Vanessa rolled beneath the table, flicking her steel fan open as she came to her knees, the barbed claws on the end swiping through the air at Joaquin’s ankles. He jumped, avoiding the strike, but she caught him on his way down, as she lifted to a crouch, while he simultaneously darted from the path of Felix’s double-edged boomerang. Joaquin yelped as one of his Achilles tendons was torn, and I did too, as Felix’s boomerang came precariously close to shearing my skull on its return flight.
“Watch it!” I yelled, struggling against my ropes. Felix scowled, leaped on an ornate credenza, and came up behind me.
“Hold still,” he said, and with a flick of his wrist cut through the ropes at my neck with the boomerang, before working his way down. I wriggled free, bindings falling from me to mingle with the reptiles now slithering across the floor, and Warren handed me my conduit as I stood. I cocked it, looking for Joaquin.
“Where’d he go?”
“That way,” Vanessa said, pointing in the direction of the reference room. I bolted forward, though the others had already beaten me there, skidding to a halt before a thick steel door. The black curtain had been rent aside.
“No!” I pushed past them all, pounding on the door, then pushing against it with my good shoulder. I wasn’t going to lose him now. I wasn’t going to let him get away with saying, or making me feel, all those things. “No!”
“Shit!” I heard Vanessa say.
“We gotta go!”
“Olivia!” Warren yanked at me, as I continued to pound at the door. “The ceiling’s caving in!”
I looked up to see sun streaking in through the crumbling hillside, then back at the door, where I knew Joaquin was breathing and alive and safe on the other side.
“No,” I whispered, choking on dust-filled air, as I raised my conduit and fired into the steel door. I’d rather die than let him live. An arm curled around mine and yanked me back, causing a misfire, but my indignation was cut short by a solid crack against my skull. My vision fled immediately, and I felt myself falling as if in slow motion. A set of arms curled about me, softening my landing, then everything drowned in black.
I wasn’t awake. I was floating in memory, drifting along echoes of forgotten sound. Like the emotions Joaquin had laid bare, I was buried deep in my past, and even though I recognized it as a dream, I felt and saw and smelled all the things that’d assailed me after that first attack. And like the first time, I couldn’t escape any of it.
Beeps and readings from complicated machinery surrounded me, and voices intermittently spewed from an intercom in the hall with words I’d long stopped hearing. I was lying on a bed, body aching because I’d been there for weeks. I looked down, past crisp white sheets, and tried to count on my fingers just how long I’d been in the hospital. But I couldn’t concentrate. I was distracted by the brace on my right hand, holding my fingers straight and aligned, like the Boy Scouts’ three-fingered salute. My eyes wandered, drawn to the blackened nail beds poking from beneath the dingy gauze, where the jagged fingernails had only now begun to lengthen, finally long enough to cover the tender flesh beneath. Proof that I was healing. That my body was fighting even as I remained not moving, not speaking, trying not even to think.
I wriggled my fingers, then tentatively twisted my wrist when that provoked no real pang or ache. I lifted my entire arm shoulder height, and frowned when there was no smarting response. I repeated the action with my other arm, the one sealed tightly in a cast. There. A sliver of white-hot pain shot through me, and I dropped it again, letting the ache wash over me, ringing through my core before it ebbed and faded away. I closed my eyes, and rested.
When I opened them again, it was dark. The streetlights outside my window had come on, and I could see the headlights of passing cars as they sped down Flamingo Road, each in a hurry to reach a separate destination, all unknown to me. All unimportant.
What time was it? I wondered, my mouth dry as sandpaper. For that matter, what day was it? I glanced at the wall across from me with a giant number twenty-five emblazoned, black on white. That couldn’t be right. That meant it’d been only one day. Twenty-four hours since the doctor had sat next to my bedside, face solemn and concerned, voice soothing and low, tanned hands patting my own as he told me I wasn’t merely healing. I was growing life.
But he was wrong. They were all wrong. Because I was broken. You couldn’t go five inches up or down my body without running into something that was fractured, shattered, or bruised. Me and Humpty Dumpty, I thought, biting my lip till it bled. Never to be put back together again.
I licked the blood away, surprised at the metallic taste, then frowned as I thought, That’s not right. Bleeding means the vessels were working, and the heart was pumping, doing its job like nothing ever happened, like it hadn’t been stomped on and bruised and stopped. So why did the fucker keep on ticking? I felt my betraying heart skip a beat, before it started slamming against my chest, faster and harder with each progressive beat, and my head grew dizzy and light. I opened my mouth to suck in a lungful of air-because that’s all I had left, one lung-and still the panic attack snuck up on me, an A-bomb detonating right in the middle of my chest.
I wish.
I swallowed hard and tried to slow my breathing, ignoring the button beside me that would call the nurse who would provide the drugs that would numb me to the world. I fumbled for the remote, pushing it behind me, deep beneath the extra pillows I’d been given, before fishing out another hidden treasure. My own call button. My own form of medicinal relief. I was my own nurse.
The razor had come from the guy in the bed next to me. They’d let him shave before he left the hospital, and he’d tossed it in the bin between our beds, and left without saying good-bye. The adventure from my bed to the trash can three feet away had been my first since fleeing across the desert night, and I’d almost ruined it by sitting up too fast. I passed out and flipped the wrong way on my bed, but luckily the nurses had been in the middle of a shift change, and never noticed a thing.
Now I curled my fingers around the razor I’d nicknamed Tonto after the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, and lifted the bedsheets to reveal the pale, freckled length of my good thigh. The marks from the day before were already scabbed, healing. And that just wouldn’t do.
“You’ll get better, Joanna,” my mother had said, smoothing her hand over my face, drying my tears after the doctor had gone away. “You’ll see. You’re going to heal, the pain will stop, and you’ll go on to live a happy, full life. I promise you. You will survive this.”
I sliced, once, twice, and her voice receded. She finally shut up. I shut her up. I shut the doctor up. And the screams and cries in my head, the ones that woke me up in a cold sweat each night, the ones that caused these sudden attacks of panic, finally shut up, too.
I sliced again, watching the blood well, a thin black line in the dim light. Cars continued to race by outside, but it didn’t matter where they were headed. My thighs burned. The pain anchored me. It gave my life in this bed meaning and purpose.
When I was in pain, I felt safe.
I came to in a place very similar to the one I’d left in my dreams. Curled on my side, I first saw the machines, all turned off and silent in the corner as there was no real emergency here. Not on the surface anyway.
“He got away, didn’t he?”
I didn’t turn or look around, but I knew someone was there. I could smell them in the corner. I inhaled deeply and caught something close to brewer’s yeast and Axe after-shave. Felix.
“He did. Who’s Tonto?”
I did turn my head at that. “What?”
“You were talking in your sleep. Who’s Tonto?”
I dropped my head back on my hands, facing the wall again. “An old friend,” I whispered, and touched the bandage on my left arm, wondering, as a reassuring flash of pain shot through me, what else I’d said. “How’d you find me?”