Yesterday (Part One - Chapters 15 & 16) (Patreon)

CHAPTER 15

The car lurched twice, there was a long honk and the distant squeaking of a wheel rubbing against the pavement. Eva heard her mother's cell phone fall off her hands, but she couldn't see the car rising above ground and rolling two times until it crashed into the road. All she heard was a dry shriek of terror, a violent blow and two seconds of silence.

The headset on her cell phone played three notes.

No service.

The number you are calling is off, or out of service.

* * *

Some time later Laura wondered why she had not sensed her mother's accident. She recalled the sense of uneasiness that had run through her entire body moments before, and the vision she had of her father. But death itself took her by surprise. At first it felt strange, as if something was dissolving inside her. And while Eva was still speaking, she was fleetingly absent from the conversation trying to find out why, lost in the wasteland of her mind.

––Laura! –– Eva cried desperate over the earpiece –– Are you listening to me? Mom's dead!

CHAPTER 16

The clouds were so high, they looked like a painting.

The train made its way to Madrid, crossing with parsimony steep mountains and fields ploughed with hypnotic geometry, but Adrian looked up to the sky trying to sleep.

Cottony shapes huddled on the horizon. High up, huge and unreachable. He felt that, seen from above, the planet must look like a big melting pot to the lucky observer, with the cream-colored cumulonimbuses floating as in a bacterial culture, with him and all mankind being tiny germs, perhaps fed by the resulting penicillin, perhaps slowly digested by it.

He was sorry he didn't have his cell phone with him. He'd tried to talk to Eva, but he couldn't get a signal on any pay phone at the train station. He also thought of communicating with the French guys. Maybe he was in time to back out, but it turned out that nothing worked in that place, so he stopped looking, and then resolved he would fix everything when he arrived in Madrid. His wagon was rattling and strangely empty. Only two anonymous heads were peeping in the distance. They didn't look like they were gonna put on any movies either. He had been waiting for a long time for the inspector to come by, only he must have done it in his sleep. Then he tried to sleep anew, and got lost in the clouds again.

* * *

He woke up startled and his face soaked in sweat. A nightmare was fading into his memory, but he was still able to remember some details. He was a double agent. Lived a double life. Little more. Every second that passed, the memory faded away and, coming out of his sleep, he began to be aware of what was around him.

Everything was dark. He reached out with his hands around him but with every movement he felt pricked. He discovered with restlessness and a slight dizziness that he was not sitting, but lying down. His world turned upside down and he panicked again, blood hit him like an ice pick in the middle of his eyes as he tried to find his way around.

“No, not again”.

He hit a plastic cylinder connected to a cord, and groping in the dark he found a switch. Click. Nothing happened. His throat was sore and his mouth tasted awful, his face covered in a thick layer of cold sweat. He wanted to pass his hand across his forehead but a new sharp pull on the back of his hand made him wince again. He carefully patted the skin with his other hand trying to calm the sting. There was a plaster and, attached to it, a plastic tube that was inserted into his skin through a long needle.

A needle.

Intravenous.

A hospital?

Had he had another accident?