I don't own POI. But if anyone wanted to reboot the series I would be ecstatic if they started here...
Humpty Dumpty
"Jesus."
Jesse couldn't hear much over the sound of his own laboured breathing and the hiss of his air supply. Couldn't see much, either – not all the dust had settled. The beam of his helmet light pierced the murk to reveal rubble – lots of it – and twisted metal. Glass fragments shot little sparkly reflections back at him.
"Jesus God."
Jesse hadn't been in the Fire Department when the Towers came down. Still in high school back then. And while he knew that nothing could ever compare with the horror and heartache of that day – this must be a little bit like it.
The top three floors of the downtown building had pancaked. Thankfully a fire alarm had caused the building to be evacuated only about twenty minutes before the missile hit it. But it was still up to Jesse and his guys to go looking for anyone trapped. So here he was, point man for the firefighters clawing their way up a miraculously intact stairway.
He reached the landing and made the turn to go up the next flight. No dice. A concrete slab, formerly part of the wall, had canted over and was held in place only by the metal handrail of the stairs. Which was dangerously warped. Jesse held up a hand to stop the guys coming up behind him. He peered at the stairway. "We can't go any further, guys. The whole damn thing's gonna come down any minute now." He prepared to retreat back downwards to the relative safety of the floor below when something caught his eye. Colour, in this monochrome world. Red. Blood red.
"Shit, there's someone up there."
The guys behind him came up. Jesse pointed to the leaning slab,and to the trickle of red coming from behind it. Then it was a slow-moving nightmare as two guys risked their necks inching up to the slab, and gingerly passed straps around it. An exposed beam up above gave them a point to rig a makeshift pulley and after a couple of minutes they were putting tension on the lines. The slab shifted. Behind it there was… a tangle of bodies. And… Jesse could hardly believe his eyes. What the hell was going on up there when the missile hit? Some kind of a gun battle, from the looks. A mangled assault rifle slithered down the stairs and dropped over the edge into the dark. There were at least four guys, black-clad and heavily armed. Dead, of course, crushed into the side of the building when the blast threw them there. Another guy, too. He lay on top of one of the others, cushioned from the full impact by the body underneath him. He differed from them in that he wasn't clad entirely in black, instead wearing a black jacket and red shirt. Then Jesse realised that the shirt was red because of the blood. It was still tricking sluggishly. And dead men don't bleed…
"Hey! We got a live one here!"
Time sped up abruptly. The backpack with the first aid supplies was passed up to them, and then it was a case of getting a line in, blood and morphine, a collar around his neck and a tube down his airway. They got him on a stretcher and then began the careful trip back down the staircase until they reached the less-damaged parts of the building below. Jesse could see the man's injuries. Four, five GSWs to the torso that he could see, maybe more he couldn't. The guy's O2 saturation and BP were way down, pulse weak and thready… Not much hope for this one...but after all the man had survived, they had to try. They had to try.
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"Bloody hell." The ER physician was Australian, not long out of his residency, and he had never seen anything quite like this. "All the King's horses and all the King's men," he muttered to himself as he surveyed the injuries presenting here. Then aloud: "Ummm… Okay, we're gonna need to plug some of these holes first..." He directed his team into action, prioritising the worst of the man's many injuries. Looking on the bright side, he reflected as he began clamping and stitching, if they could put this guy back together it'd be worth a pretty damn good journal article.
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The skull fractures were the most worrisome in the end. John Doe's cranium had sustained three major fractures. His jaw was broken in two places. Three broken ribs, one of which had punctured a lung. Six GSWs in his torso, one of which had only just missed his heart. A portion of his liver had to be removed, along with one lobe of his right lung. Eighteen hours of surgery to stitch and patch and resect. His pelvis was in several pieces; one femur now had enough metalwork to set off the average airport metal detector. Both tibias fractured, one simple, one compound. Another GSW had cracked his right humerus. All these injuries were terrible. But the skull, and the brain beneath it… The depressed fracture over the temporal lobe was the most dangerous. There was bleeding, and some swelling. After several procedures to relieve the pressure the neurosurgeon was finally guardedly hopeful. They kept John Doe in a medical coma for nearly six weeks before they dared to bring him gradually back awake. The swelling of his face began to go down as the soft tissue injuries healed. And one day Megan Tillman realised she recognised him.
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He was being wheeled down a hospital corridor for an MRI when they came face to face. Megan had heard Campion, the Aussie guy, boasting about the fantastic paper he'd put forward for Emergency Medicine based on the case; she'd vaguely intended to go visit the patient some time. Somehow she hadn't gotten around to it when she saw him in his bed being pushed along by a cheerful orderly. With those injuries it could only be Campion's Humpty Dumpty. Oddly, it was his his eyelashes she recognised first. He was lying with his eyes closed until the orderly was forced to pull the bed to a sudden stop to avoid her, standing frozen as she was in the middle of the corridor. The eyes opened and she was suddenly certain. No way could she ever forget those eyes.
"John," she said uncertainly. His eyes focussed on her face for a moment before wandering. She could see him trying to pull himself together. The blue eyes focussed again.
"Hello?" he said.
"Um. How are you going?" she asked.
"Oh. Okay I guess," he said after a moment. Then after another moment: "Do I know you?"
"It's me. Megan," she said. She examined his face for any flicker of recognition. None came.
"Oh. Okay," he said. His eyes wandered again.
"Sorry, Ma'am, but Mr Doe was supposed to be over there for his scan 'bout five minutes ago," said the orderly.
"Oh, yes, certainly," said Megan crisply. She stood aside and let them go.
"I'll talk to you later, John," she said after them, but the man in the bed did not reply.
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When the call came over his cell Lionel was just about to ditch the paperwork for lunch. He was surprised at the jolt of adrenalin which shot through him when 'Blocked Number' showed on the caller ID. And he absolutely froze in his seat when he heard the voice.
"Cocoa-Puffs?"
"Relax, Lionel. It's me. Not her."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he hissed down the phone.
A chuckle. "Not to be morbid, Lionel, but you saw Root's body. So by a process of elimination..."
"Okay, okay. Finch's Machine. I get it."
"I need you to do something for me-"
"Wait. Wait. What the hell has been going on? Damn near everyone ends up dead, and suddenly you call me up wanting me to do something, no questions asked? Forget it. You tell me what's going on, right from the start, or you can find some other sap to do your dirty work." With a decisive swipe of his thumb, he cut off the call.
Two minutes later the phone bleeped again. 'Blocked caller'. He let it go to voice mail, dumped the phone in his desk drawer, and got up. Lunch. He had been about to have lunch, right?
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Megan had to wait for the end of her shift before she had a chance to go and find John. He was back up in his room, of course, lying half dozing. With both legs in casts, and one in traction, he wasn't going anywhere much. He was gazing out the window, eyes half closed, those long eyelashes hiding the blue eyes. As she walked over to his bed he stirred a little and grimaced. Poor bastard. Just about everything must hurt right now. He seemed to hear her thoughts and pressed his morphine pump. "Ahhhh..." he murmured. Then he looked up at her, seeming to see her properly for the first time.
"They're trying to wean me off this stuff," he said, gesturing with his good hand towards the pump. His speech was a little slurred: the injuries to his face and jaw were still healing. Megan tried not to think about the brain injuries.
"Yeah, you've been on it for a while," she agreed. She pulled out her tablet to access his notes, sitting as she did so.
"So… Doctor… why did you come to see me?"
"Because I know you. Knew you," she corrected herself.
There was a flash of genuine anxiety in his eyes. "So who- who am I?"
She was forced to backtrack. "Actually I don't know much about you. I know your name really is John, but I don't know a surname. Not a real one, anyway. You helped people." She found herself pausing as her own memories welled up and threatened to overwhelm her. "You helped me, once. In a very dark time."
"Tell me. Please." There was a hunger, an uncertainty, a desperation in his eyes.
So Megan sat with him and told him her story – about her sister's rape and suicide, her own need for revenge. The guy who came out of nowhere to stop her making the worst decision in her life.
"You said I'd get my life back," she finished. "You were right. It wasn't easy, but in the end I did."
He was lying there frowning at this. "I can't remember any of this," he said. He looked across again at her face, studying it, evidently trying to spark a memory. She saw the moment he gave up, something a little like despair seeping into his expression.
"There's more, though," she said, trying to encourage him. "A little bit more, anyway. When you, when you rescued me… I didn't know it at the time but you were working with another man. I never knew his real name either, but his first name was Harold. He came into the ER once with some pretty distinctive injuries. And a couple of times he called up asking for favours."
"So… so this guy. He might know more!" For the first time John seemed animated. He grimaced again. The morphine had worn off.
"One last thing. The last time he asked me for a favour it was to put through a prescription for medical marijuana for a police detective – John Riley. So this Riley guy might know something too."
"Or maybe he was me," gasped John.
She looked at him in concern. He was sweating slightly and looked pale. "Pain getting bad?"
"I'm fine," he said with an effort.
"Rate it, please. Ten point scale."
"Three."
"Liar," she observed.
"Look, the pump won't give me any more right now, so there's no point-"
"I'll talk to the nursing staff-"
"They only give me Tylenol," he said. His voice and breathing were more under control now. A slight flaring of the nostrils was the only indication he was hurting. "It's okay, honest. In a couple of hours the pump will let me have some more morphine."
"That's quite a long time," she pointed out.
"I'm not going anywhere."
She snorted a little at that.
"Come and see me again?" he asked after a moment.
"Yeah. Yes, of course." She reached out and stroked the salt and pepper hair, growing back from the stubble left by his surgical procedures. "Don't worry. We'll work all this out. Okay?"
"Okay," he whispered.
I'm pretty sure this will be continued….
