H.A.L.F.: The Deep Beneath

Be Careful What you Wish For

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Be Careful What You Wish For 

Erika did not want to see her two best friends killed. She closed her eyes tightly while she prayed for a miracle. She would have closed her ears too, if she could. She waited to hear the gun blast, but it didn’t come. Instead there was only a loud thud as if someone had fallen to the earth.

She opened her eyes. Ian stood a few feet away, his hair mussed, eyes wide and brows drawn together. Joe still held her tightly but Nacho lay on the ground. If Jack was down and neither Ian, Erika nor Joe had shot Nacho, then why was he lying in a heap on the desert floor?

Joe loosened his grip on her. Her wrists were free but throbbed from where Joe had pinched and twisted them. Erika spun around and backed away from Joe. His hands were at his neck, his eyes bulging. Joe’s body jerked and he grasped at his throat as if he were trying to pull at a rope or cord. But there was nothing around his neck. Joe rasped as if trying to catch his breath.

Is he having a seizure or something?

Ian looked just as baffled as she was. No one touched Joe yet he appeared to battle against someone choking him. Erika didn’t know who or what had a grip on Joe, but there were already two bodies on the ground. She didn’t want to see another.

“Stop!” she screamed. As vile as Joe was, she knew she’d get more satisfaction from seeing him rot in jail than die and get away with what he did.

Joe panted for air as he fell to the ground. Though he no longer tore at his neck, he didn’t seem to be able to get up. He strained with an effort to rise, but he stayed down.

“Look, whoever you are, don’t kill him,” Erika said.

“Why the hell not?” screamed Ian. “They shot Jack. He was going to rape you and sell you. He deserves to die.”

“No one deserves to die,” she said. Erika didn’t wait for Ian to counter argue. She searched the ground for Jack as best she could in the dim light. Ian did the same.

Ian yelled, “He’s over here.”

She ran to the place where Ian stood and she knelt beside the motionless body of Jack. He lay face down. Erika turned him over and felt his neck. A pulse. Thank God, Jack’s alive. Her eyes roved over Jack’s body as her hands felt for a wound. “He was shot in the left shoulder.” Her hands were wet with his blood.

“Is he -?”

“Alive? Yes. But there’s a lot of blood.” She held up her hand for Ian to see. The smell of the sticky liquid brought a wave of nausea. “Help me get him up. We’ve got to get him to the car and –”

A rustling sound in the brush interrupted their conversation. Erika turned in the direction of the noise and a shadowy figure emerged from the weeds. Her hands and legs had almost stopped shaking but the appearance of yet another stranger, intentions unknown, caused her to quake again.

The stranger stood at the edge of the brush that surrounded their party spot. Erika estimated his height at around five foot six. He was thin and so pale that his skin looked almost white in the moonlight. She could see nothing of his face. He had taken Nacho’s cowboy hat and the shadow made by the wide brim obscured his visage. In fact it looked as if the stranger had taken all of the dead Nacho’s clothes. Nacho was small, but the dead man’s clothes hung loosely on the stranger’s frame. Erika glanced back at Nacho’s body and he was indeed naked now. How the stranger accomplished stripping the dead man so quickly, Erika did not know. A shiver ran up her spine.