Post by Slayer of Blood on Oct 22, 2009 22:16:12 GMT -5
Speckled ceilings and fluorescent lights. That’s what I have to look forward to for the rest of my life. I can’t get up and walk away; I can’t push the pause button and get a sandwich. Hell, I can’t even use the remote to change the channel on the TV in my hospital room. Instead, the only ability I possess is the blinking of my eyes. Oh, and the fact that I’m stuck inside my own head. Screaming.
I stew inside my own mind, occasionally blinking, the only thing I have control over. A giant hose shoved down my throat operates my lungs, and my food comes in the form of liquid down an IV. I can’t feel anything below my neck, and what I do feel above that point is dull, throbbing pain located on the right side of my face and neck. The Wound. The thing that’s damned me to this Hell on Earth.
My life is in the sole hands of doctors and machines; right where I swore I never wanted it. I’ve told my family that if something like this ever happened, they were to unplug me. The hospital, on the other hand, seems intent on prolonging my torture, taunting me with their precious abilities they take for granted: walking, talking, breathing. I’m a prisoner inside my own mind. I can’t tell them to let me go, to move on with their lives. I can’t tell them to save their money and send my little sister through college. I can only lay here, trapped inside my mind with only a view of the world outside my window. I can only wave from my balcony, never open that window and interact. Because I am aware, they are keeping me alive, draining the shallow coffers of my family and their insurance company, putting them in debt with the excuse that “she might pull out of it.” Like hell that will happen. The damage is irreparable, unless someone from the Star Trek future comes back and puts me back together. Humpty Dumpty, at least you didn’t have to suffer this society’s moral bureaucracy.
~~~
My front bumper crossed into the intersection. I glanced up and saw the light a cheerful emerald green. I smiled back before returning my attention to the road. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement. I looked right, and I felt my muscles lock up with fear. Not again. Please, not again. I tried to force myself to relax, but it was impossible.
The huge black Dodge exploded out of the side road, spraying gravel. With my forward momentum, I couldn’t judge the vehicle’s speed, but in that instant when I realized the danger, I knew there was nothing in between him and me. I was alone in the intersection, doing fifty-five, not nearly fast enough to outrun him across the two-lane square.
I let go of the steering wheel.
I heard the eerily familiar explosion of steel on steel. I slammed sideways, toward the passenger seat. My seatbelt caught and held. I felt my cheek smash against my shoulder, and then darkness set in.
I woke only a few moments later, to the sound of squealing brakes and blaring horns. I tried to move my fingers. Nothing. I squinted in the failing light, trying to see my surroundings. Only the ceiling of my truck. It seemed to be in one piece, but who knew? I tried to move my fingers again. Still nothing. Toes, same story. No. This can’t be real. Why won’t my fingers move? I started panicking. I tried to lift my head, but my muscles refused to respond. No. NO.
I suddenly realized that I couldn’t breathe either. My diaphragm stayed stubbornly still. No matter how much I struggled to force air into my lungs, nothing happened. I was struggling within my own mind, ordering my body to comply. I could hear my heart in my ears, thumping a little slower each time. My head swam. I needed air! Why couldn’t I breathe?
~~~
I woke up, my eyes adjusting to the black nothingness. A flash of hope lanced through me. I was dead. Or the whole thing had been a horrible dream and I was safe at home, tangled in my sheets. Yes, let it have all been a horrible dream…
The click and puff of the breathing machine dashed both of my hopes rudely into a million little pieces. I was worse than dead. I still lay upon sheets of bleached cotton, inside a hospital where untold hundreds of others also reclined. If I had been able to scream with any volume or any success around the tube in my throat, I would have. If I’d any motor control whatsoever, I would have tossed and struggled until I fell out of the bed and the damned hose yanked itself free. I could die at last. No more monetary drain on the family, and they would have known it was my choice. Instead, I screamed silently inside my own mind, tears pooling in my eyes and spilling out onto the pillows. How many more times would I wake like this? Alone in my hospital room, alone in my own body? Talking to myself?
“This may well be your last, sweet thing,” a voice came from my bedside, near my right elbow. I rolled my eyes toward the voice, the closest thing to fright and surprise I could manage in my state. The voice, male, like liquid silver tumbling over wind chimes of the deepest mellow tone, continued; “Though, as you aren’t alone, I suppose that you didn’t wake in a dark hospital room completely abandoned.”
Was he reading my mind? That couldn’t be possible. And how had he gotten in? I didn’t recognize his voice, so he couldn’t be family. Wasn’t there usually some light in these damned hospital rooms?
A laugh danced through the air, the deep tone of wind chimes in a thunderstorm.
“Yes, I am. No, it isn’t impossible. I walked through the front entrance and caught an elevator. No, I’m not family. At least…” His words trailed off, receding with the darkness as a dim light began to glow in one corner. Sprawled in a turquoise monstrosity of a recliner, my visitor looked all the world like a bored aristocrat, sizing me up with a calculating stare. My eyes widened as I realized he had responded to every single one of my mental questions. Holy crap.
“I doubt a priest would bless his defecation, though if it makes you feel better…” He leaned forward in the chair after glancing down at the arm of it. “You’re right, this color is simply revolting, and the fake leather is quite tasteless.”
Holy. Flipping. Crap. No way.
“Way,” he responded.
My mouth felt like paper. I hadn’t been imagining his answering my thoughts. He could read my mind. I could do nothing but stare at him, admiring the way the soft glow from the tableside lamp defined the planes of his face. His lips quirked upward, and I followed the pointing crinkle of his cheek up to his eyes. Those eyes arrested me. Deep blue agate, scintillating to a rich pearled green and illuminating to a pale, frigid, icy blue-white… The colors of his eyes came in subtly changing colors, and looked deep into my soul. I felt stripped bare beneath his gaze. I could feel my mind stuttering to a standstill. Like a bird caught in a snake’s gaze.
My midnight visitor grinned, a strangely terrifying thing when I realized that my comparison of him to the snake had caused the reaction. The corners of his mouth pulled upward, almost in a predatory way. Straight, perfectly white teeth glittered in the dim light.. If I could have flinched away, I probably would’ve been on the floor, fulfilling my earlier sentiment of suffocating myself.
His grin vanished in that moment as he read the thought in my mind. I suddenly realized that despite the frightening smile and piercing gaze, he was by far most gorgeous person I’d ever seen. Something inside me irrationally thought: Welcome to the dark side; we have hot guys. I noticed his lips quirk upward once more.
“Are you so keen to die that you would willingly remove your own life support?” His tone was curious, almost sad, as he looked me over and took in the apparatus keeping me alive.
I stared at him from behind my locked windows, shocked that someone could see my frantic communications from within my prison. I made up my mind not to squander the opportunity.
Wouldn’t you? If you were robbed of your life as you knew it, confined to a dark hole in the corner of some black-hole hospital? The nurses ignore you, the family bawls over you, and the doctors keep thinking about ways to squeeze more money out of your sorry butt. Yes, I’d more than happily pull my own plug to get the hell out of here and let the family move on. You wanna help me out? The switch is over there.
I indicated the machine with my eyes.
A sad smile passed over my visitor’s face, and made me feel bad for comparing him to a snake earlier. And talking about dying. There was something buried in his expression that made me want to reach out and hug him, if only I could. He glanced up and rose from his seat, rearranging his off-black leather jacket. Was he leaving? No! He couldn’t! The only person I could talk to, and he was leaving? Don’t you dare!
“Easy, sweet thing. I am not leaving. I am only stretching.” He leaned forward and patted my shoulder. I couldn’t feel it, but it brought some semblance of comfort. His fingers trailed up the side of my neck, over the Wound and stopped on my cheek. I could feel his cool touch now. I felt better, even though he was a complete stranger. “I will not leave unless you ask me to. I want to be friends. My name is Chris.”
Chris. Nice, simple, and thank God, not clichéd. I felt something shiver at the base of my skull before it faded. Inside my own mind, I attempted to scrounge up a name that was much more flattering and interesting than my real name, but I knew it to be hopeless. He knew my name the instant I thought it.
“Angie is a nice name,” he said, stroking my cheek gently. His knuckle brushed across a scabbed cut and sent a dull shock of pain singing through my face. He jerked away, but I thought it felt good, a nice change from the nothingness of the rest of me. His finger returned and brushed softly across my skin again.
“So,” Chris’s expression darkened again, looking at the multitude of tubes and wires attached to me that made me look like some twisted sister to the Borg queen. “You are willing to die to leave this behind? Your family, your life, everything?”
I nodded inside my mind. My family didn’t need to spend the rest of their lives watching me crap mine away in a special home, and I didn’t want to spend it that way. But now I had met Chris. He seemed so kind… So sad at times, as if sorry that I thought such things.
My mind ground to a halt. Was he the Angel of Death? The Grim Reaper himself? Hell, that would explain some things.
Chris threw his head back and laughed so heartily that I was momentarily shocked thoughtless. He laughed so hard I saw tears appear in his eyes and for a moment thought the thunder-like sound would bring the nurses running.
His laughter slowly died to a gentle shaking of his shoulders. He wiped his eyes as he looked down at me, a beautifully radiant smile illuminating his face. I would’ve smiled back, save for the tube in my mouth.
“Angie, you are such a sweet thing. Angel of Death. I can honestly say I have never heard that before. Though, I suppose it could be accurate, in a way.” He pushed a lock of my hair aside as he looked down on me. I felt my heart stumble in my chest as thoughts raced through my head. Here I was. Face to face with that which I wished for only minutes before, and I was getting cold feet. Figuratively speaking, of course,
“Slow down, sweet Angie. You are not going to die.”
What?
“No, sweetie. Something else, though only if you want it.”
Huh? My brain seemed stuck on one syllable thoughts.
“I wish to offer you something better. The ability to walk again. The ability to live again, outside the walls of this hospital.”
Holy crap, stop dangling it in front of my face! Tell me! Anything to get me out of this hell!
“There will be a price though. You will not die, but it will be like dying. You will not be able to see your family again, and you will have to give up everything in this life.”
Kinda like witness protection? Some new-fangled treatment that scientists wanted kept under wraps..? My thoughts trailed away when Chris’s eyes darkened and his smile widened slightly.
“No, not scientists, and it isn’t new. As for fangled, there is that.” His eyes seemed to glimmer with some dark, malevolent light.
My heart stopped and I felt my blood run cold beneath my cheeks. Could he be serious?
“Utterly.”
I tried to swallow around the tube in my throat; I wound up gagging silently instead as saliva slid into my airways. Chris’s comforting hand moved to the hose in my mouth.
“It is your choice, of course. I would not force you into something you would regret later.”
Regret? Hell, if I could walk again, I would give my soul.
“You very well might be doing just that.”
My gaze burned into his. I wasn’t falling for that bull. He wasn’t going to deny me walking on grounds that I might lose something so ephemeral as a soul. I might try to delude myself into thinking I’m a good person, willing to sacrifice myself for others, but at the core, I’m as selfish and greedy as the next guy. I wanted to walk. I wanted to live life in an upright posture, no matter what. Take my soul, feed it to the devil for all I cared. I was already thinking about suicide earlier; how much worse could this be?
“Careful what you say,” Chris said, leaning closer to my face. “It could be much worse than suicide.”
Don’t talk me out of it, just do it, I snarled inside my mind.
Instantly his eyes flared a brilliant molten gold and his sad face vanished. It blazed with elated, almost gloating, triumph. It frightened me much like when he first offered his serpent’s grin. I didn’t care.
With one hand, Chris picked my upper body off the bed, while the other he took gentle hold of the air hose. I felt every inch of the hose as it pulled out of my insides, and it made me feel ill to know my air supply slowly slipped away. It was secondary, though. Something so much more important loomed in my immediate future.
As soon as the life-giving air left my throat, I felt my heart pounding faster, looking for the oxygen it needed. Then it stopped altogether as the remaining tethers of spinal tissue severed in my neck. The first real wave of fear crashed over me as I looked into Chris’s burning eyes. He smiled reassuringly before he tilted my head back with one hand while supporting me with the other. I felt his cool breath on my throat, and then his lips brush my skin. My vision started to fade just as I felt that terrifyingly expected sensation of sharp fangs puncturing flesh. Even as my mind started to shut down, I felt intense pain flashing through my whole being. I could feel. I laughed inside, thrilled.
My vision faded to utter blackness.