JOHN FINNIE (34y) JANUARY 2022, 08.06

The world was fuzzy and blurry. John blinked his eyes a few times, real eyes. For some reason he could feel the tickling sensation of his eyelashes touching his cheeks when they fluttered. My God, she'd done it. He was alive. The thought seemed out of place. A tear streamed down his cheek and he tried to think why but came up with nothing.

The last thing he recalled was... was... darkness clouded over his memories. He remembered the vision, yes. The black and white cops searching for someone, the girl getting into that car and speeding away, the old lady who'd choked him and spewed that crazy drabble... and a haunting voice saying, 'Tigeeerrrrrrrrr'. Goosebumps raised the hairs on his arms.

A premonition of evil shuddered through his body. Little Charlie was in danger. How or why was hard to recall. Who had told him that? Who had said, 'Tigerrrrrr' with such a bone chilling voice? The blurs he saw came into focus slow, and he spotted machinery, shiny things and tubes all around him. These things were strange and alien, like he'd landed in another world where technology was much more advanced than on earth.

The contents of his stomach roiled and grumbled in him. What the hell was going on? Terror-stricken, he tried to sit up, to kick off the sheets draped over him, but only his finger twitched. Machines started beeping loudly and flashing red and green lights. Again he mustered all the strength he could and only his smallest finger moved. The machines went wild with bleeping and flashing.

Someone burst through the door, but John could only see the top of it opening--a strange door he'd never seen before.

'John?' Mam's voice was choked with emotion, and sounded more wearied than he remembered it, but there was no doubt. It was her.

'John! John!' she shouted and her face came into view, tear streaked and more wrinkled than what he recalled. And then it was as if a stone plopped in the depths of his stomach--heavy, rough, nauseating. Something bad had happened. Why did Mam look so much older?

'My boy,' she wept, clutching at the sheets covering him and pressing her face into his chest. Her sobs mixed with muffled laughter. He wanted to tell her it was okay, everything was fine, but his lips did not obey his commands. All he could do was blink and watch her back jerking and heaving, and twitch his fingers. It was darn frustrating. Somewhere inside there was that feeling of dé ja vu, as if this had happened before.

More tears streamed down his face and his heart ached, broken over something, but for the life of him he couldn't say what.

'Remember me,' a voice whispered in his head, a sweet angelic voice, and it called forth fresh tears. Shit, he was forgetting something very important, someone very important, and Mam was so worked up over something. John twitched his fingers, and a corner of his mouth moved.

Ha! Progress. Whatever was going on, he'd beat it.

'My boy,' Mam said, sitting up and looking at his face. With her hand she stroked his cheek, smiling like she'd won the lotto. So maybe things weren't all that bad. She looked happy. Mam kissed his eyes and cheeks. It broke something in him. Tears poured like rivers from his eyes and a numb sensation flooded over him.

'You're back,' she whispered with her face a centimetre from his. For a minute she looked into his eyes, wiped the tears from his cheeks, and he saw that she had been struggling for long, suffering, waiting, aching over something. He wanted to hold her, and at the same time it scared him. Mam had always been a tough cookie. What could have happened to break her this way?

Abruptly Mam stood, clutched his hand, and turned to yell out the door. 'Dan! Dan, come quick! Get Samantha! Hurry!'

Mam's hand squeezed his too tight, and then he heard footsteps thudding up steps, carpeted steps by the sound of it. Two people burst through the doors. Why was Samantha there? Last he remembered, Samantha didn't even know he existed. When she came into view, the numbness in John was replaced by an all too familiar tingling response. God, she was hot. Hotter than ever. Her boobs had grown, her face matured. There were laugh lines crow-footing the corners of her eyes, and frown lines.

Right then he swore he'd do anything to keep her happy, to diminish those lines. Samantha screamed then, but she looked at something on the other side of the bed and pointed.

Dad walked past the foot of John's bed and looked serious very suddenly, then panicked. 'It's the doctor!' he hollered and whipped out a very sleek and impossibly thin phone from his pocket.

'Dan, John is awake!' Mam said. 'Look! His eyes are open!'

Dad froze, turned slowly, and when his eyes met John's emotion welled in them. He dropped the phone, rushed to John's bed, grabbed John's face and looked in his eyes.

'Son? Can you hear me?'

Yes! John wanted to shout, but nothing came out, so he strained to twitch his fingers.

'Dan, he's moving his fingers.'

'Is that a yes?' Desperation and hope oozed from Dad, and John again moved his fingers. It was a bit easier that time.

'Dan, he did it again,' Mam said.

'He's trying to communicate with us,' she said with new tears shining in her eyes.

Samantha smiled and touched his arm. Fuck yeah! That was amazing, even if he couldn't move or talk, she was here with her hotter than ever body, smiling at him. Him! Then John realised what was going on. He couldn't talk, couldn't move.

He was an invalid, and everyone had aged. He must have been in a coma, or maybe his memory was as screwed up as his body. No! He wanted to cry, to scream, to throw things and break stuff with his fists, but only his hands twitched slightly. What a sad sack of worthless bones he was.

'This is great,' Samantha said, and he could hear she meant it. 'But what about Semila, I mean Doctor Leang?' We need to call emergency services or something. Is she alive? Why is she collapsed?'

Deep inside, John's guts twisted and a wave of sorrow washed over him. Semila... It sounded familiar. Was she his doctor? He could not remember, but deep down he knew she had helped him. Maybe she had been the doctor tending to him when he was in a coma. Damn! If only he could talk, or write, or move his head. Then he could ask someone.

But she had helped him, he knew. She had saved him from something. Wait, where had that thought come from? So many questions, and no hope for answers! If he could see her face, maybe he would know why her name rang bells.

'I don't know,' John's Dad said, getting up and disappearing behind the bed. 'I can't feel a pul-- wait, no there is something.'

'Oh no,' Samantha squealed, 'there's blood. Oh my god, there's more!'

'Sam, come over here and help me. Bring me those towels, staunch the flow. I'll call emergency services.' Dad frowned and Samantha leapt into action.

Mam pushed a button, and John's bed stuttered into action, bending so that his head was more upright. 'There you are, John, so you can see what's going on too.'

Trust Mam to think of him when someone else lay dying on the floor. Come to think of it, why was there an almost dead doctor on the floor beside his bed. And John saw he was not in hospital as he'd thought at first. It looked familiar, but he couldn't say why. This sure wasn't the room he'd grown up in.

'It's ringing,' Dad announced, the thin phone clutched at his ear.

'Hello? Yes, we need urgent assistance. There's a doctor bleeding to death on my floor.' A pause. 'Yes, this is my home, yes, that's right.'

Mam rubbed John's hand, and Samantha pushed towels against the woman on the floor. The woman was not dressed as a doctor, but the overwhelming sense that she'd saved him washed over him. How could she have saved him if she hadn't been a doctor?

'Please hurry. There's a lot of blood.' Dad paced up and down the room. 'No, we found her like this.' He listened, then answered. 'My son's room. She was a doctor. My son has been in a coma for seventeen years.'

Fuck! Bleeping went off from one of the machines, and John guessed it was a heart rate monitor, 'cause his heart leapt into his throat and sank into his stomach at the same time. Seventeen years! Bloody hell, what had happened to him?

Mam jumped from her chair and looked into his eyes. 'John? It's okay son, you're alright.' She stroked his cheek. 'I'll explain everything, but you need to calm down. We only just got you back. Breath deep.'

All panic had left and her brown eyes were pools of calm that drew him in and helped him breathe easy.

'That's it,' she said, 'deep and easy.'

A whimper came from the floor, and when John looked tears streamed down Samantha's cheeks. Obviously she knew this woman, this doctor Leang. She cradled the woman's head on her lap, and it reminded him of the soldier who'd died in his arms. Tears sprang to his eyes and poured down his cheeks, wet and salty. Tom, that's what his name had been. There was so much blood! How would the doctor survive? For a reason John could not grasp, he desperately wanted her to survive. Where were emergency services, dammit?

Just then a doctor with a white coat flew into the room--no one had heard him climb the steps.

'Doctor Ryan,' Mam said, 'John is awake, but something's happened to Doctor Leang.'

The doctor looked confused, frowning at the carpet where doctor Leang lay bleeding, and then smiling at John. This doctor he didn't like so much. Why was that? Those glasses he wore were ridiculous.

'So she has woken him,' he said, 'but what in god's name happened to her! All this blood!' It seemed his back straightened then, and the look in his eyes was determined. 'Samantha, get me the kit. Why are you faffing about with towels, goddammit.'

He stepped up to the body quick, then bent low and started touching wounds, muttering and grumbling, feeling her pulse, checking her eyes. Samantha scrambled out another door on the other side of the room, then returned with a steel table full of all kinds of medical things John didn't recognise.

'It looks like an animal has torn her apart!' The doctor exclaimed, surprised and stumped.

Mam and Dad gave each other the 'what the hell' look.

The doctor grabbed a device about the size of Dad's phone and started pushing buttons and waving it over places where blood leaked from doctor Leang. 'We must stop the bleeding first, then we'll do an internal examination.'

Samantha nodded, hands trembling. A minute of silence passed, tense and horrid. 'Will she survive?' Samantha asked, almost a whisper. The doctor paused.

John thought his eyeballs might pop out of his skull. As Doctor Ryan waved the device over various wounds, the skin started to mend itself, the blood pouring out lessened then stopped altogether. Seventeen years. Of course they'd have made major advances in the medical department. He wondered how it worked and why he was still in a coma if a device that could do that existed. When he could talk again, he would ask the doctor he decided.

Doctor Leang coughed, spluttered blood from her mouth, and curled in on herself.

'Oh! Sem!' Samantha rushed to the doctor and held her head in her lap, dabbing at the blood with a towel. The doctor's eyes fluttered open, but she looked deathly pale, her limp and bloodied arms as useless as his were.

'Don't,' she rasped, 'Don't-' She coughed again and a stream of blood poured out of her mouth. It was so much like Tom. God, he couldn't watch. John closed his eyes and tears poured down his face. The pain in his heart was surreal. Had he know this woman? Had she read to him or something while he was out? That had to be it. Maybe in his subconscious mind he'd known her better.

'Don't what,' Samantha asked desperately, frowning and touching the doctor's face.

The doctor breathed out, and for a long tense moment he thought she would never breathe in again. Nobody moved.

'Don't let them drug him,' she whispered, straining at Samantha, frowning, then she really did breathe her last breath. No! With all his might he reached out to her, and his arm actually lifted for a second. Mam gasped, Samantha wailed, Dad looked around awkwardly, and the other doctor pushed Dad aside and knelt at doctor Leang's face.

'Ms Grimes, there's still a chance. Hand me the internal organ scanner and the EP2 X5.' The doctor held his hand out to her while she sniffled and wiped tears from her face.

Then John glimpsed another side of Sam, the competent doctor side he'd never seen before. A determined expression took over her placid face. She stood quick, removed devices from drawers in the silver table that looked like bigger versions of the phone, and one like some space age gun machine. With her left hand she pushed buttons and touched the screens until a green light appeared on the laser-like device.

'It's good to go,' she said handing the device over and keeping hold of the ginormous phone thing. By now the carpet was blood-soaked around doctor Leang's greying body. There was no movement in her lungs, and no life in her still eyes. When John looked at those empty eyes something in him stirred, something like a memory. Had he gazed into her eyes? If he'd been in a coma, it would not have been possible.

'Remember me,' an angelic voice whispered in his ear. Had it been her? What'd happened to her? Had he met her before? As frustrating as it was, he couldn't get answers. The only thing he knew for certain was that she had saved him. Samantha had said this doctor had brought him back. Whoever she was, he would heed her dying words.

Come hell or high water, he'd never drink another pill in his life.

P.S. Ever heard the expression, 'Famous last words?' Nods knowingly.

© Steve Ford and Joy Cronjé 2018