The Headshrinker's Dilemma

Chapter Seventeen

Dale couldn’t do it. Inches, centimeters away from touching her face but he just couldn’t go through with it.

“Dale?” she spoke again, her voice querying but also drifting off from the pain medication.

She was looking directly at him now. There was so much behind her eyes. Dale tried to remember the last time he saw her – the alley, they had just burst through the door and they were planning on escaping together and then… Then she took a bullet for him, to allow him to escape. And now he was here, standing in front of her, again there to kill her. This was the second time he had considered doing this and he couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person he was truly.

But the longer he stood there, the more time he had to really let everything sink in; his surroundings, Cashier Girl lying on a stretcher with a gunshot wound because of him, authorities, several stories down surely making their way upstairs to seize him, finally close to being accosted for the horrible things he had done. The answer to Dale’s question was as he had always suspected: he wasn’t a good person and he doubted that he had ever been one.

Dale pulled his hand back (he had kept his hand in front of her that whole time – still considering, still contemplating). His hand and arm fell to the side of him. He leaned back against the back wall of the elevator. He let his eyes wander, drift into the nothingness of the metallic sidings and the paneled ceiling.

“Wh – What happened?” she asked. “Did – Did you escape? Oh God – They didn’t catch you did they, babe…” there was sincere remorse on her face, as if his capture would have been the worse news ever.

Dale opened his mouth to speak but the words got caught his throat. Cashier Girl had began to cry. She tried to move on the stretcher, to get up, as if she was going to do something to stop what she believed had happened – anything to save him, Dale thought. This made him feel worse.

Cashier Girl stumbled some as she tried to swing off the stretcher. Dale sprung over to catch her, holding her up. She was in his arms. The smell of the hospital was on her but it didn’t bother him as much. He guessed it all was subjective.

“Dale… I’m…”

“Stop. Look, we have to get out of here,” he spoke softly into her ear as he held her up.

“Huh?” she was confused. The medicine hadn’t worn off enough yet.

“Never mind. Just know I got you, okay? I got you.”

He heard the words come out his mouth and he knew they were true. He couldn’t kill Cashier Girl. He loved her. And that was his decision. Final. There was no turning back. He now needed to move on from that idea and figure a way to get them both out of the hospital.

The elevator was getting close to the top floor. His mind ran through possible scenarios. Worst case: there were several police officers already on the floor, standing in front of the elevator waiting for them. If that was the case then he would have to act fast – he would have to reach and grab at their heads as fast he could and hoped that his power affected them enough to hinder their arresting him.

He turned to Cashier Girl: “Hey… I need you to be with me okay? Be close behind me. Can you move? Can you walk?”

She was now standing on her feet, although she looked more like deadweight than anything else. She was using the elevator wall to hold herself up and her eyes had a hard time finding him.

“Hang on…” he said.

They were getting closer. Dale took off his gloves and shoved them into his pants pocket. He then took off his heavy coat and threw it to the side. He needed to be lighter. Athleticism wasn’t his thing but he just sensed that he needed to be loose – the coat was restricting and if he was going to be facing the worst case scenario then he was going to need to be able to move and do so swiftly and with precision.

He paused to look down at himself. Long sleeve thermal shirt, jeans, some old sneakers. It’s the best he could do. He looked back at Cashier Girl one last time. She was far from her normal self but she was starting to come around.

Dale turned to face the elevator door. Ready. They were there. The ding of their arrival sounded extra loudly in the elevator. And then…

Dale had taken out one of the police officers. He had been right about the authorities already being up there, waiting; it had been the worst case scenario. And suspecting that he would be – the moment that the door opened, Dale flung himself into the air blindly, his arms outstretched and the palms of his hands up, reaching forward for whoever it could grab. He barreled into two officers. He was genuinely surprised that he had been right. He had suspected it, thought that there was a very good chance of it happening, but it was totally surreal to actually have it happen, to live in it, it was one of those things that you imagined and saw in your head but never actually believed that it could be real, like in your reality. Dale grabbed the first officer, the closest one to him, and planted his hand on the man’s face. He felt it happened – the shrinking – but he couldn’t stay on one person for long, he had to move on to the next.

There were several police officers there. Dale wasn’t sure exactly how many, he just knew that there seemed to be a lot. He moved on to the next officer and shoved his hand in his face too, then another.

“Freeze!”

“Stop!”

There were more shouts and commands. Dale ignored them all and moved from one to another. Then there was gunfire but he kept moving. A white hot pain shot across his back and then something tragically cold that felt like lead dropped down his leg. He wanted to look to see what it was but something told him not to – Dale continued to fight, to claw, to grab, to plant and shove his hand into the faces and on the heads of the officers… Until he was exhausted and finally collapsed to the floor.

He was done. He was tired. And his body had begun to hurt. He lied on the floor. Still. Waiting for the rest of the police officers to come grab him and scoop him up, throwing handcuffs on him. But after lying there for a few moments, no one came. Dale was suddenly aware of the silence that surrounded him. Then the stillness. He opened his eyes (he hadn’t realized they were closed), lifted his head up some and looked around himself. It was an impossible scene: all the police officers were lying on the floor, many of them grabbing at their face, others staring up at the ceiling, all of them with deformed faces, smoke or steam coming off of them, stunned in silence. No one was dead but it might have been better if they had been. Dale remembered the torture that Felicia experienced.

Suddenly, Dale’s body was wracked with pain. Still lying on the floor, he looked down at himself. His leg was bloody. So was his arm. Gunshot wounds. Panic filled him. He had never been shot before. He wasn’t sure but he thought a bullet or something had grazed him across his back.

Cashier Girl. He looked around for her. In the mayhem, she had gotten lost. There. She was lying on the floor halfway out of the elevator. The door open and suddenly the ringing sound of the chime from the elevator not shutting became audible. Dale pushed himself up. He crawled to the closest wall. He used the wall to pull himself up. Again, he looked around at the c*****e. It was unbelievable. One, that it had happened at all. And two, that he had survived while the trained officers with guns were all lying on the floor, writhing in pain, near dead or deformed from their heads being semi-shrunk.

Dale used the wall to hold himself up as he made his way over to Cashier Girl. He was in a lot of pain and his hearing seemed to be going in and out – in the distance he could hear something that sounded like a fire alarm in addition to the chime of the elevator door. Dale slid down the wall, more like a collapse to be next to her.

“Hey…” he started.

She was conscious. She turned to him. There was some pleading in her eyes. He tried to read them.

“We need to go,” Dale said.

Cashier Girl extended her hand out to him. Dale again used the wall to brace himself and help pull himself up, this time pulling Cashier Girl up with him.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded. Dale took her hand and led her off down the hall, the wall the only prop holding them up.

***

They had made it pretty far. They were in the garage parking lot. It hadn’t been an easy task. On top of their injuries, his wounded leg and arm and grazed back, and Cashier Girl’s gunshot wound in her shoulder, they had had to duck in and out of rooms, closets, and any compartment or port that they could find that would provide them cover until they had made their way out of the hospital. They were about to walk out from under the garage and back into the world.

The garage was colder than the rest of outside. The waning sun was still providing some warmth to the air. It felt good to be back out in the open. Dale hoped that they would be able to disappear, vanish into some form of anonymity with the rest of world, blending into the crowd. The only problem with that was their wounds.

“There,” Cashier Girl pointed out.

A taxi eased down the street. Dale waved his good arm out in front of him in an attempt to hail the cab. It passed them some but then stopped. They hurried their injured pace to catch up with the cab. Dale opened the door and let Cashier Girl climb in first. He followed.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

Dale didn’t know. He hadn’t thought about where they would go – only that they needed to escape. He looked to Cashier Girl. She seemed better. She sat up and leaned forward, moving her injured arm out of the way some.

“Kruthic Mountains. Do you know the place?”

The driver eyed her curiously: “That’s a long way – four hour drive? Are you guys going to pay for that?”

Cashier Girl nodded. “I don’t have the money on me… But my parents own the resort there. They will pay you – and nicely. I swear.”

At the sound of her saying that her parents owned the resort, both Dale and the driver gave her surprised look.

“Fine. I’ll trust you,” the driver said.

Cashier Girl nodded again and then let her body fall back into the seat. She breathed in deeply and then took a long exhale. She turned to Dale – catching him staring at her. He didn’t know what to say. He was happy that she was there with him. He was so glad that he had decided not to kill her.

The driver looked at them in the rearview mirror one more time: “Are you two in some kind of trouble?”

Neither one of them said anything. The taxi driver kept driving.