Day 3

Jessica took a drink of her morning coffee as she soared up I-87 North at just over the speed limit of sixty-five. She was listening to some radio station out of Albany and trying not to think about what she was getting involved in. She wanted to have a fresh and open mind when she arrived at the Arthur Ulbrik Hospital. She did not want to have any predetermined thoughts concerning the young man, but she had already concluded that he was deranged.

She had spent the entire night thinking on what had happened. Her thoughts took a drastic turn when she was disturbed by a stranger looking for his friends. She decided that to wait a while could be destructive to her chances of bringing back the young man’s memories and decided that she make her return to the Ulbrik Hospital as soon as she was awake.

She was only a few minutes away and her nerves were already on edge. She did not like the case, but she still needed to figure out what was in the man’s head. If he was dangerous, it was her job to prove it and make sure that he was not able to hurt anyone else. If he was not, it was her job to get him back in touch with himself and living a normal life again. She dreaded the fact that one mistake on her part could end a perfectly normal individual’s life or send a madman into the streets.

She drove past the large iron gates and through the open yard to the little parking lot. She parked and then started picking up her files and laptop. She was not about to let anything get past her, she even brought a small tape recorder to capture the discussions with the man. She would make certain that she had every detail. She wanted to know what it was that he believed he knew.

She walked around to the front door and Richard was there to meet her. He led her up to the young man’s room. “Well, we’ve taken some extra precautions and we are going to have him handcuffed to a chair in a room with two guards this time. Just to make sure nothing odd happens.”

“Thank you,” she said, “I appreciate the concern.”

They made their way to the room and Jessica looked in on him through the small wire reinforced window. He was sitting in bed, eating a bowl of oats or cream of wheat. His eyes were drooping and dark circles outlined them. He looked as though he had not slept. She knew how to start their conversation. Things were already looking better for her.

“Alright, let him finish eating and then we’ll get started.”

Richard shook his head, “Okay, I’ll show you to the room so you can set up.” He walked her down to the end of the hall and turned into a room that looked like it belonged in a prison. She swore she had seen it in countless movies. It was perfectly white and perfectly square with two armed guards and two chairs, both bolted to the floor. A small rectangular table separated the two chairs and was also bolted down.

She went in and started setting up. It took her a few moments to arrange everything so that it was comfortable for her. By the time she was finished, the young man was being led in with the help of two more guards and handcuffs. She felt her nerves again, this time it was in her stomach. She fought and won and she was able to keep herself from reacting to his presence. They seated him across from her and then fastened both of his arms to the chair with handcuffs.

She looked into his eyes. They were tired but still held that strange intensity. He seemed to want to sleep more than anything in the world, “You look exhausted.”

“I had a little trouble sleeping last night, it’s nothing new.” He still had that odd calm.

“What kept you awake?”

“If I told you, you would write me off as a total lunatic.” He gave her a sideways glance that said it would be harder to get the truth out of him than she thought.

“Are you sure you don’t want to try discussing it?”

He thought for a moment and then he looked at the guards, “Okay, I have nightmares. Like last night, I dreamed that they were restraining someone and that the person was screaming wildly and it sounded like they were hurting him. I wanted to help but I was tied down. I couldn’t move at all, my hands and feet would barely even twitch and then I realized that if I couldn’t move to help that poor guy, there was no way I could move to save myself if they came to me. I laid there like that for what seemed like forever while the rain pounded on the window and then, in the midst of my fear a face appeared, a face most men would love to have seen in their dreams but to me it was terrible, those beautiful eyes and that long blonde hair with those catlike features. She wasn’t supposed to be watching me and if she got in through the window, I knew that I would die because she wanted to kill me and I couldn’t move.”

Jessica looked around and then leaned in toward him, “Only, you don’t think it was all a dream, do you?”

He looked at her with all the rationality that he could pull up inside of him, “It has to be.”

“You don’t seem very sure of your self.”

“It’s difficult to be sure of anything right now. I don’t even know my own name and here I am in chains,” he rattled the links on the cuffs, “and I don’t know what I did that was so wrong.”

“You attacked a woman. You do remember that, don’t you?”

“You mean the woman in my dreams. I remember trying to get away from her. I was trying to free myself. She is the only face that I remember and she haunts me almost every night. You’d have done the same.”

Jessica leaned toward him. She could tell from his voice that he had convinced himself that that attack at least was a dream. “She haunts you every night. You mean you dream about her, was it the woman you saw in the window last night?”

“I told you, it was a dream, and yes, well, at least I think it’s the same girl.” He started wringing his hands. She watched as the wringing changed to a slow but steady massage. She figured it had more to do with the fact he could fight five men and win than any sign of nerves or tension. His face was still calm.

“The attack was real. It happened, you almost killed her. It took five men to stop you, with the help of two doses of anesthesia. You had just awoken from your coma and were still sleepy and slow. Do you think that that could be why you remember it as a dream?”

“And you think that the trauma would cause these dreams that I have been having, possibly be the root of the fear and sense of helplessness, don’t you?” His blue eyes narrowed.

“You said you remember her. Do you mean from before the coma?”

“She was the first thing I saw in that, well, when I awoke. She looked familiar and I felt that she was dangerous. Something about her was not right. It was like when you know a room and you start to ignore the little things, but if something moves, you know it.”

She pondered the idea. It seemed to make sense. She knew that she would not be able to recall every detail about her apartment, but if she went home and something were missing, she would know. She was not certain that she could argue against it. It would be the same kind of memory as language or training, something simple that was repeated for years would not be lost when something like your own name would be. Amnesia was far from predictable. “So, she seemed to be a threat. Do you really think that you can rationalize to me how a one hundred and fifteen pound woman who stood five-foot-four could possibly threaten the life of a man who looks about one seventy-five and that I have seen fight five men? Do you think that makes sense?”

“Do you think it makes sense that a man of my stature can fight five men and not know that size matters very little in a fight? Do you think that I would hurt anyone without a damn good reason, or that some kind of offense was not involved? I know that size can seem like a huge factor, but truthfully, it means nothing. As far as my idea of defense, I guess that depends on what you have to say about me.” His eyes focused on the table and he started talking as if he no longer cared. She had hit a nerve.

She leaned forward and peered into his eyes as he tried to look away. His expression was one of simple annoyance. “Look at me. I need to see your eyes. You need to have faith in me, faith that I can find out that you are not guilty.” He heard the doubt of it in her voice. He knew the little things that gave it away; the lack of intensity in her eyes, the slight weakness of the words as if she were trying to reaffirm something that she had been repeating over and over in her head. He wished that he could have faith in her. She was the only thing standing between him and the same fate that awaited the majority of the tortured minds that were trapped in that hospital.

“I have little faith in anything. Give me hope, and then I can have faith.” He looked at her again. He was looking into her blue eyes and knew that she was already deciding that he was guilty. She saw him as a monster and he was the one who knew who the monster really was.

“Now, tell me what would make you want to hurt a girl. Anything that you can think of that would make you that angry.”

He leered at her, knowing that there were hints of something in him that wanted to surface and yet he could not say them, especially to her. “I was not angry, I was protecting myself. It’s the only explanation.”

She leaned back in her chair and brushed her dark hair back, “What do you think she was doing that you would need to protect yourself? Did she have any weapons or anything?”

He looked at each guard in turn and then looked to the small black spherical object above them. He then looked at her, then to the voice recorder and then back to Jessica. “I see her face every night. I know she is alive and watching me for some reason. I fear her like I fear no other thing I have seen since I awoke. I have no recollection of having any such fear. I am not afraid of you or any of these doctors or anyone else. No man, regardless of size, no animal and yet a little woman would send chills up and down my spine and makes me go into a cold sweat when I see her. She needs no weapons and whatever she did scared the living shit out of me. I want to know who she is and why she is there and what the hell she did to me. Can you understand that? All I know about her is that she is far more dangerous than you could imagine and that she needs to be dealt with by any means possible. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I think it’s something that you and the police can’t help with. Now, if that’s not basis for some type of derangement then I don’t know what is. Especially when there is no way to figure out if any of it is true.” He then interlaced his fingers and leaned back. “I don’t know enough to make her look bad, but then again, I don’t know my own name. How much do you really think I can help you with that? I have one thing in my head from before and it’s an unfounded accusation that you will probably never be able to prove or disprove. That’s the clue you’ve come to find, now what are you going to do with it? Are you going to convict me of being a lunatic who suffers from murderous rages and then has strange dreams that seem to direct his attacks or are you going to look into it the way you should and find out that nothing seems to exist to defend my argument that she is dangerous? And what could possibly prove that it is her, maybe it was just someone who looked like her?” He cocked an eyebrow, “Hmmm?”

Jessica looked at the now alarming individual with a lump of fear in her throat. He seemed to know all the questions that people would ask and he could see the problems with his own story and he knew that those facts made his position even more precarious. She could feel that he was not afraid of his destiny. He knew that death was possible and likely if he were proven a murderer. He was only interested in getting out and he also knew that he needed to know who he was. Her fear was of his uncanny knowledge of his situation.

She stood and walked around with her finger and thumb to her temples. She was trying to figure out if there was really anything else that he would give her. She tried to think and her thoughts began to wonder. She was preoccupied with the strange man who had come to her apartment the night before. The man was alarming. He had the same all-knowing gaze that the man across the table seemed to have. She wondered if there was a link. She doubted it. They were probably just really wise men for their ages and possessed a deep understanding of how people interacted. She had noticed the look in the eyes of one of her professors who had seemed to be able to figure out what was going through your mind before you did.

She looked at the man behind the desk and wondered just how alike the two might be. What if the man calling himself James Dalton was a murderer, or had the same vampire based derangement that the man in chains did? She had the look of a person who was speaking to death and did not want to die.

“What’s wrong?” the man asked.

“Nothing, nothing at all.” Her voice was trembling as the words passed through unsteady lips.

“No, you’re just afraid that I might know something about it. Come on, try me. I told you the secrets in my head, now it’s your turn.” He was almost too calm.

She looked away and then glanced at him. She wanted to ask if he knew the man. She wondered if it really was happenstance that had brought the man to her door. “Do you believe in…,” She trailed off, too weary to ask that particular question.

“Vampires, the undead, zombies, mummies and all the things that go bump in the night. No, I don’t. Do you?”

She looked at him with alarm, “How did you know what I was going to say?”

“I know what you’re thinking. There’s the tape with the stake, the set ideas on vampirism and then the amnesia and the girl at the window. It just makes sense. And now there is something else getting to you and you’re starting to slip up. Don’t worry, it’s understandable. You’re under a lot of pressure right now.”

“So, if you know, why don’t you try to convince me that you don’t believe?”

“Because, I shouldn’t have to. It should be simple enough to believe me when I say that I don’t believe in those things. They can’t exist, if they did, so many things would be different and I’m sure we would have figured out whether or not they were real with all the technology and such that we have now.”

“Why do you have to make so much sense?”

“Because, I’m sane.”

She looked into his calm blue eyes, “Are you?”

He shook his head in disgust, “You know already whether or not I’m dangerous, but you spend too much time watching a video that you cannot explain. That video was a mistake. One that will disappear and so will you.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“The girl is gone, isn’t she?”

Jessica’s eyes widened in wonder, “How did you know that?”

“It’s pretty interesting isn’t it? I mean, think about it. I’m the dangerous one and here I sit with my hands chained to a chair and yet the one I was going to hurt just disappears as soon as I am locked up and you start following up my strange reaction to waking up. Isn’t that kind of odd? I bet it won’t be long before she has completely faded away and either your memory and the video will be gone or you will be. I choose the latter seeing as how death is probably easier than brainwashing. Now, I’ll leave you to your own devices, but I know she is still out there, only you won’t find her. She’s dangerous.”

Jessica was unable to say anything. He seemed to think there was some kind of conspiracy going on and still seemed to be thinking rationally. She ran to the table and grabbed everything and ran out. She collapsed against the wall, hugging her laptop. She slid down and sat on the floor, holding her eyes shut as tightly as she could. All rational thought told her that he was insane and most definitely delusional but she wanted to believe him. It was as if those piercing blue eyes were screaming out to her to believe every word.

He was a man who knew little of fear and yet someone plagued by a young woman. It was like some kind of spy game or something. She swore she could have seen that kind of thing coming in one of the old Mission Impossible episodes that she used to watch on late night cable when she was cramming back in school. She also swore that this guy was far too close to looking like some action movie star maybe that was part of what made her want to believe him. She hated that weakness, but she had also learned enough to know that even a child too young to talk was more comfortable with a pretty face than an ugly one. Damn psychology and its double-edged sword effect.

The last thing she needed to do was analyze herself when what she really had to do was clear her head and go in open minded and try to see if she could cut through whatever this guy thought and make any sense of what had happened that night at the hospital. Yet, she could also tell that he knew about the girl coming up dead and the fact that information on her seemed to grow more and more difficult to find by the hour. Things seemed to be on his side and he was the one in chains and behind bars. She did not like how things were adding up. They were becoming even more difficult as he gained the advantage. She hoped that she could eventually prove something and find out what was going on with the man in that chair.

She set down the laptop and started wiping her eyes with her forefingers to get the tears out that she had tried to dam up. She then wiped her nose even though it was not running. She wanted to look presentable. It would boost her confidence a little even though the man knew he was getting to her now that she had run out of the room like a small child. She stood and tried to walk off the effects of the conversation. She needed to get something more out of him. She had what she had thought she needed but now she knew that there was far more to that man than she had anticipated.

Heather Westchester was the key to his argument and she was dead. She gathered her things and then ran down the hall to where Dr. Tollvert usually worked. She started looking around and then saw him. “Excuse me, Richard, I need to go and check on something today. I’ll be back tomorrow if you don’t mind.”

“No, not at all. We’ll keep a watchful eye on him for you.” He was jovial as always.

She turned and ran back to her Malibu and jumped in. The ride back to Manhattan was not too bad until a little past the Tappan Zee Bridge where things always seemed to clog around the toll booths that dotted the rest of her path to the city. She hated dealing with the traffic, but her job was on the line and she had little choice in the matter if she wanted to figure out anything. She darted off to the library and by the time she got a parking spot it was almost eleven. She ran to a small store and picked up some chips and a wrapped sandwich for lunch, fleshing out the meal with a Coke and a Butterfinger she grabbed at the cashier counter.

Once in the library, she started her research. She wanted to know anything about the undead and anything about cases where information just disappeared. She needed an edge and she thought that a basic knowledge was a good place to start with a person who seemed to be able to play games like that man back at the Arthur Ulbrik Hospital. If he was going to play games, she would at least learn enough to figure out his rules.

Three thousand words worth of vampire notes and five hours later she decided it was close to time to wrap up for the day. She had not even scratched the surface and had more names for the strange blood suckers than she would have ever imagined. The varieties ranged from the Rhangda of the West Indies to the Qiang-shi of China and Mongolia. The Szlachta beasts of the Balkans and its reputed masters, the ancient Vampyr seemed to be present in more legends than the German Nosferatu. She even managed to trace the roots of the vampire legends back to the Hebrew Lilith, not a pretty name, but rather the first companion of Adam who spurned the idea that she should be forced to lie with the man and became the Hebrew ideal of the harlot and slut.

She had come to the conclusion that the man in the Hospital was right about one thing; there were too many incongruities in the legends. It seemed that every story had the creature dying in some different way. The stories seemed to agree that the consumption of living tissue was necessary for their survival and that sunlight did at least scare them off. Maybe he was just a hobbyist and it had flooded his head as he tried to solve his own riddles. Maybe it was something that comforted him? Perhaps just the fact that he remembered something so well was a comfort to him. If that was the case she could not find it in her heart to blame him for trying to use it to cling to for hope until the truth was uncovered.

She packed everything away and sighed as she stood up. She looked around the library. The long corridors between the stacks seemed to go off into absolute nothingness. She wondered what it would be like to have all those books and not know even one shelf’s worth of their names. She realized that that was probably only a small part of what amnesia felt like. She never imagined that it would be so difficult to deal with someone who had no memories. She hoped that somewhere along the line, she could find a way to help him, if that was what he really needed.

She shouldered her carrying case and started to walk for the exit. As she did she walked past a woman with a young girl. She smiled at the two and the girl pulled her mother to a stop. The young girl had big brown eyes and looked at Jessica while biting her lip, “Shh, the monster under the bed never left, you just don’t think he’s there anymore.” Jessica’s eyes widened and jaw dropped. Then the girl pointed to the books Jessica had in her arm. One had a photo still from the movie Nosferatu on it and then the strange statement made a little more sense.

She turned to the counter and dropped the books off. Then she left. When she stepped out onto the street, she looked up at the sun. It was warm and the air was nice for being in the city. She preferred the atmosphere at the hospital and realized that such a nice place was probably a very good idea for those patients, especially the ones that would never see the normalcy of her life again. She hoped that she could save at least one person from the fate of being locked away from the rest of humanity forever.

She watched as the endless flow of people passed her by. They were faceless and unimportant to each other and yet they were more intertwined than they could ever imagine. If any of those people lost the slightest bit of their self to something, their entire world would spiral into an endless darkness. Then they would dare use anything to cling to that near normalcy of their old life, a life where everything was based on friendships and intimacies that they tried their best to ignore when they were out here. It made her wonder why, if those relationships were so important, were people so afraid to meet each other without either being forced or going to places where meeting was okay. It was growing ever rarer to just meet someone and she thought that it probably crossed very few others’s minds.

The work she was doing was opening her mind to things that others ignored and it was beginning to make her uncomfortable.

He was sitting at a chair eating a bowl of pears and looking out a window that was guarded with bars of black iron. He was alone and he was nameless. He, it was how he referred to even himself; he, that guy, him. He thought that it was odd that he would use pronouns to describe himself. Even me and myself were awkward once they became the only way you knew yourself. It did not feel right to him to refer to himself as that guy when he was thinking, that was how women talked about ‘that guy’ they just shot down or people on the street talked about ‘that guy’ that bumped into them. He wanted a name and he wanted a past and he wanted a future and for some reason his feelings and thoughts and what little that he did remember seemed to betray him. He knew only that he was supposed to keep his mouth shut, but with the prospect of becoming himself he could not and now it had gotten himself into more trouble than it was worth. At least before he was that guy who was allowed to do things on his own and talk to people.

He slurped a pear half off of his spoon and felt the cool syrup coat his mouth. Ah, simple pleasures of life. But, he still yearned for the solace of knowing himself. He wondered what it would be like. Maybe it would be like when you met someone new for the first time and a whole world would open up and he would have the fun of getting to know himself. Maybe it would be like an explosion and everything would just rush in and fill up all the empty spots that they had vacated. He did not care how it happened so long as he found out who he really was and found a way to save himself from the hell that he had built for himself with the information he had given Jessica.

He slurped down another bit of pear and then looked to the door where he could feel the guards standing outside and waiting for him to try something. Of course, there was nothing he could think of trying without ending up shot or tranquilized. He just had to wait and hope that Jessica could fight her way through his memories or that he would eventually remember something on his own.

It had been hours since she had left. He was not sure exactly how many because he was losing track of how time passed now that he was locked away. He wished there was some kind of pattern to his day, but all there was was time and waiting for that time to pass. He hoped that dark would come soon. Even though it frightened him, it was welcome and somehow familiar. It would be cooler and quieter and he would be able to think and his mind would be a little clearer and yet he would still be scared witless.

He looked back out the window as he sliced another pear half with his spoon. The sun was starting to get low in the sky but it would still be a while before dusk. He let his thoughts pour and tried to search them for himself and found nothing. Still, he struggled through every story and hope that he could dream up. He fought to make those daydreams click with something so that he might know what made them and maybe, just maybe, find out a little more about himself. Then, in the midst of daydreams and minutes or possibly hours beyond an empty bowl of pears, he fell asleep and the dreams became real dreams that he could see and hear and touch and remember.

He found his dreams wandering through a starlit darkness that undulated and cascaded and stars and comets made their orbits about him, fast then slow and then gone and then changing and then there was only darkness and then there was that face with the beautiful green eyes and the long blonde hair. He could feel rage building up and then there was a calm that rushed over him. He knew that he had to stay calm to face her. She was very dangerous and he would need to be able to think clearly to be of any good against her. Then he realized that it was simply an image that he could only see and it was cold, so cold. He startled awake.

It was night and he was still sitting in the same chair but the bowl of pears that he had emptied long ago was gone. He must have been very tired to have slept through someone coming into the room. He looked out through the bars and he could barely see the treetops by the moonlight. It was late and he was still sleepy. He wanted to lie down and his bottom was beginning to hurt from sitting so long. He had one hand free so that he could eat and his other was locked to the chair along with both ankles. He wanted to at least be able to adjust a little.

He tried to pull his restraints loose with his free hand and discovered that it was useless. Without a key, he was not going anywhere. He looked out the barred window and saw that the moonlight was strong. He could see the leaves rustling in the light wind that was left from the storm the night before. He wished that he could feel that wind and hear the rustling of those leaves and then he saw the branches move against the wind and a chill went through his entire body. He prayed that he was dreaming and he struggled against his constraints.

He felt that he knew what was coming. It would be her. She would come to the window and then she would watch as he sat there, wide awake and helpless to do anything but close his eyes to keep her face from making him so frightened that he pissed his pants. He did not want to see her. He wanted to be able to leave and to fight her off, but he knew that those things would not come to him that night. He was locked down and locked in and then there were the armed guards outside. He might be quick, but dodging bullets was out of the question.

He fought with his restraints hoping that he could find a way out. Then he saw the glint of light in the yard from something. He became perfectly still and absolutely silent. He watched the yard below, hoping to see what had made that glint and think of what to do about it. Then he saw something dash between some bushes, so fast it was only a blur. He knew that it was an animal but he could not think of anything that moved that fast. It made a cat look pathetically slow.

He thought that it was just a trick of his mind. He knew that when people were kept to themselves they would start to hallucinate and make things up to keep them from losing touch with their own social habits and allow them to cope when they were reintroduced to the real world. He hoped the same was not happening to him. He needed all of his faculties about him to get out and manage to put the dreams behind him, whether Dr. Fairchild was convinced to make it real for him or not. He knew that he had to believe that those images were dreams and that the very thing he saw was not real, otherwise he would be spending the rest of his life in walls very similar to the ones he was forced to look at while sitting there that night.

He sat watching and hoping he would see something more substantial and then even the wind seemed to stop as he strained so much that time began to slow. He knew the effect well. Some referred to it as the five minute hallway. Commonsense would tell you that no one would make a hallway that takes five minutes to walk down, yet given some darkness and a few spooky sounds and even the most stalwart mother fucker would be convinced that a ten foot room took an hour to move across. He remembered the feeling. It had to have come from when he was younger.

The dark was getting inside his head and he did not like it. He was beginning to feel that this very thing was the reason he had trouble sleeping during the day. It would make more sense to be well rested when you felt that you were about to die and so he must have learned to sleep during the day to help him during the night. Then he thought it foolish that a grown man would be afraid of the dark. There had to be some other, more sensible reason and yet he now knew that his fear of the night was rooted deeply in his past.

He heard something scratching against the brick on the outside of the building and knew that it must be close to the window if he could hear it through the thick glass. He tried to stretch his back and neck to look out the window and down the side of the wall. He wanted to see what was making the noise. He had never noticed such scratching before and it made little sense considering most of the time he spent in that room was time filled with the purest void of silence. He could not pull himself up far enough to see anything and most definitely not far enough to see all the way to the bottom of the wall.

He slouched back in the seat and rubbed his left wrist with his free hand. The shackles were painful with that much pressure against them. He did not like being so helpless. He knew that if anything other than the usual visit happened, he would be at the mercy of the nightmare angel in the window. He wanted so desperately to have something, a thing that he knew would help him somehow, but he could not remember exactly what it was, only that it would save his currently bound and lame ass.

He started looking around and hoping that he could find something or think of something to help him but he came to the same conclusion he had earlier. He was absolutely helpless. A child that could crawl had more of a chance than he did. His one free hand would be barely enough to fend off a fly. If something was coming and it really was not his mind playing tricks on him, then he would be easily overpowered. Shadows began to leap as his mind worked on both the helplessness and the need to find a way to not be so vulnerable.

Then he heard an explosion and yellow light burst across the window. The blast tossed his chair and he heard the door rattle on its hinges. He contorted his body and pulled the chair to see if it would move. The chair spun on one leg and the chair fell with him still held to it by two ankles and one wrist and he felt his ribs smack against the chair arm and instantly pain rushed through the side of his head. He lay there, not wanting to move. He could see the blood on the floor out of the corner of his eye, a dark oozing shadow, growing slowly.

He could see the door now and could hear the roar of flames as they consumed some not distant enough part of the hospital. Someone had set the place on fire and he was going to burn. He cringed at that way to die. It seemed low, somehow dishonorable to die in that fashion. For some reason he associated it with evil and darkness and it seemed to him to be a way to cleanse the world of bad things. He did not want to be cleansed, it seemed backward.

He could hear screaming. He could feel the panic and the fret and the horror that was clouding the minds of all those that were near the flames. He thought to himself that the hospital staff would find it very difficult to get all the patients, especially those that were already frail of mind, out of the hospital. He knew that his chance to make it out alive relied on the staff and they would probably overlook him for the less dangerous patients.

He started racking his body against his restraints and the chair began to clack and bang against the floor. He could feel his joints on the verge of snapping under the power of his jerking and the painful scraping as he tried to writhe free of the bonds. The guards did not even look through the small window in the door. After a few moments of fighting, he felt blood trickling down his hand and both feet. He cared little for the pain, but he cared more about making it out alive.

He finally gave up as he saw someone dash past the window in the door. Then he heard the guards shout and he saw another head go by. The guards were chasing someone, someone who was screaming at the top of their lungs and they were yelling just as loud for the person to stop. Then they ran far enough away that the sounds of the fire overcame their screams. He hoped that someone would remember him, but it was not looking like things were on his side.

He laid there listening to the building crackle and the support beams screech under the weight of the debris that was left hanging over little more than flames as they ate their way through the walls and ever closer to where he was. He felt the flesh of his wrist tear some more as he struggled and then he felt his thumb snap and he paused, eyes wide with pain as he slid his hand through the restraint. He slowly held it up to his face and looked at his thumb. It looked like it was almost an inch longer than it had been and then he took his other hand and pulled it. He screamed as the loose bones slid back into place. He did not remember being able to do that, especially not the part where his thumb still worked after all that punishment. He fought back the pain and focused on crawling toward the door.

He started crawling toward the door and heard another explosion as some kind of tank or batch of chemicals exploded. He hoped that he would not get a front row seat for any of those. He made it to the door after some scratching and clawing that made his nails bleed and his ankles hurt more from dragging the chair that they were still locked to. He remembered that this was nothing compared to some kinds of pain he had felt, but he did not know how bad that pain had been. Maybe that was why he so afraid of that strange woman.

Then he heard shouting and the locks on the door were being slid back and keys turned and then miraculously, the door flung open and he saw a shadow and a splatter of blood as two loud gunshots rung in his ears. He scampered for the open door and knew that it was his chance of getting out. He got to the door and caught it just as one of the guards tried to slam it shut. He felt his arms rack with pain from the jolt. He grimaced and pushed as hard as he could and the door flung open and the guard hit the floor. He lurched for the fallen guard’s gun and grabbed it, turning it on the other guard and then nodded; a gesture for the guard to run. The look in his eye told the burly man that he was not joking.

The guard held his hands up with his gun pointed to the air and then slowly started to bend down. Then the other guard made a move toward the young patient who still had his ankles bound to the chair. The guard grabbed the gun and his arm and then the man twisted and caught the guard in the head with the chair. He felt his ankles twisting as the chair connected solidly with the guardsman’s head. Then he flung the chair around and hit the other guard in the chest and grabbed the keys. In seconds, he was free and running to find the nearest exit.

He ran toward the door that separated the two parts of the hospital and crashed through to the other side. He could see patients and personnel running around as organization fled into the night. He had other things to worry about, namely himself. He bounded down the hall and through several rooms, trying to navigate his way to a door he had never seen while awake. Another explosion rattled the hospital and he was flung to the floor. He stood and ran to the nearest window and fell two stories to the ground. He rolled on the landing, but he could still feel the pain coursing through his legs. He had suffered enough already.

He looked up at the flames that consumed the building and that were spreading to the surrounding trees and grass. He turned and belly crawled away from the fire. When he was at what he thought was a safe distance, he stopped to rest and let his wounds calm. He needed to take a breather. His breaths were coming slow and hard, even though his chest tried in vain to hurry them and it made his lungs burn. He felt the pain from his bruised ribs and the split in his head, as well as his wrist, thumb and his ankles. He was in bad shape and he still was not home free. There was a chance that the fire was only part of what was happening.

He started massaging his ankles in hopes that they would be able to carry him further if the need to run came. He had a weapon and pajamas and was free, but why, what was really happening and how many were going to die in that fire. He knew he could not save them all, in his condition he was lucky to have gotten out on his own, but that was the price of his freedom, pain and guilt. For some reason, it was a very familiar feeling. He felt as if the night was more normal and the gun felt comfortable in his hand. He wanted to know why, he did not think of himself as a violent person.

He laid there watching the hospital burn, flames leaping and dancing in the moonlight. The screams were like a macabre symphony which some demented composer would set to such a scene to increase the intensity of the disaster a hundred fold by playing on the nightmares of the witnesses. He did not like the sounds that came from that building as it was consumed by those flames. They were large and strangely intense, even at his distance. Whatever the cause, there had to be something aiding the conflagration.

He did not know how long it was that he stayed there watching, but by the time his muscles and joints stopped aching and only dull thuds were all that were left where knife stabs had been, the building was little more than a crumbling frame of what could have been almost anything from a library to a barn. He looked at his ankles and saw that they were swollen and his bare feet would not help either. Then he looked at his left hand. The thumb had stopped aching but his wrist still throbbed.

He stood and began to walk toward the small parking lot at the other side of the building, careful to keep a watchful eye for anyone who might pose a problem for him. He could see the reflection of the flames and the moonlight in the grass and leaves and tried to not look at the blaze. He already felt guilty for running to save himself and it only seemed worse that he would simply leave. Then he felt a sudden blow to his back and crumpled to the ground.

He rolled as he fell and looked up to see the face of his assailant. She was not the person he had expected. Her blonde hair was long and pulled back into a pony tail that popped out behind a backward baseball cap. Her high cheek bones were accented with charcoal and she was wearing one of those sports halter tops and tight biker shorts. She held up a baseball bat as if she were at a practice game. He knew that the bat was what had caused him the pain in his lower back.

He started firing and the first three bullets hit and tore through her flesh. She was forced back and then she fell to her knees, clasping the wounds in her chest and dropping the bat. She looked at him with a look of desperation. She wanted to die, but the bullets were not doing the job. He did not want to shoot her again, and yet she seemed to be pleading, almost begging for him to finish her off. It made no sense to him that the plea would be to die, most begged to live. He found himself shaking his head as he pondered it.

“Hey, Ally, hurry the fuck up, will ya. We gotta go,” a shout came from the direction of the parking lot and Ally was gone in a flash, leaving only her wood Louisville Slugger as proof that she had been there. The blood had disappeared into the shadows of the grass and trees.

He turned over onto his hands and knees and watched as Ally ran toward the voice that had called out. He stood and darted after her. He made it around the corner in time to see a Saleen Mustang convertible with four women in it fly past. One of the women was Ally and one of the others had the face that had haunted him so often in the night. He felt a rage, a calm focused strength, build up in him and he turned to look at the vehicles in the lot.

He spotted an old Dodge Ram. He broke the glass and the alarm went off. Then he opened the door to the big truck and in seconds he had the engine running without a key. He was not totally sure why he knew that, but it worked and he was following the low sitting Mustang out the long curvy road easily. Then they hit a straightaway and the Mustang took off like a jet compared to the truck. He punched it, but the truck was no match for the specially tuned racer. As the car made distance, the girl that haunted him turned and looked at him, stood up and made a wide-eyed face with a huge almost clown like, deranged grin.

He felt his stomach churn as he watched the car speed out of sight. He knew where to go, he could feel the direction they were going, or maybe it was something more than gut instinct that was telling him that those girls in that car were going back to the Big Apple. He was not just certain; he would have bet his life on it if he were a betting man. He did not let off the gas as he sped toward I-87. Once on the interstate, he slowed to a good eighty five and tried to keep an eye open for cops. He was driving a damaged, stolen vehicle with no explanation that would easily be linked to a fire out in the middle of nowhere. That would not be easy to explain, especially while carrying a police issue pistol in his pajama pants.

The trip to the city was going to be a couple of hours even at the pace he was setting and he checked the gas. He knew he did not have enough to make it all the way, but as long as he got as far as he could in it, he would be alright. For some reason, he remembered walking a lot at night and he was beginning to think that all these things were tying in somehow. Maybe he was the one chasing her when he ended up in the coma. That started hatching an endless line of questions and an overwhelming amount of self doubt.

An hour and forty minutes later, he found himself stranded on the side of the street. After checking the truck for a gas can and money, he darted into the brush nearby and started following the road at a distance. He did not want to be noticed and hoped he would be able to find a decent place to sleep when day came. He felt his ankles throbbing and focused on the woman’s face to keep his mind off of the aching. He needed some clothes and a bath and some real food before he would be worth anything. He could see the Tappan Zee Bridge by the time dawn started to break. He found a pile of leaves and bedded down far from the road in hopes no one would find him while he rested.

As he tried to sleep, he thought of how strange it was that a person would have skills such as fighting, marksmanship and car theft and still feel that they were a genuinely good person. It happened in books and movies, but he could not picture himself as a cop or a military guy. He thought it made little sense that they would have found him in New York and not been able to identify him if he were either. He listened to the cars pass by in the distance and hoped that there was a good explanation for the things he knew. Otherwise, his life would not be very easy at all.

It was not long before he had fallen into a deep sleep that had come to him all too easily lying along the side of a road only miles from a truck that would be pronounced stolen and have his prints all over it. He did not dream that day, his sleep seemed dark and still and fast. He awoke the next night more rested than any he had spent locked away in that hospital.

Next Chapter: Night 3, Day 4, Night 4