Meyer looked at the vial containing the spider antidote. He wanted to hold it, to feel its weight. Justin stood in front of him, letting Meyer stare at the vial. The drafts continuously rushing in through the door sliced through the silence between them like scissors.
"How did you get this?" Meyer asked, eyes still fixed on the vial. "You don't often see houses here plagued by insect infestations." He turned his gaze to the deathly love dancing in Justin's bright green eyes.
Justin spoke. "Why should I answer that question?"
"Why not?" Meyer took the vial in his hand without breaking eye contact. "Are you using illegal materials? Actually, it's quite a good development that these days people can request police inspections for shops."
He placed the vial back on the table.
Justin bared his teeth as he spoke. "Are you threatening me?"
"No, no. Not at all," said Meyer with a smile. "Just making friendly conversation."
"How ridiculous of you to stand up to me without a single weapon!" Justin reached for his belt without sitting down.
Meyer saw the glint of the weapon's handle.
"That must be a real gun," he said in a dry tone.
Justin nodded and drew the gun from his belt, slamming it onto the table. "Now the gun winks at both of us. In situations like this, someone always gets hurt."
Meyer was exhausted from trying to figure out what Justin was trying to do. Was he regretting coming here? He didn't know.
"You won't let me understand your true intentions. But every truth is eventually revealed. Expensively. Now let me make the payment."
In response to Meyer's resolute words, Justin picked up the gun on the table and started to play with it.
"You're not afraid, Steve Meyer."
"Just Meyer."
"Okay, Meyer, do you need the gun to actually go off to feel fear? I'm not crazy. Do I look crazy to you?" Justin tilted his head with skeptical curiosity.
Meyer raised a single eyebrow, rolling his tongue inside his mouth. A kind of boredom masquerading as stalling.
In that brief moment, while Justin was fiddling with the gun, Meyer had a chance to closely examine his face.
Was there something familiar in that face?
"What do you want from me?" His voice cut through the sharp contest of the environment and threw it aside.
Justin stood up, gun in hand. "Do you think this show I'm putting on stems from something irrational?"
"..."
"Well, what I'm saying is... For this antidote to activate, someone has to die. Slash! Do we cut a throat or pull a nail? The answer lies in neither. From which dark corridor within us do we pluck a piece of apple?" In his green eyes, a flicker of light like tree branches swaying in the wind.
It belonged to a poem.
"From which dark corridor within us do we pluck a piece of apple?"
Meyer tried to remember the rest of the poem.
"To die, instead of drinking blood from the whip of summer beauty,
A beautiful evening, with branches crackling,
To die, waiting for morning's escape,
To die—
To die like death itself."
He hadn't read this poem anywhere, no. It hadn't caught his eye either. Who had said these words to him?
In the dark room that suddenly appeared in his mind, a girl with pink eyes lay on a bed, looking at him. A sleepy night. Ecstasy at its peak. A gambling table. Everything seemed chained to death.
"Who are you?" Meyer asked through clenched teeth. Justin's flickering image before him was tearing him apart. How could a stranger reopen such a familiar wound? "What do you want from me?"
Now his heart had begun to skip beats. There was a weight in his body.
"All I want is for you to kill one of us."
The answer poured down on him like boiling water.
"W-what will you gain?" Meyer's voice trembled for the first time in a long while. He swayed like a cradle.
Justin said, "Kill me," and extended the gun. Then Meyer saw a kind of alarm in those moss-colored eyes.
He had surrendered.
He had handed over the gun.
He had left himself defenseless.
Meyer averted his eyes from the table. For a moment, he shut them as if to save them from everything. Sweat trickled down from where his hair met his forehead. It spread across the fine lines of his face.
If he didn't kill him, what then? Would there be another threat? Another gun? "Kill me," said Justin and murmured, "I must see my child again."
"If you don't, then I'll kill you." Justin immediately reached for his belt and drew another gun. He pointed it at Meyer's vulnerable-looking body.
All these movements felt like a rehearsed stage play. Planned and controlled.
No doubt.
Meyer felt the gun was foreign to him. But death... it wasn't.
If I kill this guy, I'll go to jail, he thought.
"Your real fear isn't killing me," said Justin as he sat back in the chair, full of confidence. "What you're truly afraid of is going to jail."
Meyer shivered, his voice fleeing into himself.
"You double-faced people only fear consequences. Don't comfort yourselves with your conscience—it's a weary shadow, a cloud."
Why did this man speak like poetry?
"Kill me..." The voice tore through Meyer's helpless ears. Like a bullet. "And leave me to myself. To grief's chest, its arms, and its legs."
Meyer felt his hand reaching for the gun involuntarily.
The grip was cold, chilling, and terrifying.
The trigger so close, and himself so distant.
His fingers trembled, eyelids twitched. As if to block his sight.
"If you don't kill me, I'll kill you. Is that what you want? Why is this so hard for you, Steve Meyer?"
Meyer now felt so numb he couldn't even be bothered by the use of "Steve." He tasted the sour adrenaline spreading from his gut to his body.
"Let your past accompany you..."
"My past?" Meyer muttered in a barely audible voice.
Justin said, "All you have to do is pull the trigger," in a determined tone. A smile blending madness and captivity appeared on his face. Was he someone who surrendered to fate or someone who defied God?
"Don't you have the courage to do it yourself?" Meyer challenged one last time.
He felt the strength in his fingers and every part of his body draining away.
Justin stood across from him, not blinking. "Do you?"
Meyer raised the gun because he could feel the conviction in the weapon pointed at him.
What he was fighting wasn't just the decision to kill or not. It was himself... His darkest parts. Justin's confusing words. Let your past accompany you—what did that mean?
What had happened in the past?
He thought of the email he had received. The message claiming to be from the future.
Would you like to remember the future?
He took a deep breath and swallowed.
Everything had gone dark.
The only thing dancing in the vial on the table was the shadow of death.
He tightened his finger on the trigger.
His whole body shook.
BANG!
He had made just one decision.
Justin's body staggered backward in the chair. An inertia fell over his wide-open eyes. The hand holding the gun slowly dropped.
THUD!
He hit the floor.
What would happen now?
Meyer heard the cheerful chatter of passersby from the neighborhood.
He listened silently for two minutes.
In Justin's moss-colored eyes, there was undoubtedly a moment of reunion.
He lay on the ground, driven by an urge belonging only to the dead.
"A death like a poem," Meyer said and felt his left eye moisten. A fear merged with the wetness collecting on his lashes. He took the vial from the table and slipped it into his pocket.
The merciless and daring voice of the Devil Chip pierced his mind.[You've completed the tasks successfully. Take a look at your phone.]
With trembling hands, Meyer placed the gun on the table and opened the phone screen.
[The organs of the little boy named Tony have given life to Frank Cut.]
Tony… the child he never managed to get to the hospital.
Time had stopped in that moment. Everything slowed down. Only silence remained.
Just like now.
Meyer couldn't comprehend what he was seeing. Still, not a single word fell from his lips.
[Don't you want to return to the future? To where you belong…]
He couldn't move. He didn't understand anything.
Then something made his legs tremble.
A shadow appeared at the door.
A pair of high heels.
Then the shop door creaked open.
His heart pounded with terror as he saw the familiar eyes of the person entering. Pink...
It was Emma.
How was he going to explain this to her now?
Emma walked in, and though she smelled the blood, she didn't react at all.
Only one word left her lips:
"Let's go."