Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 475; The Dead and the Surviving

Henry appeared behind me, a stair higher, and while combing through my hair tenderly, he looked around as well.

In the end, he motioned to the cement ground.

"He is buried inside?"

"I guess... We are the only ones here, no living Patrick, no rooms in which he could be..."

"And no cameras." Henry pointed up with one hand while still combing through my hair with the other.

These 20-meter-high steel ceilings had a bunch of sockets embedded in them, but there were no actual cameras in there; instead, there hung some cables out as if they had been ripped out.

"Creepy," I mumbled before taking a few steps down, looking at the cement ground the stairs led to.

Henry came beside me and crouched down to touch the floor carefully while I slowly stepped on it with the tip of my shoe.

I... don’t even know what exactly we both were expecting to happen to not simply step on it and behave so cautiously. It turned out to be ordinary dried concrete, nothing that would give in and gobble us up.

I chuckled while stepping onto it.

Henry also laughed and straightened up to stand beside me.

"Okay, let’s see where he is." I flipped the coin in my head, using it as a compass.

Stepping forward, I saw that one of the hands covering the woman on the coin retracted.

"Follow me," I didn’t have to say; the puppy was glued to my side anyway, and after taking a few steps, he started with the questioning.

"Why did you operate on that man?"

"He looked as if he were dying," I said, walking further forward.

Without our supersight, it would be disturbing as hell with the sound of our steps echoing in this empty hall that only consisted of massive steel beams every twenty meters.

"Just because of that?" Henry asked, a bit annoyed but sounding as if he had already known that I would say that.

"However, it came with an unexpected gain." Further forward, more arms on the coin rose, telling me we were going in the right direction.

"What?"

"The grenades you took from the gang house—there were a bunch of other weapons, right?"

"Yes, containers full of them. Why?"

I recounted how Armless fell unconscious, how I operated on him, and how I got the visions together with the content of them, not leaving the assassination request out.

"Ha!" Henry bellowed, hearing the murder part, the echo of his exclamation reverberating a few times.

When I was finished with describing the offer I made to Armless, the hands on the coin stopped moving.

So I stepped back—no movement—and turned to my side—movement.

I grabbed Henry’s wrist to go left.

"How sure are you he won’t try to kill you?"

"A hundred percent, I saw him willing to cooperate; besides, he wouldn’t be able to kill me even if he managed to shove me off the building."

"They gave him two weeks to kill you?" Henry asked, and I nodded while continuing to go and flip.

"And we’ll leave in three days, only after the first week is up. And there is even an unsupervised weekend in between the two—wait, do we have to work on the weekends?" I turned and looked up at Henry in horror.

"I... don’t... know..." Henry’s expression grew even worse than before.

"Fuck," I brought my hand over my face.

Would they give us two days off when their only purpose was to act out occupational therapy with dumb tasks that were more or less supervised?

I mean, do we get work off on holidays during the apocalypse??

Probably not, right?

Then why weekends? If there was no work on the weekend, the people wouldn’t get the food from the government and would starve—so why would anyone besides us even want a free weekend if it meant no food and no water?

Damn it!!!

And if we didn’t show up Saturday or Sunday, wouldn’t that immediately alarm them?

"Ethan..." Henry murmured in the end, and I nodded.

"Yeah, he probably knows about this and has a solution." Now that this devastating discovery has been thrown at Ethan, even if he is not aware of it at this moment, we can concentrate on the matter at hand.

The coin was precise and fast; there was no need to change directions more than two times in total before all the arms covering the woman had retracted, and she gave her usual creepy-as-fuck grin.

"Alright." I crouched down and knocked against the concrete we stood on before looking up at Henry.

"Can you use the... power of destruction slowly and gently so as not to damage the corpse or something?"

Henry chuckled, pleased that I was using the cringy name again.

"Will you promise me not to flip the coin no matter what corpses we find?"

I rolled my eyes but nodded in the end.

"I told you I can control whether I look into the past or the future."

He crouched down beside me and laid his hand against the concrete.

"Yes, but just today you received a vision you didn’t initiate." He gave me a glance that said he wasn’t kidding.

Damn, I shouldn’t have told him how I got the vision from Armless, though it wasn’t remotely the same as involuntarily looking into the future of a corpse contrary to the past, but whatever.

I nodded again, telling him to hurry up.

His palm soon sank into the concrete, with shadowy energy escaping at the sides. He moved slowly, wiping the surface with his hands, shedding it centimeter by centimeter.

Fuck. This will take forever.

I held onto his arm and flipped the coin in my mind—the hands had already been back in position, covering the woman.

"I’ll tell you when to stop," I told Henry, and with him using more of the shadowy energy and the coin used as a compass, it went much faster.

And luckily we used this method, because even though we had made a one-by-one meter deep hole, there was still nothing but concrete.

Henry leaned suddenly forward to look at the wall inside the hole that was closest to us.

"Look."

I changed my position, discovering that there was a hole around fifty centimeters into the hole we made but didn’t notice.

However, the coin didn’t indicate it to be Sebastian.

I reached down and pulled the corpse out as far as possible, trying to get it up to the concrete.

With Henry’s help, we eventually managed without damaging it that much.

The corpse had already significantly decomposed, more a skeleton than a human, but there was still flesh here and there.

"Well, they wouldn’t set up such a big concrete graveyard just for Sebastian," I said, and Henry agreed.

The skeleton had a bullet hole in his head, execution-style.

Already having a suspicion, I pulled the still-intact sleeves of a hospital gown up and really found an admission bracelet.

"That’s the hospital on the internet site, which one should go visit if one has symptoms," Henry scoffed.

"Yeah, we have now confirmed how exactly they helped their patients."

That was when I saw something moving in the corpse’s eye socket, a small pink worm wriggling up.

It wasn’t a normal worm.

"Henry." As soon as I finished calling him, he had already acidified the worm, together with the rest of the corpse, before he pulled me away.

"A mass grave covered in concrete only for the worms to survive? They didn’t manage to come up with something better?" He snorted.

"Hmmm, the worm stayed small, though."

"Burning would have been better."

"But burning corpses leaves behind signs, right? Like constant smoke or something?" I asked him, and he shrugged.

He forced me behind him, so to see what was going on in that hole, I latched onto his back, holding onto his crouched figure.

With my face against his, I commented,

"No wonder you constantly do that; it’s comfortable."

"It is, isn’t it?" He laughed, his mood lifted again, as he nuzzled the side of my face while still utilizing the shadowy power to deepen the hole.

The first corpse was clearly an anomaly, as it was close to the surface, but that didn’t mean that there were no more corpses—on the contrary.

After breaking through the one-and-a-half-meter mark, the corpses were literally stacked over each other.

Henry had already acidified through a few stacked corpses before we even noticed—because the coin still did not show the creepy grin, meaning we had not reached Sebastian and that he was beneath them.

After a short pause in which we stared at the ribcages protruding from one wall of the hole and calf bones sticking out from the opposite wall, Henry continued.

Only when we reached the two-meter mark did the woman show her creepy smile.

"Stop."

Along a thin layer of concrete and remains of bones on top that had been acidified, we saw white fabric underneath.

The fabric looked like the clothes from the center.

"I’ll go." Henry stood up cautiously so that I had enough time to remove my hands from his neck before he jumped into the hole.

He used his power to dig out Sebastian’s remains, and his corpse was in a relatively good state.

His face was unrecognizable, with too much flesh gone from that area, but part of his shoulder-length hair was still attached, making him identifiable.

I reached my hand down, and Henry chuckled and took it to jump back up with our new passenger on board.

He held Sebastian as far away as possible so that he wouldn’t be near me; it was just that the way he did it was like carrying a bag of trash.

"He will break like this; hold him properly or give him over," I said while raising my arms, but Henry rummaged through his pockets before pulling out... something like a plastic band used to span between two sticks to mark the beginning of a construction site.

Henry put Sebastian on the ground before binding the band around his neck, even making a ribbon.

Then he looked at me mischievously but also a bit proudly, waiting for praise.

I suppressed a laugh and looked at him helplessly.

"Yeah, I can remember you saying you would put a ribbon on his corpse. Still, you want to traumatize that poor girl even more?"

"Poor girl? And what about us being traumatized? Yet she still demanded his corpse be presented in front of her! Are we her lackeys?"

I nodded along.

"You don’t look especially traumatized."

He hugged himself before deadpanning.

"I am. I am so affected by what I saw today; I feel PTSD knocking."

I finally burst into laughter and saw his imaginary tail wagging happily at that.

Alright, just let him play around; a corpse is a corpse—it doesn’t get much worse anyway.

When I got a grip, I looked back down in that hole; we couldn’t leave it like that, especially if there were still a few surviving worms inside.

"I’ll get plaster from the construction site."

I told him, and before he could say that he would go, I commanded him to wait before I teleported.

We had quite a hole, two meters deep and one meter in width and length, so I had to go a few times to get us a bunch of plaster and water to mix it with.

I didn’t want to conjure it up after touching it, to not risk it breaking or something or components disappearing back into the past.

In the end, I showed off my skills in mixing the water and the plaster, and Henry applauded readily while he always had Sebastian’s corpse in view to check on any escaping worms that may have found their way inside him when buried in the mass grave.

Anyway, hyped up by the cheering audience, the mixing got done soon, and the first batch got in the hole, filling it a discouraging tenth.

So mixing the next big barrel and throwing it inside, I ignored Henry’s constant offers to help because I honestly loved the way he was fangirling all over me.

In the end, the hole was filled up, and I again felt as if I had clocked out at the end of a day just to continue working.

Maybe it’s a sign for me to really go into construction work.

My resume now has building walls and filling mass graves.

Fucking lovely.

"So sexy~" Henry purred and again applauded when I gestured to the filled hole with a ’ta-da’ motion.

I turned away and chuckled.

"Can you get rid of that?" I pointed at the barrels, and Henry swiftly moved.

"Now we have to wait a bit until it dries up. I don’t want any worms wiggling through the wet plaster."

The best would be to acidify the whole mass grave to make sure to get rid of any worms; however... why the fuck should we?

Only Henry was able to do that, and I won’t overwork or weaken my puppy for the shitty, illegal, and disturbing mass grave in a city that would soon get abandoned.

"Mhm~" Henry didn’t seem to mind, glancing at my handiwork while still watching out for the corpse.

I pulled him back a bit and sat down, leaning against him.

He asked for disinfectant, so I conjured one up, and after using it all over his hands, he again combed through my hair.

"Do you know how many plaster crumbs you got in your hair?" He laughed.

"Still sexy?" I smirked while using the disinfectant myself.

"Always. And I uncovered a new hobby: delousing you." He laughed and pulled out one of the little crumbs."

"Pfft, feel free. But don’t eat them."

Henry giggled happily, and while watching over the corpse, I asked myself what I could conjure up to transport him properly.

"A clothing bag? These black ones?" I conjured one up and showed it to Henry.

He nodded while continuing with delousing.

"He will fit in just right."

"Perfect. I still want to see what is up there." I turned around to look at the staircase.

"Let’s take a look before we go."

After waiting about an hour and seeing no worms escaping the hole or the corpse, we were ready to go.

"That was a good grooming." I said while standing up and touching my nearly crumb-free hair.

"Let’s get more crumbs into your hair soon." Henry was full of anticipation regarding his new hobby as he put the corpse into the clothing bag.

Meanwhile, I inspected the nearly fully dried plaster.

It seemed stable enough for us to leave it.

"You don’t have to wait long with work tomorrow." I turned to the staircase before telling him I would teleport up.

We discussed for a moment who should teleport with the closing bag, and after the puppy was sure he wouldn’t destroy the corpse when teleporting with it, I went first.

From the concrete ground to the top of the stairs, there were a big and a small hatch in the ceiling with a bunch of locks on them.

I really wanted to know what was upstairs, so after discussing it with the puppy, I teleported while giving the following command, ’Teleport me to the other side of the hatch, but only if it will be safe, unseen, and unrecorded.’

And I really teleported.

I saw the dark sky in the distance, above me a little red ceiling, white tiles beneath me, and a white fence around me, but most of all, I saw water.

A bunch of water was surrounding the little pavilion I stood in.