Wild Tiger Chase - Chapter 50: Chapter 50

— Phillip —
Phillip looked down at his bare feet, then up to the scene playing in front of his eyes. He felt the cold, the pain, and the weakness caused by the thinness of the hospital gown, the broken glass he had stepped on, and the sickness in his veins—in this order. He felt things, smelled things, and heard things. He could almost taste the bitterness and the blood in his own throat, dried and sore thanks to the tube that was stuck inside it until hours ago. And even though his senses were all working, nothing in this place felt right.
The red fog was the last thing he remembered before waking up for the first time. After what felt like years, he saw himself in a hospital bed, prickled by IVs and plugged into a life support machine. Rafa was there, teared up and confused—and as Phillip told her the truth, Rio made his entrance and put him to sleep again.
Hours later, he woke up for the second time.
Phillip tore away all the needles, clips, and tubes so he could trudge through the foggy, empty streets going from nowhere to nothingness. In a silence broken only by the distant sound of battle, the streets led him to a two-story building that looked like a restaurant and smelled like a cemetery. Once he looked through the window, his eyes widened.
And now, being frozen in place for the past minutes, he still wondered in what kind of distorted reality was Léon capable of attacking Roberto... and in what kind of fucked-up world did Rafa die in her brother's place.
Everything had happened so fast, Phillip barely understood the sequence of events he had witnessed. Rob touched Léon's arm. Léon turned around and attacked. Before his attack landed, Rafa interrupted the blow with her arms crossed above her head.
The thin layer of crystals broke with a crisp crack, and Léon's scythe met the flesh of Rafa's arm.
For a second there, she was quiet and motionless and dead, or so it seemed, but after a moment, she growled. Her muscles flexed, legs and arms acting in unison as she tried to push Léon back. Still, it wasn't enough.
Phillip wasn't sure if the darkness escaping from the gaping wounds on her arms was really blood or something else, but it didn't matter. The blade bit into her flesh at the same time as Phillip pushed himself away from the window and into the room. The window panels swung inside, and Phillip climbed up the window sill with all the glory that his hospital gown allowed.
Meters away, Rafa bit down her lower lip, locked her jaw, and let out a muffled, trembling scream. Rob, then Phillip held Léon's arms, trying to stop him. Phillip could see it now. The substance oozing from Rafa's wound was a mix of blood and a purple-red, iridescent substance that could only be Lifeforce.
"Wake the fuck up, Dickens!" Phillip shouted.
"Leo, please!" Rob added.
Léon blinked, and Phillip almost thought he'd go back to normal. Instead, Léon positioned his right foot away and, as if Phillip and Rob's combined force was nothing for him, he leaned forward to push his scythe further down. The blade dug deeper into Rafa's arms. She wailed and tried to escape from him, but Léon accompanied her movements as if intent on finishing what he had started.
Steps approached. Jackal had a murderous look in her eyes as her steps echoed inside the restaurant. She held Léon's curved blade with her bare hands and clenched her fingers. Cracks appeared and spread on it. With a loud crack, the scythe broke.
Without his weapon to give him support, Léon lost balance and started to fall. Before he was out of reach, Jackal spread a hand over his face and pushed him downward with so much violence, the floor around him cracked. She knelt down and leaned over him, the tiles breaking under her knees as if she was a statue made of pure iridium.
The tattoo on her wrist throbbed and blurred as she angled his head, forcing him to look at her.
"Enough, Léon."
Something changed in his eyes. Conscience swung back into his expression, and Léon gritted his teeth, slapping Jackal's hand off of him. He sat up and crawled away from her, tears pooling in his eyes.
Jackal got up and cleaned the hands that had touched Léon's cheeks. She glanced at Rafa and took in a deep breath, averting her gaze.
"For now, I have everything I need," she said, "so you may go. If my theories are correct, I'll need your help in a few hours to finalize something that not even The Water Dragonness was able to do." She stretched her arms over her head; the bones in her back and wrists popped like virgin bubble wrap. "Rest up and try not to kill yourselves while you wait for my call, yes?"
Phillip couldn't say or think anything. It's been years since the last time he saw so much blood in his life, and the trembling in his entire body was definitely new to him. As if mirroring Rob's movements, he knelt down beside Rafa. The cold spreading in his chest was in direct contrast with the warm liquid soaking his gown.
His breathing shallowed.
Oh, fuck. That was an ugly cut. A deep, bone-showing and blood-pumping-from-exposed-meat kind of ugly. He looked up and watched as Rob ripped his shirt and placed a trembling hand on Rafa's arm. She wasn't even screaming anymore. While Rob seemed lost, her paling face was set into a look that almost looked like... conformity?
Oh, hell no.
Something sparked inside him. Phillip jerked the shreds of fabric from Rob's hands and, furrowing his brows, he tried to avoid the pool of blood forming in front of her. As the mix of blood and Lifeforce smeared against his skin, Phillip winced, trying to put up with the burning that got worse by the second.
"That won't be enough," Jackal said. "She might go into shock if you don't stop the bleeding soon." Jackal took off her blazer and tossed it on Phillip's shoulder. "Wrap it to stop the bleeding and apply pressure. And don't let her temperature drop too much. Also, you need to—" She stopped, eyes widening. Her gaze snapped to a point at her left.
Moments later, a muffled sound echoed inside the restaurant.
Was that... a gunshot?
As if the sound had awakened him, Rob took the blazer and positioned himself beside Phillip. He wrapped the expensive fabric around Rafa's wound and knotted its sleeves around it. "C'mon, Sis, get up! We need to get you to a hospital."
"So she actually managed to escape, huh," Jackal mumbled. With a satisfied smile, she looked at the purple shard in her hands and something glimmered in her eyes. "Considering the rate of molecular agitation and the way Léon and Antônio's flow changed when acting together..." She furrowed her brows. "Well, if I'm correct, this is gonna..."
She waited for a heartbeat. Two. There was a click, distant and muffled as if coming from inside a wall. Jackal then hurled the broken blade, and it stuck on something mid-air. The reality around it warped and rippled like the disturbed surface of a lake. Then, a shot echoed again.
This time, the shard hovering in the air responded in kind, reverberating the bang inside the restaurant. Cracks webbed away from the shard. Glass-like pieces of reality fell, shattering into a million bits when they touched the floor. When the shard of Léon's weapon fell like the others, it met the polished floor inside the restaurant, pierced it, and sunk into the old tiles inside a house Phillip had never seen in his entire life.
Toni's undimension was broken, and Phillip was now seeing the real world outside. Right in front of him, carrying Toni's gun, were Satina and Count Cae. Together.
Cae was the first to cross through the broken walls between the two dimensions, aiming Toni's pistol at Jackal's face while, step by step, he approached. Satina gasped, but Phillip wasn't sure if she was looking at Rafa, Léon, Toni, or maybe all of them in turns.
"We..." Phillip furrowed his brows. His voice was low, drained, and confused, and he hated to hear it that way. "We need to get her to a fucking hospital," he barked. "And Léon too. C'mon, let's go!"
Rob grunted and got up with Rafa in his arms while Satina looked from him to someone at their left. She rushed towards Léon and let him embrace her.
"C'mon, let's get out of here, Cous," she said.
On the floor, a dense wave of red fog washed in towards Toni. As the tide came and went, the hole in his undimension started to close.
"Faster! It's regenerating itself!" Satina shouted.
Rob obeyed, but the pool of blood made him lose balance. Before he fell, Rafa still in his arms, both Phillip and Jackal ironed their hands on his arms, to steady him.
A bang echoed inside Toni's broken undimension.
"You won't move," Cae said. He snarled the words at Jackal and aimed the pistol again, glaring through the smoke coming from the gun. "I know you need these people. They're mine now. If you want them back, you better give me what I want."
Jackal clicked her tongue. "And here I thought I was starting to understand you, Caetano." Her eyes set, hard and heavy, on one specific face in the group.
"You know what I want." Cae sidestepped to stand between Jackal and Satina, who had just reached the group with Léon. Cae pulled the pistol's hammer and furrowed his brows. "You gave Vanessa three days—I'm giving you two. If she dies, so does your chance of developing your serum."
"Caetano, Caetano, Caetano." Jackal rubbed her temples. "Please don't be ridiculous. You know that's not—"
"Yes it is!" he shouted. "If this is really important to you, you'll find a way. So get to fucking work!"
Jackal furrowed her brows and the air felt even colder. She reached for something into her pocket and threw it at Cae's feet.
"Whatever you say, Caetano." A black card gleamed against the flickering light inside the restaurant. Jackal jerked her chin to show Rafa. "Use this to pay for her limb replantation surgery; have them bring Dr. Nines. Take too long, and she'll lose her arm, so you better get going."
"That's—W-why are you letting us go?" Satina asked.
Jackal shrugged. Her gaze softened. "I could lie and say it's because of this new situation." She smirked and gestured at Cae. "I won't. The truth is that you can run all you want." With a final wink, she turned around. "But none of you can hide from me, Satina. Not anymore."
Phillip wasn't sure about how much time had passed, but Jackal's words still circled in his thoughts.
Someone from the hospital staff had handed him oversized jeans and a t-shirt, and although his quick, cold shower was enough to remove the dried blood from his legs and arms, he knew he needed much more than that to wash away the cruel thoughts creeping ever-closer to his mind.
Jackal. Cae. Toni. The Wicked Trinity. Things were getting so complicated that he could barely decide who was the worst among them. There was Rio too, sure, but that was a name he was working hard to ignore, at least for now. Philip's heart and mind could only handle so much at once.
He swallowed hard and looked down, peeking around his left shoulder. Despite all that, Rafa looked so calm when she slept. It was hard to believe she had just gone through a... limb replantation, apparently.
"... Both of the bones in her forearm were cut, not broken, so it was easy for us to complete an osteosynthesis, then the anastomosis that allowed us to connect her arteries again." Dr. Nines took in her third or fourth deep breath of the conversation. "After that...."
They had taken around twenty minutes to reach Cidade Santa's Public Emergency Unit—the real one this time—but the utter chaos inside the hospital only registered when Rafa was already being undressed by the nurses. The place was filled to the brim with wounded, crying, desperate people... and Jackal's credits were crucial to cut a direct path from the reception to the emergency surgery room Acácia Campos, number 29, the best one in the entire hospital.
In the silence of the waiting room, as the group tried to cope with everything that had happened in the past week, one of the nurses told them what had caused all this chaos.
The columns that sprouted around Cidade Santa before the red fog appeared had created some sort of fence around part of the city. Energy cables were cut, and so were cars, buildings, and less savory things, like people.
So yeah, like a good predator with a taste for the hunt, Jackal had never let them go. She had only released them from a smaller cage to a bigger one.
"... Only problem was during the fasciotomy," Dr. Nines continued. "Miss Rafaela woke up during the procedure—and before you ask, yes our anesthetist gave her the correct dosage to a procedure like this—so I accidentally cut her in her shoulder, here, while she struggled against her constraints. This will..."
Phillip looked out of the window again. A rainy morning would be much more appropriate to whatever the fuck was happening. Still, the sun outside was so bright and so hot, he wondered if summer had started again. He narrowed his eyes and reached over Rafa's bed to pull the blinds closed.
When he leaned back, Rafa's brown eyes were open and glued on his. He stood very still, one of his arms still half-stretched towards the window.
"Hey, are you—" was all Phillip could say before Rafa raised her fists.
One of her hands held his collar, while the other missed its mark. Her plaster-covered hand hit his jaw, cheek, and chest, as she tried to get used to the different weight and control she had over her own arm. Rafa hauled him down—her strength intact—and in his attempt to find support, Phillip hit a side table beside the bed. An infopad, a tray with medicine, and an empty vase of flowers went clattering on the floor.
A choir of exclamations, admonishments, and a single chuckle filled the room as Rob, Kaliandra, and Dr. Nines moved in to help.
"Rafa, calm down!" Rob said.
"She does this every time. It's so funny," Kali mumbled.
"You just left the surgery room; you shouldn't be awake, let alone wrestling!" Dr. Nines added.
Rafa's healthy hand tightened on Phillip's collar. "You're pale. You still sick? Are we back? Do you remember me?"
Phillip paused. He felt a laugh forming in his chest, but it never escaped his pursed lips. "I... yeah. Of course, Partner." As Rafa let him go and relaxed back in bed, Phillip added, "For the last two questions, at least." He pulled the neckline in his t-shirt to show the dark veins webbing out. Rafa grimaced, and only now did Phillip chuckle. He crossed his arms and stepped away from the bed. "Are you... okay?"
Her face scrunched up and she shook her head. A hand rested on his shoulder. Phillip turned around to look at Rob.
"I'll stay with her, so can you—" He jerked a thumb towards the door.
Something cold twisted in his stomach. Leave. That's what he wanted. Before Rob could complete the sentence, Phillip swept his eyes around the room and cleared his throat.
"Yeah, sure." He fit his hands deep into his pockets and sighed. Friends and family only; he got the gist of it. "I'll wait in the hall."
"Phillip?"
He turned around and paused.
With a half-smile, Rob continued, "I was going to say... can you check on Léon? He's in room 761. Tell him I'll be back in a minute or ten."
Phillip blinked a few times—then some more—and finally nodded.