Chapter 34

Sam felt the world begin to go fuzzy. The back of his throat pressed hard against his tongue while two large slab hands compressed his neck. His arm outstretched towards the gun laying next to a heap of crumbled concrete, the two inches of space between his fingertips and the weapon mocking him. Sam could taste the acrid scent of morning coffee and onion bagel on the large goon's breath in his throat.

If Sam could have breathed, he would have retched.

He kicked wildly until one of his boots managed to connect with the man's kneecap, jerking it violently out of place. The goon let out a barking yell and collapsed on top of Sam, the grip on his throat coming loose. Sam tried vainly to gasp for breath, the weight of the man on top of him hindering his efforts. He eeled his way from beneath the big goon, his lungs taking greedy gulps of the humid ocean air as he slithered. Grasping the gun, he swung it behind him, firing two blind shots. The first bullet passed through the man's beefy palm, leaving a small hole and the inevitable inability to use the hand for the rest of his life. The rest of his life proved to be less than a second, as the other bullet passed through the right side of his head.

Sam pulled himself to his knees, the bits of loose concrete bit into his palms. He blinked his eyes intently as the stinging sweat rolled down into them and heaved deep breaths to regain his composure.

He had managed to put down 10 of Jasper's men already, and if Sully couldn't manage to take down the plane, he knew he was in for many, many more. He wasn't expecting to take on a whole army when he got off Victor's plane. Jasper coming armed to the teeth in a location this isolated for a meeting that was essentially mano y mano only meant one thing to Sam: Jasper was scared.

Sam rolled the dead goon over and hastily patted the body down, hoping for any extra ammunition he could get. Sadly, he found nothing but a bulky set of keys and half a roll of Rolaids.

"Shit," He muttered. He pulled himself to his feet and leaned out of the courtyard-facing archway. Sam stretched out from the insecure bricking that formed the arch, the unsound structure not allowing him very far. From his position, he could only see a toothpick-like sliver of the black barrel of the cannon. He was almost there. A flash of the light tan of Jasper's suit jacket made his heartbeat quicken. Jasper was already there.

Faith trudged along the concrete corridor. The heels of her shoes scuffed against the floor, her tired feet barely lifting enough to clear the ground. Two more hallways, my ass, she thought to herself while she gingerly blotted her hurting, sweaty face with the bottom of her shirt. The spectre of her mother walked confidently in front of her, a woman on a non-corporeal mission. Wonder if she tries to grab at something, her arm goes through the thing like in the movies. The thought caused a grin to pull at the corner of her mouth, albeit with an amused uneasiness at the potential sight. Remy slowed his pace to match Faiths, sliding back next to her. He took a gummy from his pouch, the same that he was wearing in Illinois; This one, though lacked the marked evidence of violence, the grim reality of the events that had transpired.

"So, what about Sam?" Remy asked bluntly. Faith's mother cocked an ear stealthily to the conversation.

"What about Sam?" Faith parroted.

"What are you gonna do? Are you gonna, like, kill him, not speak to him, what?"

"I'm not gonna kill him," She said.

"So, you're just gonna forget about him then?"

"I don't know, Rem. Probably," She added hastily. This was not a conversation she wanted to be having with the vision of a 17-year-old kid. Especially one that had quickly felt like a little brother to her in the immensely short amount of time they had spent together.

"That would be stupid," Her mother's comment came out as blunt as Remy's question had been proposed. Faith stopped mid-stride.

"'Scuse me?"

"That would be a stupid thing to do, and you know it now, hurry up," Her opinion and command came out all as one entity.

"Oh no, no. No. Stop," Faith said, giving her own command, which both her mother and Remy begrudgingly followed. Faith's mother turned and interlocked her stubby fingers behind her back, looking like the world's smallest drill sergeant.

"What?"

"'That would be stupid?' How is it stupid? He killed my father!" Faith spat. Her hip crashed against the wall, taking the weight of her body as she relished the moment of rest despite the conversation.

Susan Spencer's face contorted to a familiar expression of egregious accusation. Faith made the same one when she was told she was a relative of Dr. Mudd. "He did no such thing!" she asserted.

"Yes, he did!"

"No, he didn't," Remy chided mid-chew from his flanking position next to Faith. Another gummy was progressively melting orange sticky residue onto his thin fingers as he munched on the worm's body.

"Yes. He. Did." Faith hissed, her body vibrating with the anger that welled up and began to surge through her as she allowed herself to feel it for the first time since learning about Sam's actions.

"No. He. Didn't," Her mother aped back to her, eyeing up her daughter as she closed the distance between the two of them. "And you stopped again," She added with the air of a woman that hated pineapple, finding the pizza in the break room to be Hawaiian.

"Yes, I did cause I'm tired. I'm fucking tired, and I fucking hurt all over cause I was tortured all fucking night by a lunatic about a treasure that I don't fucking care about!" She screamed, jabbing a frustrated finger towards the courtyard, the large green patch now silent from ringing gunfire and dotted with bodies. Just as her world had lit up with neon colors when she felt the excitement of breaking into the Edwards house, her world had darkened with the news about Sam, the feel of the bright colors being replaced with the dark, dismal grays of betrayal, anger, and disappointment. Faith's mother stared at her like she had done when Faith was a toddler having a tantrum. She waited patiently, making sure she had it all out of her system before continuing.

"Yes, you do," She asserted gently once more. Faith let out a defeated cry as she slumped sideways against the wall again, touching her temple to the cool wall, much as she did last night, and closed her eyes. Tears had begun to form under the lids.

"He killed dad, Ma," Faith said in a small voice, trying in vain to control the tremble of her lower lip. She couldn't remember the last time she had referred to Everett Spencer as 'dad' since he had died. That term of endearment was reserved for the man he had been before the 'accident'. The man that had played catch with her on the broken sidewalk in front of her childhood home. The one who had taken her to the racetrack, the place she had nicknamed 'the horsey house', and let her munch on fries as he studied the day's program. The guy who she remembers at her kindergarten graduation, staring at her proudly in her yellow dress, her mother's hand tightly in his, squeezing it affectionately as Faith's name was called. That was dad. Everything else was just a memory of a man that had given up on life and given up on her.

Faith opened her wet eyes and stared helplessly at the wall. "How do I look at him after that?"

"Boogie," Her mother said quietly. Her voice that had earlier been all business and matter of factness had softened with compassion. "Things happen in this world. Bad things. Sometimes you know why; most of the time, you don't. All you can do is deal with the cards you've been dealt and make the best hand you can." Faith's mother dropped her eyes to the floor, "I spent too long trying to fix the hand I had by waiting for cards that had already been played. And your dad, well, your dad folded." Susan Spencer has spent the last 10 years of her life talking about her late husband, his actions, her actions. This was the first time that Faith had ever heard her mother make any assignment of blame when it came to either one of them, even if it was veiled in terms of poker and gin rummy.

Her mother had always loved card game analogies. Faith was the only 10-year-old in her class that could talk in purely poker cliches.

"Now Sam," Her mother continued, "Sam was dealt the same hand as you. He just played it a different way. To make the best hand for himself, he ended up discarding one that you needed. He wasn't thinking about your hand or my hand cause he didn't know. Sam didn't know, Faith. And he wasn't the one that laid those cards facedown on the table. Your dad did that himself."

"I know." Faith wiped at her eye with the heel of her hand.

"So you can't blame him for something he didn't know about."

"But he caused all this, Ma. I can blame him for that." She rolled her eyes.

"You didn't blame him for me."

Faith glanced at Remy. His voice wasn't his own. His voice was of a person much old and wiser than his age of 17. It immediately dammed up the constant stream of self-pity that was rolling through her mind. "He let me come along on the mission. He's the one that facilitated that, and you said you didn't blame him for that cause he didn't pull the trigger. Is that still the case?"

"Yeah."

Remy leaned back against the edge of a chipped brick arch across from her, his hands stuffed into the pouch of his hoodie. "Then can you really blame him for your dad? Cause Sam didn't pull the trigger there either."

The words sank like lead into her system, filling up her empty stomach with an uncomfortable fullness that radiated to her chest. She blew a deep breath out her mouth, the discomfort remained.

"Boog, it's been a very long time since you've been happy. A lot longer than you ever let on. Trust me, I'm the mom; I know these things." The hint of levity in her mother's voice made the corner of Faith's mouth quirk up in the slightest grin. "Paling around with Sam treasuring hunting makes you happy. And other people's actions shouldn't dictate your happiness. Go and live. Don't make a hypocrite of yourself."

Faith stared at her mother for what felt to be an eternity. Days and months passing as brown eyes met brown eyes, entranced in a silent conversation that could only be had between two people with a transcendent connection. Mother and daughter. Codependents at times. And best friends. The connection was broken with the sound of a blast. It was the loudest sound Faith had ever heard in her life. She yelped with a shudder. Her stomach jumped to her throat, lead be damned, as she instinctively ducked. She threw her hands over her head, sure that the century-old fort was going to collapse on her.

Remy and her mother weren't phased. They both glanced casually toward the sound as if it was a barking dog instead of a bomb blast. Confident, well, mostly confident, that she wasn't going to end up under a pile of rubble, Faith stood back up straight, wandering towards the sound.

"What the hell was that?"

Faith's mother sidled up next to her. "That means we have to go. Come on," She said as the trio began the last leg of their journey down the hallway towards Jasper and the cannon.