The Blood Talisman (3 page)

They were talking about him. He
attempted to concentrate to try and hear what they were
discussing.

“
Dr. Jackson, your patient
don’t want his heart monitor on.”

“
Katrina, I will take a
look at him and see if it can come off. Don’t take it personally.
This patient is my responsibility. I will see what I can do, ok?”
the doctor comforted her.

“
Yes sir, Dr. Jackson,”
Nurse Katrina said.

Alex heard thundering footsteps
approaching his room and put his hands over his ears. One hand was
more like a cat paw covered in white bandages and gauze.

Someone pulled the curtain of his room
open. It was then Alex realized his hearing was back to
normal.

“
Alex Jacobs, I’m Dr.
Jackson and I’ve been looking after you since you got flown back
here to the States.”

The short and skinny man with glasses
offered his hand for Alex to grasp.

Alex stared at the hand with short
fingers. It didn’t look like a hand that had done much manual labor
in life, nor had it ever gone without some sort of manicure. Alex
switched his eyes up to Dr. Jackson’s face. He didn’t seem to have
slept in a week and his beard was starting to become unmanageable.
His hands obviously didn’t match his face.

“
You took quite the beating
from a wild animal out there in Afghanistan, and I know you
probably don’t remember much from being in a coma for the past few
days, but we have therapy options here for you to think about.
Therapy should help you to regain your memory.”

“
I don’t need help, Doc,
‘cause I remember everything that happened to me.”

Dr. Jackson seemed worried about the
sudden revelation of the return of his memory. He sneered at Alex
almost as if to say, “You know nothing of your
condition.”

“
Well, let me listen to
your heart and we’ll go from there.”

Dr. Jackson leaned over with his
stethoscope in his ears. He placed the dial lightly onto Alex’s
chest. Alex gasped briefly from the coldness of it. He noticed that
Dr. Jackson’s smell matched his looks. Sleep wasn’t the only thing
that he had been deprived of: showers too. There was silence in the
room as Dr. Jackson took a deep breath with a puzzled expression on
his face.

“
Katrina, the heart monitor
can definitely come off but I want to schedule a time for Mr.
Jacobs to meet with the resident psychiatrist to help him regain
his thought processes and memory.”

“
I told you, I remember
everything and I want to go home to my wife.”

“
Mr. Jacobs, I think that
the military is going to want you to stay so that they can monitor
your condition.” Dr. Jackson turned to sit on Alex’s hospital bed
and looked up at Nurse Katrina. “Can you give us a moment,
Katrina?”

“
Uh-huh,” Nurse Katrina
mumbled as she left the room, humming some unknown tune. She pulled
the curtain to Jake’s room closed behind her.

Dr. Jackson put his short, manicured
hand on Alex’s leg. “Mr. Jacobs, your employers want to keep you
here because if you remember what you say you remember, then I
think you know why they want you to stay.”

“
What, because I got bit by
a werewolf out in the desert and they’re scared I might turn into
the thing that bit me?”

“
You really do remember,
don’t you?”

“
I remember every detail,
but I feel fine. It’s been days since this happened and nothing has
changed yet.”

“
I’m merely following
orders, Mr. Jacobs. Don’t make this difficult on me or yourself. If
you try to leave, we’ll have to restrain you and that’s not
something I like to do to people… in your condition.”

Alex rolled his eyes and thought about
how he was going to get out of this one. Dr. Jackson patted him on
the leg and withdrew his hand.

“
Mr. Jacobs, your best
option is to see the therapist and try to regain your memory. Do
you catch what I’m saying to you?”

He wondered if the manicured doctor
was trying to hint that seeing the therapist was a good way for him
to escape or was it just a ploy to get him to stay.

“
If I see the therapist,
will I get to see my wife?”

“
Visits with your wife will
come with time. We can’t rush this thing until we know that you are
one hundred percent okay. The army will want to know if you are
confused by what you have experienced. In other words, you
shouldn’t know what happened to you and our psychiatrist will help
you to remember that.”

“
Okay, whatever gets me to
my wife fastest. Schedule whatever you need that gets me back to
her, okay?”

Dr. Jackson nodded his head in
agreement and walked casually out of the room.

Alex laid his head back against his
pillow and closed his eyes. He thought about Dr. Jackson’s
suggestion to stay and to comply, but he didn’t feel like obeying.
Alex had always been an obedient rule follower but that seemed to
have changed. He began to devise a plan to get out of the
hospital.

He was also aware of a change in his
body since his injury, but he couldn’t pinpoint what or why. He
moved his legs off of the side of the bed and sat straight up for
the first time in what Dr. Jackson referred to as days. He was
barefooted and only had green hospital scrub pants on. He touched
the cold cemented hospital floor with his bare feet. He looked over
to search for any type of shoe, but found none. He really hated to
be barefoot.

His legs felt like jelly but he
managed to stand on them. He took one step at a time. He felt the
blood pumping violently through his veins like a well-oiled
machine.

It was quiet outside at the nurses’
station. He couldn’t hear voices, only fingers tapping on a
keyboard. Dr. Jackson and the nurses must have moved on to the
other rooms. He peeked round his curtain. The nurse at the station
had her back to him. There was a soldier struggling to walk down
the hall but no one else was to be seen.

He noticed daylight coming from a room
up the hall. The door was open and he could see in. There appeared
to be vending machines inside. He kept focusing as his vision
blinked in and out. He rubbed his eyes and continued to focus
harder. He could see two people in the room watching TV and eating.
He peered harder to see the window. The light flooding in through
it was almost unbearable. His view was interrupted by the barely
walking soldier, who was now returning to what must be his hospital
room. He could hear the soldier’s heartbeat. It was thumping
rapidly, as if he were doing manual labor. The blood in the
struggling soldier’s veins pulsed in time with every beat of his
heart.

Alex felt the anger well up inside
him: anger at what had happened to him because he was confused by
it. Anger at what might be in store for him and anger at little
things. He was even angry at the very blood pumping loudly from the
hobbling soldier. He was just plain angry.

Alex’s senses felt so out of order. He
walked back over to his hospital bed and sat down on it, puzzled
and upset. He missed Amalia so much and he would to do anything to
get out of the hospital.

The phone at the nurses’ station rang.
He listened to hear if the nurse would say the name of the
hospital.

“
Fourth-floor nurses’
station,” the nurse answered as Alex rolled his eyes and
sighed.

Suddenly his eyes turned to the little
gray phone in his room. Maybe he could call Amalia and tell her to
come to him. He walked over and picked up the phone.

‘
To dial the nurses’
station, simply pick the phone up,’ a sticker below the phone
handle instructed. There were no numbers and there was no rotary.
It was simply a base, a cord, and a handle. He immediately felt
like a prisoner at the hospital, unable to communicate with the
outside world. He picked up the phone and waited patiently for the
nurse to answer.

“
Fourth-floor nurses’
station,” the nurse said.

“
What hospital is this?”
Alex whispered into the phone.

“
Sir, this is Blearney
General Hospital.”

“
In what state?”

“
Duh, this is Texas, sir.
Any other strange questions you wanna ask?” the nurse
responded.

Alex hung the phone up immediately. He
realized he was only a couple of states away from Amalia. He
wouldn’t have cared if he’d been in Washington State: he was going
to get to Amalia, no matter what it took.

He was annoyed by the station nurse’s
sarcasm and started to feel hungry. But this was not like any other
hunger he had ever experienced before. It was almost debilitating
and the flashes of the dreams he’d had earlier were beginning to
invade his mind again and he grabbed his head in pain. The walls of
the small hospital room were starting to close in on him and the
window down the hall called to him. The window’s call echoed in his
mind, like a taunting child. Everything else became
insignificant.

His mind shifted onto a single track:
Amalia.

He felt his heart begin to beat faster
and faster. He needed to get the rush of anger and rage out of
himself. He had to do something, and quickly. He didn’t like the
feeling of being trapped like a caged animal, and his head was
beginning to ache unbearably. He thought about the window. It was a
chance of freedom. Only walls and a few unimportant people stood in
his way.

He walked to the entrance to his
cubicle, and stared out into the hallway towards the window in the
vending machine room, the curtain shielding only half of his
body.

Suddenly everything became clearer and
more in focus. He began to realize that, ultimately, he was in
control of his body. He would choose when to leave this prison, not
those defenseless drones. He could sense every living soul in the
hospital. He could hear them breathe. He could hear every gnat
flapping its wings and smell every scent, however weak. He took one
step but it felt like fifty and he was immediately at the window in
the vending machine room. He crashed through it and jumped down
what seemed to be only a few steps, but in fact he had actually
been up a few stories.

The hospital sounds were leaving him
slowly. They faded into the distance. The last sound he heard was
Dr. Jackson yelling at a nurse to sound the alarm for an escapee.
Then everything fell to the silence of a dry Texas
night.

Alex kept running until he was in the
woods behind the hospital. He could still hear the alarms, but
could no longer see anyone as he had run four miles away from the
building in only minutes. It felt like a dream, and he thought that
it had to be. How else would he have gotten where he was in such a
short time span?

The momentary confusion and wonderment
was quickly erased by the pain in his head, and the hunger within.
He had to have food but he had no money, didn’t know where exactly
he was, and didn’t know what was happening to him. He needed Amalia
because she could help him cope and make everything okay. He had to
find a way to get to her, and he wasn’t going to let anything or
anyone stop him.

He started to track through the woods
in Blearney. It was dark and quiet. The dirt and fallen leaves
crackled beneath his feet as he trampled through the dark trees.
Jake looked up at the crescent moon and wondered if Amalia was
looking at it too. He felt really weak and unable to exert much
energy after his escape, and his stomach rumbled with
hunger.

It began to rain light raindrops. The
dirt beneath his feet quickly turned to mud and coated his green
scrub pants. The cool Texas rain was refreshing in contrast with
the warm night. He looked up towards the sky, closed his eyes, and
let the rain hit his face. The tiny drops streamed the sweat and
dust slowly off of his face. He needed to find a phone and call
Amalia, but for this moment he enjoyed the feeling of being back in
the States and away from the danger and the heat that the desert
had tortured him with for months. He took in the elements of nature
around him, and he let it surround him with comfort. He could see
and hear everything more clearly as his mind was emptied of worry
and grief. Anger still loomed within him, but for now he could
contain it.

He heard a phone ringing in the
distance and pricked up his ears to listen more closely. The
ringing stopped and someone answered. Alex began to race towards
what he thought might be a cell phone and people. He stepped in mud
puddles and pushed past trees and through shrubs to get to her, his
Amalia.

He reached a gas station with
fluorescent lights. The brightness hurt his eyes. He squinted and
everything came back into focus. There was a pay phone to the side
of the gas station, but he had no money. Then he saw a girl dressed
in black standing outside the gas station talking on her cell
phone.

Alex’s focus took a side track when
his stomach started to growl with hunger again. It was worse than
hunger: it felt like poison coursing through his veins. He bent
over in pain and looked back up at the girl on her phone. He could
hear her heart beating as she laughed, and he saw the veins in her
body, and the blood that pumped to her heart. Everything slowed
again, as it had done at the hospital, and he forced himself to
concentrate harder to try and overcome the agony of
hunger.