He stood over me, smiling kindly, concern staring back at me from those dull crimson eyes--halfway between red and gold.

"My dear, i'm just here to help you. Do you know why you're here?"

"That would require me to know where 'here' is," I said, a bit waspishly. I tried to get up, but he put his hand on my shoulder.
"I wouldn't. You just came to ten minutes ago--give yourself some time to recover."

"Recover from what, exactly?"

"You just came from Chicago Hospital--they found you passed out near a horrible accident. Do you remember that? The bus, and the train?"

"Kinda..."

"Yes, well, they took you from there to the hospital. After a while, you woke up and started raving about some dream you had. Scared Mrs. Mason out of her wits--apparently you dreamed about her son sucking the blood out of someone." He laughed. There was something about him, something... relaxing. I felt like I could trust him. "My name is Doctor Nathan Murphy, director of this fine establishment." He smiled a bit at the irony as I cast a look at the peeling paint, low light, and chipped floor tiles. "You were brought here because--well, because you spent the last two days screaming your head off about these dreams you say you keep having."

"Yeah... I've always had them. I dreamed about it--about the bus. The bus! I tried to help--" I was quickly becoming hysterical, my voice rising to a shout.

"Calm down, calm down! You're going to make yourself sick if you keep at that. Here, drink this, it'll help clear your head." He smiled and pushed a glass of water and some asprin toward me. Why don't we talk a bit?"

"Ugh... spinning..."

"That'll clear up in a few minutes. They had to sedate you. As soon as you heard Doctor Cullen was coming, you screamed bloody murder and we had to knock you out and bring you here." He gave a wry smile.

"You smile a lot."

"If you do what I do long enough, see what I see...you learn to be happy, or you crack under the pressure."

"Hmm..."

"So, Mary--"

"Alice."

"Hmm? Oh... I must have the wrong file. Let me just"
"No, my name is 'Mary Alice Brandon'. Mary is too religious for me, so now I'm Alice."

"Fair enough. So, Alice, you're from Mississippi?"

"Yes."

"So what brings you all the way to Chicago?"

"I saw the bus accident happening. Most of the time when I see something, I just ignore it. It's not really my problem, is it? But this time... I saw it all play out in my head, like normal. The bus hit the train. The train went off the tracks. Everyone on both the bus and the train died. That, I could have lived with. But the train... it hit some houses, didn't it? And now those people, the ones that don't have anywhere else to go, are going to catch the flu. They're going to die. That's almost a thousand people, in the end..." I saw his look of astonishment. "I see things. I'm not crazy!"

"Well, why don't we get you evaluated, see what's going on, good or bad, hmm?"

"I'm not crazy!"

"It's not often that people can see things like you say. I'm not saying you're crazy, I'm saying I want to get you checked out so I can have something to put down on the forms, okay?"

I sighed.

"So, why did you come here? To stop the bus accident?"

"I was going to try to hold the bus driver up for a while. When that didn't work, I started yelling for everyone to get off the bus. Only one person did, nobody else wanted to get out in the rain, nobody--wait! It was you. You were the person that listened! What the hell is going on here?"

He leaned down and whispered in my ear, "You will understand... in a while. You saved me a great deal of trouble--I wouldn't even begin to know how to explain how I was the sole survivor of such a huge accident."

"What the HELL are you talking about?"

"Shh..."

I felt a pinch on my arm, and the dizziness came back with full force. As I lost conciousness, I thought I heard him say something, but I was too confused to understand.