Blair freaked out. It almost would have been funny, how afraid a dead girl was of a gunshot, but it wasn’t funny because I was also freaking out. We both screamed and I’m not sure whether Henry heard just me or both of us, but he definitely turned on us next.
I didn’t need Joni’s hiss to get me to act.
“You can’t fire that!” I shouted, hands in the air. “You don’t want to. You didn’t mean to. It was an accident. You don’t want to fire anymore. You want to… drop the gun. You–you’re a pacifist! Your whole life’s goal is to be peaceful and now you’re gonna run away and join a monastery.”
Too much. It was too much! I knew it was but I was scared and honestly fucking angry. Yes, I had fucked this up. Obviously, I had fucked this up. I accidentally convinced Noah to come, I told Henry that Noah had sold him out, told him that his gut was never wrong, of course Henry was going to react poorly when Noah showed up.
But Henry brought a fucking gun. Like, dude was planning on buying some fucking… CD drives? No one knew what he was planning to buy, okay, but the point was, it wasn’t heroin. He thought he was meeting his partner to trade off some fucking tech shit. And he brought a gun.
So I didn’t care about Henry. Not at all. I cared about Cara, who was on the ground, sobbing. I cared about Noah who was–
How was Noah?
“Sammi do something!”
Blair’s sob screeched across the clearing, and I had a bad feeling about this.
How many deaths was I gonna cause out of sheer incompetence?
The good thing was that Noah wasn’t dead yet. Half his face was covered in blood and a hopefully unimportant part of his skull was missing, but he was twitching. He wasn’t doing hot, but he wasn’t cold. Not yet.
“Sammi!” Even Christopher looked freaked out, pulling at his hair.
“Uh.”
“Tell Cara to call the police,” Joni said. Her voice had dropped to an almost soothing level of calm. There wasn’t any soothing to be had in this situation, but if there was, she’d have pulled it off.
“Cara, call the police,” I said, my own voice a shaky wobbly mess. “Tell them someone was shot. Tell them where we are.”
“Tell her she won’t be in any trouble,” Joni urged.
“You won’t be in any trouble.”
Cara nodded and pulled out her phone as I turned back to Noah.
“Flashlight Sammi. They’re gonna ask how he’s doing, where he was shot, all of that.”
Slowly and steadily, Joni coached me–and, by extension, Cara–through the whole thing. We kept Cara on the phone, since if I said anything even remotely untrue, it could fuck up the paramedics' understanding of the situation. The last thing we needed was for me to say this was a shot to the chest when it was a shot to the head, and have the EMTs waste any time looking for a gunshot that didn’t exist and ignoring the one bleeding in front of them.
It wasn’t pleasant work. I was trying to put pressure on the bleeding while Blair, our resident doctor, gave me her hysterically angry takes on what I was doing wrong. She was acting like Joni but with way less composure.
At points, I could barely even hear Cara over her.
“Th–they’re asking about the gun?” Cara’s voice wavered, only just audible over Blair’s hiccups.
“The… the gun. You said the gun, right?” I fumbled through the grass until I found the black pistol, which I handed off to her. “This one? What do they want with it?”
“What do you want with… okay, yeah,” she said, responding very much to the dispatcher and not to me. “It was a small gun. No. Just one shot. Okay.”
“Sammi, focus,” Joni said. “Your hands are meandering, and putting pressure on his neck isn’t gonna help here unless your goal is a coup de grace.”
“Uh, it’s actually pronounced coup de grâce,” Christopher said.
I wasn’t sure what either phrase meant, but I definitely didn’t want to be suffocating Noah, so I moved my hands back to the wound.
Still, by the time they showed up, I had no idea if any of it was gonna amount to anything. I’d seen quite a few dead bodies in the last day, and Noah was looking an awful lot like them.
But the paramedics didn’t just load him up with a white cloth over his face, so there was hope.
“We need to go,” Joni said. “Let this all clear up.”
“Cara,” I said. “I should–”
“Hey. Sammi, it’s okay.” Christopher patted me on the shoulder, his own calm somewhat restored. “Look, worst case scenario is, Noah dies, Cara is convicted of his murder, and she gets executed.”
Joni, Blair, and I all turned on him, eyes huge with horror.
Christopher held his hands up. “Which would all take months! Like maybe a year, probably more. My point is, right now you’re panicking, but you don’t need to handle anything right now. The only immediate bad thing that might happen is Noah might die, but you can’t stop that. It would be bad but you can't get arrested out of a guilty conscience cause that would make salvaging this situation, helping Cara, way harder. We regroup, find a place to rest, you get your head on straight, and we see how the evening panned out tomorrow morning. If Cara is in trouble, we make a plan then. If Noah's alive, I dunno, maybe we can help him then. But you can't help half as good from jail.”
A plan. Yeah, tomorrow, when our heads were a bit more on straight.
“But I wanna stay with him.” Blair’s voice was a pitiful whimper as she watched the paramedics load Noah’s limp form onto the ambulance. My stomach twisted.
I gave Joni a desperate ‘help me out here’ look. I didn’t want to risk talking anymore and raising suspicion.
“Blair, we don’t know how far away you can be from Sammi,” Christopher said. “Like, we’re like, anchored to her. And she can’t go to the hospital. She’d have to lie a ton just to get in and all she’d end up doing is causing confusion, which would make Noah's chances even worse. The best thing we can do is let the pros do their jobs.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“But what if he dies alone?” Blair whispered.
“He won’t,” Joni said. “He’ll have all the doctors and stuff around him." Then her face softened. "Not trying be rude. But you’re not even physically here. And if you accidentally cry loud enough and the surgeons hear you, they might freak out, and that's not what Noah needs.”
Another good point. Blair looked like she wanted to fight them but after a few seconds, dropped her head.
“I shouldn’t have made the sirens,” she said, voice thick.
No she shouldn’t have. But I had the sense not to say this out loud because the reality is, a lot of people shouldn't have done a lot of things. This whole thing was a decent plan with a dozen cracks and a stupid tech fence bringing a pistol to a handoff.
We needed to find a place to rest, drop off our shit, maybe get some food, and then finally sleep. I was too tired to process this whole shit show of a night right now. We all were. I needed to recharge.
~~~
It wasn’t hard to find a place to stay. At least not for a night. I trundled my shiny new, slightly scratched car to the first hotel I could pick out and dragged myself in. I was too tired to even be nervous driving, and just prayed no one bolted in the road.
“I’m the room inspector and you need to tell me where the fanciest vacant room is. For inspection.” The words came out of my mouth in a tired pile, almost loosely enough strung together to be a slurred. Not that the woman at the front desk cared.
“That’ll be the junior honeymoon suite on floor fourteen,” she said, after typing in her computer a little. “Room 1429.”
I was maybe indulging in a bit of doom and gloom glumness, but it had been a long day. Like a really fucking long day. Like holy shit how had this all been one day?
That kind of long day.
So I was allowing myself the grace of being a hot mess.
I took a deep breath. “I’m the guest for room 1429, but I lost my card and the system reset so it kicked me out. Can you just check me back in?”
The woman nodded without missing a beat. “Of course I can do that for you. What did you say your name was?”
I frowned, not sure if I should fake it or go legit or—
“Just tell her she, like, doesn’t need to know or whatever,” Christopher said. He sounded almost as tired as I felt, which made me wonder if their energy was dependent on mine or if they were just mentally tapped out.
“You don’t need to know that,” I said, giving her my best, tired, confident smile. “You just need to let me up there and show the room as booked for the night. Just, you know, make sure it’s ready first?” Didn’t want to end up in a dirty bedroom or something nasty.
“Of course I can do that. Please allow us fifteen minutes to prepare it for you.” She gave me a perky smile, which I returned with something probably more concerning.
Honestly, of all the crimes I’d committed in the past twenty-four hours, this was the least egregious. Can’t blame a girl for wanting to put her head down in someplace fancy after accidentally killing her friends, ascending to godhood, getting some police arrested, robbing a tech store blind, forcing an innocent worker into trying to pawn off useless tech, and then getting a college kid shot.
I just… I needed sleep.
The room was honestly some baller stuff. I had an actual kitchen, not just a microwave and coffee maker. Swanky countertops—granite, I think? The dark stone that always gets put on counters in HGTV shows—and a stovetop with two little burners and even an oven. Just past the little kitchenette was a bed the size of my old bedroom, with a bucket of ice and a bottle of champagne in it.
I was about to throw myself on the bed when I heard a little ‘aww’ from Blair, who’d poked her head through a white door with gold handles.
“Aww?” I asked.
“Pretty bathtub. I miss my bathtub at home.”
“Wait, yeah, shit this bathroom is like, sick.”
The bed would have to wait while I checked this out. So I grabbed the bottle of champagne by the neck and headed over.
I threw open the doors to find myself in a bathroom that looked straight out of a magazine. The floors were a glossy white marble that were somehow heated. I took a ginger step on them before letting the warmth soak into my aching heels. A little waterfall trickled down a pile of stones on the countertop in what was probably the coolest and stupidest water fountain I’d ever seen. There was both a shower and a bathtub. The shower was cool, no lie, all glass walls with a showerhead just kinda in the middle and silvery glass benches on two sides, but the tub was the main attraction. It was big enough for two, more like a hot tub than a bath, with a detachable shower head, jets and an honest to god massage roller on the back of the seats.
“Okay,” I said, heading straight towards the tub and cranking it on. “Sammi needs some R and R. If any of you chucklefucks even so much as pokes their heads in while I’m bathing, you go to the back of the line for power upgrades. Got it?”
“Sammi, literally why would we want to see you naked?” Joni asked. “Just, like, turn on the TV or something before you go, so we’re not totally bored?”
I could do that much for them if it meant they’d leave me alone. After finding a station they agreed on (not an easy task but we did it), I grabbed my champagne and headed back to my now steamy bathroom for a luxurious soak with a sophisticated glass of bubbly to decompress and take in the day.
What followed my first glass was a decidedly less sophisticated hour of sobbing as I chugged down the rest of the bottle, leaning against the massage rollers as they worked their percussive magic on my knotted-up back. Honestly, it wasn’t even me being naked that I was glad the ghosts weren’t seeing. No one needed to see me like that. I didn’t need to see me like that. My saving grace was that I’d cranked up the volume loud enough that between the TV, the fountain's cheerful trickling, the hot tub jets, and the massage machine, no one could hear my choked wails.
I was coping. This was coping. Healthy coping. Cry it out, you know? It was like when you leave a baby in a crib to cry all night so it learns that life is cruel and unfair. Just an adult version with water and alcohol and no bed or parents just a room away in case anything went really bad. So kinda nothing like that, except for the fact that I was sobbing like a neglected child.
Eventually, even my godly regeneration couldn’t save my youthful fingers from shriveling into dejected raisins, so after some unknown period of time, I slithered out of the tub and onto the heated floor, where I curled up under a ridiculously soft towel and whimpered some more, brain pinging between how fucked up my life was and how fucked up life was in general that towels this nice existed exclusively behind some crazy paywall, cause I had certainly never felt anything this comfortable before.
Finally, I got bored. My ‘godly regeneration’ had taken on itself to heal me from my self-inflicted poisons, so I was now speedrunning a hangover, thankfully with mostly muted effects. Still, I was sober now and dehydrated, so I finally pulled on a robe and headed out to join the ghosts.
They’d landed on the travel channel, which for some reason I’d thought was the kind of channel that showed exotic locales or some shit. But apparently they were on episode three of Urban Hauntings.
Blair was curled up inside a pillow, only occasionally peering her eyes out. Christopher and Joni were bickering because Joni apparently was calling the whole thing out as fake, but Christopher kept accusing her of being too cynical.
“Look, the spirits clearly said ‘revenge!’” Christopher said, pointing energetically at the TV.
“That literally wasn’t the word revenge.” Joni rolled her eyes so hard I could see parts of it I never wanted to see. “It’s like, a grunt at best.”
“Okay but then what’s making the grunt if it’s just Tim and Sarah in the house?”
“First off, it’s not just Tim and Sarah, they have a whole crew. And I don’t know. Maybe it’s a camera guy coughing. But it’s so clearly faked. These kinds of supernatural hunters are always full of shit.” Joni snorted. “They find some poor sod who really wants to believe and will play along with the bullshit just cause they need something to prove their delusions.”
“Jesus Joni, you could at least try to keep an open mind.”
“All right, all right, settle down.” I waved my now empty champagne bottle at them. “Maybe Joni’s right, maybe this is faked, who knows? But logically at least one of these shows has gotta be legit.”
Joni turned baleful eyes on me. “How's your logic track there?”
“Yeah. Cause y’all can’t be the only fucking ghosts around, and you are as subtle as an avalanche.” With this, I flicked off the TV and the lights in one swoop. “Now everyone shut up while I get some sleep. Tomorrow will probably be a longish day, and I need to have my wits about me.”
“What wits?”
“Shut up Joni.”