The remains

Chapter 45

My awakening was as painful as it was sudden.

Michael was gone. Disappeared.

Aside from the sting in my head, his absence was the first thing that caught my attention.

There remained only my cell which had been removed from my jeans pocket, set on the wood floor directly before my eyes. There was a throbbing pain in my head and an egg-sized lump protruding from my forehead directly above my right eye. I touched the lump with the fingers on my right hand only to pull them back quick from the sting.

For the moment, I didn’t quite know where I was. Rather, I knew where I was, but I couldn’t be sure if I had entered into one of my vivid dreams. Had my dreaming progressed from hearing his voice to actually hearing the man; seeing him; smelling him; feeling him? I breathed, tried my hardest to calm myself; tried to focus on ending the dream, going back to sleep.

I wanted it to be morning.

I wanted to wake up to sunshine, to my routine. But every time I closed my eyes, I opened them again to the reality of the moment. All objects inside my periphery were blurry, distorted, depth-of-field spinning, pulsing like an out of control video camera.

Pushing myself up off an exposed hardwood floor, I sat up and felt a great weight inside my head. The throw rug that had covered the floor was gone. I saw the empty place that Michael had occupied in the bed. All that remained now were the crumpled bed sheets, the discarded shirt tossed to the floor.

I pulled the bedroom door open, ran out into the hall. That’s when the cell phone exploded in loud, bursting pulses. Whalen must have adjusted the ringer setting.

Running back into the bedroom, I picked the phone up from off the floor and put it to my ear. But there was no sound coming through the earpiece. In the place of a voice came a notice for a new text.

I thumbed OK on the keypad.

The text appeared on the radiant face of the phone.

Do not run little kitten. Do not call the police. Do not speak. Break the rules and Michael dies. Cry, cry, cry.

I pressed the phone back up against my head.

“Where’s Michael?” I screamed.

Heart pulsing inside my throat, I waited for an answer. A voice. But then I remembered to pull the phone away from my ear, stare down at the screen. The answer revealed itself in the form of another text.

Little kitten broke the rules. Cry. Cry. Cry.