Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (37 page)

I still couldn’t hear much of anything, but I did catch a glimpse of my right arm as they picked me up. All I saw was from the middle of my forearm down to my fingers–it was partially de-fleshed and burned so badly it looked like barbequed bacon.

That is when I started to be truly afraid. Something was incredibly wrong, cosmically wrong, because I wasn’t healing... No interesting neurotransmitters were flooding me, dissociating me from the pain. I was feeling every bit of the experience like a normal person.

Abject terror drove up in a U-Haul and announced he was planning to move in.

Thankfully, being moved and jostled overwhelmed me. I lost consciousness. Terror would have to come back when I woke up, or leave a really nasty message on my voicemail.

I remember waking up on my side with a bright light shining in my left eye. My brain was working at one-quarter speed, so I knew they’d drugged me to the gills. The drugs didn’t kill the pain, just moved it slightly sideways where I could be aware of it, but pretend it belonged to someone else.

“Dr. Sharma! Stewart is conscious!” The light-bearer yelled out, and I was muzzily grateful to hear it and know that Jayashri was okay.

I saw Jayashri kneel down in front of me. Her lab coat was a Jackson Pollock painting in red. She changed rubber gloves before she touched me. I couldn’t see anything north of the bridge of my nose, so she kept coming into and going out of view.

“Frank, if you can hear me, blink once. Do not try to talk.”

I blinked.

“Charlie? Where is Charlie?”

“Do not talk! Your throat is burned. Just blink for me.”

“Tell me where she is!” I don’t listen when I’m terrified.

“Stop, Frank. Listen to me. She is being cared for and there is nothing you can do right now.” Jaya was shouting in my face from behind her little paper mask. “You are badly injured and the nanotechnology is offline. The explosion set off an electromagnetic pulse. I have to treat you like a normal patient until we have another solution. Do you understand? Blink–do not talk! Blink once.”

I blinked again. This was bad.

“You have burns over 40% of your body. Some of them are very, very bad. I am going to put you under and take you to surgery. You will need reconstructive work later. Right now, we are going to do our best to keep you alive. Do you understand?”

I blinked again.

“Good. I will see you when you regain consciousness. I will not let you go without a fight. You will fight for me, Frank! Do you hear me?”

I blinked. I had to fight for Charlie first, but Jayashri was a close second.

No one even gave me the opportunity to count backwards from 100. I didn’t even get the chance to be disappointed about it. Darkness swallowed me, and for a time, there was no pain–or anything else.

Waking up after an operation feels a little bit like suffering from really bad dehydration. Everything feels dry and you’re disoriented as hell. It feels like it takes hours to pull your brain back together.

I shook my head back and forth, struggling against the grip of anesthesia.

A nurse came up to me and put her hand on my forehead to settle me back down. I was able to focus on her eyes for a second–long enough to realize it was Chunhua wearing a mask and scrubs.

“Chu...” I rasped at her, becoming aware that the pain was not as far away as I wished.

“Shhh, Frank. Don’t talk. There are a lot of injured people, and I can only stay for a minute. I just want you to know everybody sends their love, and we’ll see you soon.”

“Cha...”

“Shhh. I’ll tell her. Don’t talk. Rest. A nurse will be in just a minute. Things are stretched pretty thin with all the injuries. We’re getting some help in about 6 hours, but we have to cover it until then.” Her voice changed. It was Biggie the Alien this time: “I have something for you, but you are not well enough for it. Be patient and recover. We will speak again. Chunhua will not remember this interaction.”

She looked down at me, and I saw her eyes were wet.

“Not good shape, am I?” My voice came out as a rasping croak.

“Yes, sweetie, you’re in bad shape. Just rest. I’ll get the nurse.”

She rushed out of the room. I knew I was in a bad way, but I must have looked pretty horrible to merit tears.

I wasn’t in a hurry to know how bad off I was. My loved ones and friends concerned me more than finding out about myself. (God’s honest truth, I didn’t want to know how bad off I was.) I assumed that if Chunhua was up and moving, Shawn must be as well. Someone had told me that Charlie was being cared for, or was okay, and I managed to take a little peace in that.

I was wrong, but I wouldn’t find out until later.

True to her word, Chu sent a nurse in. I don’t remember ever having been introduced to her, but I remember her face from the original Health Troopers. She checked my vital signs, and the IV that snaked from somewhere into my left forearm.

“Can you understand me, Mr. Stewart? Just nod or blink.”

“Yes,” I croaked. I was feeling defiant.

“Really, don’t talk.” She walked away and came back. “I’m going to wheel you into another room in just a minute. We aren’t prepared for casualties like this, so we’re using as many rooms as we can. You’re going into the physical therapy room. Okay? Just nod or blink.”

I nodded.

“Great. There are one or two other people in there now, so you won’t be alone. Let’s go.”

She wheeled me down the hallway on the table, and I heard a lot of bad noises. Screaming. Crying. Several voices were yelling, too. There were a lot of people hurt by whatever happened, and that made me vaguely angry. My thought processes were thick and slow.

When we got to the PT room, she parked my table beside one of the examination tables along the wall. Barbara Banks, Nate’s wife, was sitting on the next table. Her head was bandaged, and her right leg was in a cast.

She saw me on the table, and covered her mouth with her hand. I might’ve waved at her, but the IVs made things a little difficult. My right arm wasn’t working at all. Shiny, just shiny.

“Okay, Mr. Stewart,” my nurse said, “I’m going to help you move over to the new table on your tummy. Scoot over just a little bit and I’ll pull you over the rest of the way. You’re going to be much more comfortable that way, and we’ll be able to change your dressings a little easier. Here we go.”

What else could I do? I scooted, slowly and carefully.

“Nurse Scott,” Barbara spoke up, “is there anything I can do to help?”

“You could keep an eye Mr. Stewart and make sure he doesn’t talk too much. Don’t push yourself: you need to rest, too.”

Nurse Scott draped a sheet across my legs very gently, and turned my head so my left eye could see a little bit. She also put a bolster pillow under my left shoulder and arranged things so my left ear was free. I already knew I was deaf on the right side, and I had the sinking suspicion that I’d lost my right eye, but it didn’t bother me a whole lot.

Drugs are good!

Then again, what drugs were they pumping into me, anyway?

“Mrs. Banks, please call out if you need help. I’m going to put a guard on your door. He’ll act as a runner until we get some communication equipment that works in about 3 hours.”

“Yes, Nurse Scott.”

“Honey, call me Noel. We’re all in this together.”

Noel patted Barbara on the arm before she left. Then it was just the two of us.

“Barb... what?”

“Frank, please don’t talk baby. Okay? I’ll tell you what I know if you keep quiet.”

I tried to nod, but the pillows wouldn’t let me do much.

“Bravo Euro stole some of the nanotech, and flew out with our helicopter. Right after that, Omura’s house exploded. There were other explosions around the neighborhood, too, but the house was the worst. Nate says there was an EMP device and it shut down our nanotechnology.” She turned away, but not before I saw the worry etched on her face.

I heard her take in a big breath before she continued.

“I was in B2 when the explosion happened. It took out the front wall of the cafeteria and the classroom. I was in the classroom with some of the older kids, watching one of the ‘Twilight’ movies on blu-ray when it happened. Nancy was close to the wall, and got burned by the fireball. Julia, Ezra, Matt Smith and Rebekah were injured, too, but not as bad as Nancy.”

Knowing I shouldn’t speak, I tried to exhale loudly enough to get her to tell me more. I was awake enough that I needed to know what I had missed.

“You’re not going to rest until I tell you as much as I know, are you?”

I tried to glare at her with my eye. I guess it worked.

“They found you and Omura under pieces of his house in the backyard. He was on top of you when the explosion happened. He was dead when they pulled you both out. I’m so sorry, Frank.”

Shoei was dead. Our nano-critters were fried, so he was really dead... no recovering. He’d saved my life. My heart sunk.

“Buttons is missing,” Barb continued. “No one has found a body, so we’ve got to assume he flew the coop. Ramos, Fitzgerald and Boyle were killed when the cafeteria wall exploded. Nate was thrown into the kitchen by the blast, and he’s pretty banged up. Darcy and Jim were in the kitchen, so they didn’t get much more than scrapes and bruises. Yolanda was in the freezer, so she’s fine. Nate tells me the walk-in freezer acted like a big Farraday Cage, and Yolanda’s nanotech is still online.”

“Me?” I had to ask, even if it meant going against doctor’s orders.

“Baby, I don’t know what to say. Do you really want to know?”

“Honest,” I rasped.

“You’re bandaged like a mummy. Your back is burned and so is the backside of your right leg. They,” she took a huge breath, so I knew the next bit would be rough, “couldn’t save your right arm, or eye. Your face is covered in gauze and burn dressings, so I can’t tell you any more than that. I’m so sorry Frank.”

“Oh.” I really didn’t have much more to say.

My head understood I’d be making the transition from superhuman to disabled, but my heart retreated from it. I worried what Charlie would say when she saw me. I couldn’t imagine our baby growing up with a father who looked like an extra in a bad horror movie. Would I even be able to keep my own family safe like this?

I wondered if it was possible to will yourself to die, and closed my eye.

“I’m so sorry, Frank.” She said it a second time, but I heard the catch in her throat, telling me tears were on the way.

I did my best to nod. She didn’t deserve to not get a response when she’d done as I’d asked her to and was a compassionate about it as anyone could have been.

“Don’t worry. Love you,” I whispered, trying to be gentle on my throat.

It was the last thing to escape my lips for a while. Sleep knocked me over the head, and I was grateful for it.

Pain meds don’t usually flip off like flicking a light switch, at least not in my experience. They fade away until everything hurts again. At some point in the slow pharmacological decline I woke up gasping. My right arm burned, even though it wasn’t there anymore.

My face burned. My back and leg were screaming in unison. It literally took my breath away. I was afraid to move in case the sensations intensified.

When I opened my eye, Barbara wasn’t there. Shawn was. He was sitting in a chair by the side of my bed, snoring quietly. I had to wake him up gently before I started to scream. The pain was becoming more intense by the second and I knew holding out wouldn’t be an option before too long.

“Shawn,” I gasped. “Shawn, please wake up.” Even speaking hurt in a way I wasn’t remotely prepared for.

He kept snoozing. I knew things were about to go south, so I moaned like a soul lost in perdition, hoping he’d get the hint and wake up.

No luck, and the pain was approaching unbearable. Fuck this shit, I thought to myself and screamed my little head off.

Shawn echoed my scream, hopped straight up and missed the chair on the way down. I’d laugh about it later, but at that moment I simply kept screaming. I’d given up on being polite. Someone needed to cope with my agony, because I couldn’t do jack shit on my own.

“Oh Jesus, Frank!” Shawn, looking a little worse for wear himself, held up his hands as if to quiet me down. “Hold on, bro. I’ll get help!”

He didn’t need to, because a nurse flew into the room with a hypodermic needle in her hand, and pushed him out of the way. She snagged the IV tube over my head and jammed the needle in the port. Relief was on the way.

“You’ll feel better in a minute, Mr. Stewart. Just try to breathe normally.” She had a nice voice I hadn’t heard before. I guessed she was one of the new people they’d flown in to relieve us.

She wasn’t wrong. The world took on that slow, heavy feeling of serious narcotic painkillers, and I could breathe without screaming in short order. It was a pretty relaxing sensation. Maybe they had something else in that shot? Sedative?

Eh. Why bother fretting about it. The pain was gone and the world was all soft focus.

“Is he gonna be okay?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Cooper. We can only give him this medicine two more times. It is still experimental. We’ll switch to morphine, and if that doesn’t help we can put him in a coma until he’s healed a little more. There’s a distinct possibility we’ll do that anyway. It will make dealing with skin grafts a little easier.”