Neverquest – Part 127

Characters: Sophia, Alyssa, Neil, Kelsey
Location: Inside the basement of CNN

Time: Day 5 – Dawn

“Pip just arrived at the hospital,” Kelsey said, lowering the phone receiver. “Looks like he’ll pull through. It seems the initial shock—not the actual bullet—caused him to faint.”

Alyssa clicked her tongue. “Too bad. I guess next time we’ll have to aim more to the right, huh, Sophia?”

Sophia looked up. There was something cold in her eyes—something that made her eye sockets shrink and disappear from the world. She was shivering, just enough for goosebumps to blanket her skin like snowflakes, and anybody who had been with her for that last, seemingly endless hour would know that those were little beads of tears frozen to her cheeks.

“…I hate you, Alyssa,” she whispered. “What the hell is running through your head…? Don’t you care that you almost killed the boy?”

Alyssa smiled. “I don’t want to take all the credit. You raised the gun. You aimed it at his head. Why, if I hadn’t pushed your arm away, we might be scraping his brains off our shoes right now.” And to rub it in, she began to grind her sole into the floor, slowly breaking away a wad of dried-up bubblegum that had been stuck there for a while. “…You can tell Pip to thank me later. Maybe he can give my boots a little smoochie-smooch. And you’re welcome to join him, Soph. There’s room for you down there.”

“…Next time, it’s your head I’m aiming for.”

“Oh, good idea. Maybe if you stopped shooting all the people you work with and finished me off instead, you’d have Jesse all to yourself.”

Sophia jumped up. “Is that what this is about!? You’re still jealous of me and Jesse?”

“Please, I’m hardly jealous of you. In fact, I pity you, the way I pity a chicken before it loses its head.” She grabbed a leftover drumstick from one of the desks and raised it. “This is you, Sophia! This is you.”

“…That is a leg of chicken, Alyssa.”

“No, this is you!”

“I’m a hunk of meat?”

“Not for long. Soon, you’ll be nothing but bone.” And with that, she started gnawing on the drumstick, tearing off the meat in long strips and slurping them down.

Sophia wondered if the mental clinic was taking patients at this hour.

“Mmm… You’re good.”

Meanwhile, Kelsey remained in her seat, with the phone receiver dangling off her finger. “So… I take it you don’t want to talk to Jesse?”

“Does he have to stay at the hospital much longer?” Sophia asked.

“No. He didn’t want the doctors asking too many questions, so he dropped off Pip and left.” Then she shrugged. “I guess they believed him when he said Pip got snipped by a machine at the garage.”

“It was a clean graze… I guess we all got lucky.”

“Right. Did you want to talk to him?”

Sophia glanced over at Alyssa, still chomping away at the drumstick, and turned her back “Just tell him to hurry back here before his ex turns into a bat and flies away.”

“Me—a bat!?” Alyssa said between a mouthful of food. “You’re the dark meat now, you sweet, current obsession!” Then she ran over to the phone and began chewing into the receiver so that Jesse could hear her ripping his girlfriend apart. “That’s what I think of your obsession, Jesse. Listen to the bones crack.”

Kelsey pushed her away and hung up the phone.

“I’m not a bat. I’m the white meat.”

“I’m sure you are…”

Alyssa turned the drumstick over. “I’m the white meat… I’m not the evil one.”

“Can you please go stand somewhere else?”

“This is you!” she screamed, turning back to Sophia. “Look at me and see what you’ve become.”

Sophia closed her eyes and shook her head. “How did Jesse ever put up with her…?”

“You are nothing anymore! Nothing but bone. Look at yourself! This is you.”

The last thing Sophia heard before she disappeared into the control room and closed the door was the cold, hard snapping of the drumstick between Alyssa’s fingers. She shuddered, wiping the dry tears from her cheeks, and saw Neil bent over one of the machines with a screwdriver in hand.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“Don’t ask.”

“Only making friendly conversation,” he shrugged. “…If I didn’t know better, I’d say you girls aren’t turned on by that.”

“Just…don’t say anything, Neil. You’ll only ruin the moment.”

He shook his head, fiddling around with the colored wires in the machine. “You know, it’s funny. All my life, I’ve been socially inept—like I never seemed to fit in, like I was an end piece in a puzzle with no border. And I never really asked for much out of my life. I just wanted to move out of my parent’s basement, maybe lose my virginity by the time I reached middle age… I don’t know.”

“Neil…”

“But that’s what life seems to be about. Losing things. We think we’re going places, we think we’re becoming ‘human,’ but we fail to see all the things we’re leaving behind. It’s like we’re snakes, shedding our skin and our lives in our footsteps. You know, there’s nothing wrong with watching cartoons or telling your mom you love her… You can’t always retrace those footsteps.”

“I know.”

“It’s a rout, you know—this world in which we live. It ain’t fair for either of us, but we play their game anyway. We’re just pawns in this one-sided chess game. And somehow, we don’t think of opening our arms and embracing each other. We don’t seem to realize that we could be friends and build our army up again. So we let the world beat on us and drown in our little ships, without a voice.”

“Neil, what are you—”

“I learned something today,” he said, spinning around. “I’m thirty-five years old. I saw my best friend killed. I saw another friend of mine dead in the ground like a pile of roadkill and another shot in the head. I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours and I can think about is how I’ve wasted my life on such trivial things. I’m not going to be this man forever, Sophia. I’m going to grow up, grow out, spread my branches and be someone. You will see.”

“That is very commendable, Neil,” she said with a trying smile.

“And look,” he said, grabbing her shoulders. “I’m looking you in the eyes when I speak. I’ve never done that with anybody.”

This time, it was her eyes that sank away.

But his hand caught her chin and gently pulled it up. “And I’m not afraid to help you in your time of need, Sophia. I’m no Jesse when it comes to charming women, but I know a hurt face when I see one. I’ve had my share of them. And the one you’re showing me now—that, I do recognize. Because look, no matter how rough the past eighteen hours or so have been on both of us, I want you to know that I’m here for you.”

She shuddered again and her eyes began to swell. “Thank you, Neil…”

“You can cry, if you want. If you need somebody to cry to…”

“Yes, I do,” she said, but she was already in tears. She threw herself forward and buried her head in Neil’s chest, letting the whole world go.

Neil stumbled backwards for a moment and quickly caught himself on the machine. Then he looked down at Sophia, weeping into his shirt, and he slowly reached up and held her head close.

“This will all be over soon,” he promised her, biting his lip. “I almost have the machine fixed. We’ll get the visual on your father, and we’ll get that password, and we’ll destroy that virus once and for all… Then it will be over.”

Sophia didn’t say anything, but he knew she heard him because she only cried harder. He looked up at the lights, biting down on his lip harder, and then closed his eyes as the sensation began to burn in his mind. He couldn’t hold it back any longer.

“…To hell with it,” he said, right before he broke down into tears next to her.