Instinct

Chapter 9 -- Anthony

I couldn't remember the last time I shut my jaw. My salivary ducts ran dry, letting my mouth coat itself in the muggy air of outside. No matter how much I wanted to close my mouth and just idly watch the events unfold before, I unconsciously couldn't. I was just frozen in bewilderment of what all of the factions were witnessing. Everyone around me unanimously watched on in utter silence.

It started with Crimson. She was the first to go up in the Vulrant before any of us could, she would be the first one to receive the serum of the injection. Normally we'd all carry on uniformly until we were all fitted with the injection.

But that hadn't turned out the way I imagined. The way, I think, anyone would imagine.

Crimson began to react violently to the injection. Her body writhed around uncontrollably from the looks of it. She started freaking out and screaming, launching herself forward onto the floor on her hands and knees. Crimson kept screaming at the top of her lungs in a earth-shattering, blood-curdling kind of way. Warranting the lot of us to remain frozen in our spots and for Omar and the Indigo doctor to look upon her with confusion and worry.

It was as though no one even tested the injection before hand, she was probably the first person to blindly be tested with it. I thought for sure she was going to die at that point. Something stopped me from running out and trying to heal her in whatever way I could. I felt like that no matter what I attempted to try and help her; none of it would work to any avail. There was no guaranteed reason as to why I thought that.

But I had a gut feeling that this was supposed to happen, like it was all apart of some plan. A grand scheme...

Blood started coming from her mouth and nose, flowering into the water and rippling away in splotches. Crimson placed her head on the ground at one point and looked to be pushing into the ground whilst carrying on with her pained screams.

Then there was some foreign movement out the corner of my eye. I looked over to see a group of five walk out from behind a closed set of doors and exposed to the rain outside. It looked as though they were heading towards another pair of doors across from them. The group consisted of Zoe, two Xultant guards dragging a mortally wounded person while a younger boy followed behind him with a gun of his own.

I recognized the boy just a bit. More so solidified by seeing his neck tattoo of the word 'Thrree'.

He was a Zyto, I knew that much, I remembered a year or two back when there was a small rebellion occupying one of the markets in the city. I had worked with him closely as he and some other Xultants and Zytos to suppress the situation. He was shot in the leg at one point. I remembered running out and dragging him behind some cover to heal him as best as I could. The process would take longer than twelve hours to fully have it healed, and would have to be dealt with daily treatments. So I prompted to close off any internal wounding of arteries and repair his skin so that he wouldn't bleed out. I remember him giving me courteous nod and a 'thank you' before returning back to the situation.

I could vividly recognize who he was from that day for no particular reason. It confused me as to why he was over there with Zoe instead of waiting in line for the injections.

And then something broke out within the group of five. The man the Xultants were holding, presumably a prisoner of some type, broke out of their grasp and started fighting back against them. He grabbed a gun from one of the guard's holsters and shot him twice in the chest. I flinched each time the shot rang out from afar. How could all of this be happening now all at once?

The prisoner turned around and started to fight the other remaining Xultant, ending it with the prisoner killing him with the gun. Everyone now had their attention directed towards him, Zoe and Thrree. The prisoner stumbled over himself, completely dismissive of killing Thrree, even though Thrree clearly had a gun on him. He fell over and landed on his hands and knees, yelping and continuing to crawl forth towards Crimson direction. I was deaf to the conversation around me or the words that came out from the man's mouth. If I was listening I would've known that he was calling Crimson's name.