Hey, guys, now that school's started again, it may take a little longer for me to get these new chapters up, and I've had a lot of stress on me lately, so be patient! This chapter's a little long…but it's good!
"Should we follow her?" I asked stupidly. We'd just lived through a tornado! A frigging tornado! Nothing in my life had ever been so scary and I was all shaky from a combination of nerves and adrenaline. Out of the original seven people on the bus when we left Ohio, there were now two missing, alive or dead we didn't know yet. We had no choice but to follow Ran outside into the night. My mind made up, I headed for the front of the bus and used my four arms to pry the doors open. Ran may have thought she was strong, but she wasn't as strong as me. I made up for what I lacked in bone with muscle.
Outside, crickets were chirping their endless songs and the mosquitos were already out and biting. We were some miles from the main road, and by the looks of it, we were also in the middle of nowhere. If we could find Blacky, maybe he could fly up and have a look around.
"Ran?" I called.
"Over here. I found Blacky!" she called back, from somewhere over to my left. Behing me, Freddy carefully climbed down the steps of the bus and looked around. He whistled at all the debris littering the ground. Anything on the outside of the bus that had been sticking out or not nailed down had apparently been ripped off and thrown. But that might mean…
"Oh, jeez, I'm comin'!" I cried. I ran in the general direction of her voice and there, about twenty feet from our now wrecked bus, lay Blacky. From what I could see in the meager light, he wasn't breathing.
"Blacky!" I screamed.
I ran up until I was standing right behind Ran, but Blacky's fur was so dark that he blended in with the shadows like smoke. I couldn't see a damned thing.
"Hang on. I have to focus on withdrawing my subconscious. Then we'll have some light." She muttered.
"What's going on, where's Black-…oh, no." muttered Freddy. Freddy and Blacky were the two remaining members of the original band and they were best friends. The twins had apparently decided to stay on the bus because they did not follow us out.
Suddenly, I tensed. Something was happening to the air. I was suddenly scared, but why I didn't know. I just…sensed it. Ran was glowing with a bright white light, the outlines of her body shining from within just like a goddess out of a mythology textbook. She stood up and went over to kneel on Blacky's other side, and her glow illuminated a grisly scene.
"OH!" Freddy cried, eyes suddenly wide and mouth covered. I just stared.
Blacky was sprawled out across the ground, blood pooled in a dark puddle just under his lower arms. He was breathing, but very shallowly. It was anyone's guess as to how he was even alive at all, because sticking out of his stomach was the brand new exhaust pipe for the bus. His arms were also bent at odd angles and he was moaning.
"Oh, man. Can anyone lift him?" Ran asked.
"What?" I said dazedly. Our show would have to be cancelled, for sure.
"Fuing help me lift him!" she said irritably.
"We can't, he's too heavy." said Freddy, finding his voice. Ran made an impatient noise in the back of her throat and threw up her hands. With the motion came a huge fountain of water that geysered up beneath the fallen bassist, bringing him at about waist level. Freddy and I jumped back in alarm.
The water lifted Blacky right up off the ground, so that his limbs lolled and his tongue rolled out of the side of his mouth. The pipe was firmly lodged in his stomach.
"I'll be right back, I gotta call the others." Said Freddy. He looked like he was going to be sick and I thought I knew the real reason that he was dashing away as if his life depended on it. He was gonna be sick. I didn't blame him. We saw our fair share of blood at our concerts but now it was concerning someone we knew and loved. This blood was different.
Ran reached into the geyser of water and grasped the top of the exhaust pipe. She pulled it out with an almighty squelching sound and the water ran red. Immediately Ran began the singsong chant again and she threw the pipe away. She moved her arms like she was touching him but I couldn't quite see through the water. Apparently, she could.
The water ran pink for a few seconds, then clear again.
"Get me a towel, something he can lay on." She barked. Gone was the tentative uncertainty in her voice. This wasn't a question, it was a command. I moved to obey, but Freddy had beaten me to it. He came trotting up on all fours with a huge blanket in his mouth and I took it from him and got prepared to set it underneath him. She began lowering her arms very gently and the water level came down. With it came Blacky. I spread the blanket down and he fell very gently onto it. No blood seeped out from under him now. She had done the milky white clear thing like she had with Blacky.
"I called Mike, Mitch and Todd but nobody's answering. They're out of range." said Freddy.
"Did you call an ambulance?" I asked. He shook his head.
"I called our agent and he said if we can make the bus crawl to Des Moines that he'll meet us there with an ambulance and everything.
"What about crowd control?" asked Ran.
"Covered. What did you DO!" cried Freddy, eyeing the fallen bloody pipe and the fresh blood gurgling up out of Blacky's stomach in fresh rivulets. The fur around the area was matted and his whole backside was soaked from the water.
"I'm helping him." she said.
"HELPING HIM? HE NEEDS A FRIGGIN' DOCTOR, NOT SOME KID!" he screamed. I flinched. His voice cut through the night like an air horn. The crickets abruptly stopped chirping.
"If you want to figure out a way to drag him onto the bus with a fuing PIPE stickin' out of him just so he can die on the bus, then be my guest, but since you guys picked me up I've considered you friends and I do anything to help my friends. If you don't trust me to know what I'm doing, then I can take that seal on your body right the fu back off and you can die of blood loss just. Like. HIM!" she shrieked. Her whole body was shaking with what I took to be adrenaline and shock, but a look at her face and the furious expression told me that it was anger. During her angry diatribe, Freddy had stood back up and was glaring at her through a face on the verge of tears of grief for his best friend. Since he said nothing in return, Ran once again kneeled by Blacky's side and flattened the fur around the wound so she could begin to close it. She laid her palms flat against the bloody hole and milky colored water seeped out from beneath her hands. Blacky arched his back and roared in pain, once again shutting up the crickets.
"What's she doing to him, tell'er to stop it—Let me GO!" he screamed as I wrapped my arms around him to stop him from leaping at Ran. Ran began a different singsong chant this time, one that was almost like a lullaby, soft and sweet. I wasn't any language that I'd ever heard but it was beautiful anyway. Blacky groaned and while Freddy and I struggled, unheeded by Ran, Blacky slowly sat up. He tried his arms, but they were broken. Three of them, his two winged arms and one of his lower arms, were bent at wrong angles. Ran continued to sing her lullaby and Blacky patiently watched what she was doing. He whined the way dogs do and without warning, she gently lowered her head to the edge of the wound and bit him!
"HEY! Get off him!" screamed Freddy. He was fighting furiously now and I aided myself with the help of a few more tentacles to hold him at bay.
"Let her be, Fred, she knows what she's doing, if she didn't then we'd all be dead by now! He's fine! If she wanted to hurt us she'd have done it any time! DON'T-GIVE-HER-A REASON!" I yelled over his voice.
Ran withdrew her head and her eyes were glowing a beautifully clear shade of deep blue, her fangs were dripping some sort of clear liquid. There was no blood. His stomach stopped bleeding freely and without ado, she began her sweet song again. The clear milk white thing now covered both sides of Blacky's wound. He apparently felt no more pain.
"Why can't I feel my arms? Look at my arms…" moaned Blacky. His voice was needled with a pain in his gut that seemed not to be there anymore.
Ran stood up, her expression unreadable, and gently bit his lowest broken appendage. He hissed in pain and I said "Can you at least give us an explanation of what you're doing so he'll stop fighting?" Ran withdrew her fangs, again dripping with a clear fluid and wiped her mouth with the back of her arm. She was still shining like the moon.
"I recently had a physical and while examining my mouth the human doctor told me he needed me to bite down on something. I did and this clear fluid squirted from my canines. He sent a sample of it to a hospital and the hospital sent him an email and the sample saying it was a form of morphine, which was impossible, according the the email." She explained.
"Why's that?" I asked. Freddy stopped fighting so much.
"The email said that no living creature should be able to produce any form of morphine or painkillers. But that's exactly what's in my fangs."
"A narcotic? Jeez, we better hope the gangs never get a hold of you." I muttered.
"That's what's weird. The hospital said it wasn't morphine, exactly, but it was a relative and without the narcotic effects. It just numbs pain as far as they could tell." She finished. Blacky was moaning again and I rolled my eyes. Okay, was this kid normal in any way?
"Can I finish the job please?" she asked, not mean.
Freddy relaxed like a dead body and swallowed hard. I could tell it was way against what was really trailing through his mind, but he nodded mutely. Blacky said "Wait!" and she faltered.
"What happened?" he asked.
"You fell out of the bus while we were caught in the tornado." I said. This much, at least, I knew to be true. Blacky groaned and shook his head. His long, slightly wavy black hair hit him in the face and he shook his head to move it, but it didn't move. He tried moving his arm to tuck it behind his ear and screamed in pain as the broken bones grinded against each other. Ran got a concerned look on her face, reached up and tenderly touched his face. He winced but when a full minute passed and she didn't seem to hurt him, he nudged her hand over his muzzle and allowed her to move his hair aside for him.
"Wow. That's a first." Said Freddy, staring. I knew what he meant. Blacky usually never even went to whatever whorehouse happened to be nearby at the time, let alone allow someone he barely knew to touch his face. He was kind of touchy about his personal space and he didn't take to people too easily. He whined and winced only a little as she gently tugged on the arm she'd bitten and set the bones. Blacky watched on with relatively calm liquid blue eyes riddled with only the slightest hint of pain
"This is not normal." Freddy said. I nodded, watching interestedly. Sher bit his other two arms, re-set them, too, and told him not to move his arms.
"There's a sheet in the storage compartment on the bus we could tear into homemade slings." I suggested. Ran nodded. Her nose was bleeding again and she winced and put a hand to her head.
"What's wrong with her?" Freddy asked me.
"You got me. Maybe she's doing more than just numbing his pain." I whispered back as I walked away.
"What are you talking about?" he hissed. I stopped just outside the bus with a hand on the edge of the doors and turned back to him, staring calmly into his Halloween orange eyes.
"Think about it Fred. She said she controls everything '"from the lowliest mud puddle to the water contained in our bodies."' What are our entire brains surrounded by?" I asked. Freddy's eyes widened and he stormed back onto the bus ahead of me.
"Ugh…Freddy!" I cried. From inside, I heard the twin's outraged cries as Freddy dialed our agent again. He sounded furious. I wondered if my big mouth had gotten poor Ran into a load of trouble. I jumped onto the bus after Freddy and saw that the twins'd gotten the power back on in the bus. The overhead lights were on again and they'd done a little tidying up. The windows were still blown out and there was still blood and glass everywhere but the bus looked otherwise alright. Freddy was shouting orders into the phone and he hung up, growling.
I marched back out the doors, shaking my head and gritting my teeth, kicking myself for even suggesting to Freddy that she may be able to control various parts of our brains with water. It was possible. I kicked open the storage compartment and yanked out a few dirty sheets and a first aid kit we kept in there. I popped the box open and pulled out the little pair of scissors those things always come with and headed back out to the shining white beacon that was the Sea Goddess.
"Got them? Good, I'm not sure what shape to cut them in-"
"-Good, I do." I cut her off shortly. I began impatiently cutting the two sheets into four squares and began spiraling them and slinging them around Blacky's neck to gently cradle one broken arm/wing. Ran began helping me and pretty soon all three broken arms were slung. He gently stood up and towered above the rest of us as usual.
"Incredible. If she weren't here to do this, he'd be bleeding to death on the ground with a pipe through his stomach…" I muttered to myself. I followed Blacky back to the bus but then I noticed the almost regular source of light was faltering and dying. I turned back and saw that Ran was following us at a snail's pace, her trail dragging on the ground and her head hung. Her hair obscured her face but I was pretty sure she was either crying from the pain in her head or just wincing with it. I doubled back and put an arm around her shoulder. She looked up at me and her eyes were watering up, but she was biting back the tears. She was so beautiful.
"C'mon. I'll carry you back to the bus." I offered.
"I'm fine." She mumbled. She took another step and stumbled over her own tail and I rolled my eyes and picked her up around the waist and slung her over my shoulder. Not the best way to carry a goddess, but it would do for now. I set her down on one of the seats, but she suddenly jerked and sat up straight.
"Damon!" she cried. She ran back out of the bus again and I sighed and hung my head.
"What a hot head. She's so stubborn…" I growled.
"Oh, no, she's not biting Damon." growled Freddy. He began storming out the door but I held him back. I wasn't the only one, though. The twins and Blacky also moved to block him, Blacky with just one arm and a furry, muscular thigh.
Freddy looked as if he was about to say something, opened his mouth, then shut it again. He 'hmmphed' and sat down heavily, arms crossed and glaring.
"Fine." he gave in. The rest of us sat down and waited as well, but I was a little uneasy. If she could control our brains, which I didn't doubt, then she was probably just doing it to calm us down so she could help us, but the idea, still…my conscience was nagging at me. Damn morality I thought to myself.
We sat in silence for about twenty minutes when Ran came back in, Dam in her arms. She was stronger than I'd at first thought. She set him down and suddenly collapsed on the floor, breathing heavily. I jumped up and helped her up into the seat opposite Damon. Damon himself was awake and fully alert and he took Ran from me and put a hand to the side of her face. His touch was loving, almost gentle, and he grabbed a blanket out of the corner and covered her up with it.
"Damon!" cried Freddy. Damon, of course, couldn't hear him.
He touched his brother and Damon started and looked around at him.
"You okay, man?" he asked. Damon smiled shakily and nodded. He showed us a small shallow cut on the side of his head that had a thin film of milk white stuff covering it.
Freddy got up and hugged his brother and Damon pulled away.
"I gotta get this tub moving again." He said, turning back to the driver's seat. He turned the key in the ignition and, miraculously, it started up!
"Woohoo, we are back in business!" cheered Damon. His happiness was not readily shared. Ran was apparently unconscious again. A small trickle of blood ran out of her nose and I took up the beer rag from earlier and wiped it for her, being careful not to touch the stuff. Who knew what it did?
The bus lurched as we began moving again and I sighed and rubbed my eyes.
"You guys okay?" I asked the twins and Blacky.
"Yeah, I feel like I could do a concert." said Kou. Adrian growled at him and said "Oh no you won't." Freddy was red-eyed and the whites were bloodshot with tears for his brother.
"You should be thanking her, Fred, not siccing the cops on her the minute we get to Des Moines." snapped Adrian.
"She deserves a thank you, not a jail cell." added Kou.
Blacky and I were silent.
"I was scared, okay? I saw Blacky lying in the dust and I thought 'oh shit, there goes my best friend'. Then I saw her bite him and I imagined her tearing through Damon's jugular with those fangs, and…dammit, she's not a nurse, Guppie!" he yelled.
"Yeah, she's just a kid, but it doesn't change the fact that if it wasn't for her, half of us would be dead, Freddy, so lay off and call the agent back, tell him to call off the cops." I demanded. He stared at me a moment, then shook his head wearily.
"I don't know, Gup, goddesses don't exist." I growled and slapped his face with a tentacle. He stared at me, eyes wide in shock.
I stood up and glared down at him. What was his problem?
"Oh yeah? Where did the inspiration for that song come from? Why were you so adamant about recording it?" I demanded. For this he had no answer. I took that as an 'I'm sorry', and sat back down. Ran stirred and sat up, pushing the blanket off of her. She realized we were moving and pulled her hair back out of her face. She was covered in blood that was not hers. Her face was streaked with it from her hair, making her look like a killer. Which, I reminded myself, Freddy probably thought she was.
Up ahead, the city of Des Moines, Iowa loomed over the horizon. There were ambulance lights and I heard sirens. The bus stopped and the doors, of course, were stuck open. Immediately, two paramedics barged in and ushered us out of the bus one by one.
"Are you hurt?" one asked me. I shook my head.
"What about the girl?" he asked.
"What she needs is sleep, and a decent meal." I said. He nodded and began pushing her out the door. Still glowing, she allowed it. Blacky followed them out and now I was the only one left on the bus. I got off in time to see two cops slapping handcuffs around Ran's wasted wrists. She was crying now, and loudly. I shoved my way through the crowd and yelled at them.
"HEY! She didn't do anything but help! You can't lock her up for that!"
"Excuse me, sir, but you need to calm down or we'll be forced to send you to the hospital with the others." said one of the paramedics. I let it go and decided to give Freddy a good kick in the ass for this the next time I saw him. She didn't deserve this!
I watched the cops push a struggling Ran into a police cruiser and drive off, then watched as a heavyweight ambulance carried off Blacky and three regular ones carted off the rest of my band. I was left alone with an empty broken tour bus and a few curious onlookers.
"What the fk are you lookin' at! Go on, go home!" I screamed at them. They obeyed, a little scared. I hung my head and headed towards the nearest hotel to check myself in and wait to visit the guys at the hospital tomorrow. Meanwhile, the busy city of Des Moines, Iowa continued on around and without me.
"She deserves better than that. Damn you Freddy."
I walked off towards the nearest Mobile 6 to check myself in.
Really long, but what's gonna happen to Ran?