Aiden came to consciousness on the riverbank with no recollection of how he got there or how he managed to get out of the gravicar. He retched, coughed out water, and tried to roll to the side, but his ribs responded with a fiery stab of pain.
Cracked, maybe even broken, he thought absentmindedly as he tried to wipe the blood from his eyes.
He tried to take a deep breath, but that proved to be an almost impossible task. He felt like there wasn't enough air around him. Every breath he took came with a tortured wheezing sound. He also noticed something that made his blood go cold - the faint hum that his artificial lung had been making and that he got as used to hearing as his own heartbeat was not gone. Whether it had been the crash or the river water, or the combination of both, but his lung had stopped working.
The doctors had never been able to restore his remaining lung to full capacity after his close encounter with freezing vacuum, so the artificial lung had done most of his breathing for the past sixteen years. Without it, he would suffocate, and it would be a slow and agonizing process, because his remaining lung could draw enough air to keep him barely alive and aware for a while.
Aiden almost cried with frustration. What was the point of surviving the crash just to slowly suffocate now, lying helpless under a bridge? He couldn't even call for help, because his transmitter was at the bottom of the river along with is car. He was not visible from the road and the broken guardrail was the only thing indicating that somebody had gone off the bridge. Even if somebody stopped to investigate the gap and saw his car in the river, he would probably already be in a coma or dead by the time help arrived. Aiden almost wished that the people who had shot his antigravitational drive had stuck around to make sure the dive off the bridge had done him in. A quick shot to the head was preferable to slow suffocation.
He rolled on his back and looked at the darkening skies. The first stars were already coming out and it seemed to him that they were laughing at the irony of his situation. Then he heard sirens, so faint at first that he thought he was having an auditory hallucination due to the lack of oxygen, but the sound grew closer and soon he could see the flicker of emergency lights on the bridge above. Against all odds, help had arrived.
YOU ARE READING
Of Broken Things
Science FictionSynopsis: When Aiden Stapleton, a successful private investigator, accepts to look into the murder of a seemingly ordinary college professor, he unwillingly crosses the paths of a government official eager to cover up traces of some shady research...
