"You? Or those behind you?"
My question lacks any bite, but carries a quiet venom called resentment. I want to focus and pierce through the veil guarding his thoughts, but the cocktail of negative emotions based on fear, helplessness and despair, keeps me too shaken to focus and actively read his mind.
"It doesn't matter, because that will not change anything. Now answer my question. When did you gain the ability to read minds?"
That calm, that indifference. The nerve he has to break into our life, threaten Lizbeth and I, keep us at gunpoint and look like we don't matter, like our lives don't matter, and he holds any right over us. The anger that had been in the depths, stifled by fear, despair, hopelessness, and other feelings, comes back. It rises to the surface and jumps high, shining bright, and lacing my mind with a deep layer of venomous hatred.
The tears I have been holding back are pushed where they are coming from. My heart returns to its place, beating strong and fast, and I can feel the fire in my eyes, carrying the wish to burn that man, that disaster in my and Liz's life.
"You approached Liz purposefully. You came here months ago purposefully. You are just a piece of scum, but you are trained, like a soldier or something like that. I don't believe you jumped out of a rock. You are not alone. If anything, you are just a lackey. But even mind reading can't give you and your scummy kind control of the world. So why don't you leave? I don't even need to read deep in your mind to know you are part of a megalomaniac group full of superiority like Tyne Turner."
I breathe heavily, my chest rising and falling with heat coursing through my veins. I needed to say those words, to vent, to regain some feeling of control. I calm down, the previous cocktail of emotions melting somewhat, and relax.
"You don't need to say anything, you have shown enough, and unlike you, I can get the answers I want on my own."
The slight disdain as I raise my head slightly is obvious, but I feel like I have earned that right to look down on 'Mike'. And now, the game will not be dominated one-sidedly by him. I don't know what he wants, and I don't care. I just want Liz and I to survive.
My determination solidifies in a firm light in my eyes, and my courage comes back. But for the world, I may be a joke.
*Poof!* *Pfiu!* *Pak!* *Crack!*
The first sound is the muffled noise the bullet made as it left the dark muzzle in front of me. Only now do I register it, along with the darkness of the hole in the middle of the silencer connected to the handgun.
In the heat of the moment, my anger has blinded me, and made me forget that a soldier, as I have deduced 'Mike' has been, and still is, maybe in another form, with another allegiance, is a killer, cold-blooded or not.
The second sound is the subtle displacement of the wind as the bullet passed by my ear, close enough to leave it hot, and slightly red, a sound sharp like an arrow straight to the heart.
My heart seems to stop as the bullet hits the wall right behind me, behind the couch I'm sitting on, breaking pieces of it to shower me with them, along with the created dust. But I don't even register the dirt after the impact, tetanized by the fear that produced the last sound, the one of my courage shattering, of my mind crashing after freezing mid flight, of my heart almost stopping like a car hitting a wall.
"You still don't understand."
As he says that, 'Mike' shakes his head and stands up.
'They never understand, until they are broken.'
That floating thought is like a sigh, a lament, an indifferent one. But more than that, it is a simple statement born out of experience, and that brings with it a decision, a path, the way to go to get things on track.
My fear comes back, stronger than ever, with a deafening buzzing that makes my brain hypersensitive not only to sounds that seem close, but feel far away, behind a fog, but also to light.
In that almost psychedelic perception of the world, 'Mike' walks step by step to Liz, each silent step like a hammer squeezing my heart to crush it, an invisible hand to suffocate me until no life is left in me. I don't even register his back turned to me for the first time in a careless mistake, or a deliberate show. That is until he stops beside Elizabeth, turns to the side to glance at me, then cock his foot back.
My heart drops, and I shout:
"STOP!"
I don't know whether the sound comes out, or it just remains in my mind. I do know that my mouth is opened, and my brain which has just come to life in a psychedelic way has crashed again, worse than before.
*BANG!*
The sound is harsh, the strength behind it is great enough to raise Liz's unconscious body a few inches up the ground as she reflexively curls with her abdomen as the central axis.
"Hurgh!"
She opens her mouth, and out comes a shower of red. It looks so much like that time a few months ago, that day my white dress had been painted red.
My mind turns blank as I look at the scene. Liz, curled like a shrimp, her hand tied behind her, blood dripping out of her lips which had always formed a gentle smile, except maybe that time at the police station. Her carefully crafted appearance for the date she was looking forward to was now a mess, but also like a flaw that enhances a tragic but beautiful painting. The wires move in my mind, but the gears refuse to turn.
Like a defective machine, I turn slowly, away from Elizabeth on the ground, to him, the devil standing over her body.
His expression, still unchanged, without any anger or any ripple of emotion, chills me like a winter I have never known, with the abyssal cold that rushes to me. And now I understand what he said. I understand his lament. Because now I know my place. And he sees that, because, without any change in expression, he once again cocks his foot back, for the inevitable he is planning, the inevitable now imprinted in my broken mind.
*BANG!*