NATHAN CROSS STRIKE BACK..

Chapter 2

“I know,” Derek said. His voice had changed. The businesslike warmth was gone. What was underneath it was cold and flat. He looked at his men. 

“He has made his choice to fight back instead of joining and work for me.”  He nodded slowly. 

“We cannot leave him walking around after this. He knows too much and he is angry enough to actually do something about it.”

“Obviously,” Serena said. She looked around the room. Her eyes landed on something leaning against the wall in the corner.

A baseball bat.

One of the security men had brought it in earlier. Nathan had not thought about it until now.

Serena walked over and picked it up.

She held it with both hands and felt the weight of it.

Then she looked at the security men. 

“Hold him properly,” she said. 

“Do not let him move.”

Two men grabbed Nathan's arms and pressed them down hard. A third man put his knee into Nathan's back and pushed him forward so he was bent toward the floor, his face turned sideways against the cold marble.

He could not move.

He looked up at Serena standing over him with the bat.

“Serena,” he said. “Don't.”

Immediately she swung.

The bat connected with the side of his face with a sound that filled the entire room.

White light exploded across Nathan's vision. Pain like he had never felt before rang through his skull. 

“Hold him still properly,”Serena said. Her voice was calm.

She moved down to his leg.

Without wasting anymore time she raised the bat.

She brought it down hard on his left shin.

The crack was loud, Nathan screamed.

And Serena didn't stop with just one hit, she continued, unit it got the point.

Nathan could say anything but just opened his mouth, and couldn't screamed the kind that comes from a place deeper than choice. He could not stop it. The pain was enormous and complete and total.

His leg was broken, he lay there shaking. Tears ran down his face without him deciding to cry. His body was simply responding to what had been done to it. He could not stop shaking.

He could not believe this was happening, he could not believe she was the one doing it.

This woman. His wife. The person he had protected and provided for and loved for eight years.

She handed the bat back to the security man and smoothed her dress with both hands.

“Good, now I can forgive you for wasting my time” she said quietly.

Again she picked up her wine glass.

Nathan lay on the floor and breathed in short painful bursts. Every breath moved his broken leg slightly and sent fresh pain shooting up his body. He could not straighten out. He could not think clearly.

But somewhere underneath all of it  underneath the pain and the shock and the disbelief —Something cold and permanent was forming.

Derek looked down at him one final time.

“You made your choice,” he said simply. He turned to his men. 

“The Westside Waste Processing Yard. Night shift ends at eleven. Nobody there until six in the morning.” He straightened his cufflinks. 

“By six he will not need to be anyone's problem anymore.”

“The crushing machines start at six thirty,” one of the men confirmed.

“Perfect,” Derek said.

He took Serena's hand and they walked out of the room together without looking back.

**

They drove for a long time.

Nathan drifted in and out of consciousness in the back of the van. His leg was on fire. His face was swollen beyond recognition. Every bump in the road sent pain through him that made him bite down hard to keep from making noise.

"Stay awake," he told himself. 

"Stay awake."

The van stopped, the doors opened.

The smell hit him first garbage and rot and chemicals and decay. An enormous open darkness full of waste piled high in mountains on all sides.

The **Westside Waste Processing Yard.**

The city's main refuse dumping ground. Every garbage truck in Creston City emptied here at night. The waste piled up until morning when the workers came and the massive crushing machines reduced everything to nothing.

The men dragged Nathan out. He could not walk. They did not care. They dragged him by his arms across the uneven filthy ground, his broken leg trailing behind him, and threw him deep into a pile of garbage.

He sank into it. Soft and wet and cold and dark on all sides.

One of the men looked back from a distance and spoke to the other.

“Workers start at six. Machines run at six thirty.” A pause. 

“He will not make it to six in this condition. And even if he does, with the injection we gave him, his heart will stop in ten minutes regardless, and —”

He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.

They walked back to the van, the engine started.

The lights moved away.

And then there was nothing but darkness and the smell of everything that had been thrown away.

Nathan Cross lay in the garbage and stared up at the small square of dark sky visible between the piles of waste around him.

His broken leg pulsed with pain that came in waves. His face felt enormous and wrong. His ribs screamed with every breath.

"Is this really it?"

He thought about everything. Eight years building something from nothing. A formula that could help millions of people. A product worth over a billion dollars in the future.

Gone.

His wife standing over him with a baseball bat, smoothing her dress afterward like she had just finished a small chore.

Gone.

“Heavens are you watching this,”he thought. 

“Is anyone watching this? Does any of this matter to anyone?”

The anger moved through him like a current.

“I will not die here, I don't want to die, not in a situation like this, but like this...”

At that moment he tried to move. His body barely responded. The broken leg made any movement almost impossible. His arms shook when he tried to push himself up.

He fell back, he tried again.

Fell back again.

“Move, please move.”he told himself. 

“You do not get to die here. Not like this. Not thrown away in a garbage pile while they go shopping tomorrow.”

He tried a third time, but couldn't then his eyes started closing, it was as if his life was leaving his body.

“This is the end, it has to be the end.”

And then the dragon mark on his chest began to burn.

The jagged/ dragon scar he had carried since birth — the one no doctor had ever explained — suddenly came alive with heat beneath his torn shirt. Not painful heat. Something else entirely. Something that moved outward from his chest like a slow wave, pushing into his arms, his hands, his body.