Child of Mercy (36 page)

That’s when I realized… I wasn’t alone.

There was someone else in the room with me, I could hear him breathing.  For two seconds I forgot to breathe myself, fear paralyzing what was left of my moving body.  Who was in my bedroom?  Was I even in my bedroom?  Suddenly it seemed less like a weird dream and more like a dangerous situation to be in, especially when I found I couldn’t open my eyes. 

A swishing sound hit my ears, like a swinging door being pushed open, footsteps echoing in its wake.  “Hey, I’m here to pick up an Anja Evans?”

That’s me!
  Only the guy mispronounced my name, with a hard “j” instead of the softer “y” sound of Ahnyah it’s supposed to sound like, so obviously I didn’t know the guy.  Also his shoes squeaked, so we definitely weren’t in my bedroom, not that I really thought I was anymore. 

“Evans… Evans… I don’t have an Evans, how long has she been here?” a different man answered, sounding bored as he flipped through papers.

“I don’t know, some time tonight.  Are you sure you don’t have her?  Maybe she’s not updated in the computer yet.  Blonde hair, blue eyes, about average height, wearing some kind of costume?”

That sounded like me alright, but costume?  My hands moved a tiny bit, sliding across the heavy fabric that felt nothing like my pj’s.  Why would I be dressed up in a costume?

“Oh, Jane Doe number six.  Sure, we’ve got her over here.”  The steps got louder as they walked in my direction. 

“You’ve had six unidentified females today?  Are they that common here?”  He sounded almost as surprised as I was.  If they didn’t know who I was, that meant they hadn’t called my family or anyone yet.  I was completely on my own.

“No, they’re really not.  That’s why she’s only number six,
ever
.”

I’m over here, I’m awake…
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t make any sound, and my eyes still wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I tried to force them open. My fingers started to respond sluggishly, but the men must not have noticed under the sheet.

All at once, I realized I must be in the hospital.  That would explain the uncomfortable bed, the vague disinterest about me and the smell of disinfectant.  I drew some comfort from that, because if I was drugged out or paralyzed, at least I was under a doctor’s care.  That was my assumption anyway…

“Are you sure you have the right one?  I’ll catch hell if I bring back the wrong body.  How did she die?”

Die?
  I couldn’t be dead!  I could still hear, smell, and feel everything.  On the plus side, my tongue started to loosen, and I could open and close my teeth.  If I could move, I couldn’t possibly be dead, but something was definitely wrong.  I swallowed uncomfortably past the lump that rose in my throat. 

What had happened to me?  All too soon, the comfort of finding myself in the hospital turned to despair, and I could feel a silent tear slip from the corner of my eye.  It went unnoticed by the men in the room thanks to the sheet pulled up over my head. 

“Ah… looks like traumatic blood loss.  Tissue damage to the neck, died in transit to the hospital, that’s all I’ve got here.  But you’re welcome to take a look before you take her.” 

A millisecond before the sheet came off, my eyes popped open and a high, keening cry leaked out of me like the air out of a balloon; my only available version of a scream, I suppose.  The effect was electrifying.  Both men screamed, and like a switch was flipped, I felt the energy rush back into my limbs.  Filling my lungs with air, I screamed right back at them, and we stared at each other, all of us screaming for a good ten seconds before the room got really quiet. 

“You’re… you’re…”  The guy dropped his clipboard as he backed up a few feet.  The other man, the one who came to get me I assumed, continued to stare at me like I had just risen from the dead, which was understandable.

“W-where am I?”  My voice sounded shrill to my ears and I couldn’t help but wince, doing my best to swallow back my fear.  I felt… wrong somehow, but I couldn’t quite identify why.  Finding myself in such strange surroundings was too distracting.

“Shoreline Memorial Hospital in San Francisco.  You’re, um… you’re supposed to be dead.”

“I’m sorry…” slipped out reflexively, though what I had to be sorry about, I couldn’t imagine.  Shoreline was the same hospital Bridget worked at, and I wondered if she knew I was there.  I was tired of lying down and I might have said something to that effect as I pushed myself up to a seated position, but I was too busy looking at my surroundings to be sure if I’d spoken out loud.  It wasn’t a hospital room as I’d assumed, but what looked like a morgue, based on my experience with TV and movies. 

I was still half lying on a gurney, but a large stainless steel table stood in the center of the room, with holes drilled through it for drainage of various… ugh, I didn’t want to go there.  “I feel…”
dizzy, confused, itchy, nauseous, sore, tired…wrong…
“…different.”  My tongue finally supplied, and I again marveled at the sound of my own voice.  Was it my ears or the timbre of my voice that had changed?  It was impossible to tell. 

“That’s understandable, you’ve been dead for over an hour,” the morgue attendant replied distractedly, bending to pick up the clipboard. 

“Oh come on, Dave, there’s obviously been a mistake.  She’s no more dead than you or me.  I know some folks that are going to be glad to see you up and walking around.”  The other guy gave me an encouraging smile.  

Walking around didn’t sound like too bad of an option.  More than anything I wanted out of the morgue with its strange smells and disturbing tables.  Despite the dizziness, I launched myself to my feet, throwing myself off balance as my muscles propelled me farther than I had intended.  I careened into the icky metal table, sending a tray of tools crashing to the ground.  The sound was deafening, and I clamped my hands over my ears as I waited for it to end.

“Whoa, are you sure you should be up and around?”  Smiley guy reached out to steady me, catching hold of my elbows. 

That’s when I noticed the front of my dress had been cut and gaped open, showing more of my natural assets than I cared to, outside of a beach.  When I say my dress, I don’t mean
my
dress.  I’d never seen the thing before in my life.  No wonder they reported I’d been wearing a costume, I would have made the same assumption.  The underdress was made from a scratchy, coarse linen, the color of marigolds.  The outer layer was a heavier, indigo wool, held up just below the shoulders by two round metal broaches adorned with three running horses, their legs intertwined. 

It was hard for me to gauge the whole effect in looking down.  Wherever it came from, they’d never get the deposit back.  Besides the long cut down the chest, it was also soaked through with blood on the left side of my body. 

“I don’t belong here,” I murmured, pulling myself free from his grasp and doing my best to hold the dress closed.  Overcorrecting, I nearly fell over the other way.  Trying to muster a modicum of dignity, I swallowed again, clearing my throat in search of my normal tone of voice.  “Can either of you tell me what’s going on?”

“I’m not sure, this almost never happens,” Dave replied, losing some of the stunned look from his face.  I saw his eyes dip to my chest and I shot him a look.

“But it does sometimes?” That was disturbing to hear on many levels. 

Dave’s face flushed when he saw that I noticed him looking and he turned away, coughing into his hand as he approached a desk set in the far corner of the room.  “Well no, not down here.  Usually they catch that sort of thing up on the main floors.  Um, let’s see what I can find out here.”  He tapped on the computer and the other man followed to look over his shoulder.  “You were brought in a little over an hour ago… and died enroute to the hospital.  They tried to revive you, but…”

He’d already said that before, but it was like it had happened to someone else.  “I don’t remember any of this.”  I shook my head miserably, it was starting to pound something fierce. 

Smiley guy took pity on me, fixing me with that same reassuring smile.  “You’ve been through quite a trauma, ma’am.  Maybe you should sit down?”  Nodding, I avoided the creepy tables and slid into a plastic molded chair by the swinging door.  “I’m Mike Turley, I work for the medical examiner’s office with SFPD, and I’m glad to find you alive and breathing.”

“Anja Evans.”  I stuck out my hand by force of habit and after a moment’s hesitation, he shook it.  I was struck by how warm his hand was, but I didn’t feel uncomfortably cold.  Any difference in temperature was probably from my lying in the chilly morgue for an hour without my socks on. 

“Nice to meet you, Anja.”  He pronounced my name correctly that time.  “Sit tight, I’m sure there are a lot of people who want to talk to you.”  Straightening, he turned back to where Dave sat at the computer.  “I’m going to need to make some calls and my signal’s for shit.  Do you have a phone I can use?”

“Oh yeah, there’s never any signal down here.  Feel free to use this line here, dial nine to get out.  I should really get a doctor down here to examine her, or I wonder if I should take her up to the ED myself…”

A lot of people who wanted to talk to me.  Cool beans.  And lots of doctors poking and prodding me as well.  Even better.  My eyes flicked to the swinging door beside me, the urge to flee growing stronger and stronger, until I lurched out of the chair and out the door with a soft rush of air.  Once I was on the move, it seemed a simple thing to keep going.  Objects in motion are easier to stay in motion, or something like that.  I’ve never been particularly good at physics, no matter what you may have heard. 

I’d always had the stigma of being kind of a book nerd.  It’s cliché, but maybe it had something to do with the braces and glasses I wore all through high school.  Okay, so looking back I can admit it had more than a little to do with button down shirts and skirts that didn’t rise above the knee, but my parents were really strict while I was growing up.  Even three years out of high school, I still had trouble coming out of my shell, as my sister Hanna liked to call it.  Or pulling the stick out of my… behind (I’m paraphrasing), as Bridget liked to say a bit more colorfully.

While the braces were long gone, the glasses remained, but I liked to think I didn’t look all that different from any other student at the Central Coast Academy of Fine Arts.  When I wasn’t wandering through the bowels of the hospital wearing a torn, bloody rag, that was. 

The need to get away from the morgue propelled me forward, I thought it was adrenaline lending me swiftness at the time.  The earlier stiffness was completely gone, no trace of the paralysis, though I still felt off my game.  Every second that drew me farther away, I expected to hear my name called from behind, or even a ‘stop that girl!’ yelled after me.  But I didn’t run into a soul on my way to the wide elevator at the end of the hallway.  As the doors slid shut, so did my eyes, and I allowed myself a brief moment to catch my breath and give thanks to the gods above for not only allowing me to get away, but for sparing me from whatever near-death experience I’d narrowly escaped.

As conspicuous as I felt in my bare feet and ruined dress on the ground floor, it was nothing compared to the flare of embarrassment that went through me when someone joined me in the elevator.  A little wisp of a man, close to my height, peered at me from behind oversized glasses.  Dressed in blue scrubs, he could have been anything from laundry staff to a neurosurgeon to my untrained eyes. 

“Are you alright?” he asked, more than a little concerned by my appearance.

“Yes, of course.  This isn’t my blood,” I waved off the concern.  Come to think of it, I wasn’t in any pain.  What had the guy said back in the morgue… tissue damage at the neck?  My neck felt fine.  Surreptitiously, my hand snaked up to probe at my neck and felt nothing but smooth skin.  “It’s ah… it was a costume party that got a little out of hand.  You know how it is.”  I gave him my best smile and crazily enough, he bought it.

“I remember those days,” he smiled wistfully.  The doors opened on the second floor then and he held them open for me.  “Getting off?”  There was definitely a light of hope in his eyes.  What kind of a weirdo wanted to flirt with a barefoot, bloody wreck of a girl in the middle of the night in a hospital? 

“Sorry, not my floor.”  I pushed the button for the third floor, stepping back with a faint smile as he shuffled off. 
What I wouldn’t give for a mirror…
  Self consciously, I pushed the hair out of my eyes and realized for the first time I wasn’t wearing my glasses. 

I wasn’t blind by any means; I could tell the difference between a tube of toothpaste and a tube of anti-itch cream, but I had trouble whenever reading was involved.  Normally when I forgot to put my glasses on, after a few minutes I’d get a light headache until I put them back on again, but I’d been walking around the hospital just fine without them. 

Looking at the numbers on the elevator buttons, they were sharp and distinct.  I could clearly read the posted weight limit and even the elevator permit behind grubby plastic.  Maybe it was one of those things where you got hit on the head and it changed your eyesight?  Only I didn’t think I’d hit my head, and since when did the Flintstones logic work anyway?  The night kept getting weirder and weirder. 

The elevator doors opened and I stepped out onto the deserted hallway.  I knew my roommate Bridget worked nights up on the third floor in long term care as a ward assistant (a glorified name for an orderly, but I’d learned long ago she didn’t particularly appreciate that label), and I hoped it wouldn’t be too hard to find her without attracting more attention.  Luckily, I didn’t meet a soul, and I spotted her standing at the nurse’s station, head bobbing to Linkin Park blaring from her earbuds.

You’d never think someone like Bridget and I would be friends from looking at us.  Maybe that makes me a little judgmental of appearances, but you have to admit, most people do make snap decisions based on looks.  Paired with her maroon scrubs, she wore chunky, black combat boots that flopped open at the top, a score of black rubber bracelets like Madonna used to wear back in the eighties, and at least three chunky silver necklaces.  Her dark hair was plaited into thick braids that hung down her back, revealing the top of the tattoo on her neck.  I’ve always wanted one, but I could never picture myself as a grandmother with a tattoo.  Who wants to see a cool design get saggy, old, and faded as you age?