KILLING SARAI(90)

Niklas is on top of Victor now, hitting him repeatedly in the face, but Victor reaches up and grabs Niklas’ throat and lifts him off of him, slamming his back hard against the floor. Victor stands up and kicks Niklas in the face before forcing his way through the room to get his gun.

In seconds, he’s standing over his brother’s surrendering body with the barrel pointed at his face.

“Victor, don’t kill him!” I manage to shout through the pain.

He blinks back into focus having been momentarily lost in a blind rage, and he glances at me.

“Please, don’t kill him,” I repeat in a soft, desperate voice.

“He tried to kill you,” he says, looking at me with a confused expression as though he can’t believe what I’m saying. “He shot you.”

I press my right hand harder over the wound, blood moves in-between all of my fingers. I’m starting to feel faint.

“Victor, he’s your brother. He’s only here because he was trying to protect you.”

He looks back and forth between me and Niklas, both of us lying bloody and helpless on the floor on opposite sides of the room. His face is consumed by conflict and pain and things that I can’t possibly understand because I’ve never had a brother or sister, I don’t know what it feels like to be loved in that way. Maybe Victor never knew either, until now.

I try to lift my head but I’m so weak that my cheek stays pressed against the scruffy carpet.

“Niklas is all that you have, the only family you have left,” I say. “I would do anything to have someone who cares for me as much as he cares for you. Anything.”

The room gets very quiet. I can see Victor’s eyes, clouding over with…I’m not sure. Is he even really looking at me at all? I feel like I can hear Niklas speaking but it sounds muffled and distant in my ears. I see the ceiling now. Just the ceiling. Thousands of minuscule holes open up to me from within the material and I feel like I can see every single one of them as they push down on me from high above. That warmth. What is that warmth I feel all around me like a blanket?

“Sarai?” I hear a voice say, but whose voice it is I can’t tell.

All I see is blackness. I try to lift my eyelids, but they’re too heavy.

I hear the voice again and a shot of pain radiates through my body when I feel like I’m being lifted into the air. I try to cry out, but I don’t think anyone can actually hear my voice.

I try to cry out….





CHAPTER FORTY-ONE





I feel like I’ve been dreaming for days. The same constant series of images and voices all around me always sound calming yet persistent. The images, they’re what tells me that it’s not real because everyone I see are already dead. Javier. Izel. Lydia. Samantha. My mother. They walk by me in a sort of quiet, contemplative state as if I’m not even here. I can almost touch my mother’s hair when she passes.

I must be dreaming.

But the dreams are slowly fading and the strange, unfamiliar voices I hear are becoming more distinct. I feel like I’m trapped inside my own mind and it has forgotten that it controls my body. Because I can’t move anything. Not my eyes or my lips or my hands. I can’t even tell if I’m breathing on my own. But mostly what I think about are the voices, how clearer they’re becoming. I find myself concentrating as hard as I can so that I can focus on their words, but I never get further than the sound.

At least not until I hear Victor’s voice in the distance.

“I won’t be here long today,” I hear him say to someone.

I try to wake up, but I think the effort has the opposite effect because in an instant I’m consumed by blackness and all of the voices disappear.

More time passes. More dreams. More voices.

And then just like that as if a switched had been flipped in my brain, my eyelids break apart and I see that I’m lying in a hospital bed.

Victor is sitting next to me in a chair.

“You’re awake,” he says and smiles down at me.

“How long have I not been?” I’m still trying to put my mind back together.

“Three days,” he says. “But you’re going to be fine. They kept you sedated most of the time you’ve been here.”

I try to raise my back from the pillow, but the pain in my stomach is too much. I wince and my hands come up to put pressure on the area, but Victor takes my hands and guides me back down. “You can’t be moving around yet,” he says and stands up. He takes the extra pillow from a nearby chair and positions it underneath the back of my head. Then he pushes a button on the side of the bed to raise it to allow me to sit upright. An IV snakes along the top of my hand, plastered to my skin with white tape. It itches like mad.

“The bullet missed every organ,” Victor says as he sits back down in the chair. “You were lucky.”

Niklas’ face flashes in my mind.

“Or your brother is just a bad shot.”

I look down at my arms resting on the bed at my sides. I want to know what happened to Niklas and I feel like I should hope that he’s dead, but I can’t.

“Is he—?”

“No,” Victor says. “Half of me wanted to kill him, but the other half couldn’t do it. I just wonder which half would’ve won if you hadn’t been alive in that moment.”