The Immortal Blood

Chapter 38

He had drfited between consciousness and a restless sleep for a very long time, amidst the comings and goings of white coats and sounds of medical instruments. He had been tortured by a long series of tools, hands, unfamiliar voices, until, finally, one late afternoon, he had opened his eyes and indistinctly seen a modular ceiling of neutral colours.
His wife had fallen asleep on a chair next to his bed, therefore it had taken him some time to realize he had one leg locked in a brace, the fingers of one hand heavily bandaged, and his left arm pierced by a long needle attached to an half empty IV.
He had never felt so confused and helpless in his life: his eyelids were so heavy that he could barely hold them ajar, as he tried to absorb informations from the world around him.
Thinking seemed to be an insurmountable task, and his thoughts clashed in perpetual motion in his brain, making his ideas even less clear.
'Where... what...' words returned in a continuous mantra, names suddenly appeared only to get lost in an endless wave of quotations unknown to him, and it had taken superhuman effort to spell out, first silently, then discernibly, a sort of statement in the direction of his wife.
Cleo had woken up with a start, her attention immediately on him, an expression of pure relief radiating rapidly over her tired face, mirroring his own, which could not be more bewildered.
"Hey, honey" she had told him, putting her hand on his only intact arm. "Do you know where you are? Who am I?"
"Hmm" he had managed to mumble, with a vague nod of his head. "Hospital?" He had then added after a long pause, the word struggling to fall out of his mouth.
"Yes! Yes... they found you... how do you feel?" Cleo had watched him anxiously, keeping her voice thoughtfully low.
"I..." Adam had returned to study his body, abandoned in bed, as if it were a stranger's.
"You have a bad sprain and fractured fingers... can you breathe?"
He looked at her as if she were speaking in a foreign language: he could not grasp the reason for such a question until he tried to clear his voice and his entire chest contracted into an excruciating spasm.
He had remained motionless, trying to channel air into his lungs which seemed to have become as hard as concrete, but his muscles did everything but cooperate, as if they had developed their own stream of consciousness.
"Your ribs are cracked, honey. Try to breathe a little at a time. The doctor had to intubate you for a couple days... you almost punctured your lungs."
"DAYS?" Adam repeated, in shock, sobbing as he finally managed to swallow a few gasps of air. His throat burned as if he'd just eaten a handful of shards.
"You've been here almost a week now, they've given you lots of medicines to make you sleep... you've had a severe concussion. We've been quite worried, but since yesterday you've started to get better." Cleo stared at him with tears in her eyes, her lower lip trembling like it always did when she was about to burst into tears.
Adam had squeezed her cold fingers between his in a familiar gesture of comfort. She looked at him and smiled.
"Do you remember what happened?" She asked, uncertain.
Adam had looked back at her with an empty, questioning look. 'What happened?' His brain had managed to formulate coherently, even though he didn't know the answer.
Something dark and unpleasant had stirred in the depths of his mind: feelings of terror, anxiety and anger, twisted images of faces and bodies surging back from his memory; a shovel, a lighter, and finally the disgusting, revolting smell of burnt flesh, which had caused him to shiver from head to toe.
"It's all right, stay with me." His wife had reassured him, but he was already stuck in another reality, one made of grass, pools of blood and the stench of ignited gas.
"Honey, calm down!"
But the tremor had only exponentially grown, risking to make him fall out of bed, while two malevolent eyes stared at him from the center of a fireball like scorching daggers.
Nurses had rushed into the room to intervene, but all he had been able to see were hands stretched out towards him, clasping him firmly to the ground, then the metallic scent of blood had made him so nauseated that he had almost retched.
Cleo had cried hurriedly, a thousand miles away from him, and the nurses must have increased his dose of sedative, for he had immediately felt himself lifted upwards, away from the infernal scene that surrounded him, to another voice, more masculine and stentorous, asking him how he preferred his eggs.
'Scrambled' he replied, before losing consciousness completely, falling back into a dreamless sleep.

This had continued throughout the following week, his memory coming and going in flashes, overlapping sporadically with the waking and sleeping states that were timed by the medications he was being administered.
As the days went by, he had begun to talk again and be able to hold up a good conversation, but it would still take a long time for him to fully recover.
"Are you sure?" The Chief doctor asked him, unimpressed, at his request to try and reconsider the dosage of the painkillers. "The ribs..."
"They hurt, but all I do is pretty much sleep. I just... I just want to be able to think." He explained, frustrated, since, even though he'd by now recovered most of his memories of his fight with Vernon, there were still so many dark spots that he couldn't place.
"We'll give it a try, after all, you're young and in good shape, despite what happened to you." The doctor sighed, shaking his head. "But should you have any problems, you must contact a nurse immediately."
"All right." Adam nodded, watching him scribble something on his chart, before vanishing into the maze of corridors outside his room. He still had a long way to go.