“Remember Brian, don’t play hero.” Brian could hear his mother’s words playing through his head. He had to get out of there, and he wasn’t going to drag Candice all the way over grunge city to get a rental car either. He had a plan. And it probably would get him home before nightfall. He was going to call his mom and ask her to pick them up. But first he would have to find a phone.
Brian ran with Candice in his arms until he couldn’t anymore. He could hear his heartbeat his ears and his heart was beating recklessly. But if he stopped now he would never get to that phone.
Candice spotted the change in Brian almost instantly. His breath was shaky, he was breathing in and out as fast as he could, even so they were walking. It scared the life out of Candice. When she called his name, he could only nod to acknowledge that he heard her. Candice finally reached out to him and pulled him to a bench. Her mother had asthma, and sometimes the same thing happened to her as well. Brian all but collapsed onto the bench from exhaustion. The fear had only taken him halfway there.
Candice asked him yes, no questions like “Do you have an inhaler?” She couldn’t quite say the word properly, but Brian knew what she meant. He was surprised at the little girl. She could adapt better to emergency situations than he could.
Also, she had the innocent capability of defining who was kind and who was not, judging in some unknown way, most certainly not by looks.
Candice got up from the bench and started walking towards a scraggily looking man. Brian tried to protest, but he found that he couldn’t move. He watched their conversation in vain from the bench, aching to get up. He was so sure that the man was going to kidnap Candice from right in front of his eyes.
When the conversation ended, the man walked over to Brian. At first he squinted a bit at him, but then he said, “Don’t I know you?”
“Maybe,” Brian whispered, then he felt himself being lifted. The big man was carrying him inside a swanky looking store and Candice was following behind with a triumphant smile on her face. She immediately made her way over to the phone and dialed a number.
“Hi Auntie Jackie!” she bellowed cheerfully into the phone. Brian could practically hear his mom squeal with delight at the little girl for using the phone all by herself. He smiled despite himself.
Brian listened as Candice filled her aunt in about the incidents that had occurred. She expertly told Mrs. Littrell their exact location and where they could expect to find them. Candice had a huge smile on her face as she listened to her aunt.
“Brian, she wants to talk to you!” she exclaimed and held out the phone. It was a cell, so Brian didn’t have to get up. He didn’t want to alarm his mom by talking to her now because he was still short of breath, but it looked like he had no other alternative.
“Hi mom,” he wheezed, smiling despite himself.
“Oh, honey are you all right?” he heard his mom gasp.
“I’m fine, don’t worry…” on the word “worry” he began a series of hacking coughs and signaled madly for Candice to take the phone. When she did, Brian was able to throw himself back onto the couch and lie on his back until the coughs subsided. All the while, he was thinking about how worried his mother must be. The tickling in the back of his throat subsided and he was finally able to rest his aching chest muscles. Usually he coughed something up when he breathed this hard, but now he was fortunate.
Somewhere in-between his heart problem and the stress he had developed this hacking cough. His doctor gave him an inhaler for it just in case, but it usually wasn’t a problem. It mainly came up when his lungs and heart muscles needed to work faster and at the same pace as each other. But it happened rarely…not even a high-energy concert could spark.
All of the factors this cough needed were there: stress, heart and lungs over working and overwhelming sense of panic and fear. The stress he had developed was mainly from the fear something happening to Candice when he was on duty. He knew that he would eventually be forgiven if something happened to her, but he loved children and wouldn’t be able to live with himself if something happened to Candice.
Candice eventually hung up the phone. She refused to let Brian talk, but explained to him what she told his mother. Brian found out that she was really good at playing off the situation and making it better than it actually was.
While they waited, Candice grabbed Brian a bunch of magazines and talked to the storeowner. Brian never really got around to asking her how she picked that guy as the nice guy out of the crowd. He looked like a biker on parole, but somehow she had known.
The store got few young visitors during those few hours. Most of them came for a free read and didn’t look like they had any money on them to spare. The owner chased them out grumpily when he saw that they wouldn’t be able to afford a thing in his store.
It turned out that Brian had led them farther away than he initially thought. It would take his mom close to four hours to get to the little store. He wondered what the people called this place.
Three more people entered the store. This time they looked like they could afford things in the store because they were older and they were already pulling their wallets out of their pockets before they even got inside.
There was one man that stood out for Brian in particular. He was wearing a big cowboy hat that didn’t match anything that he was wearing. His hair was slightly long in the back and you could see the start of a beer belly on him. Brian swore that he had seen that man before. If only he would show his face properly and take off the hat. It didn’t really matter, but he saw Candice looking at him strangely too and got suspicious.
They stayed in the store for at least a half an hour, marveling over the motorcycle magazines and asking the owner all kinds of outrageous questions. The man was more than obliged, because they looked like they were going to buy enough stuff to pay off his rent for at least two months. Rent in that area was extremely low, but business was terrible so the prices dropped dramatically. Brian would shop there often if the people around weren’t so intimidating.
“What’s up with that guy on the bench?” One of them asked.
“He’s just a bit tired.”
“Does he work here?”
“No, I just let him in here ‘cause that ‘lil cutie pie over there begged an’ pleaded with me. I can’t resist a cute face.”
“What about my cute face?” Another guy asked. They all burst out laughing and acted like they had been friends for years.
After the laughter died down, one of the men asked for a particular type of magazine that the owner didn’t have on the shelf. The owner told the man to follow him to the back room and he would get it for him. Even so they weren’t asked, the rest of the men followed.
Fifteen minutes passed and they were still in that room. Brian was already up in a sitting position when he saw a man coming out of the room. It was Brutus. The man with the big cowboy hat was Brutus, and he was pointing a gun straight at Candice.
Everything from then on went in a blur. Brian felt himself run towards Candice and leap through the air heroically. He also heard the explosive gunshot. Then everything around him went utterly black.
Part 5
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