4 C.P.H.4

Theodore grabbed the gun from the man's dead body and with Lucy he slinks swiftly down the empty hallway, both of their eyes still shimmering somberly, all fear has left Lucy and Theodore looks like he doesn't care anymore, all earlier confusion has left the features of his face and was replaced by this unnerving witty smile.

They enter a small room, where four Chinese guys are playing mahjong on a table filled with food and alcohol.

The four men immediately stopped laughing and freeze, staring at their victims with wide-opened eyes.

"Say hello to my little friend." Theodore raised his gun and emptied the whole magazine, blowing them away with the bullet to the brain, before they could even react.

"I feel nothing..." Theodore muttered, he didn't feel anything, as if taking five lives for the first time means nothing to him, he wasn't even surprised and awe at his John Wick level aim, all he felt paralyzing numb & emptiness, he can't tell whether he was even a human being anymore, and it scared him a little, he does not want to lose his desires, his personality of who he is, he don't want to become an empty vessel with no purpose in his life.

"This drug has changed us..." Lucy said. "Both physically and Mentally." She grabs a bottle of booze and chugs half of it down before she kicked a dead guy off the chair and sat in his place.

"I didn't see you with us." She questioned, while she devours the sandwiches on the plates as if she hadn't eaten for a week.

"I do not remember a thing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing." Lucy stared at him and he stared back calmly. "Do you prefer a long explanation or a short one?"

"Short" Lucy nodded. "We are victims of Gang, you see this..." Lucy lifted her shirt and pointed at the bloodied bandage wrapped on her stomach. "They inserted some sort of powerful drugs inside us, but when he kicked us the packets might have ruptured the pouch."

"Can we expel them out of our bodies?" Theodore asked her. "I have no idea" Theodore nodded as if to tell her that he understand. While Lucy finished her meal, Theodore looked around the room, he looted money from the wallets of those four dead Chinese men & kept on looking for anything that was worth some cash, until he came across a large metal cabinet that contains an astonishing array of weaponry.

He spotted an empty Duffle bag in a corner which he used to pile all the guns from the cabinet, he lobs the bag filled with weapons on his shoulder before Lucy reached inside & grabbed a handgun and a magazine.

"For later use."

†††††

Both of them stride down a hallway that leads to a stairwell. They took it and at the top of the stairs, they find themselves in some kind of warehouse, filled with workers.

Ignoring the factory workers Lucy comes out into a small parking lot while Theodore followed suit. The sun has already gone down so it was dark outside.

Lucy spotted two taxi drivers chatting, Lucy pointed her gun at the younger man. " You speak English?" She demanded.

"No! No! No!" The Asian man let out a terrified scream as he back paddled. "No?" Lucy didn't waste a second and shot the man in his legs, before switching the muzzle to the other man's head.

"You speak English?" The terrified man nodded his head instantly, he don't want to suffer the same fate as his buddy. "Y-Yes."

"Then take us to the hospital." The driver nods meekly. "Hospital! No problem!" The driver opened the door for them, Lucy and Theodore.

Once they were seated the driver kicked the gas and drives through the streets of Taipei. "Fetch me a silencer from inside the bag." Lucy asked Theodore, who took it out of the bag and handed it to her.

Theodore looked out of the window and found himself amazed by all the life around him as if he never noticed it before.

He felt his eyesight & hearing are particularly well developed beyond mere mortal comprehension. He can hear every conversation in his vicinity, amazed by this he turned towards Lucy. "You can hear it too?" Lucy replied back with a "Yes".

†††

The car stops in front of a hospital, the driver points at it. "Hospital! Hospital!" He cries out in fear. "Wait here." Theodore ordered and steps out of the car.

"It will be better if you stay here..." Theodore calmly said and moved his gaze onto the backseat. The driver followed his gaze and let out a terrified whimper when he spotted a grenade shoved between the gap of the backseats.

"Stay here, okay?" They hardly gave him much choice. The poor driver doesn't dare to refuse so all he could do is, nod his head in fear as he watched the duo walk away and enter the hospital, both of them marches confidently in as if they knew exactly where to go. So, as a result, nobody gave much attention to the pair.

As they head down a hallway Theodore glances at the signs. The Chinese characters morph into small drawings that are easy to interpret. Then everything speeds up. Theodore strings together different ideas, the letters change, and the words appear in English.

He eavesdrops on a group of nurses chatting in the hallway. The words are simultaneously translated until he ends up hearing the conversation in English.

"Amazing..." He was amazed by what he is capable of now, his eyesight has improved so much that he can even spot minuscule dirt particles from across the hallway, if he focused, he can hear the faint beats of other people's hearts, and even the sounds of their bone grinding against each other as they walked past him. He is now capable of using stereoscopic smell to determine the location of any smells he picks up. Theodore can sense a single molecule of female sex hormone from at least a mile away and could even discriminate among smells.

Lucy paused, and he did too. Through a round window in a door, they noticed a team of surgeons and nurses operating on an elderly man.

"Let's go." Theodore followed after her and entered the operating room. Lucy goes straight to the wall where X-Ray pictures of patients are hung. Theodore looked at them and could immediately tell the source of the man's problem, the doctors are just wasting their time on this patient.

The man is beyond saving, the tumor has already invaded the cortex on the right side from the spine, if they operated on him he will die for sure.

"We need help, urgent." Lucy calmly said.

"Sir! Miss! We are operating! Please leave immediately!" The pair's sudden interruption outraged the head surgeon.

But Lucy didn't listen to him, she raised her silencer adorned handgun and shot the unconscious man sleeping on the surgical bed and then shoved him off the table onto the floor. She then settles down on the surgical bed. The surgeon stands rooted to the spot, the nurse was about to let out a horrifying scream.

"Please refrain yourself from screaming, madam, I will not hesitate to shoot any of you." Theodore's voice was cold and deadly serious as he levels his gun at the nurses.

"W-What do you want?" A terrified nurse whimpered. "Please, I have kids..." Another one begged desperately for her life.

"We will not harm you as long you follow our orders" Theodore didn't budge and kept his cold and indifferent look.

"Okay... we will listen, just don't hurt any of us, please." The head surgeon tried to keep his calm, and abide by the pair's orders.

"You wouldn't have been able to save him anyway. The tumor is more invasive than you think. It's already invaded the cortex on the right side from the spine." Lucy told the surgeon as she stared at the dead body laying on the floor.

The surgeon is confused but he doesn't have the balls to question her theory.

"Somebody put a bag of drugs in us. I need you to remove them. It's Leaking." It seems the current event is too straining for a nurse, she dropped down like a bag of potatoes.

"Do it now." She orders.

"Right... I'll... I'll just administer a local anesthetic." The doctor stuttered out. "Don't bother, I don't feel physical pain anymore." There is a hint of regret in her voice, and Theodore's face also became a little sour on hearing her words.

Lucy rips the bandage off her belly. The surgeon gazes at the closed wound and nods to his nurses, to fetch the tools for surgery.

Lucy plucks the surgeon's phone out of pocket. "Do you mind?" The doctor shook his head and told her to go ahead as she dials a number.

The doctor cut open the stitches with a pair of surgical scissors while Lucy waits for someone to pick up the call on the other hand.

Theodore stared at her, and don't know what to think of her. Heck, the situation he is in is also impossible but here he is somehow stuck in a fictional world and with each passing second he felt a part of him erase to nothingness.

"I... I have to reach inside" The doctor interrupts Lucy, who is chatting with her mother. She nods and gestures for him to continue.

"Miss, can you lend me your phone?" Theodore asked a nurse, she fetched her phone out of her pocket, and with trembling hands, she handed him her phone.

"Thank you." He opened the browser and searched his name, but there is no one in UFC with his set of names, he is a world champion yet nothing on him is available on the net.

While he was busy browsing the internet, the doctor gently inserts his whole hand into the new gaping wound.

"You're not partying too much, are you? You promise me you'd look after yourself." Lucy begins to sob softly on hearing her mom say those words.

"I'm trying to, mom. I'm trying to." Tears are rolling down her cheeks as she spoke. "Mom?... I feel everything."

"What do you mean, Sweetie?"

"I feel the space... The air... The vibration... I feel gravity... I feel the rotation of the earth... the heat leaving my body... the blood running in my veins... I feel my brain... and I can travel to the deepest part of my memory."

"Sweetie. We have a bad connection. I hear you so well. What did you say about memory?"

"I remember... pain in my mouth when I got braces... I can remember the feeling of your hand on my forehead when I had a fever... I remember stroking the cat, it was so soft." Theodore listen to Lucy's each and every word in silence, he too was on the same bumpy road as her but, for him it was bearable and he can somehow able to stop them from projecting inside his mind.

"The cat? What cat, honey?"

"A Siamese with blue eyes and a broken tail." Lucy answered. "Sweetie, you can't possibly remember that. You were barely a year old." Lucy sobbed silently.

"I just wanna tell you that I love you, Mom and dad. And I wanna thank you for the thousand kisses that I can still feel on my face... I love you, Mom."

"I love you too, Sweetie. More than anything in the world." Lucy hangs up as the doctor slowly extracted the packet dripping in blood.

"How much is left?" The surgeon felt the packet in his hand and after carefully checking the amount he finally revealed the amount. "500 grams."

"How long will it take me to eliminate the 500 grams I have in my blood?" Lucy questioned.

"To answer that, I'd need to know what it is." Doctor answered. "C.P.H.4" The doctor was startled by this.

"Are you sure?" The doctor grabbed the stitching thread and a pair of needles. "Tell me about it." The doctor nodded.

"Pregnant women manufacture C.P.H.4 in the sixth week of pregnancy in tiny quantities. For a baby, it packs the power of an atomic bomb. It's what gives the fetus the necessary energy to form all the bones in its body. I'd heard they tried to make a synthetic version of it. I didn't realize that they'd succeed." The doctor paused.

"If it really is C.P.H.4, in this quantity, I'm amazed you're still alive." The surgeon revealed the shocking piece of news.

"Not for long."

After the surgeon finished stitching her wound, she climbed down for Theodore to take her place.

Once he sat on the surgical bed, the doctor obediently cut opened the stitches and when he took out the packet everyone gasped, Lucy froze on seeing an empty lose packet with a huge tear in it, only a few mere grams worth of drug is left in them.

"2 kilos worth of C.P.H.4..." Lucy muttered, it looks like his condition is much worse than her and there is an 80% chance that he might die at any time.

Theodore remains silent, lost in thought, in his recollections.