She Wore Mourning by P.D. Workman (best desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Zachary? Are you okay?” A woman’s voice. Not Bridget’s. He couldn’t figure out whose voice it was.

“What happened?” he asked. But the words didn’t come out properly, and all he could hear was moaning.

He drifted in and out, sometimes trying to pinpoint the source of his pain and sometimes trying to turn the world back the right way around again. People kept fading in and out, telling him not to worry. Telling him everything was going to be okay.

Lights strobed in his eyes, so bright he had to screw his eyes shut to avoid their assault. He wanted to put his hand over his eyes because it was still too bright, even through his eyelids.

“Sir! Sir, can you hear me?”

The new voice was loud and insistent. Zachary tried to block it out. His body was cold, and he had an overwhelming feeling of sleepiness. He decided that he must be home in bed. Maybe someone had left the window open. That was why he was having such strange dreams. He was cold, and his body was trying to wake him up. If he just snuggled under the blanket and waited, the furnace would kick in, and he’d be able to go back to sleep.

“Sir! I need you to stay awake. Can you talk to me? Can you tell me where you’re hurt?”

Zachary tried to shake his head, but it felt wobbly and weak. The world did a couple of somersaults.

“Sir, can you tell me your name?”

Zachary tried to form the words. Only a moan came out.

“Zachary,” a woman’s voice said. “His name is Zachary.”

“Zachary?” The loud, insistent voice burrowed into his head. “Are you in pain? Can you squeeze my hand?”

The world spun. The loud voice stopped for a while. Zachary tried to process some of the words that whirled around him.

Jaws of life.

Backboard.

Inside his belly, he started to shake. Where was his blanket? Why wasn’t he warm enough?

He wished he could get out of the dream he was trapped inside. Maybe he needed to go to the bathroom. Sometimes he had bad dreams when his body was trying to wake him up to go relieve himself. Zachary tried to focus on his body’s signals. Did he have a full bladder? Was that why he needed to wake up?

He was just floating in mid-air and couldn’t read his body’s signals. Maybe he had left his body in the dream. Maybe he was experiencing an astral projection. He was really somewhere else. Maybe in his bed, maybe sitting in a hypnotist’s chair somewhere. He’d had out-of-body experiences before. He’d never told anybody about them, but he’d experienced that removed feeling before.

“We’re going to lose him. Zachary. Zachary!”

He tried to rouse himself. The voice was just so damn loud! Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He wanted to fall deeper into the dream. Into the part where he could do things he couldn’t do in his physical body. Fly. Breathe under water. Project himself into another plane of existence.

“Zachary! Stay with me, buddy. Focus on my voice. Can you count? Backward from one hundred. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight…”

Zachary wanted to wake up enough to tell the idiot that that was what you did to go to sleep, not to stay awake, but he couldn’t rouse himself. His lips moved like he was counting too, but there were still no words, just animal moans.

“Finally here.”

Zachary didn’t know what was finally there. Maybe he was ready to wake up. He thought maybe he’d fallen asleep riding the bus, and he had reached his destination.

“Cold as a witch’s backside,” someone complained.

There was laughter and some joking around, but the mood was mostly somber. Zachary wasn’t cold anymore. He had finally warmed up. Maybe he had pulled the blanket on, or maybe the furnace had kicked in.

There were more lights in his eyes, so bright that they cut into his brain even through his closed eyelids. He tried to tell Bridget to turn off the light. Just because she couldn’t sleep, that didn’t mean she had to keep him awake too. He wanted to sink deeper into sleep, to find that peaceful, restful place.

The noise was even worse. Like the building was going to fall on top of him. Zachary tried to reach out to steady himself, to keep the world from falling down around him or to keep himself from falling into the world. More moans came out of his mouth.

“It’s okay. Just a few more minutes.”

Zachary’s head spun. He waited for it to all settle down. How much had he had to drink at supper? He couldn’t remember what he had eaten. Or what day it was. He thought it might be Christmas. He’d had too much to drink and he needed to throw up, but he had to wake up and get to the bathroom. He didn’t want to barf in his shoes. Doing that once was enough.

There were tearing, rending noises around him. More light. More noise. It was overwhelming. Zachary felt his jaw clench. There was an explosion in his brain. All the sights and sounds were gone, and he was stuck inside his brain, in blackness, with no way to get out.

He didn’t know how long it lasted. A second or an eternity. With no external stimuli, there was no way to gauge it.

A moan woke him.

“He’s coming back.”

The world tipped this way and that, trying to reestablish a horizon. Zachary realized his eyes were open again and he couldn’t command them to shut.

There were hands on him. Moving him, then strapping him down. His head felt like a watermelon. He tried to speak to one of the figures moving around him, dark silhouettes against the bright lights.

It’s going to be okay. Everything will be all right.

We need warming blankets.

Shock and hypothermia.

Zachary thought the world was right-side-up again. He tried to look around, but he was still in the grip of the nightmare and couldn’t move.

“You’ve been in an accident,” a new voice told him.

There were