building in the pit of my stomach and I realize with a start just how close to death I am. A few giant gulps of water and I could drown. My limp body floating to the surface, my eyes glazed in a similar fashion to Alex’s when he had died. 

Abruptly I splash back to reality. A reality in which I am spluttering and gasping for breath as I surface from the water. Looking down I see the water has turned to a murky brown and red shade, the dirt and blood washed from my body. I lift myself from the bath, grabbing for a folded towel and briskly wrapping the scratchy material around my bare body which has begun to shiver from the cold. I startlingly realize that the cold isn’t coming from the room but seeping from a place within me. A place I wasn’t aware even existed. “Pathetic” I hiss, hating how weak I have become. People often mistake being an assassin for being hard willed and unaffected by the things that they do. Most assassins bury the pain and allow the facade to slip and crumble only if they are left to face the person they despise the most, themselves. I shut my eyes, swallowed by a black abyss, brought on by the thought of losing Jared. If I ever lost Jared... But I don’t finish the sentence. 

I pass the next hour sitting on the bathroom floor, the towel wrapped tightly around my body, shivering and pitiful. I wait for Jared, knowing he will have thought to bring clothes. And food, I remind myself. Food is important too. Long moments pass and my mind races through all that has happened. I bar the moment Alex is shot, numbing the pain by digging my fingernails into the tender flesh of my palm. I skim through the events again and again some part of me realizing that the whole situation is odd. Before I can identify what it might be I hear the unmistakable click of the door lock and the rusted hinges protesting as they are pushed open. 

“It’s me” Jared sighs and I stand, walking toward the sound and distorting my face into an unreadable mask. “Clothes?” I ask when in his sights. He stifles when he see’s me, his eyes cautiously scanning my body and the thin towel which covers me. “Yes, I’m naked under the towel” I remark, watching Jared recover and fumble through a plastic bag, throwing me a shirt and pants, underwear and a bra. “Sorry” he mumbles and I’m startled by his truly shamed tone. “Jared” I voice and he looks up. I peer into the emerald abyss which is his eyes willing him to understand that in that one word I am saying sorry. Sorry I brought us to Alex. Sorry I drove through the neighbor’s yards. Sorry I was careless and stupid. Sorry he was shot. Sorry that I couldn’t stop it. And Jared seem’s to understand because he holds my gaze with a similar intent to the way one might study an ant who is carrying a crumb to it’s colony. He looks away first and I feel my cheeks burning with a remorse so prominent I feel like my legs might give way beneath me.