Chapter 11

Chapter 11

They had gotten about 20 miles away when Claire had to pull over. She was starting to hyperventilate and she couldn’t drive. She was in shock. The whole time Dr. Crane was one of them. Why would he torture them? Why would he do what he did to Aaron? For fun? It made no sense! He was one of them. The thought of it was making her nauseous, next thing she knew she was opening the door and she vomited on the side of the road.

“Claire! Are you okay? Aaron hadn’t said anything until then, he must have been waiting to see if she was okay.

“I…I can’t believe it! He’s one of us Aaron, one of us!” Saying it out loud made her sick again. She was wiping her mouth when she looked up and saw Aaron was pale.

“I know, I still can’t wrap my head around it, but we need to move, we have to keep as much distance between us and him as we can. We should head towards Texas. It’s a huge state, and it would be really hard for him to find us.”

“What about fighting? I thought we were going to fight…who am I kidding that is impossible now. If biting out his throat won’t kill him I don’t know what will.” But something occurred to Claire then. “What if we cut off his head? That was always the last test he would do. He would cut off everything else to make sure it would grow back but saved the head for last. We know he wasn’t doing any of that for science so it must have been to test the limits of his regenerative powers as well. Did he ever get that far with anyone? I never saw anything in his research.”

“He almost got to that point with me. But I don’t how many other people he experimented on. Do you really think that’s why he did what he did?”

“It makes sense doesn’t it? Why else would he experiment on people like him?”

“Okay yeah it makes sense but that doesn’t prove that cutting off his head will kill him. I say we drive towards Texas and stop at a gas station to fill up, and keep going till we get there.”

“Okay fine, you’re right, we need to get settled somewhere before we make another move. He is probably trying to follow us too.” With that she turned on the engine and they were off.

      They stopped once just to get gas and they made it to a hotel a little past the border of Texas and Oklahoma. They had just enough cash to book a room for a few weeks. When they got into their hotel room, Claire couldn’t hold it back anymore. She fell in the middle of the hotel room and just cried. Cried about all the people they killed, about Dr. Crane, and about the other people like them he probably killed. Aaron came to her side and held her while she cried. She must have been crying for a couple hours and fell asleep because she had woken up in Aaron’s arms in the bed. He must have picked her up when she fell asleep from exhaustion. She looked up at him and saw that he was awake too.

“What are you thinking about?” Claire asked.

“I’m thinking about what our plan should be now. We can’t fight back as easily as we thought now. Things just got 100 times more complicated.”

“I know. We may have to run now…”Claire didn’t want it to be true but she couldn’t think of another way.

Aaron paused, “No. We can’t run now. We’ve gone too far to quit now. We murdered 30 people back in Arizona. I don’t want that to be for nothing. Sure, they were trying to kill us but they were under Dr. Crane’s spell. We won’t win until we cut off the head of the beast.”

Claire sat up and looked at him, his face was hard. Seeing Dr. Crane again threw him for a loop, and she couldn’t blame him because it did the same to her.  “Aaron, I don’t think that’s a good idea, we don’t know what’s going to happen when we do that. What if we cut it off and he grows his head back, and he grows another body to the other head. There is literally no way of finding out what will happen. It’s too risky! And I…”

“You what?” Aaron was looking at her now, his face had softened a bit.

“I…don’t want to lose you. I’m afraid that if we go after Dr. Crane that we’ll lose. That he’ll take you, or take me. Either way we’d be apart and I don’t want that to happen.”

He was watching Claire closely while she spoke and when she was done, he took her face into his hands as he did the first night they were one. “I won’t let anything happen to you Claire. I promised you that before, and I’m swearing it now. I won’t let him take you.” He kissed her, with so much emotion she thought she was going to pass out. He pulled away for a moment and said, “We need to kill him Claire, we need to find a way, otherwise, we’ll never be at peace.” She stared into his green eyes for a moment and said, “You’re right, we have no other option.” With that, their minds were made up, and the fell onto the bed intertwining with one another.

 

      After a night of letting themselves go into one another, they almost forgot about the grueling task that was upon them. But when they both awoke they went from feeling eternally blissful to feeling eternally doomed. They laid there for a moment ignoring the task at hand and just enjoyed each other’s warmth for a little while longer. After a few more moments they got dressed and decided to go hunting before they started creating a plan to kill Dr. Crane. They decided to leap from their window to one of the trees, it was a distance that both of them had made before. Both of them leapt delicately to the tree outside of their hotel window. They tried to find a wooded area to go hunting but Texas wasn’t as wooded as some of the other areas they were at. Especially since they didn’t eat anything in Arizona expect for the throats of their enemies’ pawns. So they waited in the tree until something came to them. Eventually a rabbit came towards their tree, checking that there was no one there, they both jumped from the tree and tore the rabbit in half and shared their kill. They were still hungry by the time they were finished so they walked around a bit. It was nice and warm where they had stopped by Texas. Claire had decided that if they were able to kill Dr. Crane, she wanted them to build their life there. It was warm, and the blood of the animals was just as warm. They ended up coming across a fox and they cornered it and split it in half too. The fox was a lot harder to split between the two of them. They tried ripping it in two like the rabbit, but it wasn’t working as well. Aaron said he would take the butt end of it and that Claire could have the head. The chivalry of this was only something the two of them would understand. Though people think that the butt of an animal is the most tender, the head holds so many juices, and blood, it tastes better than any butt would taste. After enjoying their meal they decided to walk back. Before they did though, each of them cleaned each other off. Aaron wet his sleeve with his saliva and wiped the blood from Claire’s mouth, Claire did the same for Aaron. They were holding hands when they were walking back and they climbed tree to get back into their hotel room.

      After they made it back they decided that now was the time to start planning. They had a few weeks to come up with a plan that would kill Dr. Crane.

“Well, since we don’t know if chopping off the b******s head would go the way we want it, we need to start considering other possibilities. What if we just keep chopping him apart, he can’t regenerate unless he’s had some rest. We could just keep cutting off parts of him until there is nothing left.” Aaron suggested.

“That’s just as risky. He could be stronger than we think. Plus if he did get the chance to heal he would grow stronger like you did and we wouldn’t be able to hold him anymore. There has to be something in his research that I overlooked, something that I missed before.”

“What if we burn him? I mean literally douse him in gasoline and light the match. We could keep doing it until there is nothing left but ashes. It didn’t say anything in his research about setting them on fire right?”

“No, I don’t think so. That could be something. We’ll keep that one in mind. I don’t want to decide on one thing. We can’t go into this under prepared. We should have at least three back-ups plans, because at least 2 of them are bound to backfire.”

“Yeah, we don’t know our limits and our limits are the same as his. So we don’t know what to expect. Okay so burning him alive is one option. Option two…hmmm…” Aaron was tapping his chin and thinking of other ways to kill the man who maimed him.

“Well, we could try cutting him open and removing all of his organs. That was something in his research but I don’t think he ever got to try on his previous subjects. Did he do that to you? You would have been awake.” She was scared that the answer might be yes.

“No, he never did that; he just hacked off my limbs and my prick. Luckily they all grew back!” He said with a wink.

Claire blushed when she said, “Okay, looks like we have our option two.”

“How are we going to perform all of these tests on him? Where are we going to go to do all of this without someone finding us?”

Claire had thought of that, and she had come up empty every time. “I don’t know. I thought about finding an abandoned house, but that wouldn’t muffle his screams, and there will be screaming. Then I thought about an abandoned building, like a big building, but that wouldn’t be very secure; especially since we will probably have to try a few things before one works. We also need to consider restraints. Who knows how strong he is now, and when we start cutting at him, if he heals he’ll get stronger; which would mean it would be harder to keep him where we want him. So we need to find a place that’s remote, and secure, and sound proof.”

“Well that’s a pretty tall order. I don’t know either then; we would have to do some recon while we still have time. But let’s keep trying to figure out how we’re going to kill him.”

“Okay, well what if drown him? I don’t know that probably won’t work either, his lungs would probably regenerate right?”

“I don’t know, maybe? How are we supposed to kill the guy if we can’t even figure out three? We could test it but I don’t want to test it on each other and accidentally kill one of us.” Aaron had said this so passively it knocked the wind out of Claire.

“I really hope you were joking just now.” Her voice went cold as ice.

Aaron looked over at her and smiled, “Of course I’m joking! I would never try any of this s**t on you! This is only stuff that we are going to try on Dr. Crane. He deserves it, you don’t.” He gave her a little kiss on the cheek and went back to thinking of ways to kill Dr. Crane.

      A lot of different things came up, like stabbing him in the heart, cutting it out, and eating his insides. Aaron suggested keeping him locked up without any way of getting food and just starving him to death. They decided that would be their last option. Claire thought that hanging him might work, and leaving him hanging there just in case his spine healed. Aaron said that was the lease likely one, because if he did heal again, his neck would break again and heal again and he would just get stronger. Claire also thought of force feeding him regular food until he barfed up everything and eventually dehydrated and withered away. They came to a conclusion based off of experience that since they almost died without food that the food deprivation option, and the force feeding him cooked food would be the better options. They both almost died from starvation and he that could just as easily happen to him. After a few days of debating they came up with their five options:

1.     Burning him repeatedly until there’s nothing but ashes.

2.     Removing his organs, including his brain.

3.     Drowning him, repeatedly.

4.     Force feeding him food that is poison to their kind.

5.     Starving him until he withers away.

      That was the best they could do with the little time they had. They knew Dr. Crane wouldn’t be able to find them right away. But they wanted to be ready when he did find them. They knew he wouldn’t be alone, and they didn’t want to leave another massacre for someone else to clean up. So they wanted to look for a remote place where they could take care of the pawns to take out the king. They had looked around when they could to try and find a place. They wanted to either find a remote place, or a place that was considered a bad part of town. Because when there’s screaming coming from a bad part of town they consider it a dull day. So they had a few places in mind about where they were going to take him when they got him.

      The next issue that they had to resolve was: How they were going to catch Dr. Crane? It wasn’t going to be easy. He was the same as them, he could easily bite out their throats and leave them bleeding, sure they would heal but he would be gone. They had to think of the best way to take him down.

“Well how did he get you subdued?” Aaron asked Claire.

“He put something in one of the guinea pigs. I hadn’t tried it yet and something tasted gross, I spat out the first bite and took another bite, and spat that out too. He must have injected it with something because I saw a needle mark on the belly of the guinea pig. Right where I had taken those first couple bites. What about you?”

“Yeah same thing, only I was out in the woods. I had caught a rabbit and I took a bite and it was incredibly bitter; like I was chewing on coal and acid. I had spat it out and I was looking for another one when I passed out.”

“It must have some sort of sedative. I’m not too surprised. He is a doctor. I just don’t know how we would get our hands on something like that. And how would we get him to take it. We couldn’t just put it in every animal around town and hope he eats one of them, we could eat on by mistake.” Claire was thinking out loud at this point. She was getting so sick of plotting the death Dr. Alexander Crane. She wanted him to be dead. He had betrayed her, lied to her, hurt Aaron, and made her believe he was dead. Which would normally be okay but when she found out the reason for his survival, it was like sticking a knife into Claire’s back. She had trusted this man with her life when she was discovering her illness. He had helped her when she was on the verge of death only to try to steal life away from her when it was just beginning. She was beyond outraged, she wanted to take him out, and she was sick of waiting.