Robert Crane - Alone

I coughed. “Who are you?”

She wrapped a stethoscope around her neck before answering. “Dr. Isabella Perugini. I’m the resident M.D. here in the medical unit.”

I blanched as she turned and injected a needle in an IV that ran to my arm. “Where’s Dr. Sessions?”

She snorted. “The lab rat is where he belongs – playing with test tubes and beakers.”

The haze of pain began to lift. It was still there; I just didn’t notice it as much. “So he doesn’t treat patients?”

“No.” She turned back to me, a clipboard in her hands. “I’ve treated you both times you’ve come through my doors. Want some medical advice?”

“Will it stop the pain?”

“Not immediately, but it could prevent it in the future.” She turned serious. “Stop facing off with this Wolfe character, will you? I’m sick of having blood all over my floor.”

“Send some of it to your pal Dr. Sessions; he’s jonesing for it.”

“First of all, it’s not all yours,” she said with a nod to a half dozen figures on beds down a line from me. The agents that tried to rescue me from Wolfe. “Second, if he wants it, Ron’s welcome to come over here with a mop; I suspect the janitorial department is getting quite sick of cleaning up these sorts of messes.”

“Did someone say my name?” I looked as far as I could toward the doorway and saw Dr. Sessions silhouetted in the frame.

“Yeah,” I said in a ragged whisper. “I was just telling Dr. Perugini that she should save you some of my excess blood since it’s everywhere.”

“Yes,” he said with excitement, “that would be marvelous.”

“Ron,” Dr. Perugini said in acknowledgment, with a tone that indicated some impatience. “Why are you darkening my door?”

“I came to give Ms. Nealon her test results.” His face twitched and he pushed the glasses back up into position on his nose. “Quite interesting.”

“Of course it escapes your notice she’s near dead,” Perugini muttered under her breath, sparking a quizzical look from Sessions. She opened her arms wide. “By all means, deliver your test results.”

“So what am I?” I said without preamble.

“No idea,” he replied as he crossed the floor and halted at my bedside. “You defy immediate classification.” A smile of delight colored his pasty features. “Truly bizarre.”

“He’s a sweet talker, that one,” I said to Dr. Perugini, who snorted again, this time in amusement. “Why is that bizarre?”

“I’ve analyzed hundreds of meta-humans,” he went on, “and most fall into common types – a half-dozen or so groupings depending on the special powers they exhibit. Some tend more toward incredible physical attributes, some have energy projection capabilities or—”

“Perhaps speak to the girl in English,” Dr. Perugini interrupted.

“No need for that,” he corrected her. “I gave her an intelligence test as well; I could be having this discussion in Latin and she’d pick up the essential points. The simple fact is—”

“I defy classification,” I interrupted, my words calm, coming out over the foul, acidic taste in my mouth from my recent bout of vomiting. “Even among the bizarre, I’m bizarre.”

A phone rang across the medical unit and Dr. Perugini gave Dr. Sessions a thinly lidded glare before striding away to answer it. He kept his distance, as though he were uncomfortable stepping any closer. Instead he stared at me in a way that, had any other man done it right now, would likely have set me to vomiting again. I stared back at him. “What?”

“Your physical strength is high above a normal meta’s, so you should be manifesting soon, if you haven’t already. No unique abilities to report yet?” I felt zero compunction about lying, but was relieved that Dr. Perugini had stepped away; I suspected she would see through my untruth; Dr. Sessions didn’t have a prayer.

“No. Nothing unusual.”

He turned back to his clipboard. “Well, that’s fine…it’s normal that you wouldn’t be experiencing anything yet. But as time goes by, additional abilities will materialize.” He looked down at the blood pooled at his feet. “And I’ll, uh…” He pulled a small test tube out of his coat pocket and stooped down, scraping it across the tile floor, forcing a small amount into the vial before putting a rubber stopper on it. Dr. Perugini rounded the corner just in time to see him and threw up her hands in silent exasperation.

He stood up, failing to notice her behind him. “I’ll get this analyzed and maybe it’ll give us some ideas of what you are.” He turned and started when he saw Dr. Perugini, then shuffled around her as she glared at him.

“He has the bedside manner of a goat,” she said with a hint of a European accent. “But not the common sense nor tact. That—” she pointed to the phone behind her—“was Ariadne. She and Old Man Winter are coming down to see you now that you’re awake.”

“Did they already know I was awake when they called?” I asked. I could believe Dr. Sessions would wander over and not know that I was unconscious; I’d be shocked if Ariadne and Old Man Winter weren’t spying on me.

She stared back at me, her dark eyes cool and unflinching. “Yes.” She turned away, grabbing a clipboard off a nearby shelf. “You’re going to need to start eating again soon. I don’t want to strain your digestive tract until I’m sure it’s fully healed, so I’ll be giving you another ultrasound in a couple hours to confirm you mend as fast as I suspect you do. After that, dinner will be served.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. The brush with Wolfe made me wonder if I’d ever be able to eat again without heaving.

“That’s okay,” she replied without looking up from her clipboard. “I’m not feeding you yet.”

The medical unit was a long room, probably as long as my house but narrower, with curtains separating individual beds and a private room at the far end with an oversized door for rolling gurneys in. Every surface was the same flat metal that I’d seen in the room I’d woken up in when I’d first arrived at the Directorate, broken up by glass windows that looked out into a hallway that matched the distinct look of the headquarters building.

The sharp odor of disinfectants wrinkled my nose as I took it in for the first time, almost giving me another reason to gag. I could hear the low beeps of monitoring equipment in the background and the faint hum of all the machinery. I counted the number of occupied beds I could see from where I lay. Less than a half dozen. “How do you handle so many at one time?” I asked.

“I don’t,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “I had to triage, and Old Man Winter demanded I treat you first.”

“But I can survive more than any of them.”

“I know,” she said with a nod, not looking up from her clipboard. “And once I had established your wounds were not of the life-threatening variety, I moved on to the next critical patient.”

“How many of them died?” The words were like ashes in my mouth. Bitter.

A moment of silence passed between us. “Five.”

I did not respond to her statement, and she didn’t speak either. The doors on the far side of the medical unit opened to admit Ariadne, who looked drawn, her severe suit wrinkled as though she had slept in it. Old Man Winter followed a pace behind her, his age less obvious today, I thought – or was that because I knew he wasn’t what he appeared?

“Hello,” Ariadne said. I didn’t bother to glare. She took this as an invitation to move closer, and hovered over my bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been kicked, punched, gutted, slapped and stomped on,” I said without much feeling. “So basically like you look all the time.” I couldn’t stop myself. Ouch.