The showers were essentially one large tiled room with four shower heads, two on the left wall and two on the right. There were no partitions of any kind.
Feld and Sondra helped each other out of their filthy clothes as Lucretia turned her water on. When Feld removed his shirt, Sondra gasped, “Oh my, Mathieu! Your ribs.”
Feld looked down and saw that his entire left side was bruised. When he removed his pants, he saw that the bruise continued down the length of his thigh. “Well,” he said, “you know what they say. Any landing you can walk away from…” Still, as the adrenaline surge since his crash began to wane, Feld became acutely aware of the pains in his left side.
While Feld and Sondra hobbled their way into the showers, they each took inventory of the various injuries they suffered from the crash. While Feld took the worst of it, Sondra’s body was peppered with various bruises, cuts and scrapes as well.
“You two are a mess,” Lucretia commented as they took their places along the opposite wall. Feld was about to comment when a dull thud echoed its way into the tiled room. He locked eyes with Lucretia for a moment before she faded from view. His knees buckled just then as the sickeningly familiar pheromone scent hit his senses hard.
The shock broke Feld’s meager hold on stability. The next few minutes were spent in a semi-conscious haze as the effects of his injuries began to affect him. As he dropped to his knees and rested the side of his face against the cool surface of the wall, he saw Sondra rush toward him, concern plainly evident on her face.
He sees her stop suddenly and turn back toward the entrance of the room. Turning his head slowly, he sees the Dominar and her blaster standing there, shouting something that he can’t quite hear over the ringing in his ears. Then, reality takes a vacation as the Dominar levitates up off the ground, her back arching impossibly backward, her wild-eyed face aimed at the ceiling, her arms and legs thrashing wildly, the blaster falling uselessly from her panicked grip, a thin, crimson line forming across her naked throat, the line growing in size and texture until the bloody rivulets gain their freedom and snake their way down to the tile floor beneath her.
After closing his his eyes for what was surely a microt or two, he shook his head and opened his eyes again. He saw Lucretia’s shimmering gray face considering his as the cold water cascaded down upon him. She said something that he can’t hear due to the ringing, but that doesn’t matter much as his stomach emptied itself repeatedly upon the tile floor between them.
When he finally finished, he looked down and spied a bit of blood mixed in with the assorted textures. Looking up into Lucretia’s knowing face, Feld shook his head slightly from side to side and mumbled something unintelligible before losing consciousness for the second time tonight.