Traveler - The Price (Book 3)
Chapter 22

You can’t give up on what you feel only because the others have done that. I was in the situation to miss a person who was right next to me, and that hurt like hell.

We stayed at Andy’s bar until late in the night. All the customers had left, so we decided to help him with the closing. I grabbed some glasses, and I followed Ivy into the kitchen, in the back.

“You know, if I think about it, I don’t have a house here. I just know that I am with Andy, that I stay here with him, in his house and that’s it. What I knew about my life from before is an illusion. My parents and my brother are living some towns away, and I don’t know how I got here. It was all an illusion. The weird thing is that my feelings for Andy haven’t changed once I got my memories back.”

“So, if Aaron and Deby will ever remember the truth, there’s a chance that their feelings from now to remain” I grumble.

“We will work this out” says Ivy.

At that moment, Deby walked into the kitchen, and we had to change the subject. I gathered all the vessels, and Ivy started washing them. In thirty minutes, everything was ready. The fact that I was helping Andy there made me forget, for a few moments, about my problems.

Andy and Ivy headed home, and we waited for Deby to replace the car key in her purse. She never had things in order in there, so we waited more than five minutes for her to replace the key, a time in which she put all kind of weird stuff in our arms. In the end, she found it. I went in the back with James, and she sat in the front with Aaron, who was behind the wheel. She turned on the music loud, probably because she didn’t want him to feel forced to have some conversation with her.

After a few minutes of driving, we saw Andy and Ivy on the side of the road. They had punctured the wheel, and they were struggling to do something, but I couldn’t tell what.

“Go and help them. I will park the car, and I will come to you” says Aaron.

We got down and headed to the two. James went near Andy to help him and me and Deby to Ivy.

“I can’t imagine what happened!” says Ivy.

“You punctured the wheel, Ivy!” says Deby ironically.

“No! It was something on the road! Look, our tires are cut!”

Deby stared at them, and then she went with Ivy to look on the road, to replace something that could give us a clue. One thing was clear. Andy couldn’t move that car, so they had to call the service tow.

I remained alone, while the girls were walking away, so I wanted to go near the guys, but I heard a loud bang. I turned around, and I saw Deby’s car rolling over. Another vehicle had hit it. I looked around, and I realized that Aaron was still inside the car, so I felt I was going crazy. I ran to that place.

“No!” I shouted.

The others were behind me, but I got there instantly. I got my head on the broken window, and I saw Aaron hanging in there, being held by the seatbelt. Even with that, he had been injured severely at his head.

“Don’t move!” I said. “Oh, God!”

He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t finish it because Deby appeared and pushed me aside.

“Someone call for help!” she says.

“Don’t move him!” I screamed at her.

Ivy was holding me by my shoulders, to remind me that the others didn’t know all the truth and I should have controlled my emotions. Then, I saw someone getting out from the other car, on the window. I went there to see if that person was all right, but if he had been without a scratch, I would have punched him in the face just to be sure he wasn’t fine. I remarked a man with a hood on his face, who started running the moment he saw me.

“Wait! Where do you think you’re going?” I screamed.

He didn’t stop, so I ran after him. I was catching him from behind, but when I pulled his blouse, he took out a gun. He pointed it right at me, but I managed to bend his hand just in time, and the gun fell on the grass. We both rolled on the ground, but the disadvantage was that he was standing over me. It was a huge person, but I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman because he was wearing gloves and didn’t leave any part of the body to be seen. I tried to fight to keep him there because I saw James and Andy running at us. He got free and hit me so hard that he put me down. He ran again, but I stretched, and I grabbed the gun. I aimed, and I shot, but I noticed there were no bullets left.

“Damn it!” I screamed.

Andy bent over me, and James continued running after him. I saw a big and blue car stopping on the other side of the road, and that person jumped inside, just before James caught her from behind. I got up helped by Andy, and I heard the ambulance. We returned to the accident scene, where Aaron was pulled out carefully from the car.

He was put on the stretcher, and I ran to the doctors to ask them if he was going to be okay. Deby pushed me aside again, getting up in the ambulance with him. All I could do was to watch it going away. Deby’s car was broken, Andy’s the same, and mine had burned. James didn’t have one, and Aaron’s was still at the service. We needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible.

At that moment, I saw the lights of a car approaching us.

“We need to get to the hospital!” I shouted to Ivy.

I jumped in front of that car, making the young man who was driving to stop the vehicle in a blink. The car hit my hands, and he opened the door angrily. Then, I took out the gun without bullets, and I pointed it at him.

“Get out of the car!” I shouted.

“What the hell? Are you insane?” he yells.

“Jo!” shouts Ivy.

He pretended to get out, but then he returned, so I ran at him, and I hit him with the gun in the head. I got behind the wheel, and I left him unconscious on the street.

“Are you coming or what?” I asked them.

“You’re crazy! We could have called a taxi! Look what you’ve done!” screams Ivy.

After that, she still got in the car. James followed her, then Andy.

“Do you have any idea in what mess you got us? When he wakes up, that boy will call the police, and we are your accomplices!” shouts Andy angrily.

“I don’t care! I need to get to the hospital!”

“Why are you so agitated?” asks Andy.

“Shut up!” yells Ivy at him.

“You wouldn’t understand!” I said.

When we arrived at the hospital, I ditched the gun in the first dumpster, and I ran into the hall. There I saw Deby, who was arguing with a doctor.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“He won’t let me pass to see what’s going on! No one is telling me anything!” she shouts.

In an impulse, I passed by the doctor pushing the doors. He wanted to stop me, but I pushed him away into a shelf with medicines. Deby was shocked, but she followed me. We managed to see Aaron on a bed, under the care of the doctors. When they understood that they had company, they pulled the louver.

There appeared another two doctors, who grabbed my hands and pulled me out.

“You’re not allowed to be in here!”

“You don’t tell me what I’m allowed to do! I had to get in there and see him!”

While I was fighting with the doctors, Ivy interfered to stop the conflict.

“Why it seems to me that you’re so interested in Aaron’s fate?” asks Deby.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said.

She looked at me angrily and confused, and then she came close.

“He’s acting weird for a while, and you ran like hell when you saw the accident. You chased the man who hit him, and you didn’t care he had a gun! I think there’s more than you let me see!”

“Do you want to do this here and now?! Fine!” I said, and I pushed her into the wall.

Ivy tried to stop me, but she got herself a hit in her nose.

“Yes! There’s something much more, something that you would never understand!”

She was staring at me as if she had seen a ghost. Ivy interfered again and pushed me aside. I heard noises at the hospital’s entrance.

“There she is! She’s the one who hit me and stole my car!” shouted the boy, who was accompanied by two police officers and a doctor.

“Damn!” I grumbled, and I turned around to run.

My instinct had remained the same, even if I knew I was about to get into trouble. Then I bumped into a third police officer, who grabbed me by the arm.

“Come on! Let’s take a walk to the police station!” he says.

Deby was looking shocked how I was escorted by the police officers, while Ivy was running after us. One of them stopped her and told her to stay there. I saw James taking her aside and whispering something, while Andy was trying to recover from his shock. I heard Deby shouting at me, but I didn’t understand what.

I got into the police car with two of the cops, while the boy remained outside, by his car, with the third one. I hadn’t been arrested in my entire life, but I could tell that I was in a lot of trouble. I couldn’t adapt just yet to this world, so I had reacted how I would have reacted normally back in the world where I had spent my last years. There wasn’t anyone to punish me if I hit someone, and no one paid if they killed my friends, so I still had that idea that I needed to make justice on my own.

I didn’t know anything about Aaron, I had done a bunch of stupid things, I had hit a doctor, an unknown boy, I had stolen his car, all of these in just one night, and I had the impression that I could have got away with it. I even had the intention, at some point, to run away from the police or to hit one of them. Fortunately, I had awakened in time. I had pushed Deby in a transport of fury, and I felt misunderstood. I knew that the ones around me had seen me as a savage because they couldn’t remember how we used to be.

I think I had an injury on my head, from the time I had fought with the hoody man because it hurt me. I wasn’t going to mention that fact because I didn’t know what Deby was going to say about the accident. Also, my story was kind of unbelievable, and I would have probably been sent to the insane hospital. My problem was that I was being escorted to the police station, and I wasn’t in the mood to chat with them or to hang around there.

I put my head on the car’s window, and I closed my eyes. One of the officers was talking to me, but I wasn’t paying attention.

Then I realized I wasn’t the kind of person who gives up on someone. Maybe sometimes I was getting angry, and I confused feelings and things, maybe I wanted to leave many times, but I would have never abandoned them. I was doing stupid things even here, just as I had done in the past. I couldn’t leave them, and probably that was the reason why I was suffering so much when someone was walking away from me.