+18 - eps 22-27 - A case takes Russell and Brock to the brink of death. It'll be up to Gillian and the team to rescue them before they're killed by a white supremacist militia. And in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the threat of a bio attack fo...
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Everything went black again, the grip on his ankles was gone and the flogging stopped. Brock wasn't surprised he'd passed out again. Actually he was grateful he did.
But something was wrong about his unconsciousness.
He wasn't supposed to hear the men curse and move around him, asking what the hell was going on. He thought he'd heard loud voices outside, and the hurried steps of the men leaving the room, shed, whatever.
Without their grip, his legs slid from the stool out of their own weight. The excruciating pain when his flogged feet hit the ground made him cry out loud, which made his ears hurt even more. The pain was so sharp it felt like a convulsion, shaking him up from head to toes and turning his stomach.
He tried to lean forward and stick his head out as much as he could to the side. Anyway, he felt the warm stench of his own vomit splashing on his forearm.
While the noises and voices outside died away, he heard a low murmur near him, and a sound like a sack being dragged. Still panting, his mouth filled with a hideous aftertaste of blood and bile, Brock turned his head to glance back. The dim glow of the dying fire showed him a big dark shape crawling slowly across the room like a giant worm.
Oh, great. Instead of knocking him out, pain caused him hallucinations.
The dark thing crawled closer, filling him with a childish but instinctive fear, especially when it let out a gurgling noise that sounded like his name. He tried to push his chair away and choked down a cry at touching the floor with his bleeding feet.
And the worm kept grunting his name, calling him out, crawling closer and closer.
Brock tried to push his chair again, a thousand burning spears stabbing his soles, the dark room spinning around, his chest a solid block of constant, throbbing pain. He moaned when the chair creaked and fell to the side, throwing him only a step away from the crawling thing repeating his name.
But as he squirmed and struggled, the hard, uneven floor scratching his clothes and his swollen face, the thing changed before his gawking eyes. In the flickering glow, something like a head rose a palm from the floor. And there was a face on it. A very distorted, bloody, messed resemblance of it.
"Brock... It's me... Russell..." the thing mumbled.
And somehow, those words made it through Brock's scattered brain and he was able to process them. So he stopped struggling.
"Coleman?" he panted.
He felt a revulsion twitch when two bloody knots of twisted meat moved like clumsy, broken hands to his wrists, still tied to the arm of the chair.
"You need to go..." said the thing claiming to be Russell.
Blood and bile filled Brock's mouth again. A hint of a coherent thought touched his brain—was he bleeding internally?
"Reg's here..."
Russell's rambling made him try to think straight. "What?"
"Go get'er..."
Russell let out grunts and moans as his ruined fingers pulled from the rope around Brock's wrist. "Door open..." he insisted.
Brock managed to raise his head and look around. Russell was right: there was a darker hole on the wall across the room, letting in a biting cold. Past it, he could see vague spaces of a dull, dark gray. Like snow, he thought. Yes, it looked a lot like an open door.
"I can't walk," he said, open desperation in his voice.
That was why they didn't bother closing it: they knew Brock and Russell couldn't take a single step.
"You gotta..."
Brock felt the rope loosened a little, enough for him to twist and pull his hand out of it. Russell dropped himself on his back, breathing heavily. Despite his agonizing pain, Brock understood Russell was right. This was their only chance to get some help, and Russell couldn't even try to reach the door. Brock lay on his back as well, to move his arm from under his body and free his other hand.
"South..." he heard Russell mutter. "Go..."
A tearing fit of cough cut him off. Brock pulled harder. It sounded like Russell's lungs were full of fluids, or blood, maybe punctured by a broken rib and about to collapse.
Brock was finally free from the chair. He rolled over and pulled himself on his knees, delaying the moment of loading his wounded soles with all his weight. Russell shooed him away when Brock leaned over to check on him. He chocked and turned on his side to spat an amount of blood that made Brock gasp in alarm.
The urgency of their situation forced a lucid gap in his mind. He really needed to move. Every minute he hesitated brought Russell closer to death and Balken's men closer to be back. So he crawled to where his heavy hiking boots were and grabbed them. He didn't even tried to put them on yet. The snow outside would ease the burning and stop the bleeding of his feet, making it easier to wear them.
"Hold on," he muttered, resting a hand on Russell's shoulder.
"Get... Reg..." Russell replied in a faltering thread of voice.
Brock wasn't about to explain to Russell he was delusional, because his friend wasn't anywhere around. So he just nodded and crawled on his hands and knees to the door, dragging a shoe in each hand.
He made it to the open door and paused, listening. Not a rumor out there. A surreal silence filled the night. He didn't see any buildings around, so they weren't near the cottage of the compound. Russell's gurgling cough put him on the move. He had to find a way to walk and reach their command post, to fetch help for Russell before it was too late.
So he grabbed the doorframe and hoisted himself slowly up. The pain when he stood on his bare feet threatened to knock him down. He gripped the wooden frame, twisting his feet to stand mostly on their outer edge, keeping as much of his soles away from the ground as he could. He tried a step out, then another. He let go of the frame and staggered a couple of yards away.
But he didn't make it any further. The pain threw him to the cold ground. It was worse than walking on shattered glass. He took a moment to breathe deep a couple of times and try to stay conscious. Then he sat up and crawled to the nearest patch of snow. There he moved his legs forward and rested his soles on the white, clean cold. It made him shiver and grind his teeth, but it eased the pain a little. He forced himself to rest both feet flat on the snow while he loosened the ties of his shoes. The cold crept up his body but he lingered there for another minute, until he felt his feet started to go numb. Only then, as fast as he could before that blessed numbness receded, he put on his shoes. He tied them loosely, only enough to keep them on.
Getting back on his feet wasn't easy without any support, but he managed to do it. He clenched his teeth for a heartbeat, but they hurt too—wasn't there a couple of them missing? He took a deep breath of the frozen night air and started moving. He didn't know where he was, but Russell had said "south". It had to mean they were north from the cottage and the command post, somewhere in the woods surrounding the compound, inside the fence. So he staggered to the trees, to take cover and try to figure on which side of them the moss was, hoping that could direct him on the right course before the pain and the cold took him down.
