ARKEN

A New World

Creed opened his eyes. He was staring at the blinding light and the ceiling above it. Shielding his face with his hand, he saw the hospital wristband and the heartrate monitor on his finger. He took the time to examine the room he was in. The top half of the room was a plain white color. A wooden trim ran all along the wall in the middle and the bottom half of the wall was painted in forest green.

He was surprised at how little pain he felt considering what happened, but he supposed that was probably a good thing. Creed had never failed an operation before, his team always had successful missions. Now they were all gone, except for him. That pain unfortunately wasn't numbed by the meds.

He was trying to piece his recollections of the previous night together when a nurse walked in. She was a pretty young thing with orange hair and red lipstick, maybe a little over dolled up given her line of work, but Creed didn't mind. She noticed he was up when she walked over to replace his IV and smiled pleasantly at him.

"You're awake. I'll get the doctor."

She took down the old IV as it was beginning to run low and put up a new one. The morphine must still have been working as his head was swimming the more he tried to sit up. He tried to reach out and touch her hand, but he apparently misjudged the distance and she was already walking away.

"Where am I?"

"Provident Hospital, in Cook County."

Creed rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, the nurse was gone and he was alone. He lay there in silence, trying to remember exactly what occurred the night before, or at least he assumed it was the night before as he had no way of telling time in there.

He remembered he was stabbed and felt the sudden urge to try and feel around on his back for the wound, but decided that probably wasn't a good idea. The last thing he could recall was Henry Marsden standing over him, taunting him. With a shard of some sort of metal in his back, Creed had been too weak to fight him or do much of anything else. He remembered trying to reach for his sidearm, but it either wasn't there or he was simply too weak at the time to find it properly.

Not long after, the doctor came in. He was a man with short, curly gray hair and equally gray stubble. He wore a red and white plaid shirt with gray slacks with a brown belt holding them up. He had one hand tucked into the pocket of his white coat and the other holding a chart. He lowered the chart and walked over to stand beside the bed to address his patient.

"Officer Creed, hello. I am Doctor Miner."

"Hi," Creed still felt out of it, but he had some important questions for the doctor, "Did anyone else make it?"

Everything in his mind was telling him no. He saw what Marsden had done to the others but he hadn't checked their bodies, maybe the people who found him helped the others. Doctor Miner's expression told Creed that this was not the case. In a sudden wave of frustration, he slammed his head back into his pillow.

"A few of them had faint vitals, but...we couldn't save them. I wanted to run through your injuries, Mr. Creed."

"I was stabbed. I got that part."

"Yes, particularly in your lumbar region. You're quite lucky—the foreign object missed nicking your spine and did not damage any of your organs. You did have a high blood lead level, attributed to the chunk of lead in your back."

"Lead?" Creed struggled to identify the metal when it was happening. He wasn't sure whether that made him feel better or not.

"Yes. You've been undergoing chelation therapy since. We've been giving you Sodium Calcium Edetate, and when you're discharged, you'll be given a round of Dimercaptosuccinic Acid, or Succimer. You'll take the pills for nineteen days and we'll see how you're doing from there."