I gasped with the pain and then tried to breathe again.
“Sophie!” he yelled in my face. “Where are you bleeding from?”
Bleeding? I panted for air. I wasn’t bleeding. But a distant thought occurred to me. There was blood all over my face from biting the other man. “Not mine,” I got out.
“God,” he swore and gathered me into his arms. He tucked his head into the place between my head and shoulder. The perspiration from him dripped down my shirt and reminded me how he had worked to get here in time to help me. “You stupid…girl,” he muttered as if that was the worst insult he could come up with. Rearing back, he glowered at me, regaining his hold on my upper arms. “You drugged us. How could you do that?”
I was struggling for air. My chest felt as though it had been punched with a wrecking ball. I couldn’t even speak to Zach, much less tell him that I had done it for him. I hadn’t wanted him to die.
Of that I was still certain. If Zach had faced the burned man then he would have died. I knew I had done the right thing. The only thing I was going to wrestle with is whether or not I should have killed him when I had my single opportunity.
But life isn’t tied up in neat little packages with pretty bows. The world before the change hadn’t been like that, and the world after the change wasn’t turning out to be any better in that respect.
It was when my breathing began to sound as if I were rasping helplessly that Zach’s eyes opened wide. I coughed and a little blood spilled out of my mouth. It was my blood then and he knew it. The horror in his face was obvious.
The tunnel that was so tight around me narrowed dramatically and I couldn’t even tell if I had really seen Zach or not, much less the panting figures that appeared behind him as I swayed.
Lights out…again.
Chapter Thirteen – Not Again?
“…Never seen anything like it,” someone said.
“We’ve never seen anything like a lot of things,” said another voice. It sounded like a young man, not Zach. It was a voice I’d never heard before.
“They marked her face,” the first someone said, who was also someone I had never heard before. That person had a husky voice. It was a man’s voice who sounded like he was a heavy smoker or that he used to be one. “It’s like a tattoo.”
“She’s special,” said the younger one. He was very close to my right side and I thought that perhaps he was standing over me, looking down at me. I didn’t like the feeling it evoked. It felt as it did when Zach was doing it, except this time it was worse. This was a stranger. This was someone I really didn’t know, someone I couldn’t possibly trust, and someone who could do something terrible to me at any moment. If the burned man had taught me anything it was how to be distrustful. I didn’t know these people and I was afraid to open my eyes.
“We couldn’t find any trace of the other one,” said a new voice. It was a woman’s voice and it wasn’t Kara.
Zach said, “There’s blood by the billboard. A lot of it. It’s not Sophie’s, so she must have injured him in some way. I’m hoping he crawled off to die, but he’s been resilient in the past.” I nearly sighed with relief at the sound of his voice. If he was here then all couldn’t be bad, except that I had a faint recollection of him being on his bike, and then with me, shaking my shoulders. He had been relieved to see me, but he had also been so terribly angry.
“She probably did hurt him,” said the young voice. “But she’s so young and frail. She looks like a strong wind could take her away.”
“She’s stronger than she looks,” Zach said, protectively. “Once you remove that tube, she’ll be just fine.” What tube?
“Relax, cowboy,” said the smoker’s voice. “No one’s threatening her. Just stating the obvious. We need all the humans we can take in and it doesn’t matter whether they’re skinny or fat. They’ll fit in.”
“We don’t need him,” Zach stated coldly.
The young one sighed from above me. “No, we don’t need a sociopath. But we need to understand what he’s capable of doing.”
“He’s capable of burning things, of attacking those he perceives as weaker than he is, of killing people,” Zach said fervently. “I’ve told you about what he did in Bandon.”
“How do you know that he killed the person whose bones you saw?” the young voice asked in a neutral tone.
“How do you know he didn’t?” Zach countered. “If he didn’t then the very least he did was to dig up a corpse and use the bones for his afternoon snack while sitting around the bonfire. Maybe he was roasting marshmallows too. You know, some funky kind of Dr. Lecter s’mores.”
“Calm down, Zach,” the young voice said. “You have to remember we have only witnesses here. We have no security tapes or DNA evidence. We have only your account and Kara’s to go on. If we managed to catch up with this man, then we-”
“He’s dangerous,” Zach said coldly. “I hope your people truly understand that. He would have killed Sophie. He stabbed her through one of her shoulders. It went all the way through to the back.”
“Which seems to have magically healed and all that’s left is a very red scar,” the young voice replied. The words were unconvinced but the tone remained dispassionate as if he was stating a plain fact and not questioning the intriguing circumstances behind it.
“You know just as well as I do that this world is different from the one we were born in,” Zach responded just as swiftly. “There are things here we cannot explain. The firefly pixies, as Sophie calls them, have formed an attachment to us, particularly her. They did something to her. They healed her.”
“Something else we haven’t seen,” said the smoker’s voice skeptically.
“We’ve seen things, Ethan,” the woman’s voice said. “You know what we’ve seen, what we’ve all seen. Firefly pixies aren’t so strange, are they?”
“No,’ said Ethan, who was the smoker’s voice, and it was a reluctantly ‘no.’ “No, we’ve seen…things.”
“Thank you, Calida,” the young voice said calmly. “You’re the voice of reason as usual.”
Zach snorted. The sound came from close by and I felt warm fingers curled over my wrist on that side. I didn’t have to ask to know that they were his and they felt good there.
I opened my eyes and saw him staring down at me. He didn’t look hale and hearty. There were dark rings under his eyes and his prominent cheekbones were gaunt. He hadn’t been taking care of himself. His mouth opened as he saw my awareness and he muttered, “Sophie.”
I started to say that I was sorry, but then I started to choke. Something was in my throat. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe properly. I couldn’t move my neck. Panicking I began to thrash about. There was pain in my chest, searing pain that roared across me. Zach’s face became alarmed. “Don’t struggle, Sophie,” he said urgently. “You had a collapsed lung and broken ribs. They had to put a tube down your throat. You can still breathe. Try to relax.”
I wanted to swallow but I couldn’t. I wanted to jerk the tube out of my mouth and my throat because it felt alien and so uncomfortable. It didn’t belong there. My chest was on fire and my body ached with uncountable pains. There was another IV in the back of my hand and there were people around me. A lot of people who were all watching me as if I was a bug under a microscope. Behind them I faintly acknowledged the room as belonging to some sort of hospital. It seemed so absurdly surrealistic and I began to grapple weakly with the hands pressing on me.
Another man pushed aside the red headed teenager who was to my right. He leaned over me and said firmly, “I’m a doctor, a medical doctor, Sophie. I put the incubation tube down your throat to help re-inflate your lung. One of your ribs had punctured it and it was causing a pneumothorax. We’re going to leave the tube in until your lung is better healed.” He stared down at me with gray blue eyes that looked kindly. Regardless, my legs stretched out to their full length as if I had been zapped with a strong volt of electricity. Cramps began to twist muscles in hardened
lumps along my calves. I clenched down without thinking about consequences. Abruptly, I was unable to breathe at all.
Zach was kneeling next to the bed, his mouth near my ear. “Relax, Sophie,” he said demandingly. “For God’s sake, you’re going to have a stroke if you don’t.”
The doctor was saying something to someone else and then he was injecting something into my I.V. The lassitude that came was nearly instantaneous. “Morphine,” he said to me. My eyes blurred a little. My body became a limp noodle and I couldn’t control anything at all. “When you wake up again we’ll take the tube out. You understand I don’t have any way of ascertaining that the lung is properly re-inflated or that the puncture is closed enough to hold your lung together, but from what I can tell from reading-”
“Forget it, Doc,” Zach snarled. “She’s half out of it.”
I looked at Zach beseechingly. My eyelids were so heavy and I didn’t dare close them while so many strangers were around me. If I did then I knew I wouldn’t wake up. With a tremendous effort that was almost all I had left, my hand caught his and squeezed. Zach bent over me and whispered, “Sophie, what is it?”
I caught his shirt with my other hand and held on tight. Any second now and my fingers were going to slip away.
Zach’s face changed from concern to a grimace. He corrected it quickly and said, “I won’t leave, Sophie. Kara or I will be here.”
The doctor was saying something to the red headed teenager. “-Found several U-plates in the hospital’s stores here. The anesthesia is still operational so I can repair the rib that’s more problematic. The new woman has some paramedic experience so I can use her with the procedure. Even without electricity, it’s pretty simple, really.”
Zach’s head shot up but I was fading fast to be alarmed. “Simple for you, maybe,” he barked.
I let go of his shirt and watched as my hand dropped away. My eyes closed on his frantic, “Sophie? Sophie!”
♦
There were bits and pieces that I remembered over the new few days. Apparently I didn’t do so well with the anesthesia. It made me sick and the doctor had to compensate by giving me something else. He cheerfully reassured Zach. “She’s got the I.V. She’s breathing steady and her blood pressure is excellent. The rib is repaired and the lung is staying re-inflated. It doesn’t get much better than that.”
“Why is she so groggy?”
“Side effects of the anesthesia. Not uncommon. And treatable.”
But Zach’s voice was concerned and aggravated at the same time.
Then Kara was there for a little while. She held my hand and talked to me about the new people, but I think I fell asleep on her and I couldn’t remember anything she said later.
Some unknown time later they were getting me on my feet and walking me around. I didn’t like it much, but I felt better after I did it. Kara said, “It’ll keep you from getting pneumonia. What did he do? Punch you in your ribs? Oh, sorry, I know you can’t answer me, yet.”
And there was another time lapse. It seemed as though they were always getting me up and down, but it turned out it was once an hour or two. Just when I thought that I was starting to feel better the doctor took the tube out of my throat.
Boy, was that a lot of fun. Not.
After the removal I started feeling a lot better. I had a sore throat and my chest still hurt, but I could stay up longer, and my strength was coming back.
Kara told me it was two days later, but it felt like it was two weeks.
Zach came periodically to peer in the door at me. But after the tube was removed he didn’t come back and I didn’t ask where he’d gone. Kara stayed with me and she was gently optimistic.
The doctor’s name was Sinclair. Whether it was his first name or his last, I never asked. He was nice enough for a man who liked to take my temperature and my blood pressure and click his tongue knowingly.
After two days, it was an evening and I was sitting by the window, looking out at the sunset pensively. I didn’t like being cooped up but I was grateful I was still breathing. Sinclair told me I had a lovely three inch scar just above my belly button and a piece of metal inside me now. It was something wrapped around my rib to facilitate the fracture’s healing. My biggest challenge was to breathe deeply and often in order to prevent pneumonia from developing. Apparently, that was the worst complication of a ruptured lung.
Kara stayed with me for the entire time, only leaving for essentials. As she went to get something to eat, the doctor came in. She nodded to him and went on her way. I tensed up in the chair and looked at him warily.
Sinclair stopped abruptly. He was a balding man in his forties. The gray in the hair he had left matched his gray blue eyes. He was a tall skinny man who looked like running marathons was something he did for fun. “You don’t trust me,” he said astutely.
I kept my hand on the dagger that was hidden from him between my body and the side of the easy chair I sat in. Then I shook my head slowly. “It’s hard to trust anyone,” I said. My voice was rough from the tube. It felt like I had a bad sore throat and I didn’t even get ice chips to soothe it.
Sinclair perched on the side of the bed, just close enough to make me a little nervous. “No, I can understand that based on what Zach and Kara have said. I know Kara’s told you about our group.”
I shook my head again. “She told me when I was half looped.”
Sinclair nodded. “Okay. We’ve got about twenty people. Our leader, for lack of a better word, is Gideon. I don’t know if you remember him, but he’ll come see you later. We live down at the Redwoods. We’re going to move you down there tomorrow or the next day. I don’t want to make you nervous. Well, more nervous, anyway, but we haven’t found the one who hurt you, yet. We’re kind of in the open here and that makes us a little nervous, too.”
I stared at him. Sinclair seemed a little too at ease, a little too…happy? It seemed weird. It was even weirder that what was usual. “You’re happy,” I stated, rather than asked.
Sinclair appeared a little surprised at the statement. “You’re the first real patient I’ve had for weeks.” He waved his hand around the hospital room. “I practiced in Sacramento. I’m a surgeon, lucky for you, but now I’m a general kind of go-to guy. But hey, I got to do surgery for a change and it was something kind of neat for me.” He smiled readily. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re doing well. I just hope we don’t have any repeats. Since you burned the sign down, we think that that guy won’t be able to find us.”
I frowned. I didn’t want to talk about the burned man. I had a vivid recollection of the last moment I’d seen him as he walked away, half stumbling, bloody, but altogether too determined. There was something that happened before that moment that came to me like a brick falling on my head. Suddenly he glanced over his shoulder, and then he craned his neck to look into the distance. As he turned to face me, his face distorting into a mask of heated rage. Then furious indecision boiled over his expression. Despite his makeshift bandage, the blood continued to drip down his good hand, pooling at his feet, and I hoped for him to pass out.
He hadn’t passed out, but he had known that someone was coming. He had known someone was coming for me. He had known. How long had it been before I made my way to the hospital beside the highway? It had been a long time. An hour maybe to go the two or three miles from the burned sign. An hour before Zach had smoothly stepped off the moving bicycle as if he was stepping from an escalator. There was no way that the other man could have physically seen Zach. There was no bodily way to be warned, but he had been all the same.
The burned man knew things. Just like I did. Just like Kara smelled the strong scent of cinnamon before something important happened. Just like Zach had his dreams about me. The startling comprehension made me wince unexpectedly. The doctor’s face twisted with worry. I raised my hand to stop him from coming to me. “I’m all right.”
And it wasn’t going to matter about the sign being destroyed. The burned man was
going to know how to find me, in his own special manner.
“Are you in pain?” Sinclair asked. “Do you need something?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I was just thinking about…him.” I paused and the moment drew out. Finally, I asked, “Is your group ready for someone like him?”
It was the doctor’s turn to frown. I’m not sure if he understood what I was asking him. “We’ll protect ourselves,” he said instead of answering directly.
I shrugged. There was something else I wanted to know, but I didn’t know how I was going to phrase the question. How was I supposed to ask if the doctor had some extra ability that he might not be willing to talk about? ‘Excuse me, Doc, but have you got ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, or some other as yet indescribable psychic talent?’ He’d probably check my blood pressure again and give me another shot of morphine.
Kara stepped into the room again. Dressed in a standard set of scrubs, she appeared quite relaxed and healthy. She looked at us curiously and handed me a juice box with the straw already inserted. “It’s lukewarm but it’s apple juice.” She tossed one to the doctor who caught it deftly. “And one for the M.D., too.”
“Thanks,” Sinclair said, inserting the straw with a little flourish.
My head started to hurt. I don’t know what it was, but it was probably a tension headache. It was becoming increasingly obvious throughout the day that Zach was patently avoiding me and I didn’t have to write to Dear Abby to figure out why. I’d be angry if someone drugged me involuntarily too. The really bad part was that I didn’t know how I could explain it to him without sounding like a complete freak. I put the juice down and rubbed my temple with both hands.
“Headache?” Sinclair asked. I nodded. He got up and put his juice next to mine. “With your permission?” he said affably and waited for me to nod again. He began to rub my temples with his index and middle fingers of both of his hands. His fingers were warm and felt as though the warmth was being imparted into me. It didn’t take a minute before the pain began to dissipate. It was gone before I could open my mouth.
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