Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 316. The first
Before I could see more, I was pulled away, landing on the ground, or better said, on Henry, the woman holding the corpse looking at us startled.
"KENNY!" He pressed his hand against my heart, his breathing irregular, his own heart beating like a drum.
I turned to him, and he clutched my jaw, his other hand still feeling for my heartbeat.
"What is going on?" The commander, standing not far away, came to us.
"WHY DID YOU TOUCH HIM? TOUCH HER!" Henry snarled in my ear.
"Oh... right." I mumbled, dazed from being yanked away so suddenly. Given that I see my visions always during a span of seconds for the people in the present, Henry should have instantly grabbed me the moment I touched the corpse’s arm.
"But I only looked in the past," I said.
"I GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THAT!" His hand still pressed against my chest, as if he couldn’t regain assurance by just feeling that my heart still beat, contrary to the morgue back then, where I went into cardiac arrest from flipping the coin on Henrietta’s corpse.
The commander reached out his hand to help me away from Henry, but I glared at him, so he sighed and walked to one of the survivors who was hiding, motioning for the Birthmark to follow him as he tried to communicate with them.
"I am alright." I patted Henry’s hand on my chest, but he didn’t let go; instead, he laughed angrily.
"Good, I am not." He let himself fall backward, lying on the ground with me on him.
"Sorry."
"Yes, you better be."
"What are the Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area?" The two words told me something, but for the love of God, I couldn’t remember where I had heard about them.
"I don’t give a fuck." Henry was furious, taking deep breaths, trying to calm down when he thought of something.
"The book about the brain, the center library," he said.
"The one about the pineal gland?" I asked and conjured it up at the same time.
While lying on Henry, I flipped through the pages until I found the drawing of a brain.
"There." Henry pointed at the description under the drawing, little numbers indicating which brain areas were meant. The description wasn’t much, but the two areas were described as areas for ’interpretation and building of speech.’
Henry chuckled, connecting the dots on his own.
"I already found the language the woman spoke to be strange, but I thought it was because she was screaming and crying."
"What messed-up shit is going on here?" I asked when I heard the commander clear his throat loudly.
"Stand up." He said, having apparently returned from speaking with the survivors.
I sighed and patted Henry’s hand above my chest until he let go under curses, and I could stand up again.
Birthmark stood beside the commander.
"I don’t know the language they are speaking, nor do I understand it."
"Mhm... So what was the idea behind throwing an average of people into a parallel world, their brain areas for language destroyed or manipulated?"
I looked at Henry, who was hugging me from behind, his hand again on my chest to feel my heartbeat.
"Testing what a parallel world does to them? But why the language issue?" I asked him. If they wanted to test, they could test it on the four hundred survivors we had already brought back home.
"Hmm... so that they won’t interact with each other? Talking about their experience and falsifying the results?" Henry replied, much calmer again, his deep voice making me shudder at the close proximity.
"So that they won’t ever speak about what they’ve seen? But can they still write it down?" I conjured up a paper and pen, using the book as a table to write down a few sentences.
"Show that to a few survivors and give them the pen to write back if they can." I handed what I held to Birthmark, who nodded and walked away again, the commander following after him.
"How did they come here intentionally in the first place?" Henry asked me.
"It was definitely intentional. I saw them in a laboratory, but I didn’t see anyone I recognized, though. Henrietta?" I asked him and saw him clench his jaw.
"If they used her for things like this instead of closing the portals, they haven’t understood a thing."
"Fuck. Our world is doomed." If nobody is cooperating, what the heck should we do? Kill off everyone who is behaving stupidly?
If we do that, are we ever going to finish with the killings?
What about the portal tomorrow? I was so distracted by Henry pulling me out of the vision that the air I couldn’t breathe in came to me naturally.
How dare I forget even for a second that someone was waiting for me? 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶
I grabbed Henry’s hand and flipped the coin with the resolution that I wouldn’t let go until this portal tomorrow was where it should be.
And I saw it. I saw the vision again, yet the number of survivors had increased, and the portal had moved. The crystalline forest had melded together with a real forest, nature again present.
What remained the same were the crystalline figures, or maybe not, because they had multiplied as well, but just like last time, they did not attempt to walk to the portal.
The moment the portal opened, I was again thrown out of the vision.
"Nothing changes." I said to Henry, as well as to the commander and Birthmark, who had come back.
They gave me the book, the paper, and the pen back. I saw the first sentence I had written down: ’Do you understand what I am writing? Follow us, and we will bring you home.’
"Nothing changes; the portal will open tomorrow." I repeated to the commander, while Birthmark stood by with dark faces, also looking at the paper.
Under the sentence I had written were a few others, if you could call them sentences.
A few lines with strange ups and downs; someone wrote something that nearly seemed adequate, as if it were because of me that I didn’t understand it, but in the end, none of the people could convey what they wanted to express.
"They don’t want information on parallel worlds; they solely want their bodies’ data," I said solemnly.
"Then they would come back to pick them up, wouldn’t they?" Henry asked.
"True. And we have a portal that will open, just that it isn’t where they want it to be, because it leads to a trafficked street. Nothing of this makes sense." I put the paper, the book, and the pen back to the past and conjured up the enveloped present Henry had given me for the commander.
"From your counterpart." I told him, and he took it, reading through it before looking at Henry, who still hugged me from behind.
"Alright." He said to him, Henry not reacting since he didn’t even know what his future self had written.
I conjured up a big white cardboard and more pens and crouched down to draw a house in the simplest way possible: a red roof and green grass.
Henry followed my movements and half lay on me while he crouched down behind me, hugging me and being annoyingly sticky, yet I didn’t say anything.
Then I conjured up a branch and tape, making a sign that showed the house.
I let Henry pull me up and gave it to the commander.
"Walk around with that sign; maybe they’ll understand that we bring them home, maybe they won’t." I conjured up the same sign again, giving it to Birthmark before I conjured up about a hundred bottles of water, along with burgers, apples, and the like, letting them appear on the ground.
"We will leave in half an hour. Everyone who isn’t following will be left behind." I announced, feeling Henry squeezing me from behind in support.
The many eyes around us turned more piercing, but nobody stepped forward to take a drink until the deathly silent woman stood up, letting go of the dead bald man to take a water bottle.
Only then, step by step, did others come to take food or water, with the commander and Birthmark running around and showing the sign I made.
I watched them until I saw someone in the distance making his way to us.
"Finally." I had that feeling the moment I spotted the figure, and I felt a strong longing for the first one—the first of my counterparts who hadn’t beaten or murdered anyone.
The first innocent me.
