Knights of the Grey City

Chapter 44 - WALLS

"Well," said the doctor, looking up over her clipboard at me, "I'd say you're almost good to go."

"I don't feel good to go," I groaned.

She pretended she didn't hear me, making a note. "All you need now is a week or so of bedrest, another week of light activity, and some physio appointments for those ribs and the arm. You really are lucky."

"So I've heard," I said.

The doctor raised her eyebrows. "You've certainly gotten mouthy since it's gotten easier for you to breathe. Can I expect this for our whole meeting, here?"

"No. Sorry," I said. "Tell me no one else is crabby when the whole top of their body has been crushed like a pop can."

I got a half-smile at that, which was good. The nurses didn't like me very much, given the whole suspicion that I had lied about the source of my injuries, but I still felt like I was a model patient. Most of the time.

My doctor went over the laundry list of all my injuries and what kind of recovery I could expect to take place over the next few weeks. I'd have to take plenty of painkillers for the ribs: there were deep breathing exercises I had to do to keep any complications from arising, which were difficult to do when it feels like a car has been parked squarely on your chest. The arm would require physiotherapy to get back into shape, and that would probably take the longest to heal. The puncture wounds were on their way, but the ones that had pierced muscle would need additional time and bedrest.

All in all, I was still a mess. But all I had to do was remember the feel of the wolf demon's teeth beginning to close on my neck to realize that—like the doctors kept telling me—I was lucky, even if I didn't feel like it.

It was Monday morning, and I was already starting to feel restless.

The doctor let me know the nurses would be by soon with my daily medication and took off. The previous night, I'd been given a roommate, but he was sleeping soundly despite his broken leg. I felt quite alone.

Now that I was less hopped up on drugs, had no more appointments with nurses and doctors and had no visitors, I was really starting to feel confined both in the hospital room and in my own stiff, painful body. At this point, it really did feel like I had been crushed like an empty pop can and tossed away.

And man, the last time I'd been put up in a room like this... I'd gotten into a lot of fights as a teenager, but only a couple had gotten serious enough to need a trip to the emergency room. There was the barbed wire thing, naturally, though that hadn't actually been too bad despite the horrific amount of bleeding. The kicker was that time I'd been stabbed.

It had just been some kid... I honestly don't remember who. Someone I didn't really know who was out drinking with my crew, friend of someone's buddy. An empty parking lot, cheap beer, everyone already pretty drunk.

I don't even think I had been that drunk, myself, only a couple beers in. But that kid had crossed some lines. Kept talking like he was somebody, the sorts of comments you don't make about people's families without looking for a fight. I remember standing in front of him, feeling the spark of anger for the first time in months, and telling him clearly to shut up. Everyone drunk and laughing, egging us on.

They loved to watch me get angry. It was like a game to them: sometimes they'd provoke me just to see what would happen. They liked to see the short kid lose it and take on people twice his size, winning more often than not. "He's crazy, he's wild," were the nicest things they said about me.

Well, I didn't have a knife on me, but the other kid did, and in that state, he wasn't afraid to use it. I tried to wrench it out of his grip, but he got me good across the hand, then made a slice across the ribs. I got the knife, bleeding like a waterfall, then kicked him around until he begged me to stop. The guys had stopped laughing: this was further than they had wanted this to go. This was before the barbed wire thing, before gangs were even on the periphery. Just dumb teenagers making bad decisions.