Chương 64: Book Two - Chapter 14: Triage

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ZONE 2 INCINERATION: 02: 42: 16 The wheel turned. The chair man laughed. I couldn't focus on either of those things because my HUD was flashing a red wall of critical warnings about everyone in the party, making manic laughter background noise. Liam grabbed our hard-won, grease-stained green duffel bag by the strap to pull it off and made it three steps before his knees buckled and he went down hard, catching himself with his good hand.

He went down hard, barely throwing his good hand forward to keep his nose from breaking. His bad arm dangled at his side as his face instantly lost what little color it had left.

"We need—Ooof," Isabel started, but the words died as she slid down the wall, one arm clamped over her ribs, coughing in short, soggy bursts.

"I got it." Gen eased Kane down against the wall and moved to Liam, hauling the duffel off his shoulder and ripping it open down the seam. A landslide of supplies clattered across the floor: plastic bottles of antiseptic, pristine rolls of white gauze, strange aluminum canisters, and blue-tinted chemical vials we'd never seen before. Kane groaned against the wall, green blood sheeting the side of his neck from the ragged tear where the top half of his long, floppy ear used to be.

"I need help!" Tre shrieked, dropping onto his knees before the pile.

"Nora!"

"Show me," I said, kneeling beside him. A knot of nerves in my lower back stiffened taut as overtightened guitar strings about to snap. I pushed past the pain. Behind me, Isabel coughed again, then whimpered softly. I forced myself to tune her out. Tre tried combining the new ingredients, while he barked orders at me to make the tried-and-true classics. A few moments later, my hands smelled like sour apple, and I'd made two salves… for four injured people.

"He's still spurting!" Gen grabbed the first one without waiting for anyone to agree on it, and pressed it into Kane's mouth. He swallowed, gagged, coughed, and the flow of blood down his neck slowed to a sluggish ooze. The Salve's magical properties folded the uneven edges of cartilage inward. His skin squirmed like earthworms, quickly knitting together to seal the wound.

When it was over, he was left with a mismatched set: his right ear remained long, floppy, and ending in a point, while his other ear now abruptly ended halfway in a scarred nub.

"Second one." Tre held it up, looking between Liam, still down on one knee, and Isabel, folded against the wall, both arms wrapped over her ribs.

"I'm fine," Isabel said, in a voice that had nothing behind it. Nobody had time to argue, and she knew it.

"Give it to Liam."

"No, I'm—" Gen took the other salve, grabbed Liam's jaw, and shoved the second one into his mouth before he finished his sentence.

"Ye don't get a vote." He swallowed, sagged, and got one knee back under himself. I would have given the medicine to whoever was making the most noise. And I hated that Isabel was sitting there, quietly leaking in a corner where she was easy to miss. It was a stupid, stubborn way to die. I was reaching for the aluminum cans when the notification hit, and from the sudden stillness in Tre's fingers, his had too. COMPANION ABILITIES UPDATED! TRE CARTER UNLOCKED…

Assembly Line Worker I (Passive) Effect: Unlocks Companion Crafting Table. Deploy from HUD. Place raw materials on surface to auto-combine into known recipes." Some assembly required. All of it, actually."

"Oh, thank Christ," Tre breathed, already thumbing at something only he could see.

"Did you get a choice?" I asked, thinking of my own two-skill choice earlier. Tre nodded.

"Not much, though; we needed this." A table unfolded itself out of nothing beside him, a plain, waist-high industrial gray workbench that would have looked at home in the back of a hardware store van. Tre didn't waste time admiring it. He swept the rest of the pile off the concrete in double handfuls, cans and vials and pills all at once, and dumped it onto the table's surface.

The materials sat there for a second, inert, before the whole tabletop shuddered, and item after item began organizing itself in a rhythm of small mechanical clicks. That was enough for me. Tre didn't need another pair of hands anymore, and Kane, Liam, and Isabel needed both of mine.

"Gen, get ready." She had both hands still clamped over the ruined mess of Kane's ear, mouth set in a thin, grim line. NEW ITEM CRAFTED! Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. FIRST AID SPRAY (X2) (High-Yield Antiseptic + Silver Canister) Effect: Restores 75% Health and instantly cures active debuffs. Does not regrow missing limbs." Guaranteed to seal gaping flesh wounds. Do not inhale."

I grabbed one off the table without waiting for Tre to hand it over and sprayed it over Kane's ear. The aerosol hissed out a thick, freezing-cold white mist, scented like fake pine, and his health finally ticked up for good. Kane's health bar finally stabilized ticked up for good. I brought the second one to Isabel. She looked at it, then at Liam still slumped against the wall with his arm useless in his lap.

"Give it to him."" Isabel."

"He can't lift that arm. I can still breathe." A cough undercut the sentence.

"I'm good." I gave it to Liam, who misted his shoulder without argument. Seeing how easy it was to just take the fucking heal only made me angrier at Isabel. NEW ITEM CRAFTED! BOAR-AID (X2) (Blue Vials + Aluminum Cans) Effect: Restores 55% Health"This is eighty percent corn syrup, twenty percent battery acid. Tastes like blue." I snatched up both.

"Drink it," I said, holding one out to Isabel.

"I told you. I'm fine."

"You coughed blood. Twice, if we're counting." I didn't lower my hand.

"Take the fucking heal, dude." She held my gaze for a beat too long, snatching the can from my grip and popping the tab. Isabel chugged it down without breaking eye contact.

"Happy?"

"Thrilled." With everyone finally out of crisis, the room quieted to ragged breathing, and the click, click, click of that damn wheel. Then my own body decided it was done waiting its turn. Something in my lower back gave out all at once. My knees buckled. Liam caught my elbow before I hit the floor, and I ended up sitting hard against the wall, breathing through it since screaming wasn't going to fix anything either. I drank the other Boar-Aid myself, hoping it would work out the last of my back kinks.

Within seconds, my lower back made a loud POP, and my health ticked up to one hundred. That's when I finally looked up—really looked. A blonde woman was strapped to a giant wheel that was slowly turning. The man in the chair wouldn't stop laughing, his whole body jerking in a way that seemed like he was trying to escape it. We'd been in this room the entire time, and none of us had really taken it in until right now.

"Hey," Isabel said, "what the fuck is this?" We gawked at the fucked up scene we'd been completely ignoring for the last few minutes. The wheel had two massive steel blades mounted to the outer frame. The girl's arms were strapped out at shoulder height, ankles locked to lower steel mounts. A band around her throat held her head dead center so it couldn't tip away. With every rotation, the blonde girl passed the blades, taking a paper-thin, agonizing slice across her scalp and the soles of her feet.

The gap between steel and skin was shrinking. The blades rested on ratcheted tracks, inching forward with each full rotation. Next time around, they would bite deeper into the exact same wounds. The blonde girl looked to be about nineteen. A hard nineteen. Her features were worn down in a way that had nothing to do with the dark, tear-streaked mascara down her cheeks. Even gripped in panic, a dullness sat behind her blue eyes.

Her thin white tank top was drenched in sweat, making it transparent enough to broadcast that she wasn't wearing a bra. Considering the heavy metal restraints digging into her bare skin, the friction had to be agonizing. Maltheris remained a perverted gooner demon fuck. The wheel groaned another few degrees. It wasn't moving on its own. The chair-man's laughter pitched into a frantic, maniacal scream, and the wheel's rotation jumped like someone had goosed the throttle. The woman shrieked.

She was completely upside down now. A deep red line split the top of her scalp, matched by an identical slice across the soles of her feet. Blood ran the wrong way down her body. It soaked the dark roots of her hair before turning the blonde tips red, while a second stream tracked down her inverted legs from feet to thighs. I turned back to the chair-man. A small rectangular pop-up bloomed over his head in my HUD, exactly like the one I'd seen over Kane.

BRAD WEST Form: Dybbuk Role: Assigned Companion Health: N/A Health "N/A" was a new one. What the hell did that even mean? Did he not have health stats? How was that possible? He didn't return my gaze the way people usually do when they clocked you staring at them. He just kept cackling, his body seizing with each laugh, at something that had nothing to do with anything happening in the room. His head snapped sideways and back, jerky.

And underneath all of it, buried somewhere behind his eyes, was a tinge of what sure read like fear. Whoever he was before the Grindhouse, he was dressed for a beach that didn't exist anymore, wearing a palm-print Hawaiian-style shirt, gone reddish-brown with old blood and grime, hanging open over a gray chest that had stopped being alive a long time ago. Cargo shorts, filthy and faded, and flip-flops on his feet capped off the ensemble. The chair was sealed inside a custom, three-sided glass box.

The ceiling had been lowered specifically for this enclosure, trapping him in a tight, transparent cell. A metal cap was fitted to his skull. Wires ran from it through a drilled hole in the glass to a gauge bolted on the outside marked FEAR. It was an industrial pressure dial meant for a boiler tank, not a person's brain. The needle vibrated violently, buried deep in a hand-painted red zone on the far right side of the glass. When Brad's laugh pitched up, the needle jumped, and the wheel moved faster.

He strained against the thick leather restraints, his forearms split open in deep gashes that were more rot than wound.

"Whoa…" Tre took a few steps towards the enclosure.

"Cum-guzzling gutter fucker!" Brad lunged in the chair, straining against his restraints as the Fear gauge climbed and the wheel turned more." Stop! STOP!" the blonde girl hollered from across the room.

"You're scaring him!"" We're scaring him?!" Tre asked incredulously. I examined the blonde on the wheel, who was now at a horizontal angle, her head pointing west and her feet east. ANABEL LICHI Form: Human Role: Final Girl Health: 98%"Jesus Christ, how many of us are there?" I asked, looking at Gen.

"Dunno, but I hope not many more," she said.

"Hey!" It was the girl on the wheel, Anabel.

"Fuckin' help would be great!"

"C-Can you p-please free my girl?" Brad whimpered, voice laced with terror, jaw trembling. The manic grin dropped from his face, and his eyes lost some of their milkiness, revealing a normal light brown beneath. Outside his glass enclosure, the needle on the FEAR gauge quivered, dropping back toward the amber area, and the giant wheel slowed its rotation. Anabel's head hovered at ten o'clock. Brad's neck violently snapped back to that unnatural angle.

His eyes drowned in a rush of white, and when he spoke, the human was replaced by that low growl.

"Yeah! C'mon ya ball-gargling shitstain! Let us out! Hee-hee, hee-hee." Then something really strange happened.

"Holy shit!" Her eyes went huge, jaw dropping open. She blinked a few times, as if her vision was blurry." Isabel?!"