Save Me If You Can

Save Me If You Can Chapter 10

He heard voices, vaguely familiar. They were angry voices, quick tempered and harsh in tone and growing louder. He roused quickly from a dead sleep to find himself restrained to the bed by handcuffs. He pulled anxiously against the cold hard steel, felt the skin of his wrists twist and tear as blood poured down his arms in bright red streaks, soaking the mattress under him.

Neal tried to speak, to call out, but his throat was raw, as if he had been screaming relentlessly for hours. His pathetic utterances were barely audible, futile and ineffective.

He turned to look toward the elevator. Peter was there, but not alone. He was arguing with someone.

Linus Hauser.

No!

Hauser had a weapon, concealing it at his side. He had to warn Peter! Hauser raised the weapon and fired point blank into Peter's chest. Peter went down in a peculiar slow-motion dance that ended with the agent prone and still.

Peter! No!

Hauser turned the weapon on Neal now. An infrared dot lit on Neal's chest and lingered where his heart should be.

"For my son," Hauser said. Then he fired.

Neal woke up choking, unable to breathe for a few frightening seconds, convinced that he was dying. He lifted his hands to be sure there were no handcuffs binding him, and checked his bare chest for signs of blood. The pain he felt was real but internal – his heart was racing and pounding audibly in his chest. This was yet another traumatic after effect, courtesy of post-detox nightmares.

It seemed that even as he progressed in his physical recovery, his subconscious mind was still fighting to detoxify. His dreams were dark and unsettling, violent and disturbing, providing potent levels of horror no matter how light or deep his sleep. He was becoming apprehensive of sleeping, nurturing an irrational dread that he might not wake up. He also could no longer stand watching the people that he loved being slaughtered and ripped from his life in his subconscious mind. To keep the sleep demons away the rest of this night, he returned to something once and always loved to keep him lucid, awake and alive.

He was painting again. Rather, trying to. He had yet to regain the steadiness and surety of hand necessary to create – or recreate – art in his signature style. His lines seemed off, his strokes imprecise. To his artist's eye, some colors did not appear quite true. The brush, which had always felt like a natural extension of his own hand, now felt clumsy and awkward in his grasp. A slight tremor, still noticeable even with the heroine working out of his system, interfered with his flow, interrupted his energies. Neal was frustrated and not far from afraid. What if the residual effect of his addiction meant he had lost his "touch?"

He was still painting when June arrived with the sunrise, bearing a white shopping bag filled with a warm breakfast for two from one of his favorite cafés.

"That's lovely Neal," June said as she approached with two tall cups of herbal tea. She proffered one to Neal. He placed his stained pallet down, but kept his brush in hand, as if to continue reacquainting his fingers to the instrument, determined to master it again. She noticed how he stared disappointingly at the canvas on the easel as if some place in his soul had been betrayed by the image that stared back at them.

"Are we looking at the same painting?" he asked forlornly.

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's lacking. Life. Movement. Light. Kind of like me right now." He removed the plastic top from the cup and took a sip, hoping the warm herbal brew would help melt a little of the chill still lingering deep his bones.

"Sounds to me like somebody's getting a little stir crazy."

Neal nodded. "That could be. I know I'm not allowed outside...I can't be trusted..."