THIRTY-NINE

 

My guard wasn’t going to let me leave the room.  I argued with him for a good five minutes and finally convinced him that he could follow me. 

A sense of dread knotted in my stomach as I started up the stairs.  The blue floor was abuzz with activity as I entered the hall.  People went in and out of the stairwell that led up to the Pulse, Dr. Beeson’s door was wide open, people coming and going.  But most of the activity was coming from the Extraction room.

I held my arms around my midsection as I stepped into the room.  It felt like everything inside of me was about to crack and fall apart, like I’d been filled with too many strong emotions and then someone had taken a sledgehammer to me.

A group of people surrounded West’s limp body.  Bandages were wrapped around half of him but even I could tell the blood had stopped flowing.  His wounds were already healing themselves.

Those who worked on West stilled when they noticed me in the room.  I fidgeted under all their eyes, not knowing how to deal with their attention.

“Is it going to work on him?” I asked.

A man with flaming red hair glanced at the others before stepping away from the group towards me. 

“The extraction process has begun but we are unsure of the exact time frame of when he was touched and when he was brought in.  Some are guessing it was only forty minutes, others thought it was an hour and a half.”

“And the magic time frame is an hour or less, right?”

“Exactly,” the man said, his eyes regretful looking.  “Under such stressful circumstances, no one is sure how long it was.  If it really was less than hour, he stands a good chance of recovering.  If not…”

I nodded, understanding what his trailing thoughts meant.  “How long until we know?”

The man glanced at West.  “When it worked before, we didn’t see any results for over a week.  Within a week and a half we started to see positive signs that he might recover.”

“So we just have to wait?”

He simply nodded.

I couldn’t take any more then.  I turned and walked back down the hall without another look back.  My breaths were coming in choked sobs before I reached the end of the hall.  It felt like someone was trying to squeeze me from the inside out.  As I stepped into the stairwell, I leaned against the cold cinderblock walls and slid to the floor.  When the guard saw me, he stepped back out, his discomfort obvious.  I heard him walk away.

It took me far too long to get myself back under control.  The image of metallic veins sprouting in West’s eye kept playing over and over behind my eyelids. 

I used every ounce of strength I had to force myself off the floor and go back down the stairs.

As I walked numbly back into the medical wing, I saw a man lying on a hospital bed in another room.  In my panic of the previous hours, I hadn’t noticed that he was injured.

“Royce?” I said as I stepped into his room a few feet.  “Are you alright?”

He just gave a shrug, brushing it off.  “I’m fine.  Just a few bullet holes.  Nothing I haven’t lived through before.”

I nodded.

“I really am sorry about your friend,” Royce said, his eyes studying my face.  “He seemed like a good man.  We all hope for the very best.”

I nodded again, my eyes glued to the floor but not really seeing anything.  Even though no one had said it, I heard it in the tone of their voices.  They might have been hopeful, but they didn’t expect a positive outcome.

“When do you plan on setting off the Pulse?” I changed the subject.

“With the Extractor running a lot of power will be diverted to it.  It will be another day before the Pulse has gathered enough power to go off.”

I nodded, stuffing my hands into my pockets.

“He tried saving West, you know,” Royce said quietly.  “Avian.  Everyone was firing at the Bane who were flooding the platform.  But Avian jumped in front of West while he was helping me repair the line.  West probably would have died right then if not for Avian.”

I squeezed my eyes closed, imagining the horrific scene behind my eyelids.  “If I’d been there they both would have been fine.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“He wouldn’t have gotten infected.”

“Maybe.”

I turned to leave when Royce spoke again.  “Eve, if I ever hear about you firing a weapon in this hospital again I will have Dr. Beeson make you think you’re a three-year-old little girl for the rest of your life.”

I glanced back at him, a smile creeping onto my lips.  “It won’t happen again, promise.”

He gave a twitch of a smile.  Something started to beep on one of his medical devices and two doctors rushed in from behind me.  I took the opportunity to duck out.

Avian was asleep when I returned to his side, much to my disappointment.  The doctors said they were giving him antibiotics to keep infection out but other than that there was little more they were going to have to do to him. 

As I sat with Avian’s hand in mine, I thought about what was to come.  If the Pulse really worked and we were able to freely roam, what would that mean for Avian and I, now that I had finally made my decision?

I imagined taking him hunting with me, intrigued by the total mystery of it.  I’d never seen him out in the woods like that, free to do and go as he pleased.  I had little doubt he would be good at it.  Avian seemed to be good at everything.

Where would we live once we were let out of this hospital?  What would it be like to live with Avian, the way Gabriel and Leah lived together, Morgan and Eli?  The thought was strange yet exciting.

Three years ago I watched with everyone as Morgan and Eli stood before everyone, she dressed in a makeshift wedding dress.  They spoke words to each other that I didn’t understand then.  Now they made perfect sense.  Would Avian and I ever speak words like that to each other?  Would I ever wear a dress for him?

Finally, after two hours of restless sitting, Royce limped into Avian’s room, accompanied by his regular armed men.  The man with the broken nose was among them.  He glared at me with blackened eyes.

“We’re getting everything prepped for tomorrow,” Royce said as he leaned on his crutches.  “I thought you might want to come see before it goes off.”

I glanced from Avian’s still form and back to Royce.  “We can have the doctors page you when he wakes up,” Royce said.

“Alright.”

The doctors on duty gave me a small black box to carry around and they informed me that it would beep loudly when Avian woke up.  Already feeling slightly more like myself, I followed Royce’s group to the blue floor and up the locked stairwell.

I had to blink furiously as we reached the top of the stairs, to the old roof of the building.  The sun shone with burning intensity.  It felt like forever since I had actually seen the sun.  I had missed it.

The Pulse had a blue glow emanating from its core already.  The loud hum was a testament to the amount of electricity that was being poured into it.

“Those are energy storage devices,” Royce said loudly as he pointed to five hulking, black boxes.  They were as tall as I was and wider than four of me.  “When it’s time, all the power stored in them will surge into the Pulse.  They’re going to be blown to high-heaven when the thing goes off, but hopefully not before they’ve been completely drained.  With any luck we won’t ever need them again.”

“And you’re sure the hospital will be protected from the blast?” I asked as I looked at the beautiful, yet menacing device before me.

“We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure it is,” Royce said with a half-smile.  “Trust me, no one here wants to lose electricity or all of our electrical devices.  We all lived in the dark for too long.  None of us want to go back.”

I nodded that I understood as I paced around the Pulse.  The central ring of it was spinning rapidly, each of the outer rings moving steadily as well. 

It seemed like there were a million things that could go wrong in the next four or five hours.  The device could just not work.  Its reach could be no further than the walls of this hospital.  The precautions to proof this building could fail.  I could be dead in just a few hours.

But if everything went off as planned, life was going to change dramatically.  We could go out into the city.  We could start to rebuild.  I dreamed of the outcome for the simple reason of being able to go back out into the sun freely.

I spent an hour, just looking at the beautiful blue glow of the Pulse, trying to not think of anything, to simply zone it all out.  But before long I was advised to leave the Pulse room.  As the power it held built, I could feel the sting of electrical output.  I didn’t argue as I descended the stairs.  As I did, my pager started beeping.

The medical wing was quieter by then, all of the damage from the previous day’s mission taken care of.  When I came back into Avian’s room I found him sitting up, tying the shoelaces of his boots. 

“How do you feel?” I asked as I leaned against the doorframe, my arms folded over my chest.

“Like I’ve been shot three times,” he said with a chuckle.  “But better.”

“You sure you want to be getting up now?”

“You sound like me,” he teased as he stood slowly.

“Just worried about you.”

“Now you know the feeling,” he said as he took a few steps toward me, limping as he did, his eyebrow raising.  “I see you lost your guard.”

“I think he got bored.”

“Everything almost ready?”

I nodded as we turned and walked out of the room.  Avian put an arm across my shoulder, letting me help with his wounded leg.  “I think so.  It’s a bomb of electricity up there.  I had to leave.”

“I’d be lying if I said this whole thing didn’t scare me.”

“Royce assures me the hospital will be protected,” I said as we continued down the hall.  We walked up the stairs to the second floor and went into Avian’s room.  He kicked off his boots again and laid gingerly back on the bed.  “I just needed out of that stuffy room,” he said when he saw the smirk on my face.  I just shook my head and lay next to him, nestling in the crook of his good arm.

“I’ve been thinking about something.  If you don’t like it, just tell me.  I will understand.”

“What?” he asked as he pressed his cheek to the top of my head.

“I think I should be in with West when the Pulse goes off.  Even if he can’t hear me, there are a few things I need to say to him.  Something doesn’t feel right inside of me and I think it’s because West has no idea what is going on.  It feels too unfair.”

Avian propped himself up just enough to look down into my eyes.  “I think you should.  We don’t know what is in his future and I think you should be there when this happens.  I don’t like feeling like we’ve gone behind his back with this.”

I brought my hand to the side of Avian’s face.  “I hoped you would understand.”

“Even if you say you don’t love him, he means a lot to you.  He always will,” Avian said as he looked down at me.  “I would never expect that to change.  People affect you, some stay with you forever.  West will be one of those people.”

I gave him a small smile, blinking several times before I pressed my lips to his briefly.  “Thank you.”

“What do you want to do once this is over?” Avian asked, changing the subject, and lying back down.  He may have understood but West being in the picture had still caused him pain in the past.  I didn’t blame him for not wanting to talk about West anymore.

“Get out of this hospital,” I said immediately, settling my head back against his shoulder.  “I just realized that I hate being here.  The people are fine, and I will admit it is nice to feel so protected.  But this place feels like a prison.  I can’t breathe.  I need some sun.”

“I wondered how you were handling being locked up in here,” he said. 

“I want to see the ocean,” I said as I stared at the white ceiling.  “West told me about it once.  How big and intimidating it is.  We’re so close to it I swear I can almost smell it at times.

“What about you?”

Avian was thoughtful for a while.  “I just want freedom to go wherever I want.  I have no complaints about how things ran in Eden.  In a way it was a utopia.  But I couldn’t ever leave.  I was limited to this mile radius of wherever the people of Eden were.  After the trip out here, of having the freedom to move around even just the hospital as I wish, it’s been freeing.  I want to just take off into the mountains if I want, to go, I don’t know, explore if I want to, without having to worry about someone dying if I’m unavailable.”

“You’ve been a prisoner in a way for the last five years,” I said as I nuzzled closer.  I’d reinforced that feeling multiple times, telling Avian that he couldn’t leave.  Everyone had needed him too much.  He’d saved so many lives. 

He pressed his lips briefly to my forehead.  “And I just want to spend time with you.”