Читать книгу The Human Bullet - Joaquin De Torres - Страница 7

Kaiser Permanente Medical Center

Extreme Care Ward

Walnut Creek, CA.

Fluid mechanics. . .dynamic combustion compression. . .aero elasticity. . .

The words came in waves, muddling sounds in the dark.

. . .bi-elliptic transfer is an orbital maneuver. . .

The words, then the sentences, or fragments of sentences came in and out of his existence, weak at first, then a little stronger as time went by.

Let us begin. . .sectorial velocity is the rate at which area is swept out by a particle as it. . .

He wasn’t dead, that much Crush knew because he was actually hearing words, whole readings and questions. Questions? Who was asking him questions?!

Let us begin, remember when we talked about Kepler’s second law? Do you remember? That areal velocity. . .

Yet, despite not knowing what was going on, what any of these words and sentences meant, where he was, or who was speaking, he could hear a voice. Just one voice.

. . .this requires that the sum of kinetic energy, potential energy and internal energy remains constant. . .

A female voice. And that voice always started speaking with -

Let us begin. . .

The subjects seemed random and never-ending.

. . .within a fluid flowing horizontally. . .

He was unable to find any connection between the subjects or any reason why he was hearing them.

. . . Angular momentum is subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, meaning only one component can be measured. . .

There were times when the voice was as far away as the horizon, and times when it seemed right next to his ear. He didn’t know how long this was going on, how long he was hearing the voice. There was no sense of time, just darkness and the voice.

Let us begin. . .

He couldn’t feel his body, couldn’t make himself move. He couldn’t reason or formulate a single substantive thought about his condition. He couldn’t remember a thing and couldn’t imagine the future. He couldn’t even concentrate on other strange voices that occasionally made it into his consciousness.

Then one day, it all came together.

* * * * *

“Good morning, Chris. Today’s lesson is Hypersonic travel. Let us begin. . .”

Chris Cordell’s eyes suddenly flew open, startling the person who was standing over him.

“Well, hello! Good morning, Chris! Great to see you awake this morning.” Crush blinked several times before he was able to focus on a face that he realized he had seen before.

“Do you remember me, Chris? I’m Dr. Cesar Serrano. We’ve talked to each other for the last three days. Do you remember me now?” Crush’s face softened and he blinked slowly to acknowledge the question. “Very good.”

Serrano brought up a plastic water bottle with a long flexible straw and brought it up to Crush’s lips. Crush sucked from the straw somewhat painfully, but was able to clear his throat after a few long swallows. Serrano put down the bottle. The gentle Filipino doctor in his mid-50s, smiled down at him.

“Chris, I’m going to just check a few things out as I’ve done the last few times I visited you. Okay?”

“Okay, doctor,” he answered in a low whisper. Serrano went through his routine with quiet efficiency. He studied Cordell’s eyes with a tiny flashlight, pressed his fingers along his chin, jaw and cheekbones.

He opened his mouth and shown the light down his throat as well as into both ears. He annotated notes on his clipboard and compared his results with the blood pressure and EKG readings on the life-support machine connected to Cordell by several tubes and electrical wires. Serrano smiled respectfully.

“Your blood pressure, breathing and heart rate are stable, Chris. Very good signs.” Another sign that came to Crush was the fact that he was beginning to recall what had transpired the past three days. It was hazy, but he could remember some of it. Then the mysterious woman’s voice entered his mind.

Let us begin. . .

“How do you feel, Chris?” asked Serrano, snapping him out of his momentary drift. He gave Crush the water bottle again and he sipped it deeply.

“I feel. . .broken,” he answered with effort. Serrano nodded in understanding.

“Have the nurses been talking with you? It’s important to exercise your larynx and vocal muscles.” Crush remembered this, too.

“Yes, Doctor. They’ve talked to me during their rounds.” His throat was sore but he was determined to communicate no matter how painful. Serrano let him drink again. “But they won’t answer my questions.” Crush’s mental state seemed to regain clarity, and his memory was also strengthening to the point where he could remember asking the nurses specific questions, albeit they went unanswered. Serrano pulled up a stool and put down his clipboard.

“What questions do you have? I’ll do my best to answer them.”

“What happened to me?” Serrano didn’t expect the directness of the question and his smile dropped a few centimeters.

“Chris, you were in a horrible accident at your last race at the Sepang track in Malaysia. Do you remember that place?”

“No.”

“You crashed into the bike of your friend Jason Pines.”

“JACE!” Crush barked bringing instant pain to his throat. “What happened to him?” Serrano raised his palms up in reassurance.

“Don’t worry, Chris. Mr. Pines is fine. He’s going through physical therapy in his home state of Oregon.” Crush’s eyes reflected relief.

“Doctor, I can’t feel my body. I can’t move anything, my fingertips, toes, nothing.” Serrano again nodded. It was going to pain him to explain.

“Your paralysis is the result of the damage to over 82 percent of your spinal column. You’ve been in a coma all this time. It is a miracle that you are alive at all.”

“How long have I been out?” Serrano hesitated, his smile completely gone now. “Please, Doctor. How long?”

“As of four days ago, 23 months, 17 days.”

“What?!”

“Son, you’ve been in a coma for almost two years.”

The room suddenly plunged into utter silence. The shock of the statement slammed into him like a massive wave on a rocky cliff. His eyes pulled away from Serrano and fixed themselves on the ceiling.

The enormity of this reality was too much for him to handle and he felt himself crying. Fresh naked tears poured out from the young man who ignored the pain in his throat to wail loudly at his fate. If Crush had opened his eyes, he would have seen that Dr. Serrano, one of Kaiser’s most experienced paralysis doctors and a veteran of hundreds of spinal surgeries, was also crying.