Retrospect 3/7 (Without a Trace)
Retrospect
3/7
Present day …
Movement.
Side to side. Up and down. Lurching.
Sound.
Squeaking. Rumbling. Wailing.
Tilting and nauseating and crushing and …
Too much.
**
Light.
Much, much too bright. Blinding.
A weak cry, familiar somehow.
Other voices, then.
“ … pupils are unequal … ”
*God, too loud.*
“ … can you hear me? Martin?”
*Please … stop. Too loud.*
“ … ETA is two minutes. Patient is not … ”
A sledgehammer dropped, driving everything else out. Smashing the world into dust.
**
Beeps and clattering and crisp, professional voices above and next to him.
Martin pulled his eyes open and groaned, squinting at his surroundings, which consisted of blurry, bright lights overhead. Lights that might as well have been a thousand finely honed knives, the way they sliced into his brain. Hissing, he covered his eyes and slowly rolled to his right, curling into himself, trying to escape the sharp agony.
“Agent Fitzgerald?”
The booming voice startled him and he flinched, then jerked as someone touched his arms, guiding him to lay flat, pulling his hands away from his face. He wanted to resist, but couldn’t. Between the harsh lights and ear-piercing sounds, he could barely hold onto consciousness. Wasn’t sure he wanted to, certainly not when his head settled into the pillow and the entirely too firm surface almost shattered the back of his skull into a gory jigsaw puzzle.
Someone asked him something, but the words got lost in his misery. A gentle but firm hand cupped his chin, and the question came again, this time understandable.
“Agent Fitzgerald, can you open your eyes?”
Open them? When had he closed them?
“Agent Fitzgerald, can you understand what I’m asking? Can you open your eyes?”
As much as he wanted to ignore that voice, he felt sure it would hound him until he obeyed, and so he did, groaning at the stark whiteness above him. It reminded him of how overly bright everything looked after getting his eyes dilated at the optometrist’s office. Thankfully, a blur quickly moved into his line of vision, providing welcome shade. The human-shaped form had dark spots where eyes, nose and mouth would be, and dark fuzz at the top that must be hair.
The blur introduced himself. “I’m Dr. DuMont. You’re in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. We’re treating you for a head injury. Do you remember how you got hurt?”
What the hell was up with the yelling? He wasn’t deaf, after all. Far from it.
Unfortunately.
He didn’t know how he’d been hurt, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to escape the nameless, faceless sadist drilling holes through his skull. Answering the doctor’s question with a slight shake of his head, Martin moaned as the movement heightened his agony. He instinctively tried to roll away from the pain even as he reached toward its source.
“Agent Fitzgerald, please. I need you to answer a few questions.”
Someone restrained his efforts to flee, holding him on his back, preventing him from grabbing his head. His breathing quickened. Didn’t they understand how much he hurt? Weren’t they going to help him?
God, he needed help.
Maybe they were punishing him. Had he done something wrong? He couldn’t remember. Couldn’t focus past the searing, pounding, crushing assault that threatened to annihilate his very existence.
“Agent Fitzgerald? Do you know why you’re here?”
Who was sucking the air out of the room?
“He’s hyperventilating -- ”
Somebody needed to stop stealing his air. And for God’s sake, stop the drilling. You weren’t supposed to drill holes in people’s heads.
“You need to calm down, Agent Fitzgerald,” a woman ordered loudly. “Just take deep breaths.”
The harsh tone raked over hypersensitive nerve endings, and he rocked hard to the right, gasping, desperate to free himself of his torment. Hands latched onto his arms and thighs, swiftly pushing him back over. The movement jarred his head, and he cried out as pain slammed into his skull.
And then he fell. Down, down, down he went. Really far, and really fast. He landed broken and bloody in a colorless, soundless place where no one touched or talked to him anymore.
**
He awoke to a strange, plastic smell and cool air whispering into his nose. Reaching up, he encountered a nasal cannula. Lowering his hand, he noted his surroundings. He lay on a gurney, bright lights above him and a light-blue curtain separating him from the noises that drifted into his consciousness: beeping and humming machines, murmuring and urgent voices, wheels rolling by on the floor.
A short, pretty brunette nurse with an oval face and large, chocolate eyes stood to his right, tapping a pen against her teeth as she studied a chart. The clicking hurt his already throbbing head, and he opened his mouth to ask her to stop. She saw the movement and brightened as she pocketed the pen, placed the chart on a table near his gurney, and stepped closer.
“Welcome back, Agent Fitzgerald. I’m Marissa, your ER nurse.” She flashed an impossibly white smile at him as she removed the nasal cannula. “Your vital signs are good, so I think we can get rid of this now … How are you feeing?”
He frowned as he assessed his condition. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn someone had perched beside him on the gurney and was beating him over the head with his 1,150-page hardback copy of “The Stand,” which he’d just finished reading the other night. That same someone also seemed to have infested his stomach with several handfuls of wriggling maggots. They squirmed and twisted in their warm, moist confines, wanting out.
He didn’t share those details with the nurse, though. Didn’t trust himself to speak much at all, because he had a sick suspicion that if he opened his mouth for too long, the maggots would shoot out, along with an obscene amount of vomit.
A simple answer seemed best.
“Head hurts,” he murmured. “Stomach’s upset.”
The nurse eyed him pensively, and turned around. Sliding open a bright yellow drawer on a stainless steel rolling cart, she withdrew a kidney-shaped plastic basin. “If you think you’re going to be sick, you can use this,” she suggested, settling the tan-colored object next to his right hand.
Martin had the ridiculous urge to laugh. He didn’t need something to puke in, for God’s sake. He needed something to make the pain and nausea go away.
He didn’t laugh, though, leery of doing anything that would require moving his head. Even the tiniest movement seemed like a bad idea, like it might just make his brain burst.
“Dr. DuMont should be here any moment,” the nurse informed him. “He’s reviewing the results from your CT scan.”
Martin’s eyebrows drew together. CT scan? He didn’t remember having one done.
Apparently recognizing his confusion, the nurse patted his hand. “You were unconscious during the scan. Dr. DuMont ordered it to make sure you don’t have anything more serious than a concussion.” She leaned over to pick the chart back up, fished out her pen, and made a few notations.
A concussion. That explained the ungodly pain that started in the back of his head and fixed like a vise around it, pressing ever inward. Reaching back, Martin found a large, golf ball-sized lump at the base of his skull and gently touched it. Or at least, he meant to be gentle. Apparently he didn’t know his own strength, though, because that slight brush of fingertips set off an explosion of agony which, in turn, spurred the maggots to start burrowing right out of his gut.
Hissing and squeezing his eyes shut, he fumbled for the basin, knowing he needed it, and needed it now. But his blindly questing fingers grasped at the edge and succeeded only in flipping it away. The basin hit the floor with a clattering sound that startled him. His eyes flew open as his head jerked toward the noise. The movement ignited a new torrent of pain in his already battered skull.
“I’ll get that,” the nurse offered, setting her clipboard aside and crouching to retrieve the basin.
But Martin knew she’d be too late. Even as she started standing up, basin in hand, the maggots erupted from his stomach and into his throat, and then shot forth and splattered the wide-eyed nurse.
Chunky, hot vomit clung to her eyelashes, cheeks and nose, ran down her lips, and dripped off her chin. She straightened up, mouth gaping, and then calmly called over her shoulder for some help.
Martin swallowed hard, humiliated that he’d not only thrown up in front of this woman, but on her. Every last drop had hit her. None of it had landed on him, or the sheets, or the gurney.
Letting his head fall back on the pillow, he groaned at the contact. As his brain swelled, trying to escape the brittle shell that imprisoned it, he grimaced at the hot, acid taste that clogged his throat, mouth and nose. Closing his eyes, he tried not to think about the smell that burned his senses, fearing that while the maggots were gone, it wouldn’t take much to set his stomach off again.
God, he wanted nothing more than to wake up in his own bed and find out that this was just a really, really bad dream.
“Agent Fitzgerald?”
Reluctantly opening his eyes, he saw a sandy-haired male janitor starting to mop the mess on the floor while Marissa wiped vomit off her face with a hand towel. The soiled brunette motioned toward another young nurse, this one with bleached blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail high on her head.
“Gail here is going to watch you while I clean up.”
Martin nodded slightly, grimacing as the pain spiked. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.
Marissa gave him a strained smile. “No problem. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.”
She disappeared, and Gail approached the gurney, pink-frosted lips pursed and smoky eyes roaming his face. “You going to be sick again?” she asked curtly.
Her sharp voice was like nails on a chalkboard, but he tried to ignore it. “Don’t know.”
She fished another basin out of the rolling cart and wrapped his hand firmly around it. “I hope your aim’s better the second time around.”
Martin said nothing. Had he felt better, he might have called her on her lousy bedside manner. But he was more miserable than he’d ever been in his life, and lacked the strength or desire to speak up for himself. He was at her mercy for now, and he didn’t want to get her riled up. For all he knew, she was in league with the sadistic jackass who was still gleefully hitting him over the head with that damned book.
“You want to rinse your mouth out?” the nurse asked in a bored tone.
“Please,” he replied. The lingering taste of vomit was making his stomach turn.
Gail poured a small amount of water into a plastic cup and lifted it to his lips. He let her tip the liquid in, and then swished it around for a few seconds before spitting it back into the cup. They repeated the process three times before he felt like he’d washed away some of the acrid taste.
“Is your stomach feeling better?” the nurse asked.
“Yeah,” he replied, relieved that it did.
“Thank God.”
Knowing that the nurse was thinking more of herself than him with that statement, Martin rubbed his temples. He wanted her to go away almost as much as he wanted respite from the pain.
Gail glanced behind her as the janitor left, soiled mop and murky water in tow. Turning back around, she cocked her head to the side. “Sometimes it helps to empty out your stomach, get rid of all that crap.” She lifted her chin toward her patient. “Headache still bad?”
He nodded and grimaced, mentally kicking himself as the movement threatened to bounce his brain right out of his skull.
“You shouldn’t move your head around like that right now,” the nurse smugly suggested.
“No kidding,” Martin murmured, longing for Marissa’s return so Gail could go torture somebody else.
**
Part Four
3/7
Present day …
Movement.
Side to side. Up and down. Lurching.
Sound.
Squeaking. Rumbling. Wailing.
Tilting and nauseating and crushing and …
Too much.
**
Light.
Much, much too bright. Blinding.
A weak cry, familiar somehow.
Other voices, then.
“ … pupils are unequal … ”
*God, too loud.*
“ … can you hear me? Martin?”
*Please … stop. Too loud.*
“ … ETA is two minutes. Patient is not … ”
A sledgehammer dropped, driving everything else out. Smashing the world into dust.
**
Beeps and clattering and crisp, professional voices above and next to him.
Martin pulled his eyes open and groaned, squinting at his surroundings, which consisted of blurry, bright lights overhead. Lights that might as well have been a thousand finely honed knives, the way they sliced into his brain. Hissing, he covered his eyes and slowly rolled to his right, curling into himself, trying to escape the sharp agony.
“Agent Fitzgerald?”
The booming voice startled him and he flinched, then jerked as someone touched his arms, guiding him to lay flat, pulling his hands away from his face. He wanted to resist, but couldn’t. Between the harsh lights and ear-piercing sounds, he could barely hold onto consciousness. Wasn’t sure he wanted to, certainly not when his head settled into the pillow and the entirely too firm surface almost shattered the back of his skull into a gory jigsaw puzzle.
Someone asked him something, but the words got lost in his misery. A gentle but firm hand cupped his chin, and the question came again, this time understandable.
“Agent Fitzgerald, can you open your eyes?”
Open them? When had he closed them?
“Agent Fitzgerald, can you understand what I’m asking? Can you open your eyes?”
As much as he wanted to ignore that voice, he felt sure it would hound him until he obeyed, and so he did, groaning at the stark whiteness above him. It reminded him of how overly bright everything looked after getting his eyes dilated at the optometrist’s office. Thankfully, a blur quickly moved into his line of vision, providing welcome shade. The human-shaped form had dark spots where eyes, nose and mouth would be, and dark fuzz at the top that must be hair.
The blur introduced himself. “I’m Dr. DuMont. You’re in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. We’re treating you for a head injury. Do you remember how you got hurt?”
What the hell was up with the yelling? He wasn’t deaf, after all. Far from it.
Unfortunately.
He didn’t know how he’d been hurt, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to escape the nameless, faceless sadist drilling holes through his skull. Answering the doctor’s question with a slight shake of his head, Martin moaned as the movement heightened his agony. He instinctively tried to roll away from the pain even as he reached toward its source.
“Agent Fitzgerald, please. I need you to answer a few questions.”
Someone restrained his efforts to flee, holding him on his back, preventing him from grabbing his head. His breathing quickened. Didn’t they understand how much he hurt? Weren’t they going to help him?
God, he needed help.
Maybe they were punishing him. Had he done something wrong? He couldn’t remember. Couldn’t focus past the searing, pounding, crushing assault that threatened to annihilate his very existence.
“Agent Fitzgerald? Do you know why you’re here?”
Who was sucking the air out of the room?
“He’s hyperventilating -- ”
Somebody needed to stop stealing his air. And for God’s sake, stop the drilling. You weren’t supposed to drill holes in people’s heads.
“You need to calm down, Agent Fitzgerald,” a woman ordered loudly. “Just take deep breaths.”
The harsh tone raked over hypersensitive nerve endings, and he rocked hard to the right, gasping, desperate to free himself of his torment. Hands latched onto his arms and thighs, swiftly pushing him back over. The movement jarred his head, and he cried out as pain slammed into his skull.
And then he fell. Down, down, down he went. Really far, and really fast. He landed broken and bloody in a colorless, soundless place where no one touched or talked to him anymore.
**
He awoke to a strange, plastic smell and cool air whispering into his nose. Reaching up, he encountered a nasal cannula. Lowering his hand, he noted his surroundings. He lay on a gurney, bright lights above him and a light-blue curtain separating him from the noises that drifted into his consciousness: beeping and humming machines, murmuring and urgent voices, wheels rolling by on the floor.
A short, pretty brunette nurse with an oval face and large, chocolate eyes stood to his right, tapping a pen against her teeth as she studied a chart. The clicking hurt his already throbbing head, and he opened his mouth to ask her to stop. She saw the movement and brightened as she pocketed the pen, placed the chart on a table near his gurney, and stepped closer.
“Welcome back, Agent Fitzgerald. I’m Marissa, your ER nurse.” She flashed an impossibly white smile at him as she removed the nasal cannula. “Your vital signs are good, so I think we can get rid of this now … How are you feeing?”
He frowned as he assessed his condition. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn someone had perched beside him on the gurney and was beating him over the head with his 1,150-page hardback copy of “The Stand,” which he’d just finished reading the other night. That same someone also seemed to have infested his stomach with several handfuls of wriggling maggots. They squirmed and twisted in their warm, moist confines, wanting out.
He didn’t share those details with the nurse, though. Didn’t trust himself to speak much at all, because he had a sick suspicion that if he opened his mouth for too long, the maggots would shoot out, along with an obscene amount of vomit.
A simple answer seemed best.
“Head hurts,” he murmured. “Stomach’s upset.”
The nurse eyed him pensively, and turned around. Sliding open a bright yellow drawer on a stainless steel rolling cart, she withdrew a kidney-shaped plastic basin. “If you think you’re going to be sick, you can use this,” she suggested, settling the tan-colored object next to his right hand.
Martin had the ridiculous urge to laugh. He didn’t need something to puke in, for God’s sake. He needed something to make the pain and nausea go away.
He didn’t laugh, though, leery of doing anything that would require moving his head. Even the tiniest movement seemed like a bad idea, like it might just make his brain burst.
“Dr. DuMont should be here any moment,” the nurse informed him. “He’s reviewing the results from your CT scan.”
Martin’s eyebrows drew together. CT scan? He didn’t remember having one done.
Apparently recognizing his confusion, the nurse patted his hand. “You were unconscious during the scan. Dr. DuMont ordered it to make sure you don’t have anything more serious than a concussion.” She leaned over to pick the chart back up, fished out her pen, and made a few notations.
A concussion. That explained the ungodly pain that started in the back of his head and fixed like a vise around it, pressing ever inward. Reaching back, Martin found a large, golf ball-sized lump at the base of his skull and gently touched it. Or at least, he meant to be gentle. Apparently he didn’t know his own strength, though, because that slight brush of fingertips set off an explosion of agony which, in turn, spurred the maggots to start burrowing right out of his gut.
Hissing and squeezing his eyes shut, he fumbled for the basin, knowing he needed it, and needed it now. But his blindly questing fingers grasped at the edge and succeeded only in flipping it away. The basin hit the floor with a clattering sound that startled him. His eyes flew open as his head jerked toward the noise. The movement ignited a new torrent of pain in his already battered skull.
“I’ll get that,” the nurse offered, setting her clipboard aside and crouching to retrieve the basin.
But Martin knew she’d be too late. Even as she started standing up, basin in hand, the maggots erupted from his stomach and into his throat, and then shot forth and splattered the wide-eyed nurse.
Chunky, hot vomit clung to her eyelashes, cheeks and nose, ran down her lips, and dripped off her chin. She straightened up, mouth gaping, and then calmly called over her shoulder for some help.
Martin swallowed hard, humiliated that he’d not only thrown up in front of this woman, but on her. Every last drop had hit her. None of it had landed on him, or the sheets, or the gurney.
Letting his head fall back on the pillow, he groaned at the contact. As his brain swelled, trying to escape the brittle shell that imprisoned it, he grimaced at the hot, acid taste that clogged his throat, mouth and nose. Closing his eyes, he tried not to think about the smell that burned his senses, fearing that while the maggots were gone, it wouldn’t take much to set his stomach off again.
God, he wanted nothing more than to wake up in his own bed and find out that this was just a really, really bad dream.
“Agent Fitzgerald?”
Reluctantly opening his eyes, he saw a sandy-haired male janitor starting to mop the mess on the floor while Marissa wiped vomit off her face with a hand towel. The soiled brunette motioned toward another young nurse, this one with bleached blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail high on her head.
“Gail here is going to watch you while I clean up.”
Martin nodded slightly, grimacing as the pain spiked. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.
Marissa gave him a strained smile. “No problem. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.”
She disappeared, and Gail approached the gurney, pink-frosted lips pursed and smoky eyes roaming his face. “You going to be sick again?” she asked curtly.
Her sharp voice was like nails on a chalkboard, but he tried to ignore it. “Don’t know.”
She fished another basin out of the rolling cart and wrapped his hand firmly around it. “I hope your aim’s better the second time around.”
Martin said nothing. Had he felt better, he might have called her on her lousy bedside manner. But he was more miserable than he’d ever been in his life, and lacked the strength or desire to speak up for himself. He was at her mercy for now, and he didn’t want to get her riled up. For all he knew, she was in league with the sadistic jackass who was still gleefully hitting him over the head with that damned book.
“You want to rinse your mouth out?” the nurse asked in a bored tone.
“Please,” he replied. The lingering taste of vomit was making his stomach turn.
Gail poured a small amount of water into a plastic cup and lifted it to his lips. He let her tip the liquid in, and then swished it around for a few seconds before spitting it back into the cup. They repeated the process three times before he felt like he’d washed away some of the acrid taste.
“Is your stomach feeling better?” the nurse asked.
“Yeah,” he replied, relieved that it did.
“Thank God.”
Knowing that the nurse was thinking more of herself than him with that statement, Martin rubbed his temples. He wanted her to go away almost as much as he wanted respite from the pain.
Gail glanced behind her as the janitor left, soiled mop and murky water in tow. Turning back around, she cocked her head to the side. “Sometimes it helps to empty out your stomach, get rid of all that crap.” She lifted her chin toward her patient. “Headache still bad?”
He nodded and grimaced, mentally kicking himself as the movement threatened to bounce his brain right out of his skull.
“You shouldn’t move your head around like that right now,” the nurse smugly suggested.
“No kidding,” Martin murmured, longing for Marissa’s return so Gail could go torture somebody else.
**
Part Four