As Hal felt the familiar cloud of grogginess lift, he found himself again scrambling to put the blurred elements of his surroundings together. In place of the pain that should have come with sensation was the feeling of his limbs taking the characteristics of lead and, even though the room was completely dark, Hal could hear the sound of his breathing hitting the walls and echoing back the sense of being closed in. In the thick, hot oxygen, everything finally began to process and give him the fear in the pit of his stomach that he should have had the first time he had seen Jonas. Nothing had been right about the situation and Snake had known that before he had even chosen to verbalize it. The respirations filling the room turned to sobs as he thought about Sunny and how big with sadness her eyes had been watching him leave. He wished he could have held her a second longer in his arms, wiped away a few more of her tears, and listened to a few more of her laughs. More than anything, he wished she would have kept the stupid laptop.
Hal held his breath when the door open and a silhouette disappeared into the blackness of the room with him. A female one.
"How are you feeling, Dr. Emmerich?"
"What do you want from me?"
"I think a better question is 'What did you take from us?'." Hal heard the clicks of the woman's heels stop inches from him. She lightly ran the tips of her nails over his chest and dragged them over his neck, applying added pressure as she went over his Adam's apple and traced a circle around the outside. "After you pulled GW offline, we had no purpose in life. No goals. No futures. We didn't even have control over our own thoughts, emotions or sanity anymore. We were hidden from the rest of the world like some sort of embarrassment, forgotten by our friends and families. We didn't have anywhere else to go so the government offered us...refuge from the public humiliation." The hand moved away from his neck and dug hard into his skin on their way down to his stomach, "But we were used, Dr. Emmerich. Used as test subjects. We were so numb on the inside that we didn't care anymore. But then Rhino...he gave us hope again. He made us remember that we were useful for more than just goddamn lab rats! He promised us revenge on the bastards who had given us such sorrow and it just so happens you're one of those bastards." Hal's body shuddered as the female's hand passed his waist and rested on his privates. The tips of her lips lightly brush on his ear and her voice slid into it like tipped wine, "You're not as pure as you look, are you Dr. Emmerich...or should I say Hally?"
The moment the name left her lips, it took his mind back to a feeling and a touch he hadn't thought about for nearly sixteen years along with that nickname. The woman laughed with wicked sensuality and moved her hand down into his pants. Hal suppressed an utterance of sharp panic in his throat from escaping when she massaged his groin and let her hand ride the path to his crotch.
"Is it coming back to you now, Hally? Her touch. Her taste. The way she fucked you when your dad and step-sister weren't looking."
"Please...don't do this to me."
"Is that what your father said right before he took his own life? You wanted Julie all to yourself, didn't you Hally? You knew it was only a matter of time before your poor, weak father found out about your little secret and got rid of himself for you."
"That's not true!"
The woman straddled her long figure on his and erotically rolled her body on top on him, moaning deeply in pleasure."It was just like this, wasn't it Hally? With the lights off so she couldn't see your face and how ashamed you were to be taking pleasure in the way her body longed for yours." She ran her hands along the insides of his arms locked tightly onto his wrists. He whimpered in revulsion at himself and his body's reaction to the stimulation.
"And what about your poor sister? You couldn't get rid of her so easily, could you? The more she called for you, the more you wished she'd just drown with your father!"
"I loved Emma!" He cried. "I loved her more than anything!"
"I bet you did, Hally. I bet you loved her just...like...this." Each word caught in the generation of thumping friction between them. Even though a feeling of overwhelming nausea churned in him with each deep thrust of her body, he still desperately protested the pulsating arousal that flowed through his own. The woman slipped her hands under his shirt and ran them over the stiffening hollow of his chest. She lightly kissed the flesh around his right nipple and ran the tip of her tongue over it and repeated it with the other. His breathing rattled intensely with the electricity she created with her lips as she kissed down his side in search of his left hip bone. She lowered the part of his pants that covered the area and brought her teeth and the moisture of her mouth over it to a nibble and then, a light suction.
When she felt his explosion of wet heat happen underneath her, she unmounted herself off of him. Hal shook as he quietly begged his insides to stop vibrating after the uncontrolled release of his excitement.
"You disgust me." The woman spat at him before leaving the room.
The continued carnal throbbing of his body combined with the odor shattered him into a million sickening pieces. The invisibility of the woman left him feeling more violated than he would have had they actually engaged in intercourse. He didn't want to feel anything anymore. He wanted to be void of everything and exist in perpetual nothingness. He closed his eyes and waited to everything around him he couldn't see to fade again and prayed it would be forever.
It had been three weeks since Sunny's garden had bothered to bloom anything particularly beautiful. Part of her didn't blame her flowers for not wanting to open up and experience all the world had to offer. The world was cruel and ugly and at times, she wished she could burrow herself into the dirt as well and not come up until something made it worth it.
Like Hal. He would be worth it.
Sunny's garden was normally an array of different plants that sprouted vivid colors and textures. It sat off in the rear of the backyard and had become, over time, her own place to run to when Snake's illness and Hal's hopelessness created a suffocating vacuum that she couldn't breath in. Hal had suggested it to her with his own ulterior motives of livening up the drear of the yard and to give her another hobby that he wouldn't have to eat and pretend to enjoy. She had taken to gardening rather easily and quickly, like it had been a freed repressed memory. But now, there was nothing but remnants from the massive sheet of sadness that had ripped the life out of everything, including the souls on the inside of the house.
Sunny kicked a metal watering can across the yard in frustration and watched it crash into the trunk of a tree.
"Sunny!" Mei Ling ran out as the little girl picked a planting spade and rake but seized her by her arms before she could catapult them. "What's wrong with you?"
"Everything is dead!" she shouted with a double meaning behind her eyes that Mei Ling immediately caught.
"Honey...I promise you Hal isn't dead. He's okay."
"Then why can't we find him?! Why won't he come home?!"
"I..." she shook her head, "I don't have an answer for you, Sunny."
"He's not coming back..."
"No!" her tone almost scolded her, "He is coming back. I do know that much. I need you to stay with me. I can't do this by myself." The roles suddenly felt reversed as Mei Ling's emotions got the best of her, "Snake is a mess. He's getting more ill every day and even though he doesn't say it, I know he thinks Hal is dead. I'm all alone in this fight if you start to think that way too and I just can't handle that right now." Sunny caught a glimpse of the rebellious tears that broke away from Mei Ling's almond eyes right before she wiped them away. "Please Sunny, I need you to think really good thoughts so that we can bring Hal home."
"Okay, Mei Ling. Don't cry."
"I promise I won't, sweetie, okay? Hey, I have a really good idea. How about you and Snake go into town today and get some more flowers for your garden? Today has been a pretty good day for him so far so, I think he'll be well enough to make the drive."
"I don't think Snake likes going places with me."
"Why would you say that?"
"Because he would always stay home when Uncle Hal and I would go."
"Well, you and Hal are pretty close. Did you ever think that maybe he felt that he was unwanted on those trips?"
"That's not true."
"Well, I know that but sometimes when two people have a really strong bond like you and Hal have, a third person may feel like they're getting in the way or that they're not wanted."
"He doesn't act that way, though. He acts like he doesn't care."
Mei Ling smiled as she tucked a portion of Sunny's bangs behind her ear. "Of course he acts like he doesn't care. He wouldn't be Snake if he didn't."
"So, you really think Snake wants to go with me to buy flowers?"
"Yeah, I really do. Why don't you go and ask him?"
Snake started with slight alarm in his inhale and a heightened pounding in his chest. The evidence of a cruel death on Hal's pale skin was the last thing he had seen behind his eyelids. His body had been sprawled in the coldness of a steep ditch, completely abandoned underneath a sky where his screaming wasn't heard by a soul. He concentrated on his breathing to keep his mind from wondering anywhere else he didn't need it to go. Recently, it had become harder to get the air in his lungs to move as effortless as it was supposed to. They were filling with a stubbornness that he noticed whenever he did something that caused them to expand out of their normal range. There was no need to tell Mei Ling or Sunny and get them upset over it. He knew he was deteriorating only now he could feel it.
"Uh...S-S-Snake?" Snake lifted his head from the sofa and peered over the back of it. Sunny looked as if she was silently scolding herself for letting her impediment return in her moment of nervousness. When she noticed Snake's attention on her, she walked around and sat down in the chair adjacent from the sofa he was lying on.
"Is something wrong, Sunny?"
"No. I was just thinking that maybe we could, uhm, go to the plant store today." She rushed all the words together half hoping he wouldn't hear it.
"Why can't Mei Ling go with you?"
She looked as if she had just heard him harshly tell her 'no'. "Well, because I wanted us to go. Alone."
"I don't know anything about plants."
"Oh, me either!" she happily admitted, "But, I pick the ones that look pretty on the package and look up the directions for growing them online." She looked down at her wringing hands, "I would really like it if you'd help me pick some out."
"I'm sure Mei Ling will have time later in the week. You should just wait for her. She's bound to be better at that sort of stuff than I am." Snake turned, draped his arm over his forehead, and looked back to the ceiling to signify the end to his side of the conversation.
"Okay, Snake," she said unable to hid her disappointment. Before she turned to go down the hall way to her room, she stopped. "Maybe when Uncle Hal gets back, we can all go together then."
"Sunny..." his voice caught her and she turned around to hear him sigh, "Okay."
When Sunny pointed to Snake to pull the truck into the dirt parking area of a small wooden building, he immediately got the urgency to leave. Public places for him were bad but at least most of the ones he went in were crowded and made him merely another body shifting through the bustle of it all. Intimate, mom-and-pop places never had the crowds it took for him to blend in successfully and usually made him the center of unwanted attention. It was the horrible toll the accelerated aging left on his body, the burned scar tissue that covered the left side of his face, the spastic, endless coughing that brutally racked his body—it all made him the perfect beast for societal pointing and staring.
"Are you okay, Snake?"
He felt his lungs grow rubber bands around them again. "Yeah, I'm fine. I think I'm going to stay in here."
"But...they don't allow anyone under the age of sixteen in there alone."
Of course.
Snake gripped the steering wheel in his hand and labored his breathing when he felt his body entering that place where his world started to spin around him.
"Snake?" Sunny unfastened her seat belt and crawled across the middle console. "What's happening?"
"I'm fine."
"Maybe I should call Mei Ling..."
"No." Snake opened his door and ungracefully exited the truck. The air outside of it helped and after a few more deep inhales, he regained ahold of himself.
Sunny took the same joy in shopping for flowers to see sprout in her garden that other kids took in purchasing new toys to show off to their friends. She hummed lightly as she searched the stands and racks for the something that caught her eye and paused her song to examine it more throughly when it was in her hand. Snake followed behind her and tried to ignore the eyes of other curious gardeners that stared up at him as he passed them.
"What about these, Snake?" She asked him waving a red packet of seeds in his sight.
"Uhm, they're great, Sunny."
"Are you paying attention?" She looked around and finally saw and felt the stares that was forcing his gaze to the floor. "They never stare at me like this when Uncle Hal is with me."
"They're not staring at you. They're staring at me."
The more she examined the people around her, the more she realized that they'd possibly be pointing and snickering if it wouldn't immediately so crudely sound off in the quietness of the store.
"Come on," Sunny said after she had been toting Snake by the arm for a couple seconds already, "Let's go somewhere else".
They stopped in a small area in the back of the shop that they used to show off already growing plants. Sunny moved to one plant in particular and read the little white card next to the pot.
"Poppy Flanders. Sounds like a name." As she touched the petals of the flower, an older woman with tied back red hair and a name tag approached her.
"Hi, Sunny. I didn't even know you were here."
She looked up and smiled at the the woman. "Hi, Vera."
"I see you're looking at the Poppy Flanders here. The season for growing them is almost over but, you can buy the seeds and just hold on to them until next..." The woman's voice trailed off as she caught her first look at Snake who was trying his best to stay off to the side and deal with his sudden coughing fit as secludedly as he could. The way each hack reflected off the acoustics of the area only seemed to tighten the draw strings around his lungs. To Sunny, Vera's eyes took him in with the curiosity that would have shown a deformed freak of science fiction more courtesy.
"Why are you staring at him?"
Vera's attention snapped back to Sunny accompanied with a smile as nosy as the questions she had brewing behind her eyes.
"Doll, where is your Uncle?"
"He's...he's not here." The woman's stare drifted back to Snake once more. "Stop it!"
"Oh, I'm sorry, doll, it's just...there aren't a whole lot of people around here and I don't think I've ever seen your friend here before. I'm pretty sure I would have remembered him if I had. So, did you have anything I could help you with today?"
"I don't think I need your help anymore. Thanks."
After Vera had disappeared, Sunny threw the packets of seeds she was carrying and stomped off in the direction of the exit. Snake caught her by the arm as she bolted by him.
"Hey...what's wrong?"
"I wanna go home, Snake."
"What about the seeds you picked out?"
"I don't care about them." She crossed her arms in front of her feeling as offended as she felt Snake should have been by the people in the shop.
"Sunny...it's okay."
"Why aren't you angry at them?"
"I guess I'm used to it."
"You shouldn't have to be."
"Well, it's also kind of hard to be angry when you're surrounded by azaleas and marigolds."
"Azaleas?" The name immediately perked something in her voice. "Which ones are those?"
She followed him over to a pot in corner sprouting and nearly overflowing in red, pink and white blooms of azaleas.
"My drill instructor, Master Miller," he began, "used to do a little gardening before he moved to Alaska. He said it helped him relax. I never understood it but, I remember going to his house one summer and seeing it surrounded by azaleas that looked almost just like these."
"These are so beautiful!" She passed her hand through the blooms of her new discovery. "These will look really pretty next to the magnolias. They're the only thing that didn't die. I read online that they can survive a long time even in rough conditions." She looked back at him. "Kind of like you, Snake."