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"How is he?"
The doctor nodded and stifled a mighty yawn without bothering to turn and see who spoke.
His skin started to crawl and he turned slowly, almost fearfully.
Three pair of eyes stared at him and all desire for sleep was scorched from his mind. He suppressed a shudder. A man who had slept in mud, fought clouds of mosquitoes, been shot at more times than anyone could count, shouldn't be afraid of anything by now. Hell, he spent months on what they laughingly referred to as enemy lines and he went to bed every night with bullets ripping holes in his mosquito netting . . . .
God, they looked like mother wolves.
"He's fine, ladies. No harm done a-tall. Whatever that weirdo had in mind, Nurse Bell put a stop to it with her weapon of choice." He grinned at the dented bedpan and said, "He is. Really." The women offered him faint smiles. They made it clear that if the kid wasn't, they would come looking for him.
Head Nurse Myers reached up behind her back and adjusted an industrial strength girdle around her tall, pudgy frame. She belched loudly and ignored the glare of both Nurse Bell and the big galloot, the kid's guardian angel. She sniffed once, just to show her ire and took a sip. Her whistle wet, she tried it out, making a shrill, annoying monotone that set Two Sword's teeth on edge.
Die, Benny. So many deaths, all your fault. You father. Carl. Sue. Die before you cause another innocent death.
The voice was drowning him, smothering his will to live. The monitors buzzed and the nurses screamed for a doctor. He couldn't fight any longer.
Two Swords bellowed in outrage and cast himself at the Owl. He accidentally, more or less, bumped the glaring head nurse Myers and cold coffee spewed over Benny.
"Huh," Myers said, watching the monitors stabilize. "Fool kid, just funnin us, weren't you?" She gulped more of her coffee and Two Swords glowered at her. His finger slipped up, under the bottom of the cup and held it there.
Myers choked and sputtered, hanging onto his arm. Ice coffee chilled her withered breasts and ran down onto the girdle. He let the cup go and Myers found herself dangling a foot off the floor. Two Swords lowered her and smiled. She sneezed coffee from her nose and shook a fist, her Maine accent biting and harsh.
"Myers, what the dammed hell you think you doing in here?" Boyde rapped out. She squeezed her bulk through the door and glared at her superior.
Myers opened her mouth to give Boyde the blistering she deserved. Benny groaned faintly and tried to open his eyes. She spun and whooped a laugh.
He felt something cold and wet on his face. A graveled voice muttered soothing words to his ears. It was all, like just too familiar. Dreams . . . so many deaths behind him. Why should he live, and not Carl and Sue?
A mangled body. His own, but still and unmoving. Where was Mom? No, better she never came down. Cindy would snatch Mom, make her go to the Manse and be a whore, just like she made him. But Cindy had tried that once. Mom got free. God took her away from there, over the walls, away from the guards and the electronic training collars and the friggin microchips in her brain and all of it. He started to weep and wondered that he only felt the wetness flowing down the left side of his face.
The pain . . . flowed over him . . . felt so good. It took his mind off of the past and onto the present.
Why couldn't he see? He tried to move his arm and found it too heavy. It was incased in cold stone, as was the lower half of his body. What was wrong? He should o' died, that's what was wrong.
Benny heard a familiar growl near his left ear. His body jerked and he groaned again.
"You freekin chill, Grey-Wolf, or I'll chill you with the flat of my sword, got it?"
"Thirsty."
A straw was gently pushed between raw lips. Benny managed to sip a little. The nasal voice muttered something at him. No, not him, somebody called Two Swords.
Myers turned her head and spat a stream of tobacco juice at the cup on the floor. Most of it went in.
The straw dropped away from the mouth and Benny whispered a thank you, to whoever had done it.
"Yep, s' OK, kid. You just rest a little now."
Myers offered Boyde her broadest grin. She almost patted Benny on the cheek and instead turned and adjusted the flow of painkillers dripping down one of the tubes that ran into his arms.
Boyde wedged herself into a chair. She sighed and wiggled a little. "Man, but I got to lose some weight. Know what I mean?"
She eyed Myers.
Myers joined her. Crossing her legs, she dragged her skirt up and scratched through the week old stubble there. Benny's head came up and he shuddered at the varicose veins.
He quickly turned, and made a face at the big ugly guy, his eyes narrow and crossed, his tongue hanging out while he pretended to gag.
Hiding a smile, Two Swords gave his charge a stern look and covered a laugh with a small, explosive cough. In the next room the covers blew off the bed. A large flock of birds near the hospital shrieked in terror and fled.
Two Swords shook his head and shrugged in weary patients.
"You really love that little jerk, doncha," the old woman asked softly. He smiled and nodded. Myers adjusted her triple D cup bra with the added wire netting and shoulder cushions.
"Say now, you think I ought o' get me a new bikini?
Benny gagged and looked at the near-corpse that was his body.
"Good thing I-it-can't hear this, or I-it would get sick. Can you imagine her coming to the Manse?" Benny could and shuddered.
With a dainty snort Myers pulled the stained hem of her skirt over her blue veined legs.
"Huh."
Her eyes brightened, the sagging left one looked almost normal. "Say, this reminds me of a story. Lemme see . . ." She closed one eye in thought. "Was it in aught-six? No, maybe '96. yeah. I was just a tiny thing way back then, and . . . Hey? Where you going?" she yelled.
Benny yelped and was trampled underfoot by a horde of fleeing imps, Guardians, and a minor dark-sun to two.
Glaring after them, she spat into the malodorous cup on the floor. Most of it went in.
"Angels, huh." She grunted with contempt. "Who need 'em?" Reaching under the square neck of the blousa, she adjusted a strap on her bra and leaned over Benny's still form.
"You know, kid, my Pap, he use to say only babes and crazies can see 'em. Angels, I mean. But I see 'em just fine." She nodded as if to make an affirmative. "Ayep! Ever since I got conked on the head by that piece of shrapnel when the NK came just a pouring down over the DMZ into South Korea back in . . . Lemme see, was it aught-two or twenty and two?"
The blood-shot eyes lit up. "Lordy, but the stories I could tell you about Korea. And Rio, ho-ho," she chortled. "You'd like them, you being related to that big polock, Ivanovitch, as it were."
Her eyes sagged and filled with moisture.
They slowly brightened. She scowled. "Nah, that 'un would be too shocking for a young kid like you, but was that polock ever wild. Took three girls all at one time and they couldn't move the next morning. None o' them."
The door glided open and Myers scowled at a rotund woman.
"What, Boyde?"
"Just want to check on our patient, Myers." She bustled in. "Lord, but my feet are killing me tonight." She aimed her widest end at a chair and ignored its pitiful groan. "I have got to lose some weight."
Sucking in her teeth before they landed in her lap, Myers asked under her breath, "How many times have I heard that un?"
Busying herself with the lines and tubes that thrust from various unmentionable part of her patient, Boyde leaned over Benny, whispering, "If she bothers you, just holler." Her eyes misted and she patted his hand. "Please, come back to us."
Benny had every desire to do just that, but at the moment even breathing, let alone shouting, seemed to be beyond him. How the heck was he supposed to get back in his body with all that crap wheezing and whining around him? He glared up through the Waters of Life at the big jerk of a Guardian for abandoning him to Myers and her eternal stories. What was he, a captive audience? Geezis.
One of the machines whined, a shrill noise in the dim quiet of the room. Boyde uttered a small cry of horror and leaped to it one hell of a lot faster than Benny thought she could move. She adjusted it. It spat a crackle of fire at her. Hissing curses under her breath, Myers leaned over Benny and thumped her fist down on it a few times. It gave a meek bleep and settled back to monitoring something beyond his ken.
The imp behind it snarled and reached in to play with the wires again. From the shadows a
tsi:ge:O smiled. For such a pretty elf, she looked wolfish, all her teeth showing in a leer. She touched the ball of her finger to the point on a shard of flint. Moving from shadow to shadow, the tsi:ge:O
crept near. The imp paused, studying the delicate wires. Shrilling her death song, the tiny woman leaped on the unclean spirit, driving it screaming and howling under the bed and out the door.
Casual as ever, Two Swords kicked. The imp smashed into the ceiling, came on a hard rebound off the floor, down the hall and into an elevator shaft, falling a long, long scream down.
Benny crowed a laugh. "Yo, seven points. Glad you're on my team in the final quarter, bro."
With a broad leer, Two Swords asked, "What? No two points for the basket, too?"
In a desperate attempt to change the subject of diets that never worked, Myers raised the frayed hem of her skirt and slapped at the black and gray stubble.
"A-yep! Just as slender as when I was a gel of sixteen," she crowed at the sweating nurse.
An imp spat a glob of phlegm at the machinery. Two Swords slowed it, touched a drop of fire to it from 'Heart. It exploded in a burst of flame, leaving a dank stench in the room. Then he used the sword on the imp.
Sniffing delicately, Boyde glanced at Myers.
"Here now." Myers stiffed with affronted dignity. "It wasn't me." she glared at a disbelieving Boyde. "'Twas the li'l fellah." Myers pointed under the bed to where the whimpering imp huddled.
"Uh huh."
Boyde wiggled her frame out of the chair. She ignored its sigh of relief and opened the door, waving it back and forth until her nose stopped watering.
"Say, Myers," Boyde said, her eyes full of concern, "you aren't nipping on that slop the boys in Morgue cook off, are you? You know they don't wash out the formaldehyde first,"
Eyes filled with wisdom, Myers shook her head. "That's what gives it pep, Boyde."
"Uh huh."
"You evah been to Maine?" Myers addressed this to the spirit standing on the far side of the bed. "I was birthed up on Penobscot Bay."
Boyde's eyes narrowed on the blank wall. The lighting in here was dim, but not that dim. Under her breath she said, "More like Bat Bay, you asked me." Myers rambled on.
Myers head tipped back against the cold blocks. "''Twas in . . . Lemme see . . . '80? No, maybe eighty and eight. I was just a little thing, y' see. And pert?" Myers chuckled and took a deep breath.
Snatching out his fiery 'Heart, Two Swords fled, trampling fleeing imps and kicking them through the walls in an attempt to escape.
Boyde was careful not to let the door thump shut as she hastened from the room. Benny moaned and struggled to follow, but his body didn't seem to be there anymore.
©2003 StoriesByEmail.com
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