Pain

Chapter 12 - Healing

A/N - This is the final chapter of book four. The next title in this series is called Forever I am.

Chapter 12

Healing

It had been simple from the beginning. The soldiers were losing, General Parker had told us as much. We'd reclaimed a lot of the land they'd so successfully won and now they were scrambling for their lives. Their mission since we'd come back was to try and lure us into their reach, injure us to the point where we were hanging onto our lives and then save us. Why would our authorities harm them if they'd been so kind and generous to the group of teenagers who had killed so many of their own?

It was quite remarkable. After a few days of being safely escorted to and from the toilet, Colonel Fitzroy authorised the removal of my constraints. I didn't take it for granted, using the opportunity out of bed to start working on my own kind of rehabilitation to help walk properly again. Soon that was sorted out too, with physical therapists coming in every so often to take me up to a different ward, where I was given proper exercises to build up my strength once more.

I was fed generously each day and left in high quality care. Even my medical team seemed to have warmed up to me after what had happened on my first day here. My personal items that I'd had in my pack – aside from all the weaponry – had been returned to me and I was all but content with the Jamie's necklace hung around my neck.

The good behaviour I was currently exhibiting was my own way of trying to figure out everything that was going on here. There must have been other people on my ward, given the amount of activity that was going on outside my room each day. Soldiers were also constantly prowling the hallways, making me wonder if I wasn't the only high security patient in the hospital.

Being in such a state of confusion and shock the first time I'd met Colonel Fitzroy, I'd failed to ask him the one thing that had been plaguing me since I'd been taken out of my hiding place by his men out in the bush. It was my hope that the longer I kept up the illusion that I was thankful for their actions and following along with their plan, that I would be able to find out where my friends were and if like me, they were a part of the same plan Colonel Fitzroy had initiated.

It had been almost two weeks before I found out any valuable information. A young nurse entered my room one evening, wheeling a trolley full of equipment. My chart was clipped to the side of the trolley, something I'd noticed was always removed from my room with every new medical personal who bought it in.

"Suture removal, yes?" said the nurse, his English understandable yet quite poor.

I nodded, pulling my leg out from beneath the blanket and letting him get to work. He worked quickly and in no time, he was removing the last of a very jagged set of sutures from the site of the bullet wound. Quiet suddenly after, there was a loud crash from somewhere in the building and his pager began to vibrate like mad.

He dropped the suture cutters back onto his trolley carelessly and rushed from the room, leaving everything else behind. I stared after him and after a few moments with no change and every other person in the building apparently needed with whatever had just happened down the hall, I reached forward and grabbed a hold of my chart.

At first glance, it was very disappointing. Almost everything in the chart was written in the same language the soldiers spoke. I'd been stupid to think that this chart would have been in English when half of the people who came in to check on me had barely mastered the basics of it.

I angrily flipped through the rest of the pages, searching for something I could understand. That was when I came across the last page in there, written entirely in English. My heart rate sped up as I heard footsteps coming back down the hallway. I ripped the page from the chart and put it back where I had been before my nurse left, tucking it into my hospital gown and returning to how I had been lying before.