Page 24 of The Darkness Within

Usually, I have all the patience in the world when it comes to my patients and recovering addicts, but Nash isn’t recovering, he’s just pissing me the fuck off. Can’t he see what he’s doing to himself and to others? How can he be so utterly blind?

My patience snaps, and I push him against the wall, getting right up in his face. “Look at you, it’s killing you.”

“It’s not the drugs that are killing me, it’s everything I love, it’s killing me from within, slowly, day-by-day.”

No! He’s not getting off the hook with his poor-me bullshit. “You’re a selfish bastard! When you destroy yourself, you’re not your only victim. Every action has a consequence. The guy next door? The one with the huge heart who keeps showing up for you? He’s got his own shit to deal with. You’re not the only man who’s gone to war and come back broken. There’s a whole goddamn club of us and you can join anytime you fucking like. Membership is free. If something happens to you? Mandy will not be okay. The last thing he needs is another death on his conscience, a death he’s not responsible for. But you can bet he’ll feel like he is. And I’m not gonna let you do it to him. Nor to me. Or anyone else who cares about you.”

Leaning back, I let go of him, but I’m not backing off. “I’m taking your pills and giving them to Mandy.”

“You can’t fucking do that!”

“I’d like to see you try and stop me. If you need to take a sedative or a pain killer, go next-door and see your new med tech. He’s going to make sure you’ve eaten properly first, and he’s only going to give you the prescribed dose. If you want to keep running and hiding, you’ll have to figure out another way to do it.”

He doesn’t try to stop me as I make my grand exit, snatching up the pills from the counter and stomping out the door, slamming it shut behind me.

Shortly after he slams my front door shut, I crash face first into bed. Fuck him. Fuck all the people he says I’m supposed to carefully consider before I hurt myself. I never asked any of them to care about me.

“He’s gone,” I murmur, reaching out for the solid presence of the body next to me. “It’s just us now.” Thanks to the black out curtains over my windows, I can’t see a damn thing but a shadowy lump. “I’ve got you.”

My fingers rub over the worn cotton T-shirt in a self-soothing gesture as my eyelids become heavy and drift closed. I don’t even have the strength to fight the drowsiness, nor do I want to. I just want to float away until I become part of the shadows, hiding in the corners of my bedroom. The old familiar melody falls from my lips, like an unconscious thought, humming myself to sleep.

“The sun will come out tomorrow.”

Day 15 of captivity

Collapsed in a heap and clinging to each other for solace, my fingers scratched soothingly over his dry scalp.

“When I die, don’t let them take me from you. I don’t want to leave you alone, and I don’t want them to have me,” Gutierrez rasped. His breathing sounded labored, his skin flushed with cold sweat.

“You’re not gonna die. We’re gonna get out of here and get you the help you need.”

Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t want to. “Promise me,” he pleads desperately. “Promise me you won’t let them have me.”

“I promise, G. I’ve got you. I won’t let go.”

His body shook constantly, like he was cold, and I tugged him closer, sharing the warmth of my body. For some reason, my mind was stuck on a song I learned in my childhood, from the movie Annie. I began to hum until I hit the chorus, whispering the words softly in his ear. “The sun will come out tomorrow. You can bet that tomorrow there will be sunshine.”

My words blocked out the screeching and scurrying rats, the barking dogs, and the shouting terrorists. It blocked out everything until there was just Gutierrez and me.

His harsh breaths evened out, and when he finally closed his eyes, he never opened them again. His body couldn’t fight any longer against the sepsis that ravaged him. I felt some small solace in the fact that amidst this nightmarish hell, his final moments were spent dreaming of warmth and sunshine, of hope and healing.

I held onto him for what seemed like days but was probably only one. The silence was deafening. I could hear the rats coming closer, becoming braver. Their squeaking sounded like nails, sliding across a chalkboard, setting my teeth on edge. They nibbled at his gangrenous foot, and when the guards came, not even checking to see if he was alive or dead, they dumped buckets of icy water over our disgusting bodies, washing away the piss and feces, and the sweat and the dirt, leaving us in a cold muddy puddle of filth. It took the rest of my strength to drag him a few feet over to a patch of dry dirt.

Over and over, I rocked his body, cradling him to me, running my fingers through his dirty, wet hair, continuing to hum, holding onto him tightly, never letting go. When his body grew cold and stiff in my arms, I finally gave in to the tears I’d been storing inside of me for days. My body was wracked with anguished sobs, violent and ugly and broken.

One-by-one, I kicked the rats away from him as they tried to steal pieces of his rotting corpse, and I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed some more, to whatever God was still listening, that we be saved before our captors dragged his body away from me and desecrated it beyond recognition.

For two days and two nights, I stay in bed tossing and turning in a cold sweat, caught in a never-ending nightmare. My body is wracked with chills and pain, and my head throbs. I can’t even consider keeping food down with the nausea that grips my stomach in knots. I piss myself, just like in my nightmare, just like I did back when they held me beneath the ground. Behind my eyelids, I relive that dark hell. That giant old oak tree outside my hospital window in Germany comes back to me, its roots digging deep into the earth to wrap around my body and entomb me six feet below the ground, in a dirt coffin made of terror.

It’s the pounding on the door that finally wakes me. I think the sound is coming from inside of my head, until they break the fucking thing down, knocking it off its hinges.

“Jesus Christ,” Mandy wails just before I lose consciousness again.

My world stays dark, clips of my life playing like a movie in my head. Clips of every failure, every folly, every time I fucked up, ingrained in my memory forever, playing on an endless loop so that I never forget.

When I finally open my eyes, I’m rewarded with a light so bright it’s painful.

Great, they thought of new ways to torture me.

---