by C.L. Bevill
Chapter 13
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 belonged to a man who sounded like he was a heavy smoker, or used to be. “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 smoker 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 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 smoker 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 smoker 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 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, his face was gaunt, and his cheekbones too prominent. 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 one 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 redheaded teenager who was to my right. He leaned over me and said firmly, “I’m a doctor, a medical doctor, Sophie. I put the incubate you, which means I put down your windpipe to help re-inflate your lung. One of your ribs had punctured it and 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 by 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 redheaded 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 in the procedure. Even without electricity, it’s pretty simple, really.”
Zach’s head shot up, but I was fading too 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!”
