Week One
A surge of pain shot down his arm, and he gasped and clutched at his shoulder, his eyes shooting open. Slowly, the white room came into focus through the haze. His arm throbbed unbearably to each beat of his pulse, the sensation of his muscles and tendons ripping all along the bone still seared into his mind. But when he gripped at his arm, there was only a bandaged-up shoulder where it used to be. He gritted his teeth, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop the pain but wait for it to subside on its own. So he laid there, bathed in sweat, panting away the dredges of the nightmare. Except it wasn't a nightmare, as he kept reminding himself. It was pure memory, unadulterated by the drugs they constantly pumped into his system. He blinked slowly and concentrated on controlling his breathing. Over the last few days, he'd adapted a refined technique for calming himself down.
His first few days in the isolation ward were chaotic, terrifying, and he could only collect a few coherent memories from them. He remembered waking up for the first time to find himself lying on a bed in a white padded room, his shoulder aching and wrapped tightly in layers of bandages, his left arm gone. Through the haze of heavy pain medication, he tried to recollect what had happened. Then it all came back to him in a rush of images and sounds and sensations—a dark warehouse, his arm crushed beneath an unbearable weight, an explosion, his dad, his dad, tearing his arm out from underneath the wreckage, his tendons snapping, his dad's face, smiling up at him in a pool of blood, and screaming, so much screaming. He remembered half-dragging his dad's body out of there, into the fading daylight, and then collapsing, colors flickering past his eyes as the adrenaline drained from his body, leaving him with only blinding agony and a deafening ring in his ears. Then there were voices, and a sensation like being lifted, but he kept trying to grab at his dad's jacket. They pulled him away, and he struggled against them—but then he heard a woman's voice, a soft, shaking voice, murmuring something to him. There was a sharp pain in his arm, more murmuring, and everything faded away.
When he blinked back into the white room, he couldn't breathe, though he was gasping. His heart pounded its way up his throat, and he lurched off the bed, slamming into the padded wall on the other side of the room. He felt tubes rip out of his remaining arm as he backed himself into a corner and slid down the wall, covering his face with his hands and sucking in breaths that sounded like sobs. Then there was a soft hiss above, and the room began to flood with fog. But he raised his eyes in time to see the glass door on the other end of the room, which read, in big, bright letters, the number '194.' His crime coefficient. And then the room blurred out of existence.
The following days passed in a consistent cycle—he would wake in a panic, gasping as pain surged up and down his phantom arm. He'd relive it all over again, rip out the IV tubes, and the room would flood with fog. Again and again, he'd pass from unconsciousness to delirium to unconsciousness, from nightmare to waking nightmare. It was days before anyone spoke to him. When they did, they approached him calmly from the other side of the glass door, their faces peering over the brightly lit '197.' By that time, he'd managed to remain conscious and coherent just long enough for the doctors to deem him able to communicate rationally. They simply stared at him for a moment, three faces floating in a sea of white, and then the one in the middle opened his mouth, and nonsensical words and sounds issued from it. He caught snatches like "therapy" and "medication" and "confinement." Then he heard "recovery" and "statistics" and "personal history," and the doctors' faces never changed their expressions. He nodded at them, and, seeming pleased, they all drifted off down the hall from which they came.
Since he'd learned to calm himself down enough on his own, the doctors stopped by his room every day to check in on him and spout the same phrases over and over. He was told that he'd now been in the isolation ward for six days, and slowly he began to collect his thoughts through the haze of memories and morphine.