The Final Chapter of the Choirgirl HOTeL…

Written by Adrien Amos

PART ONE

(The Adrienne Amos Factor)

Adrienne sat alone in the back of the ship designated for the mentally unstable, she turned the gun over and over in her hand, and the alien Dan had taken it away from her after the confrontation in the woods.

Thin salty tears trickled down her face from the corner of her blood shot eyes. The flesh around her brown eyes now swollen and purple. She looked as if she had been beaten by five men simultaneously.

Through her clouded vision she stared at the weapon. Her once lovely face was a map of blotchy red patches, lines of raised red cluttered the side of her face were she had clawed her face in maddening grief.

She hadn't eaten in days and she refused to speak to anyone. She slumped broken in the shadow corner of her room watching the artificial light bounce off the cool steel of the nine-millimeter that she turned in her hands. The acid tears would slide down her cheeks and seep into the wounds she had inflicted on herself and burn her to the bone.

It wasn't right. Some people have to search so hard their entire life, reaching for a single human connection search for the one thing that will make them complete. Some people spend their entire life looking for that single human connection that will suddenly make them beautiful, suddenly make them whole, the single entity that will take away all the bad thing that threaten them in the dark, take away the nightmares that haunt them when they close their eyes, suddenly shed a light on all the false belief and the hate and the fear and the overwhelming loneliness that systematically destroys their soul, like a plague or a virus that can't be stopped, that can't be cured.

Some people search so long and reach so far and die in the night crying themselves to sleep cold and alone and hating the world because they never find that someone. And sometimes, sometimes they do find that connection, and when it's taken away, it's worse than never having found it at all. Adrienne knew that now, she suddenly knew how Karol must have felt when she stood by and watched Greg's casket being lowered into the worm-riddled ground. And she cried harder as a tiny sound of despair escaped her swollen lips.

She turned the gun around in her hand. Maybe she would have been better off never having known Agent Fox Mulder at all. Maybe then the hollowness she enveloped her would have been satisfied by the drugs; maybe the cocaine would have sufficiently filled that propagating void. But nothing would now, and she could feel the very last threads of humanity inside her coming undone. The pain you didn’t know is always more frightening than the pain you knew. Her body shook from lack of sleep and nutrition. She turned the gun in her hand.

There was a sound outside the transparent door. Like the sculling of har sole shoes in a tin can. Adrienne raised her head into a patch of light, exposing only half of her grotesque face to the spectator. It was Jamie. She stood with her arms slumped at her side. Her face was covered with concern. She moved closer to the door.

"Hi Adrienne" she said lightly, the words echoed off the metallic walls of the space ship bound for Ikaran.

Hurt swelled with tears in Adrienne’s eyes as she only looked at her friend with an expression of hopeless despair. "I brought you dinner, it's your favorite, Tortallini Alfredo," Jamie tried to coax her friend into eating.

Adrienne looked at her lost, and then parted her lips to speak. "Jaamie" she whispered hoarsely, as she moved her mouth the dry swollen skin that covered her lips burst and began to bleed, "Jamie I loved him, I really loved him, it was the first self-less thing I have ever done in my life Jamie, I would have died for him..."

Jamie only looked at the pitiful creature that her friend had become; she didn't know what to say. "Th-thaaank you Jamie," Adrienne managed.

"For what?"

"For being my friend, thank the others too" and with that she settled herself back into the corner and Jamie could only make out the thin outline of her body in the darkness. Jamie turned her head away and rose, heading back to the control room where Dan and Danna were plotting their course for their home planet.

Adrienne turned the gun over in her hand, and as the door to the metallic corridor shut, three fat glistening tears slid from her right eye and she breathed in deeply and raised the nine-millimeter to her temple.

And a single shot rang through the ship, piercing the ears of its passengers.

FOOTNOTE…

Coming Next: the Delirium factor!