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The cold muzzle of the pistol pressed into Riley’s chest, halfway between her collarbone and the curve of her breasts. Her legs burned with the effort of keeping Holt’s body up and away from hers and pure terror pumped through her veins. Her hands were wrapped around his on the gun, but it wasn’t doing any good. All Riley could do was leave him with a few scratches before he killed her.
Then something gave.
Riley didn’t know whether she found a burst of strength or he slipped a little, but all of the sudden, one finger was on the trigger and the other was forcing the barrel of the gun around until it was pointed at Holt. His face barely had time to register shock at having lost the advantage before she squeezed.
The gun discharged with a crack that made Riley’s ears ring. The recoil wasn’t very powerful due to the gun’s size, but it was still enough to allow the hilt to slam painfully into her chest and her elbows to smack the linoleum floor. She couldn’t see the bullet enter his body, but she felt the man go limp and slump forward on top of her, his eyes blank and glassy.
Worst of all was the blood. It sprayed out from the wound as the shot fired, hot liquid running along the gun barrel and splattering across her upper body and the floor. More blood continued to flow from the wound as they came level with one another, drenching her shirt.
Some sixth sense told her there were other people around, but Riley’s ears were ringing and her vision had gone fuzzy so she couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe. Feeling a fresh wave of fear, she struggled to shove the much heavier Holt off her, feeling his blood, hot and sticky, coat her hands and run down her arms. There was also a heavy copper tang in her mouth, but that was probably from biting her own tongue. Her breath was coming in short, sharp gasps that smelled of blood and gunpowder. If she didn’t know better, she would swear she was drowning in the stuff.
Riley jerked awake with a gasp. Panicking at the feeling of being flat on her back, she started to squirm and struggle, succeeding only in tangling herself up in the blanket. This made it worse, and she kicked and struggled harder. With a sharp shriek of confusion and fear, she tumbled out of bed.
Her head cracked against the hardwood floor, and combined with the cold air and the loss of the blanket’s constriction, she began to come to her senses. Riley’s first instinct was just to curl up there on the floor and sob, but now her head was throbbing, so Riley figured she better go make sure she didn’t have a concussion first.
Shakily, she pulled herself to a standing position, grabbed her phone from the nightstand and headed out of her bedroom and down the tiny hall into her apartment’s one bathroom. Riley flipped on the light and went to inspect herself in the mirror only to be confronted with a blank white expanse of wall.
She cursed and slid down the opposite wall to a sitting position. Her old mirror hadn’t been mounted to the wall, simply hanging, and during the last earthquake it had fallen and smashed, and Riley hadn’t had a chance to buy a new one yet. This day just keeps getting better and better and it isn’t even five AM yet .
That was when she noticed the blood. It coated her hands a brilliant red, and there were speckles across exposed arms as well (Riley generally slept in a tank top). Her breath caught in her throat. How was this possible? It had been weeks! She had taken so many showers and washed her hands tens of times!
Feeling viscerally disgusted in a way she had never experienced before, Riley practically threw herself at the sink and turned the water on full, feeling herself begin to cry as she frantically scrubbed at her hands until the last of the blood had washed down the drain. Relieved it was gone and hoping this was all some bizarre dream, she dried her hands, wiped her eyes and turned, intending to head back to bed. When she reached for the doorknob, Riley spotted more blood smeared across her palm.
The previous catch in her throat and tears turned into full shaking sobs. Riley curled herself against the wall in the corner of the bathroom and cried for what felt like forever, but really can't have been more than ten minutes. She wasn’t crazy for feeling dirty after that day in the Phoenix. She really was. There was blood on her hands, literally as well as figuratively, and Riley didn’t know how to fix it. This wasn’t the Bible, there was no repenting (which she wasn’t even sure she could do anyway, considering she’d rather have herself and her friends alive), but she also didn’t know how to move on with this stain on her conscience.
As her crying started to come to a stop, however, Riley remembered that there was one person who might at least understand what was going on. Feeling like more of a child than she had in years, Riley picked her phone up off the counter and dialed Jack’s number.
She didn’t expect him to pick up, since it was 4:15 AM on a Sunday, but it only took one ring.
“Riley? Are you OK?” Jack’s voice was clipped and nervous and didn’t even sound sleepy.
“Were you awake?”
“Not until you called me. I was dreaming about kicking Putin’s ass. What’s up?”
Although Riley would never in a million years admit it to him, just hearing Jack’s voice was comforting, especially as he realized it wasn’t for a mission and got less on edge. Swallowing, Riley told him “I was just dreaming about, you know, Cairo Day,” heck if she was going to say ‘that time I killed a guy’, but she hadn’t been present for the original event, so Jack would know what she was talking about. “And now I’m really freaked out because I woke up with blood on my hands and I can’t get to go away and-” Hearing how childish and quavery her own voice sounded, Riley shut up. She was not some fragile little girl that needed to be taken care of, and nobody was going to get that impression.
“Sit tight Riles, don’t do anything rash. I’ll be right over,” Jack’s voice was taught and sharp, and that scared her. She’d called him for an “It’s alright, you’re not broken, everybody has this reaction,” not for what she knew now to be fear in his voice.
Riley didn’t know exactly what Jack meant by “sit tight,” so she decided to take it lightly, and by the time Jack arrived almost 20 minutes later she was curled up on the couch and mostly done crying.
With a sigh at having to get out of the warmth of her blanket, Riley got up and opened the door. As she expected, there was Jack in the half-light, a look of great concern on his features.
“Alright now,” He said, putting a hand on Riley’s shoulder and guiding her back into her own apartment. Weird , she thought, but went with it.
“Just sit down here,” He practically pressed her into a chair. “And I’ll go get some antiseptic.”
“Jack, are you drunk?” Riley called after him as he headed over to her bathroom.
“No, I am totally fine,” He re-emerged, holding her cotton balls and antiseptic, then set them on the table beside her and began to douse one.
“Then why are you acting so strange and what are you-” Her words were cut off with a surprised yelp when Jack took her chin in one hand and began scrubbing at something on her cheek with the antiseptic.
Having had fully enough of this behavior, Riley stood up and took a step back. “Alright Jack, just what exactly are you doing?”
He took a step toward her, hands raised for some reason in a placating gesture. “I’m going to clean the blood off of your face so you don’t look like a lunatic, and then we’re going to drive down to the hospital. I think having that bloody nose must have triggered some sort of episode-”
“Wait, did you say bloody nose?” All the disjointed pieces suddenly clicked together in Riley’s mind. “Jack, you can calm down. I’m not having a psychotic episode. Maybe mild PTSD or sleep deprivation or something, but there’s no episode. I’m just dumb!”
Now it was Jack’s turn to look confused. “You’re going to have to walk me through that one, because last I heard, you were calling me in the middle of the night crying because you couldn’t get the blood off your hands. I know people who’ve had psychotic breaks due to stuff they’ve seen or done in battle, and it sounds a hell of a lot like that!”
“First of all, look,” Riley held out both of her hands for Jack to inspect. “Do you see blood?”
The remaining dried smears were pretty obvious, so he nodded without hesitation.
“Ok,” She sighed, sitting back down in the chair. “Here’s the sequence of events. I must have had a bloody nose in the night and didn’t wake up so I got blood all over myself, then had a nightmare so I woke up in a bad headspace. I tried to wash off the blood and it worked because it’s normal blood, but then when I went to wipe the tears away, I got the blood from my face all over my hands but didn’t realize that was what it was from because I didn’t know about the bloody nose, then had a breakdown and called you. Any part of that seem like hallucinations to you?”
Jack sighed deeply and ran a hand over his hair, sitting down in the chair next to you. “God, Riley, you had me so worried. I’ve seen stuff like this go down and it’s never good. When I got that call from you…”
“Everything’s alright, I’m fine,” Riley said, awkwardly patting him on the shoulder like she’d seen Mac do before. She wasn’t great at handling other people’s emotions in general, and that went double when it came to Jack. “Well, actually, I’m tired, but that one’s an easy fix.”
She stood up to head back to her bedroom (there were makeup wipes in there she could use for the blood before going to sleep), but Jack grabbed her by the arm.
“Oh no you don’t. You dragged me out of bed and over here before the crack of dawn, and so we are going to spend some time together. What movies do you have on tape?”
Riley let out something that was between a weary sigh and a laugh. “Do you mean DVDs, Jack. They’re in the first drawer under the TV. You can pick out whatever you want because I am going to sleep.
She did in fact go to sleep, but it was on the couch and half way through A New Hope .