Story Two - The New Groove - 4

Background color
Font
Font size
Line height

I woke up to the sound of shouting. Slowly opening my eyes I found myself lying on a flimsy bed with a plain white sheet clinging to me. The room was dark, small and cramped with strange blue walls that fluttered in a stray breeze. It took me until I moved my arms to my face to realise they were strapped down by magna-cuffs, leathered on the inside to keep the cold off my skin. The green magna energy hummed cheerfully as I saw them restraining me to the bed, and after noticing the same with my feet I saw the walls part and Markro poked his head in.

'He's probably going to be like that for... well, good morning, Sleeping Beauty.'

I blinked hard, trying to work out what was happening, and trying to remember what had come before. I remembered punching people in the back of a kar, some glass shattering, and then, nothing. My memories were lost to that chasm of infinite oblivion known as the mind, and there wasn't anything that was recalling how I got to where I was shackled down in an ethereal dungeon.

'I'm, I'm sure there's a good re... reason why I'm...' I didn't get any further as I felt the hot soup of vomit try to rise up my throat. I went to cover my mouth and felt the buzzing of the cuff. It's really when you discover that you can't even stop vomit streaming out of your mouth with any decent results that you realise no matter how helpless you feel in any situation, it can always get worse. Always.

Markro saw my eyes and ducked his head back out of the room, which I realised now was just a curtained partition. 'Hey, nurse! He's up and about to barf on your whites!'

A few moments later a man in a face mask and with some sort of visor over his eyes entered my little hospital cell. His skin was blue, and for the next twelve hours or so of coming in and out of consciousness most of my thought processes were involved with what planet in the Empire he had come from, or perhaps even not in the empire.

For now though I was fully conscious and aware of what was going on around me. A clear mask of some kind was brought down from the ceiling on a piece of elasticised tubing and placed over my mouth. 'For the vomit,' the nurse said, gloved hands checking a bank of monitors at the side of me.

'What happened?' I asked Markro weakly. 'Did we get him back?'

Markro's face suddenly turned sour, as if a black cloud had passed over his mind. 'We got him back, yeah,' he said. 'Took almost everything we had, but yeah, we got him. He's in the bed to your right in the next partition.'

'He's not... I mean, he's alive?'

'Alive but not talking. The kar went into a barrier a minute or so after you took out the guys in ours. The thing flipped nine times, went up in flames on the fourth impact, slid to a halt by taking out most of the highway floor.'

I saw the whole thing in my mind, the scraping of the kar's ripped frame against the black and blue highway floor, sections ripping up like someone tearing down bathroom tiles for a renovation. And then Markro looked away and I realised what he was avoiding, why his face had turned grey.

'Siala?' I asked, hoping I was wrong.

'She's...' he began, not knowing how to continue.

The nurse lifted my mask up and opened my jaw a little rudely, poking a torch down my throat and examining who the hell knows what. 'Your Androssian friend is alive,' he said, 'by the powers of modern medical techniques. She's suffered burns to most of her body, more broken bones than a graveyard put through a shredder, and an almighty amount of brain damage. We're working as hard as we can thanks to many generous donations from most likely unreliable sources but she's slipped into a very deep coma, I'm afraid.' The nurse didn't sound the least bit afraid or even concerned.

'She'll come round though?' I asked hesitantly. My mask went back on in time to catch a little bile that came spurting through my teeth.

'Very possibly, depending on how long you're prepared to fund the life-support machine. You're in a private clinic, Mr Xayne, and we can only do what people pay us to do. The money stops, so does her life, if she doesn't wake up in time.'

'They don't know,' Markro interjected, 'how long she'll be out for. She could come around in a few hours, or it could be in a few decades. They just don't know.'

I put my head back, the nurse hitting the suction button on the side of my bed and draining the bile up the tube and out of the mask. I found out later they were collecting it for private investigations into the possibility of any stray substances, poison perhaps, entering my system during the fight. It was unlikely, but the boss apparently wanted everything checked over triple. He'd sold off a lot of his private collections to fund our recoveries so far, and according to Markro, was going to keep doing so.

'He's a hell of a boss, isn't he?' I said to Markro when he told me of how my recovery was being funded. He nodded, not another word being needed.

My ability to stay awake was next to non-existent, but I managed to pick up scraps of information whilst I was around. People came and people went, poking and prodding me with various instruments and needles, injecting stuff and taking measurements. I didn't particularly care, as long as someone got me out of the damn restraints.

'Everyone's out of sight,' he told me, 'with guards on the entrances to the building and the rooms. Celestrian official police at that, as there will be some men in long brown coats and magnifying glasses that want to talk to you once the doctor lets them. A massive shunt on 17-36 doesn't go unnoticed, no matter how much we want it to.'

I chuckled to myself. 'You can pile several kars up and have one break away through a dividing barrier and manage to cover it up, but as soon as one vehicle decides to join the circus, then we break out the searchlights and laser beams.'

'Full of cynical wisdom, aren't you?' Markro said, fiddling with something on his Halo-Core as he sat at my bedside. I smiled, feeling myself begin to slip into the spots and stars that were slowly swimming into vision again.

'You never told me,' I said when I came round for what must have been the hundredth time, 'why I'm cuffed to this damn bed.'

'You were thrashing around when you first got in,' Markro told me, 'and not all of it was because of the pain. Mental fits, subconscious fights, brain demons so to speak. The nurses decided that stopping you from gouging your own throat out would be a decent way to go.'

'I'm fine now though,' I said, 'so tell them I'd like to scratch my own itches now.'

He shook his head. 'You were kicking out at someone half an hour ago when you were out. They had to up the dosage of that yellow stuff to keep you subdued.

The stars had completely taken my vision now. I drifted off into what was, for me at least, a beautiful blackness, but for everyone else was full of kicking and thrashing and a tightening of the cuffs. Apparently I didn't take being seriously injured incredibly well.

You are reading the story above: TeenFic.Net