Life is Strange, page 17
Everything around us, everything Biggs has cultivated here, is dying.
I turn back to him and reach my hand out to him, acting like I’m trying to keep him at bay.
But I’m in.
I’m standing in a hospital room, and I immediately remember standing beside my mom as she squeezes my hand as hard as she can—I barely feel it—but no, this isn’t my memory. It’s the memory of Griffin Biggs. And there he sits, cradling a tiny, tiny bundle wrapped in pink. He’s facing away from me, shoulders trembling as he rocks back and forth.
“Griffy,” comes a voice from nearby. A gentle voice, much like Clover’s, but slightly older, smoother. I look to the hospital bed, where I find a woman in her forties with messy dark waves of hair falling over her shoulder. She opens her eyes groggily and moves her hands to sit up.
“How is she?” she asks him. He sits, frozen, staring back at her. “How’s our little girl?”
My heart is thundering in the silence, so hard that it feels like the loudest thing in the room.
Wisteria’s eyes wander from Biggs to the bundle, and then back up. Her smile falls.
“Honey?” she asks.
And I’m back.
I feel my cheeks wet with tears, and I look up at the gun pointed at my face, at the man holding it, at that blue aura around his head.
“The greatest,” I repeat, searching for words, “the greatest sorrows. But, Mayor Biggs, you have twelve of life’s greatest joys, don’t you? And thirteen reasons to put the gun down, and do the right thing.”
Biggs’ eyes dart from me to Clover behind me, and then back to my eyes, his wild and crazy.
“Fourteen,” thunders Clover from behind me, hand over her middle. She steps out from behind me, behind my wall of protection, and in front of me and Steph, staring down her own father.
“Clover—” I say.
“It’s okay, Alex, I know what I’m doing,” she assures me, glancing over her shoulder with a faint smile, weary and sad.
“Look around you, Daddy,” Clover says. “We grew up here. This is our home. You taught us to fight for what matters. For what we believe in. Well, I believe in Barbazal.”
I feel Steph reach forward and grab my hand, squeezing tightly, her fingers trembling in mine. I turn and pull her close against me, both of us still behind Clover.
“Alex,” Steph says, and she doesn’t have to say more. I understand. There are so many things I could say to her right now—I love you? I’m scared too? I’m sorry?
“I know,” I say, burying my face in her neck as I hear Clover continue.
“You can’t just uproot us all,” she hisses, “some of us literally.”
I hear a movement of fabric and realize she’s probably gesturing to the magnolia.
“Now,” she says, defiantly. I feel her hand rest on my shoulder. “You’re going to put the gun down, and you’re going to let these two lovely ladies go on to Fort Collins, where they can play their music and change the world for the better.”
I feel a gentle squeeze on my shoulder.
“They’ve already changed Barbazal’s.”
I look up at Clover in absolute shock.
What?
In a single day, I sent her little sister to the hospital, outed her boyfriend-baby-daddy as a low-life politician-ass-kissing sellout, and provoked her father to commit at least one felony.
Well, I guess that last one’s still unproven in court. Still, the first two would be offense enough to shoot me herself.
But I study her smile and realize something.
I guess Clover really does value the truth above all else. All else.
“Hrgh!” growls Mayor Biggs, shaking the gun at the three of us.
Clover spreads her arms to shield me and Steph and whispers… “Stay behind me.”
Slowly, Clover begins to walk backwards, and we move with her.
“Clover!” exclaims Biggs, his voice gruff and unrecognizable as the buttery-voiced, warm-smiling man who told Steph and me all about Augustus Jeremiah Oscar Rhett Barbazal, II, back at the statue. “Just where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“I’m leaving, Daddy,” she says, her once strong voice now soft, yet sure.
We look ridiculous, I’m sure, like something out of a silent film, Steph and I huddled behind Clover, who walks backwards, shielding us as we make our way to the other side of the backyard, around the side of the house, and to the front yard.
We continue our shuffle across the circular front driveway and down the hill until…
Mayor Biggs, now maybe thirty feet away from us, standing up on his front porch, gun at his side, studies us.
“You’re not going anywhere easily,” he growls. I can hear the shaking in his voice.
It sends a chill through me. The hell is he doing? What does he know that he’s not saying?
And then I look behind us at the tree line, and I remember that it’s at least a mile walk downhill into town.
“Clover,” whispers Steph when we reach the steps leading down from the property and stop. “What does he mean?”
I glance over at the trees again, knowing what comes next. “Run,” whispers Clover to us, and suddenly we’re all bounding down the hill, dodging trees and roots and sticks, rocketing through the forest like our lives depend on it.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Ffft, crunches an explosion of leaves to my right, and the realization sinks in.
These aren’t warning shots.
15: Biggs
Purple explodes through the air, emanating from all three of us, hot and scathing like a nuclear blast. Violet knives rain from the sky, searing through my flesh as every ounce of adrenaline in my body surges forth.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!” screams Steph. “Is he really trying to fucking kill us?!”
Bang!
Bark splinters away from a tree to my left, sending shards of wood cascading over my head.
I scream, startled, and trip, my hands finding jagged earth. Steph is under my arm in seconds, hauling me to my feet. We run on.
Bang!
“Is he planning on chasing us all the way into town?!” I scream.
“Just to the end of the property line!” hollers Clover. I hear the implied I hope at the end of that sentence, but I shake my head and run on. There’s an I hope thundering through my chest right now too.
I force whatever power I have left in my body into my legs. I run for Steph. I run for me. I run for Barbazal. I run for the car, and my guitar, and Steph’s drum kit, and our gig tonight. We can make it. We can all make it.
We just have to show the world the truth.
The end of the tree line glows with brilliant midday sunlight, and I sprint for the finish line. Steph and Clover bolt into the open field past the trees, and I follow, my fingers grazing the last tree when…
Bang!
The force hits me first. Like a wayward branch snapping free from a tree and knocking me forward.
“Alex!” I hear Steph scream from somewhere that feels far away. So far away. I see her turn, and everything fades into slow motion. “Alex, oh my god!”
I hit the ground so hard and fast, I don’t have time to think.
Pain explodes through my right calf, and I wonder, through the foggy haze clouding my mind, whether my leg is gone entirely. I blink my eyes open, my eyelashes crunching against the leaves. And suddenly, my arms are lifted, and then the rest of me.
“Dammit, Clover, move out of the way!”
“I won’t, Daddy! I’m leaving and there’s nothing you can do about it!”
“You’re…”
His voice is softer somewhere behind me now. Sadder. Heavier. I can put weight on my left leg. I test the ground with it, hard and sturdy and water-deprived. I test my right leg.
Nope.
I go down.
Or at least, I would have, if Steph and Clover hadn’t been under each arm to stabilize me.
“It’s her calf,” comes Steph’s voice. “We have to get her to a hospital.”
“Closest one’s in Strathmaugh.”
“How far is that?” asks Steph.
“Twenty minutes.”
“I hope you know how to make a tourniquet,” says Steph, as she and Clover hobble me forward.
“I didn’t join JROTC to stare out a window,” smiles Clover.
I look over my shoulder at Mayor Biggs one last time, a blue aura christening his head, thin and fragile, falling in streams around him and running down my arms and legs like water. His arms go limp at his side, and he drops the gun at his feet. It tumbles over itself down the hill until it comes to rest in the grass under some leaves. His face is tear-stained, his eyes wincing in what looks like physical pain.
I know that look. I remember that look from when Dad got the phone call from the hospital. The last one we’d ever get, about Mom. I remember that look from the mirror, after Gabe died.
Clover lets go of my arm and scrambles to grab the gun. At first, I think she might fire it right back at her dad, but to my relief, she clicks the safety on and shoves the gun into the back of her jeans.
“Clover,” he whimpers, “please. Where are you going?”
I expect Clover to tell him to fuck off, or tell him she’s going to Denver to start a new life with Jonah, or with herself, or whomever. But she doesn’t say any of that.
She doesn’t say anything.
“Clover!” he now hollers. And then…
…he lunges at us.
“Alex!” he grunts as he bounds down the hill.
“Holy shit, run!” hollers Steph. But of course, between Steph and Clover holding me up, and me without the use of my—holy shit, now that I notice it, my whole calf and foot feel wet, I hope that isn’t—a strong pair of arms grips my leg, and I go down.
“Please,” he cries.
“Get off me!” I holler, kicking my good leg wildly under his grip. I shuffle backward through the leaves and sticks and grass.
“Please, you have to listen!” he cries. I stop.
His teeth are gritted, his eyes clamped shut. He’s breathing like he’s just run a marathon when I’m the one that’s been shot.
I’m about to start kicking at him again, but then I notice his aura.
It’s no longer blue. It’s… purple. Brilliant, sharp purple, sharp as swords, growing up from the ground, unavoidable and deadly.
Mayor Biggs is scared to death of something he can’t outrun. Of what? Losing Clover? Probably.
My safety? Not likely. He’s the one who fucking shot me, after all.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” he says, lowering his voice to almost a whisper.
“Oh yes she fucking can,” spits Steph, squatting and scooping my arm into hers. I look up at her with a look that I hope is apologetic and also pleading.
“Wait, Steph,” I say.
I look back to Biggs, whose face by now is twisted into a grimace of despair.
He hesitantly peels his fingers away from my good leg, and for the very first time, I get a good look at my bad leg. It’s soaked red. Blood has seeped through my jeans, my socks, my shoes.
I feel the blood rushing away from my head, and everything starts rotating. Suddenly Steph’s arms are under both of mine, and she kneels beside me, cradling me against her.
“I’m good,” I say. “Just a little dizzy.”
It’s not a lie—I am good—but I’m also grateful I can’t see the back of my own calf from this angle. I don’t want to know what it looks like.
Clover doesn’t waste a second. She shoots her father a scathing glance and kneels beside me, untying the sweater from around her waist and tying the sleeves around my leg, just above the knee. She picks up a nearby branch, cracks it across her knee, and slips one half under the tie, twisting and twisting.
“Hey!” I call out. “Does it have to be that tight?!”
“If you don’t want to bleed out,” says Steph.
“It’s not that serious,” analyzes Clover. “Looks like it went clean through. Most of the bleeding has stopped. But we can’t be too careful until we can get you to a hospital.”
She glares at her father again, who’s now kneeling and staring down at his own hands, open, palms up, shoulders trembling as he cries.
“You’d better get to talkin’,” hisses Clover. “Thanks to you, Alex doesn’t have all day.”
He sniffs, drags his arm across his eyes and nose, and looks up at me like a child begging forgiveness for breaking their parent’s favorite vase.
“Alex,” he says, “you have to understand. This job… the title of mayor,” his voice practically sings the word, “is more than a job to me.”
He takes so long to continue, at first I wonder if he’s waiting for me to respond. He clenches his fist, that purple aura as vibrant as ever.
“That all you had to say?” asks Clover, cold as ice.
But I stare at that aura, and I know, beyond anything, there’s more he wishes he could say. And why can’t he?
I reach out, and I’m in.
I’m standing again, which is strange, both legs perfectly intact. I’m back in that living room with the green chairs, the TV on across the room, with the ferns and the vines and the foliage sprouting from baseboards and windows and couches, flowers now blooming from every piece of greenery in the room. Garlands of pink and purple blooms burst from every inch of the vines now. Petals rain down from the ceiling, and everywhere, people cheer, throwing hats in the air and popping champagne. A dozen little girls chase each other around with red, white and blue party poppers, and a couple squarely in front of the TV share an embrace and a warm kiss, smiles tugging at their lips, each of their heads encircled with a daisy chain. A few vines creep up from the floor and wrap tenderly around their feet and ankles, knitting them together. She rests her hand against his cheek before pulling away and beaming up at him.
“You did it, Griffy,” she laughs, a huge yellow lily tucked behind her ear. “You’re the mayor of Barbazal.”
He takes her hands warmly in his, and it’s then that I notice the single joyful tear rolling down his cheek.
“We did it, Wisteria.”
And then, royal purple explodes through the room, whipping right through me like a winter chill as every flower, every vine, every leaf, curls up on itself and withers away into brown, mangled death. Biggs’ eyes tear away from his wife as he looks around.
“No,” he pleads.
The girls, one by one, sink into chairs, collapse onto the floor, exhausted, eyes fluttering as they’re overcome with sudden fatigue. They are literally wilting.
“Daddy?” asks one of the youngest.
“What’s happening?” asks another.
Biggs watches helplessly as his precious daughters wilt around him, and then, finally, Wisteria’s eyes flutter shut. She collapses forward into his arms, and he scrambles to cradle her.
“Darling?! Darling, no!”
My fingertips freeze, and then my hands, and my arms follow, as the world around me rushes past in a vortex until…
…I’m sitting on the rock-hard ground among the leaves and the sticks, my tourniqueted leg pulsing with pain, and in front of me, a heartbroken shell of a man—Mayor Biggs—kneels, tears dripping from his chin.
“It’s all I have left,” he says. “Please, you have to understand.”
Clover stands, arms folded, dead silent as her father pours his heart out to me.
“You can’t take that away from me,” he says with a sniff. “Please.”
“She didn’t,” says Steph. “You took it away from yourself when you threatened us, and when you shot Alex!”
“I know,” he whimpers. “I know, and you’d be well within your right to go straight to the authorities, but I… I have to ask… your mercy.”
“You want us to keep quiet?” asks Clover. “After all of this? Daddy, you need help.”
“What do you expect, huh?” he asks, raising his hands to gesture all around us. “When my girls all left home, and the two left despise me.”
“Daddy, I don’t—” says Clover, softening, but she straightens again suddenly. “Don’t make yourself the victim here. This isn’t about you or your job or how you pushed your own family away after Mama died.”
Damn.
That would be a knife in the heart of any family man. But Mayor Biggs’ aura stays purple.
And that tells me all I need to know.
“Mayor Biggs,” I begin, and all eyes turn to me, the center of this discussion. I guess since I’m the one who took the bullet, I’m the one who gets to decide whether to report the injury. “I’ve met people like you before. People who choose their career over their families.”
I remember Dad, dragging himself through the front door after a long day at his dead-end job, too tired to even eat, let alone prepare something for Gabe and me. And certainly not the way Mom did. She used to make fried rice and lo mein, if only I’d have the rice ready by the time she got home from work. Mom wasn’t living at home anymore by then, at the hospital for days, weeks, months, and finally, we learned, forever. But I kept making the rice, hoping she’d walk through that door until that last call from the hospital.
And once she was gone, most nights, the rice was all we had for dinner.
And then all we had in the house.
Gabe was furious.
“She’s a kid! How the hell is she supposed to build a body and grow up strong if she doesn’t have food, Dad?”
“You watch your tone! Don’t you think I’m doing everything I can? Working extra hours? Working faster? Leaving before you’re even up, back after you’re supposed to be in bed?”
And finally, when he realized he couldn’t do it anymore,
“Someone will come. That woman from CPS. Someone. I’m sorry.”
He left.
Even if it was in self-preservation it didn’t hurt any less.
As I stare at Mayor Biggs, I feel tears burn my eyes.
“People who throw themselves into something, anything else, to cover up the pain of their past. Even if it means neglecting the ones they love, abandoning what was once the most important thing to them.”
