Did you know that dead men don’t bleed?
I mean when you think about it, it makes sense. When you’re dead, the heart stops pumping. Without the heart doing its thing, blood stops flowing. So if you shoot a person and they die immediately, they won’t bleed from the bullet wound. I learned that on an episode of CSI.
It took me a little while to figure out what happened. But I had plenty of time to think. I’d thought of song lyrics. I’d thought of movies. I’d thought of TV shows. Anything to keep myself from going crazy.
And that’s when I remembered.
Dead men don’t bleed.
Ed was bleeding when he was on top of me.
Which meant that he wasn’t dead after I’d shot him.
I stared at Kevin who was lying a few feet away from me. Rather I stared at his form. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough that I could do that. Every once in a while, he would move a little bit. And I could hear the sniffling enough to know that he was crying.
Not that I blamed him. I cried at first too. But I’m all cried out. Finally.
I wished we could talk to each other, but the gag in my mouth prevented me from saying a word, just like the gag in his kept him silent. I wished I could move close enough to touch him. Hold his hand. Anything for the physical comfort. But I couldn’t move.
I was only half conscious when someone had pounded the stake into the ground. Not conscious enough to even register then what was going on. It wasn’t until I started really waking up that I realized that the stake had a purpose.
And that purpose was to bind the handcuffs I was wearing to the earth.
That wasn’t the worst realization though.
That came later.
When someone placed a board over the entrance of the…cave or hole or whatever it was we were in. And when the sound of dirt raining down on the wooden plank made me realize that we were being sealed into our tomb.
Story Notes:
Okay, so I know a lot of you thought (and probably rightly so) that I was never ever going finish (let alone update) this story. Well, I can tell you that I do have every intention of finishing it. I have the outline done and am going to do my darndest to keep plugging away at this until it's complete.
On 1/1/09 I did a bit of an overhaul to this story, combining it with its "companion" story "Turning Tables" (which somehow never made it to this archive...) Anyhoo, to make a long story short, the "new" chapters for 1/1 may be ones you've seen before, or may be ones you didn't depending on whether you ever caught the story in the old archive. Everything posted 1/4 and beyond, though, is new. Woot!
