You Were On Your Way Home: Prolouge
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, we offer ourselves to you.
You were on your way home when you died.
It was an unusually cold night, especially for that time of spring.
Work had been exhausting—it was a bad day at the hospital.
You already knew that day was going to be bad when you saw the news playing on the television screens at the station that morning—your train was delayed, anyway. Two dozen children had been killed by a separatist military faction in a faraway country, and the broadcasting station showed clips of their mothers throwing themselves in tears over the mass grave.
What made it worse was when four members of a family—victims of a villain attack—had been rushed through the emergency room doors by the paramedics.
You did everything you could to help them.
The older woman was being worked up by the paramedics who brought her in, but she died on the trauma table at 21:27. Maybe it was because you didn't do chest compressions hard enough. Maybe it was because you didn't push the epinephrine fast enough. Maybe it was because half of her scalp had been left behind at the crime scene.
Her husband, who had been brought in with minor head injuries and two fractured femurs, threw himself at you in despair. For a brief moment, you let him hit you with his fists—his broken and mangled legs dragged behind him like a grotesque puppet. You were reminded of the news that morning—of the grieving mothers throwing themselves on the graves of their children. The man took a scalpel from the table. You thought he was going to stab you, but really, he was trying to cut his tongue out.
He was restrained by security and sedated with a syringe.
A young woman with a wedding ring came in next. Or at least, what was left of her. The police told you that her husband was a known villain with the quirk of indestructible teeth, but they could only be used at night. When she didn't have dinner prepared for him, he killed her, dismembered her body, attempted to kill her parents, and their only son. He almost succeeded, before the pro-heroes arrived. What came into the emergency room was a white sheet on a gurney, and when you lifted it, there lay only two arms covered in scraps of what was once a bath robe.
You had the same one at home.
Behind her came her son. The paramedics had intubated him, but it was hard to get air into his lungs when he no longer had any. You pronounced him dead at 21:56, after thirteen minutes elbow deep in his open chest cavity, giving him a cardiac massage with your gloved hand.
The attending physicians, technicians and additional nurses in the trauma room bowed deeply to the boy with the open chest on the table in front of them.
He was seven years old.
Someone put a white sheet over him, and then you all left the room to get dinner. It was beef curry night in the cafeteria, and you didn't want to miss out on it for the second time that month.
A colleague pointed out that there was too much blood on your ceil blue uniform, because apparently you didn't notice, so you had to throw it out.
The hospital gave you a new one to wear until the end of your shift—surgical green. It was too big for you, and it kept getting caught on the corners of desks and around doorknobs every time you walked through the hallways or past your nurses' station.
You clocked out of work at midnight, having spent the rest of your shift changing bed pans and emptying Foley catheters.
Your feet hurt, but you were unbothered to change out of your white nurse's shoes.
The corner convenience store you stopped at didn't have the right kind of bread, a scuffle between some thugs and a pro-hero diverted you from your normal route, and you lost your scarf somewhere between the third train station and second bus stop.
You were three blocks from your apartment, thinking about your cat, when you heard footsteps behind you. You turned around, but no one was there. Walking on, you were uneasy, and rightfully so.
It may have been late, but it was still too quiet, too dark and too cold.
You clutched your bag to your side with both hands and walked faster, the fabric of the oversized uniform rubbing together loudly. There was pepper spray on your keys, but you weren't thinking fast enough to grab it. Thinking about grieving mothers and men cutting out their tongues and the little boy whose heart stopped in your hand and…and…and….
Your head hit the concrete.
A large hand had reached out from behind and pulled you down by your hair.
"I should have put my hair up…" You thought. But there was a handsome young doctor who always called you by the wrong name that you were trying to impress. He hadn't noticed, and he called you by a different man's name on three different times in the same conversation.
You tried to scream for help, but nothing came out when your assailant's boot was clamped down on your windpipe.
"Oh," you thought. "This isn't good."
You looked up as best you could but caught only the glimpse of an unnaturally large mouth, baring unnaturally sharp teeth.
Fight-or-flight scrambled you onto your belly and you tried to crawl away, but that just made it easier for him to hook his claws into the waistband of your pants.
You thrashed about, clawed at your throat, tried to keep your clothing as tightly to you as possible, kicked at your assailant, scrambled for your keys with the pepper spray hanging off them. You just managed to reach them—the cartoon bear emblazed on the pink cannister of pepper spray winked at you, and with your last effort—because evidentially, the assailant had taken your forearm in his jaws and bit down—you thought about how cute that bear was.
There was no use thinking about the pain in your arm, or how desperate you were.
That was because it had all stopped—the world, that is.
The teeth retracted from your arm, a weight lifted from you—the cold air nipped at your now bare thighs, but nothing happened…
You thought you were about to die, but instead, there you lay, starring at dizzying shapes in your field of vision that weren't really there. Hours in seconds passed you by as you fought to retain your consciousness, and the contents of your stomach.
A dark figure crouched over you.
It was a head of scruffy hair, and as your vision blurred in and out—your body shutting down out of freight—you reached out to the figure. It tried to speak to you, but all you could do was brush your fingers against the dark hairs on his face, now distantly illuminated in flashing lights of red and blue.
When you smeared blood on his cheek, you choked out an, "I'm sorry", because really, you were very sorry for making such a mess.
The last thing you grasped before vomiting in your own mouth and losing consciousness was a pair of glowing red eyes, and you thought about the mothers grieving over their childrens' graves.
You were on your way home.
To be continued...