Chapter 2 #3
She paused before she replied. “No. Nothing.”
But she’d paused, and I had seen it, and she knew I had seen it.
“It’s likely a distortion produced by the head trauma,” Cole continued, clicking his pen with renewed confidence now that his colleague had backed him up. “Memory confabulation after TBI can be remarkably vivid and detailed. It doesn’t mean—”
I was out of the bed before I finished deciding to be out of the bed.
The IV line yanked against the tape on my hand and I ripped it free.
The monitor started screaming its flat, indignant alarm, and I was standing barefoot on the cold tile in my hospital gown with blood welling from the back of my hand, trembling with something that felt bigger than anger.
“Mark is dead. Something killed him. Something that looked exactly like that sketch was in the ravine, and you are standing in my hospital room telling me my brain made it all up?”
Cole raised both hands, the universal gesture of let’s all stay calm.
“Miss Gregory, please—”
“I’m not confabulating! I’m not confused, I don’t have amnesia, and I am telling you that something is out there in those mountains that shouldn’t exist, and instead of looking for it you’re standing here clicking your goddamn pen and telling me my memories are broken!”
The nurse was already in the room. I hadn’t heard her come in over the sound of the monitor and my own voice, but she was there with another nurse behind her, and one of them had a syringe.
“Miss Gregory, you need to get back in bed. You’ve just pulled your IV—”
“I don’t need to get back in bed! I need someone to listen to me!”
“We’re going to give you something to help you relax—”
“I don’t want to relax! I want—”
The needle slid into my upper arm, and the drug hit my bloodstream fast. Hospital-grade fast, not the slow creep of over-the-counter drowsiness but a warm, heavy wave that dropped through my body.
My knees buckled. Hands caught me and guided me back to the bed. The ceiling swam and Cole’s face blurred. The monitor was still beeping its alarm. Someone was resetting it. Someone else was reattaching the IV to my other hand. Voices overlapped, going muddy and distant.
Through the cotton haze swallowing my vision, I saw Yazzie.
She was standing by the easel. The sketch of the creature, Chen’s careful rendering of the thing that shouldn’t exist, was in her hand. She glanced toward the door. Cole had turned away, speaking to one of the nurses.
Yazzie folded the sketch, then slipped it into the breast pocket of her uniform shirt, buttoned the flap, and smoothed it flat.
Her eyes flicked to mine. For one suspended moment, through the rapidly narrowing tunnel of my consciousness, we looked at each other. She didn’t smile. She didn’t nod. But something in her expression shifted, a fracture in her professional mask.
Then the sedative pulled me under, and Yazzie and the room and the beeping machines all dissolved into darkness.
* * *
I came up slowly.
Sound came first. I heard monitors beeping and a ventilation system humming. Then footsteps somewhere down the corridor.
I didn’t open my eyes. Not yet. I lay still and took inventory of my body the way I did after a hard fall on the wall. Toes, ankles, knees, hips, working upward. Everything seemed functional but sluggish, my limbs heavy with whatever pharmaceutical blanket they’d dropped on me.
The room was dark. Not fully dark, the monitor cast its green glow, and the parking lot lights filtered through the window blinds, but the overhead fluorescents were off. It must have been night shift, which meant I’d been out for hours.
I heard the door open.
The footsteps were different from the ones I’d been hearing all day. My regular nurse had a quick, efficient stride. These steps were slower, each one placed with what seemed like almost performative precision. Like someone walking the way they thought a nurse should walk.
I cracked my eyes open.
A nurse I hadn’t seen before stood at the foot of my bed, backlit by the dim hallway light leaking through the half-open door. She was holding a small tray with what looked like a medication cup and a syringe, and she was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“Time for your vitals,” she said.
My stomach dropped.
It was the feeling from the mountains. The feeling I’d gotten from Mark on our hike. Not similar to it, the exact same feeling. The hum in my bones, the fine hairs rising on my arms, the primal tightening in my gut.
The charred-sage smell hit me a heartbeat later.
The nurse took a step closer.
“I’m—” My voice was thick. The sedative still had its hooks in me, dragging at the edges of my consciousness. “I’m fine. I don’t need my vitals taken.”
“Doctor’s orders.” Another step. Her face was clearer now, but something about it was wrong, like Mark’s face had been the night I’d knocked on his door.
Dread rose up and made my stomach clench.
Every cell in my body was firing the same signal, a single imperative so loud it drowned out the sedative fog and the monitor beeps and the modern, civilized part of my brain that was desperately trying to tell me that this was a hospital and this was a nurse and I was being paranoid.
If you stay in this bed you are going to die.
The thought wasn’t mine, but it came from inside me, seeming to bypass every layer of my rational mind and speak directly to my legs.
The nurse set the tray down on the bedside table and reached for my arm.
I moved.
The IV ripped free for the second time that day. The monitor shrieked. I rolled off the far side of the bed, my bare feet hitting cold tile, and the nurse’s hand closed on the air where my forearm had been a half-second before.
There was no gasp, no startled step backward, no reflexive oh, honey, it’s okay. She just stood there with her hand still extended, her head swiveling to track me with terrifying smoothness.
I grabbed the window latch and shoved it up. The window was the kind that only opened six inches—suicide prevention, probably—but I braced my feet against the wall and pulled, and the restrictor hardware tore free from the frame.
The night air poured in. I was two stories up. I could see the parking lot below, and a single cottonwood tree whose upper branches stretched close enough to the building that—
I didn’t let myself think about it. The thing behind me hadn’t moved yet, or hadn’t moved fast enough, and I had the sickening certainty that the moment I turned to look I would see something other than a nurse standing in the dim green light of the monitors.
I went through the window feet first. The hospital gown caught on the latch and tore.
Bark scraped my palms. The cottonwood branch dipped under my weight but held, and then I was climbing down in the dark with the cold air on my bare legs and the parking lot security lights turning everything orange and my heart hammering so hard it felt like it was trying to break through my sternum and make a run for it on its own.
My feet hit the ground and I took off running.