Chapter Seven

Doctor Greg Caldwell was a tall, thin man, with greying, neatly cropped hair, olive freckled skin and steady hands. His craggy, aged face is warm and welcoming to his patients and his eyes are slate grey and friendly. He nudges his glasses, small and round, up his nose and swipes his fingers over his moustache with a tired sigh and he stares at the figures of his latest patient's read out on his screen. Julia Bidwell, twenty three and with more rocks in her pretty little head than brains. Or so Caldwell would have thought had he not got the CT scan up on the monitor to prove otherwise. She been brought in with a fractured skull; obtained by tripping over her own shoe laces and it was the fifth time he'd seen her since the New Year. Winding down after the morning rush, Caldwell begins to recline in his office chair, leaning back with a hot mug of coffee cradled between both hands. It's then that the call comes through.

"Doctor Caldwell speaking, how can I help... Jeff!" Caldwell finds himself automatically sitting straighter in the chair as the billionaire's voice rings down the line, greeting him. "How good to hear from you, why I haven't since young..." now what was that boy's peculiar name? "Virgil scraped up his leg up when he took that tumble last year. Your lad thinks he knows my job better than I do." Caldwell laughs lightly, "I recall I had to stop him performing the stitches himself. What can I do for you old friend? How are the boys?"

"It's John." And that's enough to have the smile sliding off Caldwell's face. John was the middle boy, he thinks, the thin one with the pale hair and blue eyes. The one that wasn't around much because of his work. "He was scuba diving off the reef with Gordon and got into trouble. Hit by something, we think, Gordon's not sure. He was stuck down there a while though and by the time Scott and Alan pulled him out, he, well Greg, he wasn't breathing." The Doctor sobers immediately at that, the only other time he's heard sheer fear like that in Jeff's voice was after young Gordon's hydrofoil accident. The situation was serious. He sets down his coffee. "Scott got him breathing again but it took a while and, well, Virgil thinks it's bad, more than he can deal with alone. He doesn't want to admit John to a hospital, but he asked me to call you for help. I'm not... I don't..." the Father stammers on the other end of the line and his Doctor can almost picture the man wringing his hands together as he was want to.

"Jeff." Caldwell's voice is calm and clear. "I'll fly out at once." He's already packing up his desk and closing the case files on his computer screen. His colleagues can take Julia Bidwell's stupidity for a couple of days. "I'm sure Virgil is doing all he can. Do you think you can describe John's symptoms to me, so I'm prepared?" his hand skitters over his stethoscope, placing it around his neck so that he can get at the digital pad that had been sat underneath it, ready to make notes.

"Depressurisation." The Tracy patriarch's voice is soft, "The accident happened while he was pretty far down, deeper than he should have been swimming. We think his equipment was damaged somehow. The water was cold, too, so hypothermia. Virgil says his ribs are broken, from some kind of impact, but they haven't ruptured anything, he ran X-rays and a CAT scan. John's shoulder was dislocated and Virgil put it back into place. Plus oxygen deprivation, likely hypoxia, we're not sure how long he was without."

"How long has it been since the accident?" Caldwell scribbles his stylus over his pad, his handwriting messy but his notes precise. "What has your Virgil done so far for him?"

"About seven hours. We dried John off and bundled him in blankets. Virgil bandaged his ribs after he set and strapped his shoulder. He's on saline for dehydration and his blood pressures low. I'm not even sure what drugs Virgil has dosed him up on, but I can send the digital records to your tablet so you can review them on your way here."

"Thanks, Jeff, that would be helpful. I'll sign out here and give them notice that I'll be gone awhile."

"I've sent my manservant, Kyrano, in our helicopter to pick you up. He'll be waiting on the roof. Thanks for this, Greg. Virgil is exhausted, you're a huge help."

"My pleasure Jeff." And Caldwell finds it is - he's always willing to help that family out in any way he can, and not only for the pay check. Jeff's boys really are something special.

...

The first thing John becomes aware of is that he's cold. Mind numbingly, bone shakingly cold. It feels like thick, chilling needles of ice are sticking their verglas, bony fingers straight through his paper-thin skin and into his flesh. Glaciating it like beef in a fridge-freezer.

It's a sharp, biting burn, right through him; his skin prickling with it as if someone is mercilessly pushing a thousand pencil-lead thin arrows into his bloodstream that lodge and snap off, agonisingly, at his joints and in his fingers and through his chest. Cold prickling pins and needles of sensation, stabbing pains that make him gasp, long hard and heavy and he's only mildly aware of the way his neck is thrown back and of the way he's wheezing on each painfully drawn inhale. The rough, steady pounding in his head is like someone crashing cymbals against the sides of his cranium and his first coherent thought spills, blurbling out of his mouth as a long, agonised groan.

Oh god.

He tries to force his heavy, aching eyelids open, but it's like they weigh a thousand kilos and they burn and stream and sting under the strain. His cheeks are wet and he's choking, crying out against the pain and gasping on it. Heat blazes all around him like a thousand brands against his skin, and it's like playing with fire. He's so cold he needs the heat, wants to cling to it like a drowning man would a life raft when waiting for a Thunderbird, but it forces the thin spikes of pins and needles ever deeper into his bones. The smell that assaults his nose is odd and medical and sharply clean and there's the rough, hot scratch of cloth against his bared, cold skin. John can just about feel the horrible, clinical intrusion of a nasal cannula in his nose and down his painfully sore throat and there's the ugly touch of needles and wires against his skin.

"John? John! What is it? Where does it hurt? John?" There's voice he recognises but it's too loud, too harsh and his ears hurt. His head is still thumping painfully, all tight across his forehead and at his temples; it feels like someone has drilled holes into his skull and his brains are leaking out. He struggles weakly at that. He wants to keep his brains in his head, thank you very much, but moving only makes everything so much worse.

His limbs feel heavy and stiff, like someone's taken them apart, stitch by stitch and filled them with lead weights instead of bone. Earth Gravity. Must be. Something in John's brain strings that together, but it feels worse than the usual weight, heavier and more painful, radiating from his chest, out from his shoulder and down around his ribs in an ugly curve. Hell, it feels like someone has parked Thunderbird Two on his sternum. His mouth is dry, his taste buds stinging and rough. He's thirsty and he tries his best to swallow thickly but it's hard with a tube in his throat and he ends up coughing again, the noise weak and gasping. His chest is ablaze. It feels like there's an iron band around his ribs constricting; getting tighter and tighter with each breath. Like a snake coiling around struggling prey, relishing in the small animal's death throes.

"You're not supposed to be awake yet." There's another voice, one he doesn't recognise, but it's softer and he can feel, mutedly, big warm hands resting over his chest. Like someone is trying to hold all his ribs inside where they belong. There are other fingers, covered with the delicate skin of latex, pressed either side of his head, at his temples. Someone is trying to keep him still and, as John can feel his heart pounding, huge and solid in his chest, that makes him want to struggle all the more. What if these people are hostile what if...

"Oh god, hang on, let me give you something stronger for the pain, Johnny." But that sounds like Virgil. Is that Virgil? The fingers on his face feel the right size but he's not sure why because his head just hurts so much. Everything feels like it's moving, spinning around him, and even though he can feel his back pressed against something still and solid it's like he's floating in empty space.

"Give him a shot of Midazolam, 7.5-mg is probably wise. That should knock him back out." Comes the old, unfamiliar voice and John can't even find enough control over his own body to string together any sort of protest.

It takes a few seconds but then it feels like someone, maybe Virgil maybe not, has loaded his veins with antifreeze and everything blurs into the background, throbbing and painful but John feels strangely disconnected from it all. And then everything slides out. And John is gone once more.

...

Author Notes: This chapter is a little bit short, sorry guys! It was initially half of a chapter, but the second part is bugging me and I wanted to update this for you all. Second half will now become chapter eight, as soon as I work out what I can do with it. The main problem is that I wrote it before most of TAG came out, and it's got a lot of Grandma Tracy trying to fix everything with her cooking.

Leave me a review if you liked this chapter! 3

- Lenle G.