CH 6 The Inferno
/May 2004/
She took one last look at the SUV that brought them here. The man in the passenger seat smiled at her. She didn't like that smile, but she didn't know what to think anymore.
They were F.B.I., they were her to protect her right? Yeah sure she thought walking slowly towards the house.
She had no other choice but to trust them. She followed her father into the house, he looked back at her and smiled impressed with their new living arrangements. She managed to smile weakly at him, still weary about the F.B.I. agent.
She closed the door, and all she saw was orange glow all around her.
Her immediate reaction was to close her eyes and cover her face with her arms. The force of the explosion sent her flying backwards out the door she had just closed. Lying on the ground she felt intense pain on her arms. She tried to shake off whatever was causing the pain her mind not registering what was happening. This caused the flames to flare even more.
She lay there for a few seconds, until finally she opened her eyes and saw that her body was alight with flames. She couldn't scream because the smoke was taking away her oxygen. Her brain kept sending her pain messages, but the pain was coming from everywhere.
She started rolling over and over to try and put the flames out, vaguely recalling the stop, drop and roll mantra they made you memorize as kids.
Suddenly she felt someone drape a wet blanket over her body and pick her up.
She remembered flashing lights and a whirling noise as she was lifted into a helicopter. They injected her with painkillers, but she thought it was a waste because she no longer felt any pain.
She passed in and out of consciousness as the helicopter flew through the air.
She awoke in a poorly lit hospital room. She was lying on some kind of tin foil. She tried to look up but the effort was too great. Noticing that the hospital room wasn't poorly lit, her eyesight had been badly damaged, and she saw everything through a hazy fog.
For some reason, be it the drugs or the shock she had no fear of dying she felt no pain.
When she woke up again she was in a different bed in the special burns unit, a sterile room that had four other patients. She still could not see very well, but could make out eight bottles, four each side, hanging upside down and supplying liquid and food via drips, to her body. Apparently, people who are badly burned die of dehydration. She was also wired to a digital thermometer.
Over the weekend she had died for four minutes and was resuscitated and then kept alive until she could be moved to the special hospital she was at now. She told them if she died again don't try and bring her back.
The drugs they gave removed much of her consciousness, this was the best means of alleviating the pain, but they did not remove her feelings of intense thirst. She had to take small drinks from a glass through a bendy straw.
When she was finally conscious enough to remember, they wouldn't tell her what happened to her father, they just gave her more drugs. But their silent answers already told her the truth. Her father was dead.
She had been in the second hospital around a week, and it was time for her first operation. She was still on painkilling drugs and knew very little of what was going on around her. She was bandaged all over from chest to foot.
She could not use her hands; her fingers and thumbs had been individually bandaged. Her arms had taken the worst of the flames. The areas of her skin that had healed sufficiently had been used to provide skin for the badly burned areas. The healthy skin had been removed in thin layers, pricked with small holes and stretched to cover a larger area and then grafted onto her legs.
Her legs looked like patchwork. She wished for death, she didn't want to go on living after what she did, her father was dead and it was her fault. There was also no telling what she looked like. When she asked for a mirror they refused. Not being allowed a mirror made her think the worst.
She looked down at her charred arms, if her face looked anything like this she didn't want to go through life like that. She knew her hair had been burnt, her face felt swollen and her eyesight was still foggy. Over a week had elapsed.
But even death wouldn't claim her.
They told her it was a good thing when the pain returned, it meant her nerves weren't that badly damaged. But everything hurt when she moved even the slightest bit. When she breathed her chest moved and the bandages rubbed. She could only lie on her back, which was burnt too but not as badly as the front. She couldn't lay anywhere comfortable without feeling pain. She wondered why had death passed her up spat her back out.
Even though she was covered in bandages she was still expected to do physiotherapy. The nurses made her move her arms about. It hurt. The bandages scraped her raw skin as she moved her arms up and down, bent her elbows and moved her fingers. Those were the times she wished for death rather then feel the pain. She realized now how important that was. Otherwise her joints would go solid and she would not be able to bend her arms at all.
Her eyesight was less cloudy and she felt herself getting better. She didn't want to get better she wanted her dad. Why did she cheat death, she should be dead.
Again she woke up in different hospital. Where she went for her second operation; for grafts to her arms. She had found out that over a night that she was unconscious she was flown to a hospital in Germany. The Witness Protection Program thought it would safer if she was out of the country.
Each day she was having another finger unwrapped. She felt like an overgrown advents calendar.
Physiotherapy became more aggressive as bandages were removed. Finally, she was allowed to have a mirror. She used the free fingers she had to hold the mirror shakily to her face. She had her eyes closed she couldn't look right away. She had a moment of fear to see what she had become. She finally brought herself to look at her face that she hadn't seen in over a month. Surprisingly her face wasn't that badly damaged, by placing her arms in front of her face, she had saved it from being burned. She only had one small scar over eyebrow where some of the flames had jumped too. Something she could easily hide when she was able to pluck her eyebrows. Why the hell couldn't they tell me this, instead of making me worry she thought angrily.
Every three days she had the bandages replaced. This was by far the worst ordeal to go through, but it could not be avoided. She had to sit in the saline bath while the bandages were unwrapped, that was not too bad, but underneath the bandages were special gauze strips which had to be removed. This involved gentle work with the showerhead, and an inch-by-inch peeling of the material, which had stuck to open wounds. She told them she didn't want the drugs; she wanted to feel the pain. Her punishment for what she did, she killed her dad, and she needed to pay for that.
She was now on her third operation. She was familiar with the routine, they wake her up, take away her drinking straw, put her to sleep with drugs, then wake her up again by moving you about on a trolley. She could barely understand what they were saying because they kept speaking in German. She kept trying to tell them she didn't speak German, so they gave her a German/English dictionary. She had plenty of time to read..
After that operation she awoke in a different room. She was no longer in intensive care, her legs were not supported but her knees were fixed at forty-five degrees, no doubt as a result of the month's lack of movement. She noticed that she was no longer surrounded by bottles and monitoring machinery. She also had a tutor in her room for four hours a day, so she could receive a High School diploma
As her burns healed, She was getting back more movement in her arms and hands. The dead skin started to peel away now as if she just had bad sunburn. She was peeling and itching all over.
They wanted to start her on walking after she had spent three months lying in hospital bed. Her first attempts at walking were not a success. She could not straighten her legs and she fell onto the supporting nurses arms.
She was still suffering physiotherapy torture, now lifting and lowering her legs in bed and trying to straighten and bend her knees. She embraced the pain What doesn't kill you makes you stronger right?
Her hair fell in long blonde waves down her back as she walked out the hospital into the early morning sunshine, almost a year after the explosion. She looked almost normal, except for the burnt skin on her arms and some slight scarring on her abdomen. Those would all be fixed in time.
She knew walking out of that hospital she was not the same person she was before. She had killed her dad even if it was not directly. He would not have died if she didn't get involved with the devil. She survived his attempt to destroy her, and she had survived for a reason. She had also learned a valuable lesson trust no one.
Chloe was gone her name was now Natalie Ryan; Natalie was born in Germany, spoke fluent English and had just graduated from High School.
Her eyes burned with a fiery anger that wasn't there before but even the heat that touched her skin could not melt the ice that surrounded her heart. She had to get back to Kansas. She had things she needed to do, and a man she needed to kill.
She remembered searching all over Smallville for him, until she found him at her gravesite. She looked at him staring at her. Did he see the burns, but then she realized she was supposed to be dead. But looking at him brought back so many memories of the nights they spent working together to get Lionel.
She subsided her rage and walked closer to him, she was glad they were alone. When he suggested they go to his car, she went more so nobody else would see her.
She was so grateful to be speaking English; she had been speaking German for so long, although she was now fluent.
She told him her story one day, when she came to him while they were working on ways to destroy Lionel. She needed to tell someone.
/Present Day/
Chloe raced through the streets in her sapphire blue Jaguar as those thoughts swirled around her head. She needed to see Lex, even more then before, only he understood her pain.
TBC