“Go away!” she shouted at no one in particular, and this time she meant it. She needed time, more time than this Rob wanted to give her right now. The effort of the conversation, and the raging storm in her head, were all making her tired. The idea of the dreamless unconsciousness she had just escaped was teasing and tempting her. Its darkness waited again to claim her, rescue her from this existence, and take her back to a world filled with no thoughts, no memories, and no worries. She could hear the nurse, if that was who she was, pulling Rob out under protest as she drifted back into that wanted peace unconsciousness had once been.
As peaceful as the unconsciousness had been before, it was now just as terrifying. Her dreams were haunted with explosions and with visions of death, and dying. Not hers, but others. Most of the images were just that, images, unknown faces. The dreams were relentless. First she was on a plane, next being shot, then jumping out of a different plane, next meeting with faces at places she knew but names she could not retrieve, and then finally she could see steel pipes swinging at her again and again. She was part of the dream, and yet she was also an observer and commentator. She could feel the pain all over again. She wondered about the reality of it all, ‘Had she really experienced this once?’ She noticed another pipe coming toward her in the dream, or was it. She fell to the ground rolling away from the next hit. The other person was not as lucky. He took the full force against his head. Jan remembered, ‘Yes, it was a memory, real, but now just a memory,’ the sound of bones breaking, the sickening sound of the thud of the pipe as it connected with the other person’s head, and the lifeless pile that had been left after the attack. Dream mixed with reality, and Jan had a sickening feeling that she now knew the name that belonged to the victim in her dream as her thoughts interrupted trying to clarify what she was seeing. Jan felt herself receive another blow from a faceless figure behind her. It wasn’t the same person that had attacked the man that now lay lifeless on the floor, so there were at least three people there, ‘That could be Kevin, or was it Keith, that now lay lifeless on the floor.’ There was something about her attacker, but in the dream Jan didn’t get a chance to get a good look at him. In the dream though, she just caught a glimpse of the other man that now approached her. He seemed familiar, but no name came to mind. The dream took over again and she felt another blow and then another from behind. As she lay helpless on the floor the man facing her spoke in a low and threatening voice his eyes seeming to burn straight through her, “You’re almost worth saving, but I have my orders,” and instinctively she knew that the saving would not be any type of rescue at all.
In that one moment, and only for a moment, she knew who her attacker was. Not only did it surprise her, she wasn’t so sure that she hadn’t seen a ghost. It seemed as if he reached into her mind with his, and within a wink of an eye all thoughts and memories were gone. Memories she thought were there forever, who she was, friends, and the name of her attacker. It felt as if her brain was being sifted through, and shredded. She fought back as best she could, who could do this? The pain in the dream, though not real, began to increase to the point at which she awoke stifling a small scream in the process. Jan could feel the sweat on her brow slowly dripping off to the side of her head and into the bandages around her eyes. The pillow and her hair were already soaked with sweat she noticed as she gasped for air. It seemed the closer she got to knowing who she was, and who hurt her, the farther away the memories traveled. She wondered why, how, and who had locked the memories so far away from her conscious thought.
Jan listened to the noises in the room, waiting, and hoping that no one was near. She could hear the beep of the machine that she had heard earlier, but the rest of the room was silent. The beeping was faster; it seemed to match the beating of her heart. ‘Logical,’ she thought. She listened for breathing, not just hers, but of anyone that might have been left to watch her. If they were hoping she could tell them about the attack, which she could now clearly remember more of, pain and all, would they have left someone in the room, or just outside of it? Most likely just outside the room from the woman’s earlier reaction. The hurricane that had once been her thoughts and dreams now started to clear again. The woman that spoke earlier was right, rest was what she had needed, but somehow she didn’t think it was the right type of rest that she had gotten. Her dreams also led her to believe that she needed the answers they were looking for and she wanted them sooner, not later. Somehow she didn’t think that patience was her strong point. She was sure that here in the hospital if they were not the good guys, at least they were not the bad guys that had those large poles. That or their tactics had drastically changed. What did Rob, or was it Bob, say, ‘two weeks had gone by’. That was a lot of time to be unaware of where, who, or even what she was. That was now beginning to change. Thoughts, memories, and even feelings were returning, this time in a coherent form, one she could organize into a picture, she hoped, of who and what she was, or had been. There were still many holes, too many, but with time that would soon be solved. ‘Bob,’ Jan wondered where that name had come from, was it someone she had known. Her head began to hurt again as she tried to focus on the name. She began to wonder what the extents of the injuries were that she had received from the beating.
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