ABOMINATIONS

CHAPTER FOUR

Q U E N T I N

It was cold and dark, and Quentin was scared.

    He didn't gain consciousness properly until the bright headlights and the sound of a car horn forced him awake and led to him on the concrete with a scraped knee. The car sped away and he looked around. There was light rainfall, and he didn't know where he was. How far had he even walked? What happened?

    His memories were faded, blurry. He remembered being knocked out, Brett and Quincy talking, and pain. A lot of pain. He shook his head, trying to knock something back into place, and when he moved his hand to scratch his neck he heard clinking. His left wrist had a metal cuff around it, a couple chainlinks hanging off of it. "What the hell?" he said out loud, scared and confused. He felt something weird in his mouth when he spoke, and when he lifted up his hand to investigate he could feel the two smooth, long tusks jutting out from his lower jaw. One of them had the tip broken off. Quentin had no idea what was going on.

    When he stood, his legs wobbled, and his eyesight blurred and shifted back into focus. He didn't have his phone. He didn't even know who to contact. Even though he wasn't clear on the details, he knew that his brother had done something bad to him, had gotten him into that situation. And Brett. Quentin felt a pang of white-hot rage in his gut when he thought of the young scientist. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew it was his doing, and he was angry at him.

    He knew he had to start moving.

    His calves burned. It felt like his left shoulder was dislocated. His entire body felt like it was pulsing, but still Quentin continued on, not really sure where he was going but just moving in one direction. He had no idea where he was, and with the massive tusks coming out of his teeth he didn't want to ask someone for directions. He reached up to wipe his face and when he took his hand away it was covered in dark red blood. He didn't feel pain from any of the wounds on his body but as he looked at his arms he could see he had more. Bruises lined his arms and he had some cuts here and there. When he tried to think back to what caused them, his mind was still blank.

    Finally he reached a gas station and snuck in the bathroom without making eye contact with the cashier. He looked at himself in the mirror in disbelief. His left eye was purple, puffy, and swollen. There was a deep cut above it that was oozing blood slowly. There was dried blood by his nose and mouth, and just as he thought, his right tusk had its top cracked off. When he touched the jagged top of it, the pain was so bad he cringed and grabbed the side of the sink to steady himself. Quentin shook his head to try and clear his thoughts. He turned on the sink and washed the blood off of his face, making sure to take care around his swollen black eye. When he got all of it off and rinsed his arms and hands, he dried off with a flimsy paper towel, the only one left in the dispenser. At least there was one, he thought to himself.

    The wound on his forehead was trying to start bleeding again. He needed a bandage for it. In the back of his head he knew that he had no money, but he checked all of his pockets anyways, finding only a few loose coins. He sighed, pressing his damp paper towel against the forehead wound for a moment. Steeling himself, he turned and left the bathroom.

    Trying to look invisible and inconspicuous, Quentin pretended to shop for a few moments while slowly making his way toward the band-aids. He risked a glance at the cashier, and he looked like he was preoccupied with his phone. Quentin didn't have a coat on or anything that he could easily hide something bulky, so he grabbed a package of bandages off the shelf, coughing as he opened it to hide the sound, and slipped a few of them into his pocket, closing the box up as well as he could and putting it back. He meandered around the store a little bit more, feeling paranoid, and he finally walked out as normally as he could manage. When he got a couple blocks away he finally let out a breath he didn't realize he had been holding, wiping his forehead to get rid of the newly leaking blood, and put on a band-aid by guessing where the cut was. He hoped it would stop it from bleeding, but he knew that he looked completely stupid and suspicious, so he started trying to think again about where the hell he was going to go. The one thing he knew was that he couldn't go home; Quincy was definitely an enemy at this point. Some of his memories were coming back to him in feverish flashes -- a syringe, and echoing, haunting laugh, electric crackling inside his skull, and then nothing. It was like his memory had been wiped. He had no idea how he got so many bruises, or a cuff and chains around his wrist. He thought about going to the police, but he probably wouldn't be taken seriously. His story sounded like something a crackhead would make up.