Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (9 page)

“Now boy, take a deep breath, hmmm?” Like I could even
help
taking deep breaths, with how freaking cold that stethoscope felt…okay, and how afraid I was. Apparently satisfied with what he heard, the creepy old doctor repeated the procedure on the opposite side. “Just as I thought. Advanced pulmonary tuberculosis.” He shook his said sadly, though whether his sympathy was real or fake, I couldn’t tell.

“I don’t have tuberculosis!” I yelled back at him. “I had X-rays when I was a kid. My lungs are just fine!”

Nurse Baker (in my head, she was already labeled
Nurse Crazy,
so how about we just go with that?) grabbed my chin with one hand and turned my head towards her.

“Now just you listen to me, you silly little boy…if Doctor Spiessbach says that you have tuberculosis…” — she punctuated each word with a slap on the cheek that stung — “…then
slap
you
slap
have
slap
tuberculosis
slap
.”

I could feel the skin flushing where she’d slapped me, not hard enough to do any real damage, but enough to cause a little pain and a heck of a lot of embarrassment. I was starting to get angry now, which I figured was good. It was beginning to wash some of the fear away.

“There is no point in deluding yourself, child. Hmmm?” Damn, but that
Hmmm
-ing was getting annoying. The doctor had his back to me, but from all of the clinking and clanking sounds must have been caused by him rearranging the tools on the metal tray. I knew where this was heading, and I didn’t like it — none one little bit.

“I’m not delusional, doc.” Desperation was pushing me to try a different tack, a nicer one. I was starting to feel like Luke Skywalker hanging from the ceiling of that ice cave in Hoth, except I didn’t know how to use the Force to get me out of this mess before Doctor Wampa chewed my ass. Oh, and there was no lightsaber to grab anyway. “I shouldn’t even
be
here. I’m not even a patient. My name is Danny Chill, doc, you’ve got to believe me. I know how crazy this sounds,” I had to resist the urge to tell Nurse Crazy not to take offense, “but before I went to bed last night, I spent a little time on Google, looking this place up.
That’s
why I’m stuck in the middle of this messed-up dream now.”

“
Google?
” The word sounded way funnier in his accent. “I am afraid that I am not familiar with this place.”

“Oh, come
on,
man!
Everybody
knows Google.”

Look at it like this, Danny: your little late-night search engine session just landed you straight in the middle of a brain-bender of a nightmare, smack in the middle of the hospital from hell, and the one thing —
the one thing
— you choose to get mad about, is that the bad guy from this week’s episode of
American Horror Story
hasn’t heard of Google? Get a grip, man.

My little personal rant was interrupted when Nurse Crazy leaned back over me with a rubber oxygen mask of some kind clutched in her hand. A long, flexible tube connected to the mask disappeared away into the darkness behind her. The doc reached up with a trembling hand and pulled down one of those big flat spotlights on a mechanical arm, positioning it in the air right above my body. When he flipped the switch, I was pretty much blinded. The gang of nurses who had all been just shadows and silhouettes before, were now completely invisible to me, lost in the blinding white glare of the round lamp. In fact, it was so bright, tears started to form in the corner of my eyes. I squinted, tried to make out what was happening, but then the mask was pushed down firmly over my nose and mouth. I could hear the tell-tale hiss of gas flowing, somewhere in the background.

“Mhmmhfmfhmmmfhff!” I said, which roughly translated to “What the hell are you doing to me, you creep?”

Nurse Crazy must have understood me anyway, because she said: “Relax now, boy. It’s just a little something to help you sleep.”

For a moment, I could almost have mistaken her for actually caring about me…if I could have forced myself to ignore the totally black eyes, that is. But then she followed that up with this little gem: “After all, you don’t want to be awake for the surgery, do you?” Her tone was way too gleeful for my liking. And so I did what any reasonable person would have done in my situation.

I freaked.

Thrashing and writhing against my restraints, I half-expected to feel the nurses start to force me down against the table again, but the leather straps must have been doing a pretty good job of keeping me under control. The only other possible explanation was even worse, and as my vision began to blur and the world around me started to lose focus, it was beginning to look like it was the right one.

The gas was making me helpless.

It felt like my head was stuffed full of cotton candy. My thoughts were starting to get foggy, and even stringing a couple of words together to form a sentence was starting to get difficult. “Wha…what…you…” was the best I could come up with, though what made it past the face mask couldn’t have been more than a weak little moan.

“In conjunction with
this,
you are merely getting a combination sedative and analgesic,” the doc explained helpfully, holding up a glass syringe. With my blurred vision, I was seeing three needles. A goofy part of my brain wondered if he was going to stick me with the one in the middle.

I felt a poke in the inside of my left elbow, but it seemed to be far away, almost as though it was happening to somebody else and I was hearing about it later. It was getting harder and harder to keep my eyes open. The doc was suddenly sounding way too chipper for my liking.

“As Nurse Baker said, you are going to take a nice, long nap. After all, we wouldn’t want you awake during the surgery, would we, hmmm?” He gave a little snickering laugh that made me want to punch him square in the throat…if I could have moved even one single muscle, which wasn’t looking at all likely right now.

Hey, wait a minute:
“
Surgery?
”

I fought to open my eyes again. It was harder than any push-up I was ever made to do under protest in gym class. Dimly, I could see the doc’s face swimming in front of me. Then he held something up, something long, shiny, and square. I blinked rapidly, was finally able to bring it into sharper focus for a second.

Oh crap. It was a saw — a freaking
saw.
He flexed it experimentally, like I’d seen carpenters do on TV shows. Then he put it down on the metal tray and reached for something else. If anything, this next implement was even scarier. What the doc held up now looked like a bigger, nastier version of the pruning shears mom used when she was working outside in the little flower garden that she was so proud of; but these shears had evil-looking curved tips that remind me of the pincers on a crab. The doc snapped them open and shut several times, until he was satisfied with their action.

I was so terrified, I wanted to pee my pants.

“
Ja,
surgery. Those ribs must come out, I am afraid, dear boy. After all, how else am I to get at your lungs, hmmm?”

I woke up screaming, drenched in my own sweat.

“Daniel!”

Mom burst through my door like a one-woman squad of Force Recon Marines, her head on a swivel and fists clenched, ready to fight. I swear she was ready to grab whoever it was that she thought must have broken in and attacked me, and beat him to death with her bare hands. She got like that sometimes, now that Dad was gone…all ‘Mama Bear, defending her cubs,’ if you know what I mean.

For a while there I must have been bicycling with my legs and thrashing around like crazy, because my comforter was a big lumpen mess on the floor next to my bed.

And that was it, the single most important thing, really the
only
thing I cared about right now: I was back in
my
bed, which meant that that god-awful nightmare was finally over.

Slowly, I sat up. Murky gray light was starting to filter in through the window. Darth Vader stood defiantly at the foot of the bed, one hand reaching out towards me. Never had I been so glad to see a Sith Lord in my entire life, not even when he first appeared on screen at the end of Episode III and the entire movie theater went nuts.

“Honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Mom…” I said weakly. Inside my chest, I could feel my heart pounding like crazy. My breathing was coming in fast and shallow spurts, so I made a conscious effort to try and slow it down, forcing myself to make it a little deeper and more regular.

Now that she was sure I wasn’t in any danger, Mom sounded almost like she was going to burst into tears.

“What was it about, honey?” She took a tentative seat on the edge of my bed, taking my hand in both of hers and cupping it reassuringly. “It’s okay. Was it about…your father?”

“No, Mom. It was just a nightmare. I don’t have
those
dreams any more.”

When Dad had died, I’d had some pretty wicked nightmares for months afterward. Real dark and gloomy stuff, but also really weird and bizarre, sort of like the kind of thing you’d see in a Terry Gilliam movie. Even now, it’s not something I like to talk about. There’d been no way I could hide it from Mom (the screams in the night were a dead giveaway) and when she’d heard what was happening, she took me along to a see a counselor, or therapist, or whatever it is they officially call shrinks these days.

Quite how an overweight middle-aged bald dude was supposed to help a teenage boy relate to his Dad’s death in combat over in the sandbox, I’ll never know. The guy obviously
meant
well, and I don’t want to be too hard on him — but how the hell could he be expected to relate to what I was going through? It’s not like
his
Dad had gone out in a hail of bullets and an IED, is it?

Anyway, I had to go and see Mr. McNealy every week, and talk to him about my feelings, the nightmares, any other stuff that came up. There was no way I was going to tell him about any of the
other
stuff, the supernatural stuff…that would have been a one-way ticket to a straitjacket.

After six months of that, but not
because
of that, the nightmares had pretty much stopped (Mom backed me up there, she’d been listening for the screaming every night) and life was back to some kind of normal.

Mom wrapped me up in a giant hug. I was freaked out enough that I let her. We rocked back and forth for a few minutes, in the same way Mom had always done for me since I was a kid, and pretty soon I really did feel better. She finished up in the traditional way, by planting a kiss on top of my head and ruffling my hair. I scowled in the now-traditional response, and everything was good with the world once again.

“It’s still early, honey. Are you gonna go back to bed for a while?”

I scooped up my iPhone and hit up the clock. 6:30. “Nah, I’m good. Think I’ll watch a little TV.”

“Alright, honey. Try and keep the noise down, okay?” Mom yawned and went off to catch another couple of hours. It wasn’t like she hadn’t earned the right; Mom worked her ass off all week long.

I threw in the
Empire Strikes Back
Blu-Ray and flopped down on the couch, keeping the sound down to a dull roar out of consideration to Mom.
Empire
has always been my go-to movie whenever I really needed to escape from reality for two hours and seven minutes, but for whatever reason, it just wasn’t doing it for me right now. We hadn’t even made it to the chase in the asteroid field before my brain was flashing back to the dream again.

One minute I was watching the
Millennium Falcon
dodging and weaving past the pursuing TIE Fighters like I’d done a hundred times before; the next, I was strapped back down to that operating table, with the crazed surgeon leaning across my body and ‘
hmm
-ing’ for all he was worth. Then I’d snap
back
to the movie again, but in no time at all, I’d feel the cold, sharp teeth of the bone-saw beginning to cut into the flesh of my chest, grating against my ribs.

The pain was weird. Having a maniac slicing his way through your muscle and bones should be agonizing, and it
was,
in its own strange way; but it seemed like I was watching the surgery from far away, as if it was a movie where I could sort of feel the pain, but it wasn’t actually happening to me. Somebody else was getting carved up like a turkey, and I was somehow experiencing it second-hand.

Then the
Falcon
was flying off in search of Han, and the end credits rolled. Bright sunlight was streaming in through the windows. I looked over at the clock and saw that it was already coming up on nine. I sighed. My head just wasn’t in the game today. I’d need to get my act together fast. There was shopping to be done, supplies to pick up. But first things first. A bowl of Cheerios and a glass of orange juice took care of the grouchiness that I could already feel coming on.

I shook my head like a dog drying itself after a bath, hopefully consigning thoughts of Long Brook Sanatorium to the back of my brain.