Finding Hosea Fleet
“So, if you turn right, right here, that’ll take you to Ansel,” the woman said. She seemed in an even better mood than when she had talked to him at the door. She pointed down the same road she had pointed down as before.
“And how far do I go down this road?” Daniel asked.
“Oh,” the woman answered. “You go a ways. You go a ways.”
Daniel rolled down the driver side window as he made the turn. The rain spattered his arm, and he breathed in the sweet, fresh air of the humid day. “How far is that?” he asked as he kept his face near the window.
“Not too far,” she said in her little voice.
Daniel nodded and grimaced. He did not ask any other questions. He just hoped and he prayed that she was telling him the truth.
“Maybe asking Joseph how best to kill another person would have been easier to get the information,” Daniel said. After he had driven for five blocks in silence, he wondered once again if it would have been more productive to go to Joseph. He wondered again after another five blocks, and after thirteen blocks, he doubted the woman knew where she was leading him at all.
“Are we going the right way?” he asked. “Do you remember how to get there?”
The woman smiled back and nodded vigorously. She reminded Daniel of an untrained puppy about to get a treat.
How had he gotten here? How had he ended up with an addict sitting in the front seat of his car leading him to the supposed solution to his problems? Life was a thousand folds of irony. Why was the estranged son seeking revenge? Why was no other son willing to help? Why did he seek out the one who had the least ability to help? And why was such a helpless, powerless person leading him to this help? It all made Daniel want to laugh. Of course, the world had been flipped upside down. His father had been shaken down by a man with a gun, and, according to Ezekiel, it did not seem like this was the first shake-down.
Daniel laughed. The woman looked over at him. From her face, he could tell that she was startled, but her startlement lit up with that odd smile in moments. And she echoed his laugh with her own weak one. He saw that she stared at him a moment longer, even studied him, and then she laughed again as if she was a small child who had not understood a joke but still wanted to take part in it.
The world had been upside-down even before his father was shot. If it had not been, his father would not be in the hospital. His father’s life would not be in question. The man would not have come into the shop and pulled that world-shattering trigger. The world must have been upside down for a long time, and Daniel expected to see a lot more unexpected upheaval.
“Oh,” the woman squeaked out, “here, here!” Her hand shot up and pointed out an old boarded-up store. “This is the place.” She smiled. She looked over to Daniel. Her smile grew bigger. Her hand still stuck out in front of her and pointed at the old store. “That’s the place,” she said wildly.
“That’s the store?” Daniel nodded toward the old dilapidated building.
The woman nodded back. “And Lyle,” the woman continued. “That’s where you’ll find Lyle.”
Daniel looked back at the boarded-up store. For a moment, he wondered whether the woman was only fooling herself. The building was abandoned, and the woman, with her drug-addled brain, could not tell the difference between a cardboard box and a puppy dog. Then Daniel’s mind shifted. He was looking for a drug-dealer. He wanted to connect to the criminal underground. Where else would a drug dealer do his business? It would just as likely be this place as anywhere else.
Daniel stomped on the brake. Before the car stopped, the woman had already opened the door. She jumped out and scrambled toward the glass door of the old store. Daniel saw a bill clutched in one skeleton hand, and Daniel understood why she wanted to get to the store. It had not been to help him. It was for her own selfish ends. She needed a fix. She must have gotten her hands on that hundred-dollar bill (he wondered how), and she had taken advantage of his ignorance.
Daniel sighed. He made a mental note about the shrewdness of this addict. She did not seem a formidable intelligence, but she had taken advantage of him easily. Hosea would not be as simple to deal with. “Addicts,” he muttered to himself as he stopped the car and clicked his door open. As he moved toward the store, he looked up to see the woman. She had not entered the decrepit place. She was at the door, and she was talking. Maybe muttering might have been a better term for it. At first, Daniel thought the woman was talking to herself, but as he neared the door, he realized it was cracked open and a face was on the other side. “Lyle Ansel,” she whined. “I want to see Mr. Ansel.” She held out the bill she still clutched in her hand. “I’ve got money,” she continued to whine. “I’ve got money,” she repeated. As she spoke, her voice became more desperate. Daniel almost thought he heard anger in that small voice.
“Mr. Ansel doesn’t deal with sugar-slaves,” the large man at the crack in the door answered. “Everyone knows Mr. Ansel only deals with distributors.”
Daniel saw a pained grimace spread across the woman’s face. “Ooh,” she even sounded like she was in pain. “Can’t I give you the money?” she asked. “And then you can get me some. And you can even have half.”
The large man shook his head. “Mr. Lyle doesn’t sell to me either. No. No. I can’t, and you need to leave.”
The woman let out a long, low mewl.
The large man at the crack in the door shook his head and looked up at Daniel. “Who the hell are you?” the man asked him.
“I’m here to see Lyle Ansel,” Daniel answered.
“Everyone who comes here wants to see Mr. Ansel,” the man answered. “I asked who you are.”
“My name is Daniel, uh,” Daniel paused for a moment. He did not want to give his real name, but he did not know what name to pick. “I’m Daniel,” he had to take a few more seconds to decide. “Daniel Walker. I heard he is looking for distributors. I thought my business infrastructure could make him a nice profit every month.” The lie came out easily. It was the first thing he thought of, and it seemed to fit.
The man smiled at him. He shook his head. “Do you know how many addicts I’ve dealt with in my life? I’ve dealt with hundreds, and it’s become easy to spot a lie. Daniel Walker? Like Joseph Walker? Funny. I know who Joseph Walker is, but I’ve never heard of you. Do you think I got to where I am by being an idiot? Who are you? Why are you here?” His voice was gruff, forceful, and Daniel did not know how far he could push the man’s patience before the man drew his weapon.
“My name is Daniel…” The man nodded for him to continue. “Daniel Fleet,” Daniel continued. “I am looking for information. I, uh, need help finding someone.”
The large man behind the door chuckled. “Mr. Ansel is not a tourist information center,” the large man answered and began to close the door.
“Wait! Wait!” Daniel almost shouted. “I’m looking for my brother. I’m looking for my brother, and I don’t know where else to go.”
The man paused. It took Daniel a moment to realize the man was waiting for him to continue.
“My father was shot in a robbery,” Daniel had nothing else to say but truth. “He is in the hospital. My brother is an addict. I’m trying to find him.”
The door opened a little more. The man’s brow was still knit together in annoyance, but David thought he saw sympathy in his eyes.
“I don’t know how else to find him,” Daniel continued.
The man nodded. “What’s your brother’s name?” the man asked.
“Hosea Fleet,” Daniel answered.
The man nodded. The door shut. The small woman with the money clutched in her hand squealed in delight. Daniel looked at the woman. Her eyes looked up at him. They were wide. Her smile was euphoric. “You got us in,” she said. He could still hear that desperation in her voice, but her voice now held delight as well.
Daniel did not answer the woman. He only wondered who she had been before the addiction. How only had she been when she put that needle in her arm? She probably had a clean face. Her eyes must have been bright. He remembered girls when he was young, chattering away, ruddy cheeks, animated faces. Who had she been? Someone with hopes and dreams? Someone who looked at her own future with optimism? Maybe she wanted to be an artist. Maybe she wanted to be a singer. A mother. Had she loved someone? He did not know, and he could not know. Whatever she had been, her life, her hope, her future, was gone. All she cared about now was the drug. And she was excited, but only for that needle full of pleasure.
The door clicked open. The big man was back, and this time, instead of the door opening a crack, it swung wide. “He’ll see you,” the big man said and stepped to the side.
Daniel stepped through the door. The excited woman followed him, but the large man stepped in front of the woman. Daniel looked back. Her excited face turned to sadness. She looked past the man and at Daniel with pleading eyes.
“Come on,” Daniel said to the man, “she’s with me.”
The large man looked at Daniel. “I’ll take care of her,” Daniel continued.
The man paused. He nodded and stepped from the doorway. The woman’s face lit up with excitement again, and she scampered through the door. She smiled at Daniel like an excited dog and then he turned from her toward the store.
The store was dark. The only light that came into the store was through cracks at the edges of the boarded-up windows and left the large space in perpetual dusk. All around stood men with drawn weapons and stern faces. At the center of the store was a large desk with a small lit lamp. Next to the desk was a very normal-looking man pacing back and forth. The man looked around the age of thirty-five. He looked like any laborer that one would see on the street.
As Daniel neared the center of the room and the man, the man turned to him. The man stopped pacing and waited to speak until Daniel was only a few feet away.
“You’re a Fleet?” the man asked. Daniel found his voice to be surprisingly soft.
“I am,” Daniel answered.
“I know your brother, Hosea,” the man responded.
Daniel nodded. He did not know how to respond. His appearance was disarming, but Daniel reminded himself of the countless armed guards around the room.
The man walked over to the desk and ruffled through a few papers. “War hero Hosea,” the man said. “War hero Hosea turned addict. And your father is dead?”
“My father,” Daniel interrupted. His jaw tightened as he waited for the man to reprimand his interruption, but the man did nothing. “He got shot. He’s dying.”
The man nodded. “How much money do you have?” he asked.
Daniel shook his head in confusion. “What?” he asked. A cloud of confusion filled his chest.
“Answer the question,” the man commanded. His voice did not raise, and the softness of the man’s voice as he made the command unnerved Daniel.
“I’ve…” Daniel swallowed down his nervousness. “I’ve got a couple hundred bucks.”
The man laughed before Daniel finished speaking. “That won’t be enough,” he said.
“You want me to pay for information?” Daniel asked.
“Doesn’t matter.” The man shrugged. “You can’t afford me.” The man turned from Daniel and began to walk toward the far end of the cluttered desk.
“Mr. Ansel!” The woman’s voice broke through the silence. Daniel had forgotten she was there, but now she was scrambled forward with that hundred dollar bill still clutched in her hand. She held the bill out toward Lyle Ansel pleadingly. “Mr. Ansel!” Her voice almost rose to a shout. “I came to get some dust. From you. From you. Straight from you.” She began to smile, a big smile. She was getting what she wanted. Big glee. Huge relief spread across her face.
Lyle Ansel ignored her. His face was down studying papers on his desk.
“Mr. Ansel,” she called out again. Daniel winced at her voice.
Lyle glanced at her. “Edison,” his voice was calm as it had been before, “who let this woman in?”
The guard who had walked Daniel and the woman in pointed toward Daniel. “He said she was with him,” Edison answered.
Ansel turned to the woman. “She wants heroin?” Ansel asked.
“Yes, sir,” Edison answered.
Ansel sighed. He turned back to his desk. He pulled open a drawer and searched for something inside. And he muttered to himself. Daniel could not hear what he said, but he could hear his annoyed rumble. Finally, Ansel sighed and pulled out a leather case, square, about the size of a Bible, perhaps a bit larger. He unzipped the case, and the woman’s face lit up with eagerness.
“How much money do you have?” he asked her.
She held out the crumpled bill. “A hundred dollars,” she said. She did not smile now, but Daniel heard the excitement in her voice.
Ansel pulled out a small pouch. He opened it. He peered inside, and then he tossed it toward her. The pouch fell on the ground a few feet in front of her. She dropped the bill and ran to scoop the pouch up. After she had it in her possession, she nodded to Ansel like a bowing servant, and then turned around and looked at Daniel with a big smile on her face.
“Still a child,” Daniel thought as he looked at her and pitied her. She clutched the little pouch to her chest as if it were an infant, and Daniel wondered if she would have a child by this time if she had made different choices. The pouch came closer to her chest, her most prized possession. She squealed. Delight. Oh, the delight at something simple and lacking all hallowed bearing. She kept her love close. She smiled at Daniel as she passed him, for he was the one that had brought her to the promised land.
And Daniel felt the hot drops splatter him. He tasted their sour metal taste. He saw her stumble forward. He saw red. He saw the flash. He saw the collapsing face. He heard the gunshot. She fell forward. She fell with the pouch still clutched to her chest. She did not reach out to catch herself. Her arms were pinned to her chest as she hit the ground. He heard a thick thud as her skull hit the ground and did not bounce. Dead. She was dead. Daniel was sure. Dead. How could a person take a bullet to the back of the head and survive? Dead. And still clutching her the drugs to her chest.
To Daniel’s own dismay, the first thought he had was how ironic this all was.
The second thought was fear, quick-flooding fear pouring into his mind. His legs quaked. His blood shouted through his ears. His eyes darted toward the source of the danger, and Daniel saw the large revolver in the hand of Lyle Ansel. Daniel swallowed. He looked down at the woman, her body. He tried to breathe in. What? What was this? Why? From where? Why? She had just wanted her fix. Lyle Ansel could have given her that fix and let her be on her way. How could he have… How could he have so coldly pulled out a gun and shot her almost as an afterthought? How?
Daniel tried to breathe in, but he could not. He tried to breathe in, but that fear in the back of his throat choked him. He tried to breath out, but it was the same. Profanity did not ring through his mind. It was fear. Fear and shock. Fear and shock, disgust and confusion.
“Why?” The question, though weak in his mind, somehow overpowered everything else. “Why?” he wanted to ask, but he feared the same fate of this woman would be his.
It seemed like a thousand years he stood staring at the body. The woman did not pick herself up off the floor. Lyle Ansel casually put the weapon in its case before putting it away. Daniel had never met a man so willing and able to casually disregard the humanity of another. This common, unassuming man was a façade hiding brutality.
Lyle Ansel grunted as he pushed the desk drawer shut. He stood up. He glanced down at the woman. “Bitch,” he muttered and then he looked up at Daniel as if he were dealing with annoyance.
“Edison,” Lyle Anderson said.
“Yes, sir,” Edison answered.
“Please escort Mr. Fleet out,” he commanded.
Edison nodded and began to move toward Daniel.
“Wait! Wait!” Daniel cried out. He put his hands up in a fearful defense of being shot, though he knew deep down they would not help. Edison grabbed him despite his cries and began to pull him toward the door. Daniel did not struggle. He feared that if he did fight to stay, he would be shot as well. “Mr. Ansel,” he cried. “Wait! Wait!” Lyle Ansel ignored him, and Edison continued to drag him toward the door.
“I’ve got more money, Mr. Ansel. I’ve got more.”
Daniel received no response, and he was almost out the door. He knew that if he did not do something desperate, he would not get the information he needed, and he would not find Hosea and this whole search would turn out to be wasted time.
“Ten thousand dollars, Mr. Ansel. I can give you ten thousand dollars.”
The number was only a partial lie. Daniel did have access to ten thousand dollars. That ten thousand was not his, and if he did give it away, he faced serious legal ramifications. But the number worked. Edison looked up at Ansel when Daniel said the number. Ansel nodded. Edison let go of Daniel and thrust him toward the leader.
“Show me the money,” Ansel commanded.
Daniel took a few steps toward the man before reaching into his jacket and pulling out a checkbook.
“Cash or nothing,” Ansel answered when he saw the checkbook.
“It’s my business checkbook,” Daniel answered.
Ansel’s eyes narrowed, and he chuckled. “Okay, then. Write me a check for ten thousand,” he answered.
“I need a pen,” Daniel motioned toward the desk.
Ansel made a sweeping motion with his arm as if to say, “Be my guest.”
As Daniel walked over to the desk and Ansel, he felt fear. What if this man was playing a sick joke on him? What if he was only allowing him to walk over to the desk to shoot him in the head as well? Daniel walked over to the desk despite fear. He picked up the first pen he could find. He hoped that he had not picked up this unstable man’s favorite pen, and he wrote the check, taking care to remember what the check number was.
“Ten thousand,” he wrote, and he thought how he would need to act quickly. As soon as he found Hosea, he would need to stop by the bank and tell them to cancel the check. If he did not, he would go to prison.
“There,” Daniel said as he tore out the check. “Ten thousand,” he handed the strip of paper to Lyle Ansel.
Ansel snatched the paper from Daniel’s hand. He held it in front of his face and smiled. “Good, good,” he said.
“Are you going to tell me where to find my brother?” Daniel asked.
Ansel nodded.
***
“Seven, one, three, five Gilbert. Seven, one, three, five Gilbert,” Daniel said the address quickly, lest he somehow forget it. “Seven, one, three, five Gilbert.” Daniel wondered how the man knew where to find Hosea, but Lyle Ansel had said the words without a hint of doubt in his voice, and that made Daniel feel a certain degree of confidence in the address. “Seven, one, three, five Gilbert,” he said again. He pushed the woman from his mind. And he tried to make the pit in his stomach go away, but he was unsuccessful. It had been a quick, brutal act. An evil act, and it had been done with barely a thought. He had heard of what the Russians found in Poland, camps of death, showers of poison, ovens full of people. He wondered if the same casual disregard for human life had been put on to go about those atrocities. “Seven, one, three, five Gilbert.” People could get used to many things, even brutality.
Daniel shook his head as he muttered the address to himself once again. Hosea would certainly know more about this type of thing than himself. Hosea had navigated the war. He had seen the mania of the Japanese in battle. He had seen the havoc with which they conquered southeast Asia and the South China Sea. Brutality. Sheer brutal force. Maybe it was not only Hosea’s injury that gave him a taste for morphine. Maybe it was what he saw. Maybe when a good man was confronted with evil so great, he needed something to dull the memory.
“Gilbert,” Daniel said in excitement, and he turned onto the road. After the car straightened out, his eyes darted from the left to the right at the house numbers until he was able to ascertain that the odd numbers were on the left side.
“Seven, one, three, five,” he muttered to himself to remind himself of the house number once again, but he was in the four thousands, and it would be several more blocks before he got where he needed to be.
“Seven, one, three, five,” he muttered again and again after that, but his thoughts continued.
Daniel wondered if this was all a mistake. If Hosea had been destroyed by the ravages of war, would he, a man of the same stock, fare any better? Would he go a type of mad? Would he need some help to get through his nights and days? Would he even make it at all?
Daniel took a deep, nervous breath in. He continued to mutter the address to himself. He continued to scan the house numbers. When he and his brothers had stood in that hospital room, he had filled up with righteous anger. The man who had shot his father needed to be brought to justice, and the justice he needed to be brought to was death. Still, as he drove in this car, fearful, pit in his stomach, muttering an address, that fact remained the same. The man needed to die. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Daniel did not want to live in a world where evil did not fear repercussion. Evil was to be met with swift justice.
Daniel had played the film of justice out in his mind. He would be like so many pulp fiction detectives. His journey would be through the shadowed night. He would buy a gun. He would investigate, interrogate witnesses, lead after lead would fall in his lap, and Daniel would find that this man lived alone, a recluse, a loner. In the darkness of shadowy night, Daniel would follow him. The man would stop for a smoke. The barrel of the gun would jab into his back. Daniel would take him out into a remote place, far out of town, deep in the woods. A razor-sharp knife would come out. A quick slit from ear to ear. Gushing blood. Gurgling. Silence. Justice.
But justice would not be so clean or simple. He had not the faintest idea of how dangerous a person could be. Stupid petty crooks were common, but a man shooting up a convenience store in a random act of haste or panic was different than a man who killed because of annoyance. A chasm was between the two, and, where the first was stupid and thoughtless, the latter was terrifying. Evil was a gulf, a drop-off, and he had only dipped in his toes.
“I’ve seen the devil, and he is us,” Daniel muttered the phrase as he saw the correct house number and pulled to the side of the road. The house was no more special than what he had seen all day. Beat up. Broken down. It had once been new, but so had that woman, his brief guide. “Seven, one, three, five,” Daniel said the house number one last time and looked up to the door to make sure he was in the correct place. He walked up the driveway. He glanced into the windows, but everything was dark in here as well. All the houses on this street were dark. No children ran in the streets. No mothers sat on porches.
Daniel knocked on the door. The sound seemed to die as soon as he heard it. He knocked again. The same silence followed. No one came to the door. After the third time, he leaned over the railing to the left and peered through the window. When he had seen his face before, he had been confident. Despite being alone, he was taking steps to understand what he needed to do next. He was finding help so that he could do what needed to be done. That unimportant drug dealer should have given him this address, and it would have been a short drive over here and a quick conversation with his brother until Hosea was convinced to join the cause.
It was the same person looking back at him. It was the same Daniel as before. A person rarely made drastic changes to the core of his being in an hour. He had not changed. The world had. And as he stared at his own face, the face of a man who had risen from the streets to wealth, he wondered if he should give up now. He had scratched at the underbelly of society and blood had flowed. And that blood had been black, unclean. But he had only scratched an itch. Only an itch, and that itch dug deep into him. It shook his core. If that was an inch of evil, what did an ocean look like?
“Am I in over my head?” Daniel let the thought slip into his mind. “Is it better if I leave things alone?”
Daniel did not know the answer to those questions. He did not know where to begin. But he did know one thing clearly: a killer awaited justice, and the only way that man would come to justice would be if Daniel did something about it. In the small world of Fleet, he was the little boy holding back the ocean. Perhaps he was an ant in the wider world, but to his smaller world, it may have been the most important thing in the world.
Daniel knocked on the door the fourth time. When it did not open, he turned the knob and found it unlocked. When he stepped inside, he smelled the decay, the dust, the human waste, and drugs, but he forced himself into the gloom of the place.
“Hosea,” he called into the darkness.
No answer.
“Hosea,” his voice rose.
A bird chirped outside the window, but the only other sound he heard was the creak of the floorboards beneath his feet.
Daniel shouted his brother’s name twice more, but when he stopped to listen, no one responded.
Daniel swore. Had Lyle Ansel’s information been wrong? Maybe it was outdated. Maybe he lied as casually as he killed. It must have certainly been the case that if a person was okay with killing, they did not quibble about lying.
Daniel scanned the room he had entered, a kitchen. He passed into the living room. No bodies lay on the dusty furniture. No bodies lay on the floor. The bathroom was empty. The sink was covered in drug paraphernalia. The toilet was filled with feces. The shower curtain had been torn from its loops. Water had dripped into the tub, and, now filled, a small trickle slipped down the side of the tub and added to the inch of brown standing water on the floor.
Both bedrooms on the first floor were empty as well. Large holes covered the walls. A window, broken, had been fixed with cardboard. A knife stuck in the far wall of one of the rooms at head level.
Daniel shook his head. He swore again. “What the hell,” he said. “What the hell. Why? How does anyone live like this?” He shook his head again.
Each step moaned as Daniel ascended them, and when he got to the second floor he realized it was no better than the first. Debris was strewn about the hallway. The bathroom was just as bad as the one on the lower level except there was no water on the floor due to the lack of a tub. The first of the three rooms had a bed without a sheet or blankets. The bed was empty, but a man lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. He was fully clothed. He was face up. His eyes were closed, and if he had not become so sunken looking because of the lack of food, Daniel would have thought he looked peaceful. Then Daniel noticed the burnt spoon by his side and the rope around the man’s upper arm, and he knew why.
The second room was the cleanest he had seen in the house. Trash and clothes were strewn about the floor, but the bed was made. On the bed lay a man and a woman. Daniel could hear their cadenced breathing, the soft sound of people sleeping. Though the bed was made, both were on top of it. Both were facedown. Both were naked. Neither was Hosea.
“He’s a liar as well as a killer, isn’t he?” Daniel muttered to himself after he shut the door to the second bedroom and was walking down the hallway toward the third. “Never trust a killer.”
When Daniel pushed open the third door, he found he was wrong, but he felt no excitement about being wrong. In fact, he wished that he had been right, but he forced himself to accept that today was the day he met the true decay of the world.
Daniel swore when he saw Hosea. His hair was thinning. He had lost thirty pounds, maybe more. He looked weak. He looked the opposite of what Daniel remembered. Though he barely recognized his oldest brother, he knew it was him. Hosea was a fighter. Hosea was strong. Hosea was hopeful. He had dreams and Daniel remembered those dreams. Hosea was the Fleet brother whose life was supposed to end up successful. Of all brothers, him.
Hosea was.
Now… now he was not.
Now Daniel wondered if he should call this person he saw by the same name. Was he the same person? In body, of course, it was him. But was he the same person? Had some demon come to possess him?
Hosea sat propped up in bed. One arm sat on his stomach. The other was at his side. His knees were up. His head was tilted back slightly, and his eyes were open. They looked above the door frame. They did not move. They were like animal eyes, reptile eyes, fish eyes, alive, but barely alive, not a hint of self-consciousness or intelligence in them.
Daniel took a deep breath in. Another wave of emotion telling him to leave swept over him.
“Hosea,” he said the name gently.
The eyes did not move.
“Hosea,” he said the words a little louder, “it’s me, Daniel.”
This time the eyes did move, but the face did not change expression as if the eyes were the only things real and this face was only a mask.
“It’s Daniel,” Daniel said again. “I need to tell you something.”
The eyes continued to stare at him. Did they see him? He did not know. They remained just as lifeless as before.
“Hosea,” Daniel repeated the name.
Hosea opened his mouth. Daniel heard a hiss of air escape. His brother’s tongue moved. His eyes fluttered. They opened again but stared at the ceiling this time. Daniel heard a sputtering come from Hosea’s throat followed by a cough. The cough was followed by hacking, and then Hosea’s body, despite being in a half-laying position, bent double. Daniel heard a gagging sound. A liquid sound followed the gagging. Daniel saw yellow vomit pour from Hosea’s mouth onto his chest.
As Daniel felt a gag rise in his own throat, he watched as Hosea fell back into the sitting position. The sound of Hosea’s breathing stopped, and he began to convulse.