Catharsis [Novel]

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

            "Uhhnn," the moan slips between my pursed lips as shooting pains tear through my abdomen.  The pain is not tinged with the sharp bite of the hunger that has been plaguing me.  This is something new.  There is something inside me that isn't happy, and it's decided to make my life miserable.  The pain from my stomach spins up my body and dances across my spinal column until it finds my skull and skates around it until it can settle into my temples. 

            Clutching my knees to my chest, I curl into a ball and just wait for the pain to ease.  At least I hope it will ease.  If it continues like this unabated, then I'm going to end up being one of the easiest fools these criminals have ever had to track down.  Breathing shallowly through my mouth, I do my best to close out as much stimuli as I can. 

            Scrunching my eyes tightly shut, I see nothing.

            Breathing through my mouth, I smell nothing.

            Allowing my brain to focus on nothing but the release of the pain, I hear nothing.

            Slowly the curled fist of pain that has taken root deep within me begins to unfurl and lose its grip on me.  I continue to remain as motionless as possible as I feel the long snake of tension slither back down my spine and fade away into nothingness.

            My breath comes back to me through my nose, and I taste the air around me.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Cracking my eyes open, I see the muted light of the darkened back yard and the swirling cones of paper dispersing themselves as the wind changes direction.

            "It's over," I say out loud - but still in a voice just above a whisper - in a vain hope that by saying it it must be true. 

            Digging my fingers into the sparse tufts of grass around me, I balance myself as best as I can until I manage to get to a standing position.  The memory of the pain still haunts me, but aside from its lingering impression I appear to be clear of whatever attacked me.

            A deep desire to just pick up the bags and run home grips me as my subconscious gives its most valiant effort to convince me of the folly of heading back towards more people.  Especially angry people with guns.  It's a good argument, and it's a strong enough one to shake my resolve for a few moments.  But then the thought of Marie comes back, and what the addiction did to her and her body.  If I leave now, then I'm leaving that house full of drugs behind.  Drugs that could be used by someone else.  Correction.  Drugs that will be used by someone else.  I need to find them and destroy them.  I need to do that, and then I can go home and rest.  If another attack hits me while I'm getting rid of this supply, then so be it.  Some things are just worth dying for, and for me this is one of them.

            Before I can change my mind (Or allow my mind to attempt to change itself.), I take off for the far house and its forbidden treasure at a slow jog.  I don't have a plan.  Not even close to the barest outline of one, except to get inside the house and destroy whatever they have in there.

            My body's attack on me earlier has me worried about over-exerting myself.  I have no idea if that is what caused the onset or not, but I figure the less I use my reserved strength the better.  And that means no scaling the outside of the house to look for a window.  Nope.  Time for a much more direct approach.

            Embracing that thought, I aim for the only entrance into the house that makes sense: the front door. 

            Stepping onto the weakly illuminated and crumbling front stoop, I pull in several lungfuls of the night air to give me a sense of anyone who may be around and waiting for me outside of my vision.  I pick up nothing out of the ordinary, and mentally cross my fingers that my senses are still as sharp as they were before (Whatever happened to me while I was in the backyard has really shaken my confidence.  I don't like it.).

            Staring at the reinforced, solid wood door of this two-story brown house, it hits me that getting in might not be as easy as I hoped.  I'm going to need to get them to open the door for me as I don't think it's very likely I'm going to just punch through this one on my own.  But how am I going to get them to open said door?

            Looking down at myself and my dirty jeans and black hoodie, I realize I'm going about this the wrong way.  I need to make them want to open the door for me.  In order to do that, I need to give them something to open the door for.  And with that, the first taste of a plan slips into my gullet.  It's not a plan I'm proud of, but it's one that might actually be effective.  And it's a plan that goes in the completely opposite direction of almost all my recent escapades.

            As much as I hate to do what I'm about to do (And I try not to even think about how ashamed my mom and

grandmother would be of me.), it strikes me as the most efficient route to success. 

            That is, I think to myself.  If it even works.  It's just as likely to simply make me easier to kill.