We awoke on day two, the opiate fog still swirling in our heads.
Mark was gone. The entire room had been refurnished, and our wounds had clearly been extensively treated.
There was no sign a fire had ever been here, no lingering smell of smoke or scorched marks. Not a single remnant of the inferno could be found.
Just a blinding new coat of white paint and the overwhelming smell of chemical cleaners.
Jasmine and Katarina whispered conspiratorially.
Katarina looked healthier, despite her bandaging. I guess getting her fix helped.
“Guys. It doesn’t matter if we whisper. They can hear us. So, we either don’t talk or they hear us. We’re locked in some fucked up experiment where a guy burned away half my fucking ear with fire from his eyes. I’m pretty sure they’re going to be prepared for fucking whispering.”
Mask off. Now was not the time to sugarcoat. Not now.
“Do…do you think they knew?” Jasmine was shaking.
I looked her squarely in the eye. She was smart, smarter than I was ever going to be, but she was used to outwitting a teacher, the safe confines of academia. Fear was smothering any clarity in that brain of hers.
“Of course.”
“How…how can you know that? You don’t know that. You, you can’t be sure.” Katarina was almost pleading, her voice tiny, dripping with fear and pain.
“Those sprinklers? That foam? Guys…they burst through the door wearing oxygen tanks and gas masks. What does that say to you? They were prepared for FIRE.”
That seemed to click in both of their brains, but much to my chagrin, only caused more panic.
They simultaneously bolted for the door, beating on it, screaming, demanding, threatening.
So much for poker faces.
I sunk into a fresh chair.
You can’t control entropy. You can’t wrangle disorder. You can make all the right moves and still lose. I figured I’d just enjoy the general lack of pain while I could and let them dance this futile jig.
I wasn’t going to play a rigged game I couldn’t win. I’d done enough of that in this wasted life.
Two hours later, they dragged Jasmine away, kicking and screaming, begging us to help her.
They left Katarina and I food. We ate in silence.
She wouldn’t look me in the eye. I’m sure she thought me a coward for not trying to fight them off, escape, protect Jasmine.
It was kind of hard to miss the fact they came in armed to invade Poland this time.
Time ticked away and I thought about all the poker hands where it went wrong. The bad beats played on a loop in my mind. You can never remember the victories, but the unfair defeats remain forever etched.
I missed the feeling of shoving a few thousand into the middle of the table, saying “all in” with a voice bereft of emotion.
It was a far fall from there to here.
I tried not to think what the loan sharks would do to the few people left in my life when they assumed I skipped town.
I guess when you’re dead it isn’t really your problem anymore.
Jasmine came back a few hours later.
Her eyes were the same color.
But I was damn positive she didn’t have a tattoo on her forehead when she left.
It was a symbol, a single symbol, unlike anything I’d ever seen. The closest thing it resembled was a rune, but that wasn’t right. Like a rune, a Greek letter, and a crude drawing of a brain had been smashed together.
We asked her what they did to her.
But she was off. Way off.
Aggressive. Rude. Bitter.
The chipper academic was gone, replaced by just animalistic Id. She wouldn’t tell us anything other than she listened to a word.
Even that she barked at us as she flipped over a bed with a crash.
Katarina and I sauntered away, slinking into our respective corners.
Jasmine never stopped pacing, vividly throwing her arms over her head, flailing about like a badly animated cartoon character. She muttered acidic threats of violence to no one, her voice growing more feral with each turn.
Eventually, sleep took me. Even the returning pain of my burns couldn’t stave off the exhaustion.
We roused from sleep by hellish screams.
Jasmine was spinning impossibly fast on one foot, pirouetting like a prima ballerina. Her right hand and head were raised to the heavens, absolutely shrieking the same unintelligible word over and over.
We didn’t try and calm or comfort her.
I certainly didn’t try to get firm this time.
Truth be told, we just cowered and watched the frenetic dance, even as blood leaked from her hospital slipper.
Without warning, she stopped and snapped her head toward Katarina.
Screaming the same babble with a now hoarse voice, she fell to her knees, arched her back until you could hear bones started to crack, and then flung both arms out at the table.
The table levitated a few feet into the air and flew, smashing into a billion pieces.
Katarina escaped it by a hair. Nothing remained by dust and splinters where she had been cowering.
All the chairs and beds in the room rose into the air in unison.
Katarina and I ran in circles, dodging the flying furniture as it careened at us, guided by a once kind soul now transfixed in a demonic yoga stance.
The Exorcist, meet Carrie.
A chair slammed into my back, knocking me to the ground and stealing the wind from my lungs. I couldn’t tell, but it looked like Katarina had been knocked unconscious by a bed.
I tried to get to my feet but between the burns and the chair, I was in too much pain.
“Fuck it,” I thought, and just laid there, thinking about what I felt like to rake in a pot in and stack towers of chips I could hardly see over. Build castles made of sucker’s money.
“And somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even,” or whatever that dork sang.
Jasmine began levitating, rising while locked in the same position. She looked towards Katarina’s body, and it rose, limp as a deboned fish, to the same height.
Jasmine wailing that same nonsensical shit.
She looked at me and my blood came to a screeching halt in my veins.
The symbol on Jasmine’s forehead had come to life.
It was an animated, thrashing, three-dimensional. It had stabbed itself through her skull, blood seeping out at the holes, and fusing itself with her brain. It wiggled and squirmed, pulsating with life.
I felt my body rise into the air at her mind’s command.
Helpless, I soared across the room and into a wall. I wailed like an impudent toddler denied a treat as the bone in my left arm shattered, along with my hand and wrist.
Vomit spilled out of me from the agony.
All I could think was Katarina’s tiny, strung-out body wouldn’t survive the airborne journey I’d just made.
I braced, expecting Jasmine to send Katarina soaring.
Much to my surprise, Katarina dropped down with a thud, and the door flung open.
The team spilled in and began treating Katarina and me. Tiny flashlights checked our pupils. Fingers poked and prodded.
They didn’t touch or look at Jasmine.
She was still hovering, her back unnaturally arched, her neck snapped back. I couldn’t quite make out her face amidst the chaos.
She was quiet now.
I felt the sweet, sweet joy of the dragon as the morphine pumped in, my numb arm being gently positioned in a sling.
Exit consciousness, stage left.
On the way out, I saw Jasmine’s head slowly turn towards me.
There was no more symbol.
Her forehead was now fully caved in. The edges of her destroyed skull jutted out. The grey matter of her brain was exposed, slowly seeping out, dripping juices down her face.
The sounds of the pandemonium slipped away. Everything went quiet in this little corner of Hell.
I felt time slow.
The only thing I heard as the blackness stole me was Jasmine’s whisper:
“JEHNARQUIRPUJI”
I saw her fall over dead as I sailed away into the nothingness of sleep.