Free Fall

Chapter Two

~Kendall~

The pain was unbearable.

My eyes fluttered open, and I stared at a bright white ceiling, cool air rushing into my nostrils and an annoying beeping filling the room. My legs felt as if I was having growing pains multiplied by 1,000, my chest felt like a flame was lit right on my heart and ribs. I had a brutal headache, and I felt as if I moved my neck the slightest, my head would roll off.

"Oh, dear!" An older lady appeared at my side, and she rolled a plastic bag on wheels over to her. She put some kind of liquid into the bag and I felt it enter in my veins. Almost immediately, the pain slowly started to subside.

"I'm sorry, honey, I didn't think you'd be awake. How are you feeling?"

I didn't reply. I just felt so drained and tired, and every time I tried to remember something a searing pain shot through my brain.

I heard a door open and slowly close.

"Is she awake?" The voice was deep, super masculine. I heard shuffling papers and closing cabinets.

"Yes."

"Is eight days normal for a coma?"

"Comatose. In the medical field we use comatose. There is no 'normal' time period. Most don't last longer than a few weeks, though."

Silence.

"Does she have family?" The boy said in a hushed voice. The sound of someone flipping through papers stopped, and it was silent before the lady spoke again.

"No. Her mother and father died when she was in eighth grade. She was living with Charlotte Royce."

Charlotte Royce. My brain struggled to remember why that name sounded so familiar, but I was too tired and it hurt to think.

They didn't talk again. Eventually I heard the door open, footsteps, and the soft click of the door closing.

*****

I fell asleep and woke up sometime later. The ceiling was no longer bright, and a soft gray filled the room. The beeping was still present, and the cannula, the only thing keeping me alive, filling my nostrils and lungs with oxygen.

My brain seemed less dead. I raised my arms a few inches off the table and wiggled my fingers. I tried to move my head, but a gigantic neck brace made that nearly impossible. I knew it was dusk, and that I was in the hospital. But why?

I always saw pictures and movies and such about people severely injured in hospitals, but I've never once been hurt so badly that I needed medical attention.

What did I do to myself?

Minutes passed. I struggled to think, trying to ignore the horrid pain in my brain as I tried to remember what had landed me in such a critical condition. I looked around, counting the seconds in between the beeps of what I now realized was a heart monitor, and saw balloons and flowers and stuffed animals stuffed in the far corner of the room. 'Get well soon' and 'We're praying for you' were the phrases I saw the most of the brightly colored balloons. I looked down, as best as I could, at my body. I had white gauze wrapped around my ribs, and both my legs were in large white casts. I saw stitches and many, many bruises along my arms and on my exposed stomach.

I went back to looking up at the ceiling, and fell asleep with the heart monitor beeping in the background.

*****

~Erick~

It's been two weeks since Kendall Burgess came.

I had only started my 'internship', if you can even call it that, three weeks prior. Being a doctor always fascinated me, to help others who seem to have lost all hope. I was elated when my uncle, the head surgeon at Red Creek General, offered for me to be his shadow everyday after school and the weekends. Being a senior in high school, this will look fantastic to Harvard.

Uncle Mario, or Dr. Sanchez as he wants me to call him at work, warned me time and time again of what I would see in this field. He said death is more common than not, and I was strangely okay with that.

We're all just in a cycle of life. Others just leave earlier.

For three weeks, I didn't see anything too disturbing. I watched a surgery on a pro soccer player who tore his ACL, seen a man having blood shooting out of his eyeballs. And none of those sent me screaming. It was actually kind of cool how complex the human body is.

I never actually follow Uncle Mario around. I liked following a nurse, Karen, who has become like a mother to me. She explained things much easier than my uncle, who uses ginormous technical terms. Plus, I feel like I can get one on one with the families instead of just opening them up and working on their bodies.

Kendall came super late on a Friday.

That next morning when I went in with Uncle Mario, he immediately rushed off to talk with the other doctors, leaving me in the main hallway brain dead.

I was so tired, and I was thinking about bailing and crawling back in my bed to sleep when I saw Karen rushing behind the counter. I walked through the glass door and around the huge desk to where she was stacking papers and flitting to the computer.

"What's the rush?" I asked, plopping in one of the comfortable desk chairs, unwrapping my granola bar.

"We got a patient in last night. She was involved in a car accident. . ." She trailed off and I noticed she was reading one of the papers. I waited for her to continue, but when she didn't I asked, "What happened?"

"Friend was drunk. She stopped in the middle of an intersection and a semi more or less ran over the car. Driver didn't make it and the patient is in critical condition."'

I winced. "Were they high school students?" Silver Lake was the only high school for miles, and there was a great chance I'd know them.

She plucked a paper from the stack and handed it to me. She talked as I read.

"Charlotte Royce and Kendall Burgess. Seniors at Silver Lake High. Charlotte was the driver."

My jaw dropped. I knew Charlie. She was probably the most popular girl Silver Lake has ever known. Everyone got along with her; she was beautiful and funny and sweet. I studied the black and white picture of her; the senior school picture just taken last week. Her fiery red hair was in perfect, loose curls, framing her round face and beautiful brown eyes shining. She was smiling as if someone had made her laugh, her mouth separated in a grin and her pearly white teeth flashing.

Even though I didn't know Charlie on a personal level, I felt my stomach clench. Lots of people were going to be devastated by this.

I looked at the second paper at the girl who survived.

I didn't recognize her at first. I knew that she was Charlie's best friend; quiet and always at her side. She was the polar opposite of Charlie, and not a lot of people liked that. I thought she was a cute girl, her long dirty blonde hair straightened and blue eyes bright. Unlike Charlie, she had her mouth closed in the picture, half-smiling with a large dimple imprinted on her cheek.

Kendall Burgess.