The Incredible League of Goth Pizza Haters (RH)

Part 76

---Sylvia---
Sitting in the passenger's seat, everything was a chaotic blend of noises and light. Colors passed over my eyes. Reds and yellows and whites. The car growled and rain struck the windshield. There was cursing and the jerk of the steering wheel.

Time passed in an indescribable haze. I was having trouble comprehending things, and I couldn't help but wonder who was in the car with me. And where we were going.

I tried to move my hands but I couldn't. I tried to shift but I was exhausted and numb. My legs felt cold and my feet felt even colder. I tried to tell the driver but I was having trouble remembering words.

Heat formed in my neck, burning almost, and moved up to my head. I struggled uselessly as I tried to escape the pain. There was something.. And it was just so deeply wrong... Heat seared in my head and ice clogged the veins in my feet. There was metal in my mouth and for a split moment, I heard music. 

Blackness.

Color again. Lights and motion. I remember the screaming. The clashing of sounds and a sharp intake of breath. Whiplash like I tried to lift my head while on a rollercoaster. Left, then right. My world became a collision of sound and light and broken glass and then darkness again.

***

There were people around me, things happening but I couldn't interact with them. It was as if my consciousness was watching through a screen as things happened. I can't say what I felt. I don't think I felt anything for most of it. As before, time was unmeasurable and what went through my head was merely indescribable bits of words and faces.

I thought the heat was gone, but it ran down the right side of my face... dripped down onto my neck but still I didn't understand. There was a man, and he was yelling through the cracks of the passenger side window. He was soaking wet, shivering in the rain.

He held a small orange tool, and he repeated the same thing over and over. Turn away, miss! Turn away!

What?

I looked at the driver's seat. There was a man there. A man I knew but I didn't remember. His eyes were open and blinking excessively. His head was thrown back at an angle and I watched his throat constrict and expand.

What happened?

The window shattered and pieces of watery crystal glass fell onto my arms and lap. The door was dented inward and after he flicked the lock inside, he still had to give a few strained pulls and yanks before it swung open into the rain.

I noticed the cars. I noticed the traffic and the woman calling to the man. The little girl in the backseat. The electrical cords binding my hands together.

He noticed those, too.

"Are you alright?" he moved to unbuckle my belt. The release of the pressure from my abdomen and torso left room for the sudden bolts of pain that shot through my chest. I winced and he asked, "Can you walk?"

I could hardly feel my legs but my brain couldn't fucking understand how to communicate that to him.

He wrapped an arm around my torso while the other ran beneath my legs. I was lifted out and carried into the rain. It soaked me all the way through and that's when I began to feel the pain in my head.

The rain was like nails pounding down and the water that fell from my face was tinged with red. The woman who'd been calling to him got out of her car, which she'd backed away from the scene, and ran around to the back.

He ran towards her, every jolt and bounce sending fireworks of pain throughout my entire body. She flung the trunk open and began shoving things to the side to make room. Junior baseball equipment mostly. The man gently dropped me onto the floor of the car and began untying the electrical cords, all the while my brain could only focus on wondering what was happening to the man in the drivers seat.

After I was free I lifted myself on my elbows and craned my neck to see there were other people crowded around the passenger side of the car, climbing in and trying to help... John.

Trying to help John get out. There was a large truck, a tractor trailer sat only slightly damaged a few feet from the driver's side. How had I not noticed that before..?

I let my arms give and fell back. Exhaustion weakened my bones and shaded my eyes. The woman had grabbed something - a blanket or shirt - and was trying to press it to my head. Everything was beginning to hurt. My skull and my neck. My chest felt like my ribs had been compressed so far back they'd stabbed into my organs.

I could only breathe in small, quick breaths and every intake hurt like hell.

The woman was speaking to me, looking me in the eyes but none of what she said made any sense, and the voice of the little girl cried out from behind the row of seats ahead. They were draping blankets over my legs when words started to make sense again.

"-should close the trunk and warm her up."

"She's in shock. She might freak out and we don't want Megan to-,"

"I'll stay with her! I want to warm up too! It's just until the paramedics arrive!"

Don't I know someone named Megan..?

"Fine!" he jogged out of my line of vision just as the woman hopped into the car with me and swung the trunk door closed. The sounds of the outside world were blocked out. I watched the water run down the glass as she checked on the cloth pressed against my head. It came away with crimson stains and she swore before rotating it and pressing it in again. I winced and we made eye contact.

"Hey, sweetie. What's your name?"

My name?

"Do you remember anything at all?" I shifted around a bit before working to move my hand up to my head. I felt the warmth on my fingertips as she pulled them away. "No no no, I need you to lay still."

They were red with blood. I was bleeding? From my head?

I tried to sit up but she said the same thing, 'lay still until the doctors get here.' I was confused, because why would doctors come here? We're supposed to go to them. We were in a car, why not just go?

"What happened?" I tried to say, and it took a few tries to get it right. It's not exactly what I wanted to say but it's what came out. The moment she was able to translate my slurred speech into English she answered.

"You were in an accident." she said. I wanted to see the car again so I tried to get up while she tried to gently hold me down and I fell back again, breathlessly grasping my torso at the unimaginable pains that tore through.

I was handed off from one thing to another. A car to a cart to another car. A cart - a gurney - and then two or three different hospital beds as if they couldn't decide if I was dying or not. I was in and out of it. And whenever I succumbed to the pain and the sleep they were yelling at me to stay awake, which almost scared me enough to keep me there.