Chương 58: Book Two - Chapter 8: Another Nail in My Heart

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ZONE TWO INCINERATION: 05: 06: 14 The timer on screen read 11: 09 when I positioned myself inside the frame. We'd been so busy arguing that I'd forgotten to ask how long the cycle actually took. Slowly slipping my body into place, careful to avoid accidentally pricking myself with the needles, I accepted the reality that we might already have wasted too much time for the cycle to complete.

"I don't want to start shit," Tre said, "but I need to go on record as saying this is stupid. And there has to be a better way."

"It is what it is, Tre," I said, bending, lowering my body to fit inside the upside-down U part.

"We either play, or we don't." Tre glanced at Isabel for help. She stood near the corner of the frame, avoiding eye contact with all of us. He turned back to me.

"All I'm saying is you're never going to survive this if you keep taking all the punishment. We're here to help. Let us help. Maybe I could have gotten in, and the thing would've done the cycle and not hurt me at all." It was possible, but unlikely. If we had messed around trying to get Tre to trigger the device, we'd have just wasted more time. And something told me BK wanted this to be me, and anyone else getting inside would have just gotten all of us killed.

"I'm not going in blind," I said.

"I have a plan." The plan came to me in a desperate flash.

"If we work together, I can survive this with minimal damage. And if it all goes wrong, I've got two heals, and you guys have more if needed." The position I ended up in was a more violent child's pose in yoga with no release. My knees went down onto the base, and I had to lean my chest forward until it touched my thighs. The metal block at the top was split down the middle, and the two halves pulled apart just wide enough to fit my head through, placing my hands on the slab in front of me to keep my balance.

The moment I was in position, they slid back together around my neck.

"Is this what this whole thing's gonna be like?" Liam asked Isabel. Isabel let out a dry laugh.

"Which part? The part where Nora does something stupid or the part where every minute in this death game is a living fucking hell?"

"Um… both?" The moment I settled inside, the machine claimed me. Thick iron bands clamped around my ankles, locking them in place, followed by another pair locking my wrists to the base. Then came the worst of it, as the steel collar tightened around my neck, until my racing pulse thudded against the cold metal. I kept box breathing and calmly checked my HUD. FEAR: 24% (Stable) LUCIDITY: 76% (Stable) Those needles were centimeters from my skin, and the anticipation of the initial sting sent my Fear meter climbing.

I probably should have been more afraid of being crushed to death. Between Box Breathing, a skill I'd maxed out at the end of Zone One, and Isabel's Calming Aura buff, I had a thirteen percent Fear reduction and brief immunity to hallucinations, which only really happened when I hit the lower end of the Lucidity meter. A loud buzzer sounded, startling me enough that my body jerked up, pressing my back, outer arms, and shoulder into the needles.

I sucked in air and tightened my body back down into the kneeling position. The more I moved, the worse this would be. Fuck. FEAR: 28% (Nervous) LUCIDITY: 74% (Cloudy) The contraption hummed to life, and the bolt on top slowly began to turn clockwise. I focused on breathing, remembering my therapist, Dr. Boivin, calmly explaining the thought process to use as a tool alongside the deep breathing. She'd told me to imagine a beautiful, open meadow with a slow-moving river running through it.

Floating by on the water were all my worst thoughts and fears. It wasn't about ignoring them, though, she explained. The goal was to acknowledge them as you watch them slowly float past, until they float out of view entirely. It worked. I was there in my version of the meadow, looking at what I'd named my River of Troubles. My worst thoughts drifted past on the current, right on schedule. I watched them go. I breathed. I was doing it.

I was actually— The bolt turned another quarter rotation, and the arms of the frame moved for the first time. My thoughts scattered like cockroaches in the light. The needles progressively found my skin; first the outer arms, then shoulders, then a slow crawl as the device tightened across my upper back. The Scavenger's Daughter and I were now formally acquainted, and she was an absolute bitch. The River of Troubles stayed in my head as my eyes snapped open, though I wasn't sure when I'd closed them.

Isabel had rotated away from the frame, shoulders tight. FEAR: 39% (Nervous) LUCIDITY: 63% (Cloudy) The pain was bearable in that I knew it would only get worse, so I had to tolerate it. I figured if I could hold out on using the Salves until the last possible second, it would help me outlast however long the cycle would run.

"We can't stand here doing nothing," Tre said. Liam's hands were over his eyes, as he watched through a gap between his fingers.

"Okay! What do we do?" The screw turned faster, and I grit my teeth, biting back a scream. Tre moved toward me, reaching into the device near my waist, and unhooked my belt buckle. He pulled the entire belt free of the loops in my jeans, then moved around the front of the machine where my head was.

"Bite down on this." He folded it in half and placed it in my mouth.

"Wait…" Liam started, then trailed off.

"So, the door closed and then the light and stuff. What if we open the door? Will that stop the thingy?"

"One way to find out." Isabel finally turned back around.

"Take that wall." Another turn of the screw, and everything tightened a fraction; the needles already in my body pressed deeper, releasing a blinding pain that shot down both arms at the same time. My health plummeted. HEALTH: 80% Twenty-point drop in one turn. That scared the hell out of me, which caused a different spike. FEAR: 56% (Nervous) LUCIDITY: 44% (Cloudy) In response, the bolt turned slightly faster. Should've smoked another joint before this.

"Okay," Tre said, stepping so we were face to face.

"Maybe it'll help if I keep you nice and distracted while you sit through your medieval torture spa treatment."

"Thounds gooh," I said, belt clenched between my teeth.

"So I've been thinking about BK's whole deal." Tre began to pace as he talked.

"The mask, the voice modulator… Like, we get it, you're scary. Calm down. It's giving pick-me energy." I exhaled a laugh through my nose.

"Thank you! His commitment to the bit is cringe." Tre paused, eyes unfocused, likely checking my Fear levels.

"Dude wakes up, showers, then gets dressed and casually slips a dead pig on his head. Unironically!" That one got a chuckle from Liam and me. Not only that, but my stats also shifted in my favor. FEAR: 50% (Nervous) The intensity of the machine's hum softened, slowing it back to its baseline speed.

"Do you think he poops with the mask on?" Tre stuck out his rubber tongue, making a goofy face. A sound that was almost a laugh came out of me, cut short by the frame cinching another half inch around my ribcage. The needles on my sides found new real estate. They pierced my flesh as individual points of pressure first, then heat, then as a deep, persistent sting. Breathing also got harder.

The space my lungs normally filled with precious oxygen was getting smaller, and every inhale I had to negotiate based on how much the frame was willing to give. HEALTH: 64% Isabel and Liam moved along the walls in opposite directions. Just before they disappeared in my peripheral vision, Liam crawled along the floor near the base of the wall, and Isabel searched behind the big monitor, hands tracing the cables. They'd said something about a door. The room's door? A wave of pain distorted their words to a low hum.

"—'re you doing?" Tre asked, dropping into a more sober register. Had he been talking the whole time?

"Mmm."

"Taking that as a 'hangin' in there, Tre'." He picked back up without missing a beat.

"And why does he use the voice modulator? Who is he hiding from? We don't even know who he is, let alone recognize his voice unless he has a really recognizable one. Oh! Do you think it's Samuel L. Jackson in there? Could he be playing a bad guy, like Summer was?"

"What if it IS Summer?" Liam yelled from somewhere behind me.

"Why would Summer be a dude?" Tre screamed back.

"Why would it be Samuel L. Jackson?!"

"Liam!" Isabel was back there with him." Focus!"

"I don't see an opening, Isabel!"

"Samuel L. Jackson isn't impossible, by the way." Tre was talking to me now.

"Plaxx said the whole world was in the Grindhouse. And I'd actually prefer to be killed by Nick Fury than some rando with a dead animal fetish." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"No trigger behind the screen," Isabel called from the other side of the room, although I'm not sure when she moved there. The bolt creaked, and the arms moved less than a centimeter. The arms pressed across the widest point of my shoulders, and the sensation was no longer just needles. It was the weight of my own skeleton fighting against the compression of the metal arms. The needles weren't all neatly sitting the same anymore.

The ones over my shoulder blades didn't go in as easily as the ones in the meaty parts of my back. They hit bone. The machine pushed them anyway, so they were bending, like thin wires flexing directly against my skeleton, grating bone in a place I never thought could hurt this much. I tried Box Breathing. Four counts in. The frame pushed back against my ribs on the inhale, and the pain spiked white, and I lost the count at three. FEAR: 53% (Anxious)"Hey," Tre said.

"Hey, stay here. With me." I managed a weak nod.

"Good. Because I remembered something and you're literally the only person who will appreciate this. Remember Julie and the Party Bus? Freshman year."

"Thophomore," I said around the belt.

"No. It was freshman…" One of my ribs lost the battle. A brittle floorboard creaked and snapped within me. I heard it clearly through my body and briefly wondered if anyone else did. Tre's voice came back in the middle of a sentence I missed most of.

"…. just gotten your learner's permit like two weeks before, and you were insufferable."

"Hey," I said through gritted teeth. My health ticked down two percent. The intake and exhale of breath caused the needles to do extra damage. FEAR: 49% (Nervous)"You're right. Insufferable is harsh." The rotation of the bolt slowed and the compression decelerated. It did nothing to relieve the pressure. FEAR: 47% (Nervous)"Anyway, I was remembering the day we skipped school, and Julie drove us to Great America." I knew the rest. We drove to Six Flags, and when we left, I insisted Julie let me drive.

Then instantly backed out of the parking spot directly into the car parked behind us. Julie freaked out and was like, 'Switch with me,' because she was the only one insured to drive the van. We climbed over each other to swap seats. Tre twisted around in the back, watching for whoever owned the Buick I'd crashed into. They never came out, and Julie floored it out of that lot so fast we scraped the bottom of the van on two speed bumps. Some of that was Tre talking and some I filled in myself.

It was hard to tell which was which as the agonizing pressure crushed my thoughts before they fully formed. Isabel and Liam huddled near the back wall, their urgent whispers lost to the roar of blood in my ears as they stared at a seam in steel. Then the bolt turned. HEALTH: 53% FEAR: 38% (Nervous) Box breathing. Four in. I sucked in air to fill the fist-sized space left inside my chest. My vision blurred. HEALTH: 48% FEAR: 55% (Anxious) Wrong direction.

"Hey, buddy," Tre said, quieter now.

"I'm right here. The cycle's almost finished." He didn't know how long the cycle was any better than I did.

"Gettin' worf," I said.

"I know. You're still okay." The iron frame constricted. Steel bit into flesh. The heavy arms ratcheted down across my back. The last of my air coughed out in a spittle-filled wheeze as my lungs flattened. HEALTH: 42% FEAR: 59% (Anxious)"Your health's too low," Tre said.

"Take a salve." It hurt too much to shake my head, so I didn't do anything.

"Nora! Take the salve!" The machine had me folded in half, grinding my chest directly into my thighs. My spine compressed into a sickening, unnatural arch, each vertebra groaning under the pressure. My ribs surrendered, making muffled, wet detonations beneath my skin. Snap. Pop. Jagged splinters of bone turned inward, puncturing deep into my soft organs. I screamed. Loud and long and well past when I thought I'd stop screaming. The belt dropped out of my mouth and coiled on the base of the frame.

HEALTH: 35% FEAR: 64% (Panicked) A rush of warmth spread down the inside of both thighs and puddled where my chest mashed into them. My jeans felt heavy, and something leaked down past the cuff, hitting the floor. I didn't look at what it was. Tre was right in front of me; he didn't look down or stop talking. His tone never changed. HEALTH: 33% FEAR: 68% (Panicked)"Nora," Tre said, inches from my face, sounding very far away.

"The salve!" But I couldn't. I mean, I could, but I wouldn't. I could hold out for another five percent. The shards of my broken ribs sank deeper into my guts. Every fraction of an inch the frame took, they went with it, mincing my organs and filling my chest cavity with hot blood. I coughed, and a phlegmy glob of blood shot from my mouth and dangled off my chin. My vision blurred, red this time, blood sluicing warm down my cheeks. Am I crying? I angled my eyes down so I could see the top of my own cheek.

There were no tears. It was blood. My eyes were bleeding. HEALTH: 30% FEAR: 76% (Terrorized) It was time to take the salve. Only I couldn't focus on my HUD. It kept flickering, sliding left and right, and the part of my brain that normally would have held onto the thought "salve" was too busy running around screaming " we're all gonna die, we're all gonna die."

"We found something," Liam said.

"A release panel. I think we can open the door." Tre ignored him, eyes locked on me instead.

"The salve, Nora!" Straining to keep my eyes focused, I finally managed to lock onto the salve and mentally press it. Warmth flooded my chest as shattered ribs tried to snap back into their natural shape, pushing outward against the Daughter's unforgiving steel arms. The newly mended bones hit the iron arms, splintering all over again at unnatural angles as they were crushed a second time. My body kept trying to put itself back together in a space that was too small for it to exist.

Still, the internal bleeding stopped. My lungs found a fraction of space to expand. HEALTH: 55% FEAR: 51% (Anxious) Momentary relief allowed me to dial back my panic. The frenetic spinning of the bolt slowed to a grinding crawl.

"Move!" Liam yelled off to my left.

"Lemme try!" Straining my eyes, I caught a glimpse of him and Isabel on the floor, tearing at a metal panel near the baseboard. He had jammed the Bowie knife under the lip of the cover, throwing his weight back until it popped off. He reached inside. A swell of hope pushed through the pain, briefly numbing it, and I clocked my Fear meter drop another few points. If their plan worked, I'd be out of here any second.

"Got it!" Liam had his arm deep in the wall, grabbed something unseen, and yanked. A heavy, mechanical thunk echoed through the chamber. The thick steel door hissed, unsealed, and sank back into the floor.

"Yes!" Isabel yelled. Liam pumped his fist.

"Let's gooooo." I waited for the pressure to recede, for the arms to release, and the needles to slowly retract. The bolt turned another millimeter.

"Guys." Isabel spun around, looking from me to the clock on the screen.

"The timer." Tre looked up, and I caught a reflection of the glowing numbers in his glass eyes. 02: 01 The manual release opened the door, but it hadn't stopped the clock. The Boargore King had told the truth. The only way out was to let the machine finish the cycle, and if I didn't do it before the timer expired, that massive slab overhead was coming to pancake us all. Overwhelming terror flooded my system. Dr. Boivin's River of Troubles and box breathing were nowhere to be found.

I couldn't count, let alone breathe. FEAR: 88% (Terrorized) Highest yet, and the bolt responded in kind. It whirred. The arms clamped together with frightening speed. The needles pushed deep into my shoulders, scraping against my collarbone, with the high-pitched squeak of a fork dragging across a plate. Except the plate was my bones. HEALTH: 45%"Nora, calm down!" Tre screamed, grabbing my face.

"You're making it worse!"

"Yelling at her won't help." Isabel was beside him now. When did she get there? She squatted down in front of me and put the back of her hand on my forehead. It was ice cold, and I wished it could stay there forever. I think I said something, but maybe not out loud.

"…You're so strong…" Isabel's voice. HEALTH: 35%"…never made it this far without you…" The audio was delayed even though her mouth was moving, and it kept cutting out. Which was a shame because I think it was the nicest thing she's ever said to me, and I only got a fraction of it.

"…sorry I'm such a bitch…" HEALTH: 30%"…not leaving you to die in this ugly room," Isabel said.

"We're down to a minute," Liam called from near the door. The pressure inside me had built to a catastrophic level. The blood in my chest had nowhere to go, squeezed out of my torso in both directions. Most of it went up. My face got tighter and tighter, until the tip of my nose was deep purple. My tongue stopped fitting in my mouth. And there was a fist punching the backs of my eyes from inside, shoving them forward into my lids over and over.

Finally, the pressure relieved, as hot liquid spilled down my cheeks, partially blinding me in a crimson haze. A pop deep inside my ears, and a warm trickle down the sides of my neck. My nose ran like a faucet, overflowing with so much blood, I choked on the copper taste filling the back of my throat. The rest of it went the other way. I think. There was a tear, and then I don't know what was happening back there and never want to. This time, I was ready, solely focused on my remaining Healing Salve.

I activated it. HEALTH: 55% The magic of the salve rushed through me again, trying its best to inflate my crushed lungs and mend the rest of my pulverized organs. But the machine was at maximum speed. My body was a sealed, pressurized tank. The healing simply provided fresh meat for the iron to instantly destroy. HEALTH: 48% HEALTH: 36% HEALTH: 31%"Forty-five seconds!" Liam screamed from the open doorway. LUCIDITY: 19% (Failing) I wasn't going to make it.

There was something I needed to say to Tre, something that had nothing to do with running or salves or any of this… No air. No words. I really hoped my last thought wasn't going to be about how much I hated the stupid one-way Mindbleed. HEALTH: 24% HEALTH: 18% HEALTH: 13% My perspective warped. Like I was seeing in two directions at once. My eyes kept trying to adjust between a view of the concrete floor and Isabel's pale face as she staggered back. Her breath hitched.

Whatever she saw brought her hand to her mouth. I closed my right eye, and Isabel disappeared. My view of the floor remained. My left eye had come out. It hung against my cheek, still sending back a blurry view of the moldy cement and one of Tre's little plastic shoes. Along the bottom edge of it all, out of focus but enormous, the swell of my own, purple cheek. The worst part was the air. Everyone's had cold air blown into their eyes. This was air over the whole goddamn ball.

My body only knew one way to deal with dry eyes. I blinked. The lid came down over an empty socket, and flapped against whatever shit holds your eyeball into your head. Then it did it over and over again, because that's what its whole job was. LUCIDITY: 7% (Collapsing) Someone started yelling numbers. My Mom was there. Standing next to Tre, and she was the same size as him. I tried to tell Tre. I'm not sure what came out. Then she was gone. Again. Then the frame went further.

Under my sternum, in the last place that hadn't been pulverized, the pressure found room and— The beep of a heart monitor. My mouth was open— Waves breaking against the shore as the ocean drags the water away. Tre yelled at— Mom retching at the dinner table, the first time she forgot how to swallow. Isabel standing over me— My body hit something hard, making a sound like a condom full of blue cheese dressing slapping against a wall. Cold. Metal on my skin. Oh. I guess that sound was me. I was on the floor.

Someone forced something into my mouth. It hurt like hell, and they weren't gentle as they shoved it between my bruised, swollen lips. The sour-apple goop hosed into my mouth, cramming into my throat, forcing me to swallow.

"Tre! We gotta go! Leave her," Liam yelled.

"Fuck you! We can't leave her!" The salve hit. Whatever warmth it usually brought was buried under the agony of my organs pushing out bone fragments and slowly reassembling around them. HEALTH: 40% Above me, the Skevington's gyves stood open, arms sprung wide like it was greeting me at the airport after a long time apart. Drops of my blood beaded on the tips of the arms' inner needles. I closed my right eye again and watched through my dangling left eye as the angle changed.

It began hanging down the side of my cheek, then slowly rose, the world tilting as it receded into its socket. Not ideal. I could see normally again, though. And, more importantly, breathe.

"Twenty-five seconds!" Isabel and Liam were near the doorway, frozen in horror, staring back at me. The same terrified paralysis washed over Liam that locked him in place when Evan was shot on the lakeshore in Zone One. He shook his head, breaking the trance.

"Fuck it." Liam crossed back into the room. He roughly grabbed my jacket and hauled me over his shoulder like a bag of mulch. Everything unhealed inside me sloshed around. My mouth opened to release a scream, and instead drooled blood that ran in a thin line down Liam's back. He didn't register it, scooping Tre under his free arm like a football and screaming at Isabel: "GO!" Liam charged after her.

Slung over his shoulder like a dead weight, my view was limited to the moldy floor, my own blood-matted hair, and the room shrinking behind us through the doorway. A snapping cable sound cracked from the ceiling above. Liam's feet left the ground, and we were airborne as he launched forward, slamming into Isabel's lower back. All four of us flew into the corridor, hitting the floor in a tangled, bloody heap. The slab of metal fell twenty feet into the room.

The BOOM blew back our hair and sprayed a cloud of dust over everything. I lifted my head enough to see into the room. Skevington's gyves was gone. Everything inside had been flattened to the thickness of a credit card.