The first thing is an awful pain, a sharp stinging pain irradiating from the side of my head. My eyes are closed tight, impossible for me to open them for now, even if I tried, just like they were glued together.
Then, there are some hands on my face, moving my head gently but decisively, and also some words, pronounced by a deep male voice. What is he saying? I can't make it out.
The two hands lift my head a little and the pain intensifies. I screw my face in an expression of sorrow and the hands put me back again.
"Fred... Fred..."
I try to move my arms, but they are frozen, laying lifelessly beside me. I try again, this time with my legs, but the result is same.
"Fred, can you stand?"
With a great effort, I lift my eyelids, just what's necessary to distinguish a blurred image of Charles.
"Hey, you hear me? We have to go. Can you stand?"
I let out a grunt, close my eyes again and slowly roll on my left shoulder to push myself up. An unexpected sickness hits my guts and my head starts spinning uncontrollably. I bring my hand to the wound and when I look at it, it is covered in blood.
"You hit your head falling" says Charles and he stands up.
This is the last thing I'd like to do. What I'd like to do right now is lay down for a couple of hours and sleep, but Charles grabs me from under my arms and effortlessly pulls me up, making me stand on my legs suddenly made of pudding.
"Are you okay?" asks Arthur popping out of nowhere.
"Sure" I whisper with a a hoarse voice that doesn't belong to me.
"Come on, we need to go. More could come any moment."
Charles puts an arm around my shoulders and leads me towards Taima. As soon as I see her, a thought crosses my mind.
"No, wait... Isabella..." I murmur and free myself from Charles's grip to turn around.
My eyesight crosses the images in my brain and it takes me a while to understand what I'm looking at, but when I do, my heart falls apart in a million pieces.
When I see her laying down, eyes open staring into the nothingness, a bloody little round circle on her forehead, right above her left eye, one of her four legs twisted in a very strange angle, broken, the bone visible under the flesh still red with fresh blood... when I see her like that, my heart breaks.
It's like I find again my voice, but I can't say anything, all I can do is scream. Scream like I've never screamed before, except for that time when I found my entire family murdered. And just like that time, there is this pain, this dull suffocating pain on my chest.
I stumble in her direction, pushing away all the hands that try to stop me. Screaming, crying, shaking, aching, I keel next to her.
"I know, I know, but there is nothing we could do. We have to go, they are coming, we have to go."
Again, I take the hands that lay on me, dipping the nails into their flesh and pushing them away, even stronger than before. But they don't seem to care if I hurt them.
"I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but we need to go, we need to go."
This time, those fucking hands grab me from my waist and pull me up. With my legs dangling in midair and my arms stretched forward, there is nothing more I can do. My throat is now burning for all the yelling, but it's like I can't control it anymore. My own body doesn't want to obey me, and I keep screaming things I can't even understand.
.................
"What are we going to do now?" asks Charles.
"I'll bring Captain Monroe to the closest train station. You two go back to camp" answers Arthur.
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Outlaws for Life (Red Dead Redemption 2)
FanfictionFred Faraday is a strong willed girl with a troubled past. She spent the last few months looking for the Van der Linde gang, but no-one understands why. When she finally finds them, she seems to regret that immediately, but everything is more compli...
