Whispering woke me from a drugged state. I’d been dreaming that something was holding me by the ankles, dangling me over a blazing fire yet it wasn’t my head that suffered pain from burning. Instead, it was my chest, legs, and feet that screamed for relief from an intolerable, bright, stabbing, pulsating fire waiting, creeping inch by inch to destroy my flesh.
I came awake screaming, biting my lips as soon as I realized it was coming from me. One of the nurses in cheerful Easter bunny scrubs slid the needle into the port on my one movable limb and the pain receded enough so that I could focus my attention on other things.
Like the two men that stood at the door guarding it, in three-piece suits with expensive tailoring that hid the government issued Sig Sauers in shoulder harnesses. Two more men sat in chairs pulled up to the side of my bed and one wore a dark blue windbreaker over his suit with glow-in-the-dark white letters. FBI. His face was familiar to me and a million other people. Mark Devereaux, the Secretary of Defense sat next to President Alex Houston. Both of them kept their eyes riveted to my face. Behind them were the two Secret Service agents, my doctor and a nurse stood at the right side of my bed.
“Slumming?” I gasped but no one answered.
“Lakan,” Dr. Pentelli greeted as the nurse took my blood pressure. They wobbled in my vision and I wasn’t sure if they were real or a hallucination. I’d woken earlier and had seen both coyotes slinking through the room and Chief Sitting Bull at the foot of my bed.
I licked dry lips and noticed that they had replaced the oxygen mask with nasal prongs.
I swallowed and Dr. Pentelli held a cup with a straw to my mouth. I took a few swallows of ice water. He had called me by my true name.
“My feet burn,” I whispered.
“Do you still hurt?” He held my wrist, his fingers on my pulse and they were warm against my cold skin.
“Not really. It’s there but waiting. President Houston, Director Devereaux.”
“You know who we are?” Houston asked.
“I don’t live in a cave,” I retorted. “Have to be a Neanderthal not to recognize you two.” I closed my eyes. When I re-opened them, they were still there. “You’re real.”
“As real as you are, Lakan,” Houston agreed.
“What do you want?” I was resigned.
“Knowledge.”
“You believe that crap that Chase and Cameron are hyping?” I sneered.
“Lakan, I’ve seen Michael Faraday now and when he came back from Syria,” the President said softly. He leaned forward with intensity. “I’ve also talked to Robert Sheckley, he’s a good friend that I’ve known since I was a junior Senator from Idaho. I know what his son looked like after his overdose and I’ve seen him since.”
“Then why am I broken and paralyzed?” I cried out. “I can’t feel anything below my waist! I’m a fucking 16-year-old cripple!”
“I don’t believe that Lakan,” Houston said. “And neither do you. This is my proposition---you give me five years of your time and cooperation and I promise that no one will so much as type your friends’ names on a lunch list.
“By the way, that was some trick with the free trips to Canada. Homeland is still dealing with the aftermath of that fuck-up.”
“You can say that?” I gaped.
“Why? You think my tongue will sizzle and burn if I curse?” he grinned. “I have a temper. Tantrums even. Just ask them.” He jerked his thumb to the two agents on the door and both rolled their eyes,
“I talk to Senator Lourdes, you know. All the time, he’s one of the few men that I can trust when he tells me something. Even when he lies.” He paused. “What you did for his son, Mike was…a miracle. I expect you to do the same for yourself.”
He rose to his feet and towered over me. I’d seen him on TV but I’d no idea that he was 6’6”. Massive and probably hit 250 lbs., not an ounce of it fat. I wouldn’t want him chasing me.
“Think about it. I can protect you from every nut out there, including Director Chase and Dr. Cameron. Not to mention the Chinese, Russians, ISIS and Israel.”
“Holy shit. ISIS?” I said inelegantly.
“Oh, and the Vatican, too. All of ‘em heading for little old Red Lodge, Montana.”
Dr. Pentelli blanched, “Can you protect him here?”
Devereaux stepped forward. “No. This is not a secure location nor do we have enough agents and soldiers or police to hold off a mob and believe me, once his name is leaked and it will be, we’ll have thousands, hundreds of thousands descending on this hospital and town. The sooner you give President Houston an answer, the sooner we can remove you to a place that is safe.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Pentelli jumped in. “He almost died. He did die. He’s held together with staples, plaster, and wires. He can’t be moved or his spinal injuries could prove fatal. He might blow a fatty embolism that could kill him. He’s safer right here.”
I studied Houston’s face and then the Secretary’s. In both Mens’ eyes, I saw no deception or greed, no threat of danger but then, they were politicians for whom lying was as easy as breathing and making people believe was child’s play.
“Five years and no contact with any of the people that helped me? No warrants or charges against any of them? You’ll let them go? Not keep tabs on them?” I bargained.
“They should go into the Witsec program,” Devereaux argued. “They’re at risk of kidnapping as a hostage to get to you.”
I shook my head slowly. “Where I sent them, no one will ever find them. Their covers are too good.”
Mairy, I thought. Could I lose five years of my life away from her? I swallowed my own sense of loss and thought I could if it meant that she and Robin were safe forever. If the rest of my friends who had helped me would be safe forever.
“Cameron and Chase? What are you going to do about them? Neither will give me up.”
“Don’t worry, I have plans for them, too,” Devereaux said grimly.
“He’s on his way here,” I said faintly, the drugs pulling me under. I let them rather than fight the rising tide of pain versus drugged slumber.
I lifted my head and saw the artificial lights dimmed in my room which indicated to me that night had fallen. There was a hushed and muted sense to the people moving just outside my door and inside, a small glow from the chair near the door illuminated the agent sitting there. It was the light from an e-book reader or Kindle.
I heard him breathe over the hiss of my oxygen line and the subtle pumping of the sphygmomanometer cuff. I woke because my last pain dose was wearing off.
The agent heard me, put down the e-book reader and came over to my bedside. He wasn’t one of those typical intelligence clones---six foot, dark-haired and blue-eyed, a generically handsome government agent. He was a redhead with green eyes and freckles.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “You need the nurse?”
“Yeah.” He pushed the call button and one came in within seconds. None of that waiting around for hours to get an aide to call.
“I need a shot,” I said and she nodded. Her name was on the tag hanging from her neck and I reached for it, turning it so I could read it. Maggie LA Flute, R.N.
“Dr. Pentelli ordered pills for you now, instead of a shot.” She lifted the head of the bed up to a slight incline, watching to see if I showed any strain. It was 2 a.m.
I didn’t have to ask what time it was because of the big industrial sized clock on the wall. She went back outside and we waited for her to return, me more impatiently than he did.
“You like to read, Lake?” he asked me.
“Yeah. What’s your name?”
“Jeff Lindsey.” His eyes weren’t hard as I would have expected to see on a Secret Service agent. He didn’t look that old, either or like a rookie. “Your hair really that color?” He pointed to my blonde locks.
I shook my head. “Red. Dark---like oxblood they call it. Am I still wearing brown contacts?” At his head shake, “then, my eyes are blue.”
“I guess you’re a master of disguises,” he grinned and pulled out his chair, up close so he could sit and talk to me. “I heard you dressed like a girl.”
“I’ve had to be good at it and it wasn’t my idea. Still, it worked. What are you reading?”
“The newest Indie book, President Richard Nixon: A Walk Through His Life by Anne Kamwila.” He went on to tell me all about the book and his voice relaxed me enough so that when the nurse returned with a cup of pills and a pitcher of water, I wasn’t clenching in pain. Jeff went through the whole ID routine along with me, even though he’d seen her five minutes earlier. He checked my name, DOB, and her ID to ensure that she was who she said she was and that I was receiving the proper medications. Only when he was satisfied did he allow her to give me the pills and the water.
I swallowed with a sip of ice cold water and lay there waiting for the Vicodin to kick in.
“You can ask for a sleeping pill, too,” she reminded me. “Don’t wait until the pain gets so bad you can’t stand it. Every four hours the doctor has ordered it.”
“Sleep is not something I have a problem with,” I sighed. “Even the pain will be gone in a few days.” I leaned forward into a sitting position and lifted the arm in the cast, wiggling the fingers. Already, the black and blue sausage look was fading and my arm didn’t hurt as much as my legs and hips. Then again, I really couldn’t feel anything below my belly button.
“Hey, I don’t think you’re supposed to be sitting up,” he said in alarm.
“You think I can hurt myself any worse than I have already?” I asked in irony. “I’m already broken and paralyzed. What else could I hurt?”
“You could die!”
“Been there. Done that.” I reached for the railing with my cast and hooked it at the elbow, dragging my body with its anchored plaster legs to the edge of the bed. Between the rigidity of them and Jeff’s arms, I was standing.
I couldn’t say it didn’t hurt because it didn’t. Or at least, not so that I could feel it. I was a little worried, I thought I should have felt something by now. A tingling, itching, heat---anything to prove that my spine was regenerating.
I felt that subtle heat in my hands and looked down where his hands were on my waist, holding me up.
“Are you Welsh?” I asked out of the blue or so it seemed to him.
“Irish, actually. Red hair, freckles and all.”
“I would ask for you heartlight, then,” I whispered. “This is a thing that can only be freely given, not taken but it comes with a price that only you can offer to bear. You and I will be bonded forever.”
“What, like brothers?” he joked.
“That and more.”
“Why? What will it do? To me? To you?”
“It will help me to heal faster. It will make you healthier. It will make you my soul brother. It will change you.”
“Will it hurt me?”
“No. But it might make others hurt you to take it away.” He was silent, thinking of the Senator’s cancer, Mike Faraday’s bomb injuries, and Sheckley’s overdose. Brain damage, reversible deaths, repaired injuries that medical science had no answers or explanations.
“Okay,” he decided. “Go ahead.”
The blue glow started at my palms but it was a pale, feeble thing until his literally leaped from his eyes, mouth, ears and nose to pour into me with glorious abandon. He looked like one of those eerie creatures from horror movies but more ethereal---as if he were an angel shedding his human skin. In seconds, I felt bones knitting, organs healing, my cord stretching and reweaving back into the infinitely complex structure that regulated my merest thought of movement.
I felt my toes twitch and felt the pain of mending bones where I hadn’t been able to before. It was almost as bad as when I had broken them originally. I screamed and that was enough to break the connection between us. He staggered back to collapse in his chair and I fell backward onto my bed trying not to cry from the intensity of the healing that I felt.
The brilliant light, my screams and his shout of alarm called the nurses to run into my room. They yelled for a doctor and one was there in less than five minutes. He was a stranger, Jeff tried to get up and check him out but he could barely move.
Both of us were examined and after I was given another pain shot, the doctor berated me for trying to get up. He inspected everything on me from my eyes down to my toes. When he ran his fingernail across the bottom of my foot, my toes curled under. His murmur of surprise was heard by all.
“Do you feel this, Lakan?” He poked me with a pin and I jerked even through the haze of fentanyl.
“Ouch.”
“Get Dr. Pentelli on the phone and the neurologist on call,” he ordered. “I want another set of X-rays and an MRI done STAT.
“Lakan, can you hear me?” He came over to my face and looked down at me. I hadn’t realized that they had laid me flat. “Lakan, I’m ordering more tests for you, to see if you’ve regained some movement because your swelling has gone down around the vertebrae. We’ve given you enough fentanyl to take the edge off so that it won’t cause you any discomfort when we move you. Angela, call X-ray and set it up.”
“Yes, Dr. Stevenson,” one of the shadowy figures said.
“Agent Lindsey, are you alright? Can you tell me what happened?”
Jeff’s answer was a mumble. He was nearly unconscious with lower than normal pulse and blood pressure but no lasting harm had I done to him. He’d given me everything he could but no human could give up all their heartlight, even if they wanted to do so. It was like breathing---you could hold your breath but the moment that you passed out, you automatically began breathing again.
“He’s okay,” I mumbled. “Just ‘sausted.”
“Sauced?”
“No. Tired. Me too.”
I was vaguely aware that they slid me down on the bed and locked the side rails. Then, I went traveling down the hallways through long corridors but all I saw were the lights overhead. It seemed as if I were in a dream, and even when they slid me onto a narrow table covered by a white sheet and the loud knocking disturbed my quiet drowse, it still felt like a dream.
After that, someone rolled me back and forth, hushed voices urging me to move this way and that. Another saying that I couldn’t or shouldn’t move. Somewhere in the midst of all their activity, I simply shut off.