Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) (3 page)

3

I’M NOT GENERALLY given to panic when I wake up in a strange room.  When you move as often as I have, strange rooms are par for the course.  I’m lying on my back, slightly on my right hip.  The surface is soft, smooth under my fingers.  No linens.  I try to lift my head and a shock of pain races across my forehead and down behind my eyes.  Instead, I turn it to the left and shift so that I’m absolutely flat.

This room is so impossibly strange—not a bedroom, very impersonal—that a little sizzle of fear races up my spine.  It’s quiet, with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows to my left, and another just like it immediately ahead of me. It’s a greenish hue, the glass, letting light in but obscuring whatever lies beyond.  There are shadows moving on the other side that might be people passing by.

Shadow Man.

I really, really have to stop thinking that word,
shadow
.  It makes panic drop in my stomach like a swallowed ice cube.  My throat feels thick like it actually happened, like a ball of ice too big for it grudgingly slid down my wind pipe and thudded to a stop in my belly.  I ease back onto my right side.  Swinging into a sitting position does nothing for my head, which feels like it might crumble to dust like some ancient ruins. When I risk a glance down at myself, the room spins.  I’m wearing something that looks suspiciously like a hospital gown.

Sitting, I’m facing another wall. It’s all glass, too.  It is all the same. There’s not a sliver of plaster or drywall, just glass, uninterrupted.  I don’t see any sort of metal framing, no separation into panels. Just a rectangular box of green-tinted glass, like a bug in a terrarium.  Except I can’t see out.  There’s nothing in this box but me and the platform I’m sitting on.

My eyes make another, slower, circuit of the room in case I’ve missed something.  There doesn’t seem to be a door.  Hysteria bubbles up as I watch the shadows pass, wondering if they would hear me if I called out to them.  I feel trapped.  It is suddenly too hot in here.  Breathable air is scarce.

Wildly, I remember a game my parents once played at an American Legion party when I was little, maybe seven or eight.  It was late at night. Everyone thought all of us kids were asleep.  The game was just questions, no right or wrong answers, like: You’re in a fully enclosed room with four walls, ceiling, and floor but no windows or doors.  There is no way out.  You can’t climb over, dig under or go around anything to get out of the room.  What do you do?

I popped up from the makeshift bed I’d made out of my parents’ coats across a few chairs, saying I’d build something and climb out, only to be reminded that it wasn’t possible.  I said I’d make a hole in the floor and go under, again forgetting the rules.  My mother tried to redirect the conversation, and when that didn’t work, she told me to go back to sleep, but one of the group called out that all kids had to learn about death sometime.  My father yelled.   I was too young for that, he complained.  I began crying.

“The room is worse!”  I wailed, too young to understand the symbolism.  “I’d rather be dead!”

I feel that way again. Trapped. The worst feeling.  That’s when Shadow Man invades my thoughts again.  I try to tell myself that being in the room is good, because if he isn’t already in here, he can’t get in.  He can’t finish whatever it was he wanted to start when he lunged at me.  But I wonder if he’s out there, if he is one of the shadows passing on the other side of the glass.

Pieces of memory string themselves together.  Running away from Jake Armadice, only to find myself running toward Shadow Man. Shadow Man calling out to me, lunging. And then nothing.  No. Wait. I remember the roar of an engine.  I remember bright light.  I remember pain. And
then
nothing.

I glance down at myself again, and I go dizzy like before.  A hospital?

I barely finish the thought before the glass—I don’t know how to describe what it does, but it just sort of
rearranges
itself until there’s suddenly an opening where none existed before. I’m too relieved at the prospect of escape from this previously inescapable room to properly question the physics at play.

A man I don’t recognize steps inside.  The first thing I notice about him are his eyes—green, vibrant, like someone subtly photoshopped them.  Not enough to make them appear ridiculously fake, but enough for me to wonder if they’re contacts.  More intriguing than the color is how gentle they appear, those eyes.  I literally feel some of my tension ebbing like a wave.

I wonder where the panic has gone.  By all rights, I should still be on the verge of hyperventilating.  Strange glass room, strange man. Shadow Man yelling at me just before everything turned to nothing.  I reach for it, the panic. I poke where it had been, squatting in my stomach and at the back of my throat.  It was just there a minute ago.

His eyes are concerned, not dangerous. He is worried about me. Worried and curious. He steps further into the room, but he’s careful, too. Wary.  As if I might strike out at him like a snake.

“I’m Strega,” he offers.  “Bocek.”  He waits. “Do you know who you are?”

There is no time to wonder what kind of name it is, what kind of question.  My eyes never leave his, but I sense movement. Someone else enters.

Him.

The panic is back as if it never left. I scramble backward across the platform, searching for another exit I might have missed.  I nearly fall.

He freezes mid-stride.  Short side. Dark hair.  Dark clothes. Bizarre arm tattoo. Definitely him.

Strega exchanges a look with him.

“Do you remember me?” Shadow Man asks.

Nobody moves for a long, loaded minute.  Two pairs of eyes are on me, neither so much as blinking.  The only sound in the room is my own breath, which comes in quick pants.  They seem afraid of my fear.  That makes three of us.

“Where—what is this place?” I ask, my voice rasping like it hasn’t been used in a week.

“Holding,” Strega provides, pulling something from his pocket. A room with no doors, no windows. Or, all windows, if I could see through the glass.

Jail?

I focus more intently on the object he’s holding.  It looks like a pipe.  For drugs.  All those parties come rushing back, the ones I left quickly.

Beep.

This is new.  Even in my limited experience, crack pipes don’t beep. This one beeps like a digital thermometer.  Strega steps toward me with it.

“What? No!”  On my feet behind the platform now, I aim for the opening. Shadow Man eases into the space between me and it.  Foiled, I edge backward and to the side, intending to duck back behind the platform, putting some space between us.  I misjudge the distance and bump it with my hip.

I’m off balance.  Shadow Man uses the opening to grab me with his right hand. I swing at him with my own right, but he captures my fist easily.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, his brow furrowing.  I don’t believe him.

His tattoo is more bizarre up close, like looking at a circuit board…all intricate lines and odd little circles.  Instead of being drawn in black or even in gold like most of the circuit boards I’ve seen, it is a reflective silver, like a mirror.

“Do you know who you are?” Strega repeats.

What a crazy question. “Yes,” I answer. Of course I do.  But I’m not about to tell him. Not with Shadow Man stalking me and this Strega person wanting to shove a beeping crack pipe in my mouth.

“I’m Ritter,” Shadow Man offers, picking up on my reluctance to share. “Ritter Boone.”

I try to decide whether Ritter Boone sounds like the name of a serial killer.

Strega comes toward me again.  I try to tug my arms free, but Ritter holds fast.

“He just wants a breath sample.”  Ritter’s puzzlement makes me stop struggling.

What?

And then it dawns on me.

“I’m not drunk!”  I cry, again thinking,
Jail
.

Strega shoots Ritter an unmistakably perplexed look.  Ritter, still holding me, leans away, whispering something to him. 

Eyebrows lifting, Strega shakes his head.  “No, no, of course you aren’t.”  Gesturing to the pipe, he adds, “This is a BAU, a portable breath analyzing unit. You just breathe into it, and it’ll tell me whether you’re well enough to be released.”

“Released?”  My throat tightens.  “What’s going on?  Where’s Rae?  And what about my parents?”  When neither of them speaks, I continue, my voice rising.  “Is this a police station? Am I in trouble?  I’ve never—” I stop myself from telling them I’ve never been arrested before, that I am a good girl.  But good girls don’t lie to their parents that they’re going over to a friend’s house to study for finals and instead go to parties with college guys and drink beer.  The fact that I only had a Coke doesn’t matter. I’ve had beers before.  I’ve even tried marijuana. Once.  It made me a paranoid nutcase. That was the end of my experimentation.

Ritter loosens his grip.

“You think this is a police station?”

Strega looks from me to Ritter and back again.

“No,” Ritter’s face changes. His voice becomes very soothing, if not tinged with amusement.  “This is —this is a hospital.  Strega is a c—” he searches for words, his mouth working.  “He’s a doctor!”

Another loaded look passes between them, and Strega nods.  “Yes, a doctor,” he agrees, raising the pipe again.  “And if you could just blow into this, I can be certain you’re all right.”

Ritter nods encouragingly as I warily take the pipe. 

“Just put your lips around the indent and blow gently.”

I barely do before Strega takes it back and points it at the glass wall in front of me.  The pipe emits another beep and the glass lights up like a computer screen, full of numbers and symbols that mean nothing to me.

Strega, however, seems pleased.  “Well,” he says, turning to me with a smile more unsettling than his eyes, “that’s great.  Everything is resolving nicely.”

Resolving?  Pain throbs in my left temple as I wonder what breathing into the pipe could possibly have told him about me or my being fit for…anything.

“Ok, Ritter,” he says, “I’ll get her cleared. You can wait outside.”

The throbbing in my temple grows worse the longer I stand there, wondering where I am, what’s happening, and why the two of them seem to be communicating in code. All those looks and this odd room that doesn’t have anything a normal hospital room should…no IV poles, no outlets, no irritating, noisy machinery.

Strega’s back is turned.  He’s still studying the image projecting from the end of the pipe. Some sort of state-of-the-art teaching hospital, maybe?  But it doesn’t explain the opening in the glass, the way it just sort of peeled away like the Red Sea parting for Moses.

I rub my temple with the vague notion that it might help the clarity of my thinking.  Maybe if I massage just right something will click and this place will make sense.  I wonder if the pain is from some sort of head injury.  If so, maybe all of this is just some head-trauma induced, Wizard of Oz level shit brought on by—

By the car.

Roaring engine. Bright lights. Ritter rushing at me.  Someone calling out, “Hey!”  Or did the “Hey!” come first, and then the lights?  I try and try, but I can’t remember.

Either way, that must be it. The car with the roaring engine must have hit me.  I must still be out of it. Dreaming. Delirious. I’m not sure how I came up with Strega, Ritter, and this weird glass room, but—

Oh, god.  Rae. She must be out of her mind! I picture her climbing down from Random Guy’s lap to look for me. I picture her wandering the house and the yards, front and back, and then finding me sprawled on the pavement, probably bleeding.  Definitely unconscious.

Oh, no.  My parents!

Something pulls me out of my own head.  Strega.  He’s facing me again, staring.  More concern.

“Easy, there,” he soothes, edging toward me like one would approach a wounded animal.  “Don’t upset yourself.  Everything will be okay.”

He reaches out and places his fingers against my temples.  There’s a little flash of pain in the left one when he does that, but it fades quickly.  I don’t bother to duck away.  Even if I want to be afraid, I can’t.  Something about him is so utterly comforting that I think I could be on fire and feel nothing as long as he was this close to me.

Wait…was I talking out loud? Just now, when I was thinking about Rae and my parents. Was I talking?  I try to remember whether my ears heard the sound of my voice, whether my throat shoved them out.  My brains must really be scrambled if I have to wonder if I’m speaking or merely thinking.  But if I was thinking and not speaking, then—

Strega draws his hands back quickly.  I catch a glimpse of something silver at his fingertips before he dips both hands into his pockets.  I’ve never seen scrubs like his before.  They look more like some kind of sportswear, slate grey and almost but not quite shiny, with those little vent holes like sports jerseys have.

“Are my parents out there somewhere?” I ask. My mind can’t hold a thought. Random things bounce and tumble. It’s troubling.

This time, Strega’s eyes avoid mine.  His voice holds a cautious note.  “I’m certain they must be,” he replies noncommittally.