G. Fields - Under Vanishing Skies

“Stop laughing!” Viyaja yelled in a high-pitched tone. Then, addressing Pun, he said, “I order you to kill him. Kill him now!”

I closed my eyes, ready for it all to be over. I waited, but nothing happened. With my eyes still closed, I lifted my chin and pushed my chest out.

“Just do it, Pun. For God’s sake, do it. You know he doesn’t have the balls to do his own dirty work.”

I heard the swish of the sword and felt the wind as it passed in front of my face. I opened my eyes and looked down, expecting to see my intestines falling out on to the floor. I saw a puddle of blood, but it wasn’t mine.

“I swore an oath to the people, not to you,” Pun said before pulling his sword out of Viyaja. Then I watched as Viyaja collapsed to the ground. Pun looked over at the guard. The guard released me and sprinted for the hatch. He was followed close behind by the technician.

That tunnel of blackness was closing in again. But before I passed out I saw Pun smile.

Familiar voices pushed their way into my dream and battled for attention. But I didn’t want to wake up.

I was sitting in the backyard with Kelly. We were watching the girls run around. Kelly touched my arm and I looked into her eyes. She was smiling, but a single tear rolled down her cheek. I tried to wipe it away, but my arms wouldn’t move. She said something, but I couldn’t understand what she said because the other voices drowned her out.

“What?” I asked.

“Wake up, Aron.” It wasn’t Kelly voice.

Kelly, the girls, and the backyard began to fade way. I began to cry.

“Come on. Wake up.”

My eyes felt like they were glued shut. After several attempts, I managed to open them, but I was assaulted by light and I shut them again.

“That’s it, Aron. Open your eyes.”

I tried again and this time I managed to keep them open long enough to see Helen. She was smiling.

She turned and said, “He’s waking up, go get the doctor.”

I turned my head to see who she was talking to. It wasn’t easy moving my head. It felt like someone had tied a hundred-pound weight to it. I saw Mohamed just as he walked out of the room.

“Aron dear, look at me. Can you hear me?”

I looked back at Helen and croaked out, “Yeah. I hear you.” Then I looked around the room and asked, “Where am I?”

The room looked like a hospital room or at least what I remembered a hospital room looking like. A monitor stood next to my bed and an IV bag hung suspended on a chrome pole. My eyes traced the clear tubing down from the bag to where it met a needle that disappeared into my arm.

“You’re in the Male clinic, dear. You gave us all quite a scare.”

I’d been in the clinic before, but I didn’t recall seeing the monitoring equipment. It was clean and it actually seemed to work. They must have hidden it from us back when we were salvaging the electrical equipment to build the IICN.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“So, our patient is awake is he?”

I looked toward the unfamiliar voice and saw a woman who had her hair pulled up tight into a ball, the old fashioned kind. But there wasn’t anything else old fashioned about her. I tried to guess her age, but gave up. She had one of those ageless faces. She could be anywhere from thirty five to fifty five. But her eyes looked older. They were the eyes of a person who had seen her fair share of pain and suffering.

She wore a clean, white jumpsuit. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen anything that clean or that white. Having once worked in the satellite industry, I had seen a lot of people in jumpsuits like that. However I never saw anyone who could fill it out the way she did. She was too… too something. I couldn’t put my finger on.

She walked over to the bed, looked at the monitor, and then pulled out a small pen light and held it in front of my eyes. “Try to follow the light with your eyes. Don’t move your head.”

Not moving my head wasn’t going to be a problem.

“Good, good. Do you feel like you could sit up?”

I nodded. Mohamed came over and helped the woman elevate the head of the bed.

When they finished, I asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Belkin. I’m the senior physician on New Hope.”

“New Hope?”

“It’s the Mars colony ship,” Mohamed interjected. “They’ve brought a lot of medicine and other supplies.” Mohamed looked as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.

A million questions swirled inside my brain, but there was only one that mattered.

“Where’s William! Is he alright?”

“Yes, yes,” Mohamed said. “The boy is fine. He is downstairs and very anxious to see you. He refused to leave the clinic, you know, and slept downstairs for the past two days.”

I took a deep breath as a surge of relief washed over me. “Thank God.”

“Did the messages make it out? The ones we sent?”

“Yes,” Helen said. “Everyone got the messages. And let me tell you, people were pretty riled up. We almost had a full-scale revolution on our hands.”

“That’s enough questions for now,” the doctor said. “There’ll be enough time to talk later. Right now I want to finish checking you out.”

She placed a hand on my forehead and I tried to knock it away, but the IV tube got in my way.

“Take it easy. Don’t make me sedate you,” the doctor said with a disarming smile. “How does your head feel?”

“Like a helojumper landed on it.”

“It should. You had quite a concussion. You’ll probably have a headache for the next few days, but you’ll be as good as new before you know it.”

I suddenly realized that the pain in my side was all but gone. I reached down to feel the stitches, but I only felt smooth skin.

“Oh, I see you noticed that we patched up your side. You ripped those stitches wide open and lost a lot of blood. The good news is that you didn’t have any internal injuries.”

“Where are the stitches?”

“I haven’t stitched anyone together in a long time. I brought some Dermobond from the ship and fused your skin back together.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days,” she said. “I induced a coma so you’d rest. It was the only way to accelerate the healing process.”

Three days. That means the ship will leave in less than a week.

“Well Mr. Atherton, I’m giving you a clean bill of health.” She looked at Mohamed and Helen and said, “Make sure he gets up and starts walking around. The sooner the better.”

“Yes, doctor,” Helen said. “Thank you so much.”

She walked out, but stopped and turned at the door. “I’ll get you something for your headache and let the Captain know you’re awake. He wanted to know the minute you were up.”

Helen came over to the bed. She bent over, kissed me on the forehead, and then pinched my arm.

“Ouch!” I rubbed my arm. “What was that for?”

“That, my dear, was for taking off without letting us know about your plan.” She pinched me again. "And that’s for sending Mohamed and me that dreadful email. You scared us half to death.”

“I’m sorry, really. But I knew you’d try to stop me.”

“You’re damned right!”

That was the first time I had ever heard Helen swear.

“You put William at risk and you almost got yourself killed,” she said.

There was a knock on the open door. I turned and saw a man with a dark, Hispanic complexion standing there. His thick black hair was tinged with silver. Like the doctor, he wore a jump suit, but his was blue with a white stripe down each sleeve.

My heart rate skyrocketed when I saw William standing by his side. He ran over to me, hugged me, and buried his head in my chest, sobbing.