District 42-Chapter 87: Contacting outsiders

Casper woke up at the infirmary again. When he did, he wished he didn’t. Just existing made him want to vomit everything he had in his stomach, and he was pretty sure that he already did this some time ago when asleep.

The soldier noticed that there was some kind of respirator in his face, helping him to breathe properly. It was when he realized that he couldn’t breathe in and out as easily as he would usually. His lungs were ok, the problem was that they did not obey what his mind told them to do.

"Did forgets breath?" He thought and felt like he stated something wrong, but he was so dizzy that he could not help but brush it off.

Casper tried to think about what was going on, and the reasons why the symptoms he had. It took a while for him to remember that he went to the Dark zone again.

"Probraby am ill agan." The memories of those awkward situations when he was mind-blanked started to fill his head. He felt like stopping it, because the more his mind got full of thoughts, the more it became achy. But it came to a point where he could not stop it.

He started to groan and squirm the body, feeling unbearable pain. His eyes were watering and his breath got even harder.

He wasn’t in the place at the infirmary where the beds were lined and in the same room. He was in a singular room, alone. Not even a single nurse around.

He knew that it had some way to call them, but he didn’t remember where it was, and even if he did he could not, because of the weird state of his body.

"Den it! Can’t move my..." He tried to raise his arms, legs, or whatever else. Casper needed to make noises or something to draw attention from someone passing in the corridor when they walked there.

However, his body just kept squirming on top of the bed. His pain just increased even more. And every time that he moaned in suffer, he would lose more oxygen and get two times as tired, worse was when he tried to scream.

After a long while suffering alone, someone entered into the run and rushed to check on him. It was a young nurse that he knew from his days pretending to be crazy. She was a good person after you got to know her, maybe a bit frivolous.

"Casper, stop! Stop for a while, I need you to calm yourself down, so I can ease your pain. Stop already, please!" She was holding his arms and trying to stop his legs to shake. However, Casper’s movements became more stiff and strong as long as she kept trying to stop them.

She needed to call another nurse to help her out, and hold Casper.

The young nurse took a syringe from her pocket. It was pretty small and had a short needle. She injected it on him quickly, on his left arm, then waited for some minutes, still holding the soldier and saying kind words to make him calm down.

After that, his breath got steady, his mind wasn’t in pain anymore and his body stopped moving on its own.

"Thanks..." He thanked, after taking his breath for a while.

The nurse nodded for him, patting him on the arm.

"Don’t worry, it’s our job, Casper. I will take someone to be by your side until you can, at least, move to press the ring button beside your bed, ok?" He tried to nod, but his neck wasn’t moving, so he replied as louder as he could.

The nurse smiled with her eyes for a moment, sort of trying to comfort him, but Casper knew that nothing was good at all.

His mind was getting back to normal. He was pretty sure that it had something to do with the injection. His thoughts were coming very slowly, but accurately. And, during this process of recovering, he could reason better each second.

It was something good, but as long as he kept thinking about the situation he was in, it looked worst each time.

"That fat man... He is blackmailing me, right? I see..." He tried to sigh, but his lungs were still insisting in disobey his commands. "It will be hard to work with this hindrance in my way, but now that he could discover about me and my plan, I need to keep his mouth shut at the same time I find a way to erase him..."

Casper wasn’t the chaotic type. He did crazy things to the extent necessary for the intensity of the situation he was in. Indeed, he was willing to vanish that Principal, but as much as it may seem extreme, it was necessary. That man was dangerous.

"I don’t like to kill people so lightly, but there are the ones who deserve this."

Now that his body was getting his commands better, he started to turn his head to the left and then to the right to see the location he was in.

As he expected, there was nothing much in that room. Apparently, no one would enter so soon in there since he just got an injection, and people in District 42 trusted a lot on the efficiency of their medicine.

Casper tried to search in his clothes, and in the end, he found it. Thankfully, no one had noticed the smartphone hidden with him.

"I know that hid it under my underwear is practical, but it’s not still..." He was happy and disgusted at the same time.

Casper got the smartphone, searched on the list that Olaf had written down to him in the notepad, and tried to call. As he had seen, the signal there was indeed pretty good.

"Hello?" An annoyed voice responded on another side of the call after a couple of rings, apparently sleepy.

"Katarina?"

"C-Casper!? How!?" She yelled, and Casper needed to move the phone away from the ear because her annoying voice was making his heartache came back.

"L-Listen, Katarina, it doesn’t matter at all how I did it, the important thing is that I am contacting you now, and I need your help." He spoke, quickly.

Katarina seemed to understand well the situation, because she fell silent there, waiting for him to say.

"I am going to escape from this prison, meanwhile I need to prove that I am innocent. For this, I will need your help."

"I... I don’t know, Casper... What you have done is a lot dangerous and bold to be an accident or misunderstanding."

Obviously, she was hesitant. Casper predicted so, and be prepared something for it.

"Do you remember those lots of times when I got out from our laboratory and avoided one of the conditions of our deal: the researching and study you would do in me?"

"Yes." She replied quickly.

"While having contact with some of the scientists here in the Third Lab, I discovered some strange things. I tried to report to you, but someone noticed my movements. Her name was Catrina and, in name of the Main Lab, she tricked me and give me the mission to investigate the Third Lab further..." Casper was trying to make his best frustrated and dejected voice, and put enough details in the story.

"And it ended up being just like I thought. These scientists and Ridires are just crazy! The researchings are inhuman! And I had, and still have, a way to prove it. However, Catrina tricked me, and enjailed me, accusing me from invade the Third Lab on my own."

"Where do you got enjailed? And what’s proof you have? I hope that’s something more than just words, Casper, because I will be the one taking responsibility for it if I will actually help you."

Casper smiled, or tried to smile, since his face was stiff. He was aware of the grudge that Katarina had against the people from the Third Lab. That woman would grasp every advantage she could to process them and make them return all the patents for the inventions they stole the last year.

"Ok, listen. Do you know what’s Halden?"

"Yes. It’s an urban myth among the Labs, but no one can find this place, not even in the sheets of the Third Lab’s complex."

Casper thought that it was a good thing to know. He had expected that Halden would be a secret place, but he was not sure of how many people knew about it. Maybe just the most influential Jarls and employees from the prison.

"So, I have to say that this isn’t a myth because I am in Halden now. I don’t know which prison they told I am in, but it’s probably a fake one."

He heard Katarina getting agitated in the line, probably willing to ask a lot of things, but holding herself.

"And there is one more thing. Halden isn’t exactly a prison, but a place where they maintain criminals as guinea pigs and use them for experiments destined to combat and Belic power... Also... I have proofs with me, and we will be escaping from here together."

"What I need to do?" She asked, promptly.

"It’s good to have you by my side. Now, take a pencil and a paper and write it down, I don’t know how much time I have left, so I will need to be quick. What you will do is..."