Godspeed

Chapter 7

I traveled from troubled sleep to painless delusion; a state of drugged, suspended animation in which I heard, as plainly as I had heard anything in my life, the voices of friends and family gone before me.

I longed to see their faces, to feel their arms welcoming me — I longed to feel I’d finally found a home.

A voice that was male, dear, and familiar was speaking my name. It sounded frightened, an emotion I had rarely heard expressed by it before.

“Abigail, no.”

I slowly emerged from eerie, enveloping fog. I was drawn toward shimmering light the source of which I could not ascertain, and that seemed, no matter how many steps I took toward it, to exist only and continually just beyond my reach.

I strained to see his face but it was obscured in mist and shadows. Even so, I was entirely certain of the speaker’s identity and questioned why he rejected me. “Father?”

“Not yet.”

“I miss you,” I cried, shivering as though freezing to death where I stood. “I want to go with you.”

“Fight, Abigail. There is too much left for you there. Fight!”

His last word repeated at increasing volume; a command spoken again and again before dissolving into nothing.

It was then I saw, for an instant, the glimpse of a woman so beautiful I thought she must be an angel. The Angel of Death?

She was exquisite, with long curls of flaxen hair and haunted eyes that followed me wherever I went. There was a brilliant flash, and I was rendered completely blind by it. I faltered, stumbling as I faced a reality so much colder than the world I’d just seen, and so much more unkind. Pain returned and in my delirium, confused me with its brutality.

First there were directed, striking blows and then came sharper, knife-like agony.

“Fight!” Another voice demanded; this one reached me in a way the other could not, even though I did not believe I possessed the necessary strength to obey it. “Fight, damn you! Do not give up on me now!”

An odd whine and click momentarily preceded a frightening, unfamiliar sensation that crawled beneath my very skin and penetrated the muscle beneath. Tiny lines, like rivers of prickling spark burned in unison across my chest and met all at once, congealed in a vital, central location.

I jolted as I felt the fist pound against my chest again, and suddenly I realized what I was supposed to do.

I was supposed to breathe.

I desperately gulped in air that felt heavy, much too thick for my lungs. I focused on the rasp of Quinn’s ragged voice as he struggled. I resisted the urge to stop trying and forced another gasp into my unwilling body.

“Yes!” he shouted, his tone rising as I had never heard it before. “Breathe! Breathe, and live!”

As I fought to battle on, another needle pierced my arm. I groaned. A now all-too familiar, indescribable chemical smell assailed me: the same one that had wakened me in Schuyler Algernon’s scarlet room after he’d first brought me in from the rain.

“Open your eyes. Look at me!”

Without thinking, I did as I was told. My heart raced now, pounded and pulsed beyond anything I’d felt before. The waves of heat and pain continued, relentless, and I could only wonder if they would ever cease. I whimpered softly, conflicted. Most of me wanted to fight on to stay near him, but the rest just wanted this madness to finally and mercifully end.