Reckoning

by Mark Tufo

  I gritted my teeth through the fire that flowed like lava in my veins. Centimeter by centimeter, I urged my hand forward, sheer determination winning out over the protests of my unused shoulder. My back popped as I strained to arch it in an attempt to help it meet my outstretched hand. Finally I struck home. My hand touched the spot where my best friend had shot me, only there was nothing there, not so much as a pimple.

  “What the hell!?” I mumbled. Without warning, lights blazed from all directions. Well, this is it, I thought to myself. I’m having an aneurism. I’m going to die after lapsing into a coma and having one of the most delusional nightmares ever conceived.

  Only I didn’t fade into black. My eyes hurt like hell while they tried to adjust to the searing white light. I couldn’t be dead if my eyes still hurt, could I? I looked up from my precarious position to notice someone had entered the room. It was a Progerian. My lungs collapsed as I screamed myself back into oblivion, back to a place with no alien usurpers. Sweet, sweet bliss… I passed out.

  “Mike, wake up.” I sensed the voice from afar, along with a gentle nudging. “Come on, Mike. I know you can hear me.” I searched the data banks of my mind to try to put a face or a name with the voice, I kept coming up blank. I dared not open my eyes. My chest felt like it might heave right through my rib cage. I didn’t want to open my eyes, I had no desire to know where I was. It was so much easier while I was asleep. Nothing was life or death in my dreams, it just was. I didn’t have to save anyone and there were no best friends who shot you in the back, either.

  “Mike! I know you’re awake; I’m looking at your vitals.”

  Who was that? Maybe if I pretended long enough, she would just go away. She? Was she one of my “spoils?” If so, recognition was still not forthcoming. She shook me again although this time, not quite so gently. I guess she wasn’t going to go away. I might as well see what form of purgatory I was in now. I slowly opened my eyes, trying my best to gradually adjust to the fluorescent lighting that hung from the ceiling.

  “Fluorescent lighting, huh?”

  “What’s that?” the mystery woman’s voice asked.

  “Fluorescent lighting,” I said, more than a little perplexed.

  “That’s right, fluorescent lighting,” she answered condescendingly, like an impatient adult would to a slow child.

  “I guess I’m not on an alien vessel then?” I asked, half expecting her to say I was crazy, that there were no such things as aliens. I more than half hoped that would be what she answered. I was wrong.

  She looked up at the lights, suddenly realizing my thought process. “No, Mike. You’re not on a mother ship.” My heart sank when I realized I wasn’t going to be waking up from my nightmare any time soon.

  “Where, am I?” My voice was gravelly. It felt like I had swallowed dirt and then tried to wash it down with cotton.

  “Here have some water,” the woman said as she tilted my head back; “and then I’ll answer all of your questions, that I can.”

  What did she mean by that? I wondered as the cool water moved down my throat and into my belly. Does she mean what she knows? Or what she’s allowed to tell me? “Alright,” I said as I sat up on my, what, medical gurney? “Let’s start with the basics, where am I?”

  “Paris,” she answered with a small smile on her face. She was probably amused at the shocked look on my mug. All of a sudden, the water wasn’t sitting too well. Was it tainted?

  “Paris? As in France?” I asked but I already knew the answer from her accent. It was the type of accent that let you know she could speak English well, but was too contemptuous to ever let her nationality slip.

  “Actually Paris, as in the Bastille.” I could tell she was loving this, watching my face drop even more.

  “I’m in prison? For what?”

  “Not technically prison, Mike. More of a sanctuary, if you will.”

  “Can I leave this sanctuary?” I, once again, knew the answer to that question too.

  “Not yet.” She said. I must be psychic.

  “Alright, I could probably ask you a thousand questions and get a thousand one word answers and still be no closer to what is going on. Is there any chance you, or possibly your superior, could come in here and give me the Readers Digest version of what is going on here?”

  “Readers Digest?”

  Now it was my turn to act like the impatient adult talking to a slow child, and I don’t think that she liked the turn-around. “You know, the condensed version.”

  “Mike, try to stay calm.” I blinked once because I heard the words but they weren’t coming from this lady’s mouth. Then I looked over my left shoulder to see the video camera and speaker box from which the voice was emanating.

  “I’d be a whole lot calmer if I knew what was going on!” I screamed, ripping off all the leads that were attached to my body, including the IV that was in the back of my hand. Blood splattered everywhere from the violent withdrawal of the needle.

  “Stay still, Mike,” the woman beside me beckoned as she tentatively reached out to restrain me. “Or you are going to pull out your sutures.”

  “I knew it! He did shoot me! Where are the sutures?” The woman looked helplessly at the video monitor, desperately looking for assistance. It was then that the door on the far end of the room opened up.

  “In your head,” the man said as he walked into the room, holding what appeared to be a large needle.

  “Listen, Doc, you come any closer with that thing and I’m going to take it from you and stick it right into your Adam’s apple!” He must have seen something in my eyes that told him this was the truth, because he stopped dead in his tracks.

  “It’s a mild sedative,” he gestured as he pointed to the bottle that the syringe was imbedded in.

  “Listen, Doc, first off, I don’t read French. Second, I don’t care if it’s Labatts beer in that thing, you come any closer and, I promise, you’ll regret it.” I kept my eyes on him as I attempted to stand up for the first time in…! I had no clue how long. But my legs did; they buckled the second I put any pressure on them. Luckily, my arms held out as I caught the edge of the gurney. The nurse? At least, that’s what I figured she was, tried to help me get back into the bed but I shrugged her off.

  “Listen,” I glared at her, “it’s been a long time since a woman has touched me. If you do it again though, you are liable to get a broken finger or hand.”

  She snorted. “Theze Americanz! They all theenk that they are Rambo!” I thought it was funny that her grasp on English slipped when she got upset. I chuckled a little, but the doc didn’t see the humor. If anything, it looked like he was going to back out of that room and run. I must have been a sight: all bug-eyed with blood covering the front of me, half grinning and holding onto the bed. I’m not sure I could have done much more than raise my arm in protest if he had approached me. It didn’t matter though; he wasn’t coming any closer anyway.

  “You are in the Bastille,” he said as he exaggeratedly laid the syringe down on a table near the entrance to the room.

  “Yeah, I got that much,” I replied.

  “May I approach?” he asked as he splayed his hands open to show that he had nothing hidden. I nodded my ascent and attempted to stand myself upright, to give him the impression that a butterfly landing on my shoulder wouldn’t knock me over.

  “The Bastille hospital. You are in the Bastille hospital.”

  “Because Paul shot me.” Even as mad and scared as I was, the hurt still bled through my eyes, and the doctor must have seen it.

  “Yes, Paul shot you, but not for the reasons you believe or even in the manner that you believe.”

  “Huh?” was all I could muster. Did this frog slip into French ‘cause I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand what he was saying? “In English,” I said and I didn’t even mean it as a cliché.

  “It was a dart gun, Mike. It was a tranquilizer. He used probably a little more than he needed, but he didn’t try to kill you.” I n
ow thought back to that day and I remembered marveling, at the time, how quiet the bullet that finally does you in could sound. Most people who had ever been shot during war said they never heard the one that hit them.

  “Then why?” I bemoaned; the stress on my legs and arms was beginning to take its toll.

  “You were a spy,” he answered straightforwardly. That was it. My body gave out and I crumpled to the ground like a Coke can under the weight of a large boot. The doctor and the nurse both rushed forward, only this time I didn’t care. It was tough to maintain your dignity while licking the linoleum floor.

  After some agonizing moments, we were all able to wrestle my body back into the bed. By that time, I hoped maybe he would give me that shot after all. It sure would beat the alternative of staying awake and having to wrap my mind around being a spy. But the shot was not forthcoming, at least not in the foreseeable future anyway. The doctor anxiously took my pulse as his nurse examined my body for any possible fractures.

  “I’m fine,” I said as I tried in vain to shoo them off me. “What do you mean I was a spy? Am I not anymore?”

  “No, not anymore,” he said in exasperation. Then he tried to, again, get the pulse count I had interrupted. When he was done, he elaborated without any prodding.

  “When you came back from that ship, you brought extra baggage.” Bewilderment spread across my face.

  “Baggage?”

  “You were bugged.”

  “Bugged?”

  “Listen! If you’re going to interrupt me every time I finish a sentence, we’re never going to get out of here, and I won’t be able to go home to my wife.”

  “Alright, I’m sorry. I’ll wait ‘til you finish.”

  “The aliens had pretty much tuned into you.” I was about to ask another question when the doctor held up his finger. I halted, mid-breath. “They had attachments to your optic nerve and your eardrum, but the kicker was the homing signal. They had that one buried in your spine. We weren’t sure that we would be able to operate on it without crippling you.” I couldn’t resist; I had to interrupt him.

  “Is that why my legs don’t work so good?” Instead of getting perturbed, he let out a small chortle.

  “Oh, heavens no. We never even operated on your spine.” The doctor saw my look of terror. “Relax, relax. We neutralized the signal; they can’t track you anymore.”

  “How? Alright, no more interruptions, I promise.”

  “We realized that there could be no way to remove the device without damaging the host; the host being you, of course, so we had to come up with an alternate plan. We shook the little bugger to death, we compartmentalized a high intensity beam of sonic waves and literally blew the thing into a million little pieces. Most of which have already passed through your system. There was some damage to the tissue immediately surrounding the device but it’s nothing that a little time, therapy, and cortisone won’t cure."

  “We couldn’t, however, take the same measures with your eyes and ears. We were afraid that any type of explosion in your head would cause an embolism. Or, at the very least, permanent loss of eyesight and/or hearing.

  “For those, we had to operate in a more traditional manner. They were tricky to remove because they were of an organic nature. As opposed to being a foreign object, your body accepted the devices as part of itself and did nothing to reject it."

  “We’ve been studying the new technology for weeks. It’s fascinating. It seems that the material is organic but is neither alive nor inanimate.”

  The doctor looked over at me, realizing that this was not the tangent I was hoping to travel down. He abruptly stopped his diatribe. I noticed that he let go of the string a bit hesitantly and I can’t say I blame him. He was exploring a brand new form of technology and it wasn’t even from this world. Scientists could spend their whole lives searching for something one-tenth of that magnitude, and this guy had it dropped in his lap.

  “Have those senses been hindered in any way?” I asked, somewhat concerned.

  “No, if anything, they’ve been enhanced. Apparently, the aliens didn’t want poor reception on their hosts, so these little ‘bugs’ actually fixed any inherent flaws that most humans have in their eyes and ears. Can you imagine what this could do for the medical community? We could cure blindness and deafness in the world forever.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have to thank the Progerians the next time I see them.”

  “Um hmm.” The doctor cleared his throat, just now possibly realizing where this 'wonderful' technology had come from.

  “How long have I been down and out?” I asked as I lay back down.

  “Close to two weeks,” the doctor answered almost absently, still thinking of the applications that could arise from the new devices. He was even daydreaming about what he would say when he accepted the Nobel Prize for medicine.

  “Two weeks?!” I bolted back up. “It took two weeks to get rid of those things? How have we not been discovered?”

  “No, it took about ten hours to get the ‘bugs’ out of you. The rest was either your transit here or your post op recovery.”

  “Transit? Speaking of which, why was I shipped across the ocean for this operation? You can’t tell me that there wasn’t somebody stateside who couldn’t have taken care of my situation,” I said, exasperated. The doctor looked a little perturbed.

  “I am one of the top surgeons in the field. I have a vast knowledge of the entire human body. I have virtually operated on every major organ with, I might add, unparalleled success.”

  “Alright! Alright already! I’m sorry I asked.” The doctor seemed to relax a bit, letting some of his defensive posture slough away.

  “Besides, I don’t think Paul likes France much. He figured if they leveled this whole country looking for you, who would care?” He said it so absently, I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or not. I let discretion win out and decided I would have a long laugh about that one later when nobody was around.

  “Doc, how long am I going to feel like a sick kitten? If you had so much as blown hard on me, I would have fallen over.”

  “Well, it truly is amazing that you were able to stand at all. I had about another three to four weeks pegged for your recovery time, but you just might halve that.”

  “Doc! I can’t be shelved for another two weeks! I’ve got to get back to Paul, to the Marines, to everybody.” Everybody being who? Deb? Beth? Even now I wasn’t sure.

  “Mike, I’m glad you’re lying down for what I am about to tell you.” The grave look on his face had me concerned. Had my father died? I wasn’t so sure I could take that news right now. What he told me far outweighed any losses I may have suffered.

  The planet as I knew it was gone. Chaos ruled and it didn’t appear that it was going away anytime soon.

  The severity and scope of the event was too much for me to grasp. I had to bring it down on a much smaller level and then the true pain settled over me like a death shroud. My concern for my family, friends, Deb and Beth made it a constant struggle just to breathe correctly. I felt like bands of steel had been fastened around my chest and were, ever so slightly, constricting.

  “Did Paul make it off the mountain?” It was all I could think to ask, that he might possibly have some answers.

  “He did, but barely. He wanted to give you some information that he thought would be useful to you, when you were ready.”

  “Am I ready? ‘Cause if you have some more bad stuff for me, Doc, I’m liable to just go in the corner and cover up.”

  “I’ll be honest, Mike, I have absolutely no clue what it means, but he said you’d understand.”

  “Lay it on me,” I waited in anticipation.

  “He said he was sorry for the shot and hoped that it hadn’t hurt too much and that the Hobbit Tree awaits your triumphant return.” The doctor noticed the shine in my eyes. “Apparently, that’s good news?”

  “Fuckin’ A! Right! That son of a bitch did it!” I yelled.

  “Did what,
Mike?” the doc said with a quizzical expression.

  “Doc, as the old cliché goes, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  “What does that mean? I’ve never heard that cliché before.”

  “Doc, you’ve given me a ton of news, the vast majority bad, but you laced it with some silver flocking and I just kind of want to hash it over for a while.” The doctor understood he wasn’t going to get any answers and began to rise with almost a pouty expression.

  “Besides, Doc, I’m dead tired. All the excitement of the day has kind of worn me out.” That was an answer he could live with, and it almost seemed to wipe the pout off his face. “And doc?” The doctor turned, his lower lip still jutting out, just a tad. “I just wanted to say thank you for everything you did for me.” The lip retracted and the doctor seemed to gain a small hop in his step as he sauntered out.

  Great, I thought to myself, I just had a grown kid with sharp tools operate on my head. And even though I wanted to sit and think through everything the doctor had told me, I fell asleep. I fell asleep to a world full of Hobbit trees. At first, I was apprehensive. If there were this many trees, how would I ever find the one I was looking for?

  “Hello there, my friend.” I turned, in my dream, to see a young version of Paul leaning against a tree, baseball glove in one hand and what was he tossing up in the air? A grenade? I steadily walked toward him. At least, my legs were working correctly here. Paul smiled that sly grin I’d come to know so well during college. Usually, it meant he was up to something, not necessarily for the benefit of mankind. Or he was about to bag Susie something or other. I couldn’t wait to just go over and give him a huge hug or maybe a punch; I wasn’t sure just yet. I noticed Paul toss the grenade up into the air with his right hand.

  He let his left hand stay where it was, almost in a cradling position with the glove and, like the athlete he was, he knew he’d catch it. A glint of something caught my eye as the grenade started its downward plunge. What was that? It looked like a pin.

  “Paul! The pin!” I tried to run, but my legs failed me miserably. Paul just sat there, still looking at me with that devil-may-care grin. The grenade/ball landed in his glove just like we both knew it would. And for a horrible second, nothing happened.