Emerald Buddha

Chapter 15

Alex faded in and out of consciousness. The painkillers pumping through him blunted the worst of the agony from his injuries but left him in a fugue state, a Neverland of blurred images and confused impressions. The air smelled like industrial cleaner, astringent and laced with the peculiar medicinal smell particular to hospitals. Beside him, a monitor beeped with each beat of his heart, and he registered the pressure of a pulse oximeter on his finger as he shifted on the bed.

He cracked an eye open and saw daylight. So he hadn’t been out that long. Assuming it was still the same day. He tried to bring his wrist into focus and then gave up when he realized his watch was missing.

Alex replayed the moments before impact again and again in his imagination, searching the impressions for anything that might hint at who had been driving the car that struck him. But it was no good. All he remembered was a glimpse of a grill, and then the world tilted as he flew through the air, pain overloading his synapses from his ruined legs and the impact of his landing.

He cursed the effects of the drugs, and prayed that he hadn’t sustained any permanent brain injury that was causing the memory glitch. Bones they could always pin together, he knew from friends who’d taken bad hits while on their Harleys, but the old gray matter was an entirely different matter.

The door opened and a nurse entered. At least, Alex thought she was a nurse. For some reason he couldn’t get his eyes to focus. Eye. His left lid seemed to be stuck shut.

The woman spoke to him in broken English, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. The words seemed to distort as she talked, sounding more like a vacuum cleaner’s whine than conversation. Alex groaned and closed his eye again — he’d find out soon enough what she was going on about, if it was important.

When he came to again, he was moving. The harsh white glare of overhead fluorescent lights strobed above him as he was rolled down a hall. He could just make out two orderlies wheeling him along the corridor, a plasma bag connected to the gurney and draining into his arm. Maybe he was going into surgery? The throb from his legs was muted from the morphine, and he hoped that whoever was making the calls wouldn’t amputate them. The thought of being legless sent a spike of fear through him, and he struggled to speak.

“My… legs…”

The effort was wasted, because the gurney’s forward momentum didn’t slow. He tried again, but what emanated from his mouth was a strangled moan in place of words. He decided to save his strength for battles he could win.

Eventually he felt the gurney slow, and then he was moving through a pair of steel doors. The chilled, relatively dry air changed to warm humidity, and he realized he was outside. The mechanism below his body made a series of loud clacks and pops, and then he felt himself lifted. He opened his eye again and saw that he was now in the back of a vehicle — an ambulance. So they weren’t taking him to get his legs cut off. But if not, why was he being put through the trauma of a move?

Before he could muddle through the puzzle, the engine started and one of the orderlies closed the rear doors. Alex tried to move his arms to assess the damage, but all he managed was to flop his right one around like a beached smelt.

The ambulance began moving and he stopped trying. There would be time enough to learn how badly mangled he was. He suspected it wasn’t pretty, but there wasn’t much he could do about it now.

The ride was smooth, for which he was grateful, and he didn’t even notice when he slipped from the present into the narcotic dream state in which he’d spent the last few hours. When he was jarred back to consciousness, he wanted to complain, and then realized that the ambulance had stopped.

The rear doors opened and two men lifted the gurney out. He heard them speaking to each other — but again it sounded odd, distorted. He drifted away as the opiate warmth washed over him, and this time dreamed of being a child, running through a field back home in Texas — he was five or six, he thought, because his family had moved to Ohio when he was seven, and the landscape had changed for the worse. Someone was running ahead of him, and he could make out his father, his gait confident and strong, his bristly hair thick against the vivid blue of the summer sky.

The scene darkened as the sun’s warming rays changed to something more ominous, and then he was in a different place — another hospital room, but this time holding his father’s hand, which was now frail as a bird’s wing, the skin nearly translucent, the tremor in his desperately clutching fingers a byproduct of the poison the doctors had pumped through him in an effort to arrest the malignancies eating him alive. Alex’s gaze roamed down an arm bruised beyond recognition from IV cannulas, shots, and blood draws, and he could almost taste the salty tear that worked its way down his unlined cheek, young and idealistic as his father’s had once been; and then the scene seemed to accelerate away from him, down a long tunnel whose walls were closing in as his speed increased to a dizzy blur.

He came to with a start, pain lancing through his head. For an instant he didn’t understand what had happened, and then he realized that something — no, someone — had slapped him. He forced his eye open and found an Asian man in street clothes glaring down at him. Alex fought to force his reluctant lens into focus and, in spite of the drugs, felt a chill creep up his ruined spine. The man’s eyes were the color of lead, flat and uncaring, and Alex knew in an instant that this was no doctor.

Jiao nodded slowly at the realization he saw in the CIA man’s stare. When he spoke, his accented English was musical with the singsong cadence of his native tongue.

“The pain meds will be out of your system within a few hours, my friend. Then we will have a talk, and you can share with me everything you know about your operation.”

Alex’s eye widened in horror at the words, which his brain had no problem deciphering, and realized with dismay that his ravaged body was now the least of his problems. There was no question about the man’s intent, and Alex offered a prayer to a God he didn’t believe in to spare him the torment that would surely come — before he told the Asian everything, which he knew he would eventually.

In the end, Alex died a hundred times before he finally stopped breathing.