Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 159. We

I crawled after Henry, and although I was furious, I had to admit that I really could breathe properly again; even the hiccups went away after I took a few deep breaths. Yet when I climbed out of the hole and saw the child Henry had placed on the floor, the horror returned to me as if it had never left.

I pressed my palms against my eyes in an attempt to push my feelings down.

"Kenny, if I manage to save the kid without him slitting his throat, will you not go all paranoid about me being gay again?"

I chuckled and didn’t answer. However angry I was, it was nothing compared to the misery of this child. Everything else seemed rather insignificant.

"I’ll punch you only once, then." My voice sounded all choked up.

"Good, we have a deal. Just trust me in this matter. I want you to get yourself a smoke and a drink while you wait for me here. I’ll look for others; remember our goal? Only three are left, and we can soon go home."

I didn’t answer and soon heard Henry again crawling inside the tunnel and listened to him moving away.

I put my hands away from my eyes and didn’t dare to look at the child as I crossed the room and sat in a corner, really conjuring myself a cigarette up. Trying not to think about anything, I then also got myself some alcohol and began to focus on how to get the unconscious people upstairs. We would need the climbing belt, which I had always on me for cases like this, and we needed a rope, which I could conjure up.

Getting everyone through the tunnels will be especially exhausting, but I can’t let them stay buried here and go up alone to take a break. We also wouldn’t manage to drag the possessed people to the mansion, especially if the others had listened to me and had already gone back—hadn’t thought that through.

So that left us to move them temporarily inside one of the askew houses here, somewhere nearby. Someone among the four hundred mentioned that there was a doctor; maybe he can help and convince the people to slit their throats.

Everything in here feels so narrow and damp, hot and caged. I want to go back to the surface; I hate it in here. I even prefer prison; everything is better than being beneath the earth.

I even thought for a moment that being lifted by a giant’s hands up in the sky would be better than staying here a second longer.

Eventually, I heard Henry crawl back.

"I found the last three." He said after climbing through the hole. He was holding a rope in his hands, and when he started pulling, I figured he had tied one of them up and wanted to pull them through the tunnel. I stood up and came to his side, helping him pull.

"I cleared the tunnel and even found a rope; aren’t I a good dog? We can pull them here without any obstacles."

"Mhm." I felt so drained that I didn’t have it in me to get another word out.

Just everything told me that I wanted to leave here. When can we go up? What if we really leave everyone we found here? Wouldn’t I then be able to get to the surface in about twenty minutes? Didn’t I do enough? Isn’t this the job of someone else, someone who is an adult, someone who is not me?

But ultimately, I just pulled the first body up with Henry, then waited for him to put the next in place, then pulled again, then the next, more pulling. I didn’t care who these people were; just my lingering anxiety simmered down a bit when I noticed that the remaining three were all adults.

Then we began to ascend, and I stopped thinking completely.

Mechanically working, not hearing Henry speaking to me, just moving bodies, then moving more bodies. The three people Henry had found, the child, the classmate, the old man, and the twins.

The further we went up, the more bodies there were to move.

I wasn’t able to even touch the child again, so it was Henry who took over the transport.

With each room we passed, tunnel we crossed, and hole we went through, each and every time I had the illusion that light would wait for me, only for this journey to continue endlessly.

The rooms didn’t stop, and at one point, I was sure that I was still caught up in the illusions the shadow had shown me—that Henry had never woken me up. The paranoia and disbelief were so strong that it helped me; it liberated me.

None of this is real, so there was no need to let it get to me.

The next body I carried, dragged over the floor, wasn’t real.

The next time I pulled a body through a hole, it wasn’t real.

The next time I unintentionally saw the child in Henry’s arms, it wasn’t real.

We carried and lifted and huffed and sweated; the darkness that didn’t stop us from seeing constantly stifling me, these rooms like an endless labyrinth that was NEVER ENDING.

When I stood inside the attic, the first room, and saw eight bodies on the floor, I snapped back, and the smell, the images, and the reality hit me all at once.

It was such a heavy blow that I bent over and emptied my stomach.

I could feel a hand patting my back and a deep voice whispering soothingly in my ear. "You did it, Kenny; you brought everyone up. It is fine now; we are nearly upstairs. You did so well! It will be over soon."

I turned away from him, and in a daze, I conjured up a ladder, climbing it with Henry following me.

There was a slight breeze on the surface; maybe I was just imagining it, and there were so many people standing beside the earth hole, looking down at us.

There was light; it was day, and there were no walls and no rooms.

It was the same open space I had entered a few hours ago, but it felt so much wider.

Henry spoke to them, but I couldn’t hear what he said.

I saw that a few strong men who came down to us, looking through the hole in the roof at the attic and the people we had left resting there.

More words were spoken, and I touched my face, where I found my nose bleeding. I saw Henry turn to me, his face contorting in worry, when I addressed him before I gave in to the sweet, sweet unconsciousness.

"’We. It was ’we’ who did it."