Talker – Chapter Seventeen: Theories and Analyzations
Author's Note: Well I could have split it into two chapters, but then one would be pretty short and the other pretty long. So as it stands, it's one. And now it really is too long. Oh well. (I'm sorry about your hamster, Gray. Didn't mean to bring up bad memories! XO) Thanks to all for more than kind reviews.
"I never saw him fall. When did he hit his head?" Terry sat back down, eying the rather unattended fire in the growing daylight.
"I don't know, it must've been a while before we found him." Ana explained, arms crossed as she stared dejectedly into the sand. "I knew it was bad when I first took a look at him. God, I should've done something."
"What could you have done?" Kenneth said from behind.
"I don't know. Something." She was sure about that.
"It was just a seizure, it's not that dangerous, is it?" Terry said, helping Nicole toss some sand onto the discarded fire.
"It could get worse." She rubbed her temples in frustration.
"Anything could get worse. How does it look now?" Kenneth forced a bottle of water into her hands.
She paused, pushing out a long breath. "Well he…he's not in a coma, that's always a good sign. But that with this seizure thing and the color blindness—He's been hurt pretty bad. And now he's got the stress, the added injury, and I don't know what to do with him."
"Where is he now?" Terry looked around, but didn't see him.
"He slept a little bit. He's in and out." She said tiredly, sitting again and taking a drink of her water.
"Well he's made it through this much." Kenneth said surely, sensing the dismal mood amongst his group members. "If he can live through the infection, he can live through anything."
"I don't…" Ana stared. They all waited for her to continue, watching as she stared into the sand with her brow furrowed. She suddenly realized that they were all looking at her, and she straightened up with an uncomfortable mutter. "Well what I was going to say is…I was thinking about him just now. Before, I mean. When I was treating him. I was thinking about, you know…why he is the way he is."
This immediately drew their attention. They hadn't discussed the terms of Tyler's condition in great depth, being as they were so initially shocked about it. But when offered a possible reason, they were all interested. "What were you thinking?" Terry encouraged.
She bit her lip, wondering if her thoughts could come out less scattered than they were in her head. "I have this theory." She began, absently playing with the ends of her hair as she rubbed her sore shoulder. "I sort of thought at first that Tyler had some kind of immunity against it, or even a delayed reaction in his body. Naturally, I mean I'm assuming that's what we all thought. So I started thinking about why it would affect him lightly or what he had that others didn't and every damn paragraph to the last word and correct punctuation of every medical book I ever crammed into my head and came to the conclusion that it could be anything without me knowing what causes the infection in the first place." She had to take a breath after that. "But…"
"But…?" Kenneth repeated, curious.
"I was just…thinking." She held out her hands in a gesture to aid her muddled explanation. "After someone has a seizure, they can stop breathing. Or drown in their own vomit. But…anyway, he wasn't breathing for a minute after he had his seizure, so I was thinking I might have to give him mouth to mouth. And then I just…" she made a frustrated grumble, rubbing her cheek. "I was thinking that he's had that head injury for a while now. Since before we found him. Definitely before he was bitten." She stopped, biting her lip.
"Well I'm not following." Terry said, a confused expression clear on his face.
"Okay, look at it this way," she started again with a new determination. "When you have to give someone CPR, it means they've stopped breathing. It means they're dead already. What if Tyler didn't die from being bitten?"
"If he didn't die from being bitten, he wouldn't've gotten back up again." Kenneth stated.
"What if Tyler had a seizure, and he stopped breathing? He would be dead." She repeated.
"…Yeah?" Kenneth felt she was close to making her point here.
"Okay—and it doesn't happen very often—but sometimes, just sometimes, someone can start breathing again without recessitation. All on their own." She swallowed.
"No, I think I see what you're saying." Terry said, eyebrows raising. "Yeah, you mean like he…well he started breathing again after he 'died'?"
She nodded. "I don't know what the hell this disease is, but it apparently plays by some ground rules. If Tyler stopped breathing, he was clinically dead, which means the disease had reign of his corpse. But if his body gets kicked into gear by…I don't know, maybe a rush of adreniline or something, it could bring him to life again. But he'd have already been dead so-"
"The disease already would've had time to become active." Kenneth finnished, considering it. "It's an interesting idea, I'll admit."
Ana seemed satisfied that her thoughts were clear, biting down on her thumbnail. "It's just a guess. It's plausible…barely. It's asking for a lot of specifics."
"It does make sense, though." Terry threw an agreeing nod at Kenneth.
"Well maybe our Tyler's not a miracle at all." Ana concluded. "Maybe… he's the biggest medical fluke in history."
Tyler let his eyes fall shut, breathing in the warming air to calm himself and still his strange quaking. By now he was wracked at every nerve and it had taken quite a bit of effort to get himself fully awake, but he felt better once he was sitting up. His stomach hurt in a different way now. Where once it was restless and uneasy, it was now hollow and strained like someone had punched him in the abdomen, a feeling he obviously didn't appriciate. There was also a very odd pain in his head just behind his eyes. Along with those internal problems, he suffered from a few scratches and some bite marks on his right arm that he had received in the struggle. The disturbing thing was that they hadn't done it on purpose. Not that it mattered, being bitten a second time. It was a small, if the only, advantage to already being infected.
He wasn't sure that he remembered the events of the last few hours correctly, as they seemed to be massively jumbled at first. He saw the faces of the undead in his mind, himself cowering, scrambling to get away, a pain in his side. Tripping, stumbling, sand in his shoes. The suspicious taste of vomit in his mouth and the feeling of someone holding onto him, a voice instructing him to drink something and lie down somewhere and…his head all seemed to be a blur.
He tried to focus on something to clear it, such as where the others were. He deduced that they left him alone to recover. In fact…In fact yes, he thought he remembered Ana telling him just that. Of course. One by one the events in his head started to place themselves in order, until at last he was up to date with his current life and rather dissapointed. Only moments ago, he had been in an entirely different place. As he lay, mind flitting through a series of sleep and dellirium, bits and pieces of his mind had become enveloped in a wayward dream. It was simple, nothing spectacular like dreams he'd been known to have before. Not like when he was the king of Spain waging a monumental war against the people of Atlantis. He was at home. And it had been that simple. Except for the fact that his dog had been there, and his dog had been dead from a long-shot case of rabies long before he moved into that apartment. Despite that he was alone, it was still a far cry better than this beach, and this feeling.
He didn't fully understand what had happened to him, but he knew it had put some stress on the others. A panic attack maybe? Whatever it was, he knew he wouldn't want to deal with himself had the situation been reversed. It seemed like he was only a further burden to them with each passing day, and that gave him a signifigant guilt factor to handle along with his illness. There was nothing he could do. He was pathetic, he couldn't care for himself when it was most important that he did, and he was beginning to wonder if his grant to live past being bitten was a curse rather than a miracle. He'd always been a nuisance, he knew that. The only child his parents could harldy afford, but loved and so were obligated to suffer for. The aspiring writer who had, ironically up until just recently before the outbreak when his career seemed to be taking off, been barely getting by with odd jobs. And now, the bumbling half-infected creature whose only purpose now seemed to be to be a bother on everyone else's mind.
Well he'd just have to make due, he decided. He had before. Throughout his life, his efforts had been a subconscious struggle to prove that he was worth his parents' sacrifices for him, to become a successful writer and see that he had known what he was doing all along. He had to prove to himself that he wasn't a failiure, constantly hunting for publishers, picking up leads, and chasing his muse. He'd gotten lucky quite a few times. And now, he would get past this sickness and become a working member of the group. His goals in life had changed, and become much more dire and immediate. But he wouldn't let them down, because he'd made damn sure in life that he never let anyone down. Good old dependable Ty, who bails his friend out of jail at three in the morning when he needed to get home, who looks after his cousin's cat for a week when she was out of town and actually keeps it alive, who pretends once to be gay just so that his panicky friend Mick can have a double date with some clubhopping biker and his brother.
He almost laughed at the memory, but laughing now was just too much effort. Besides, that memory was long behind him, part of a life he could no longer claim. All the same, he couldn't help but remember them. It almost seemed like they had a life of their own, and their purpose was to haunt him. He just couldn't get his mind off of those things. A very breif job during college when he had worked at a new age book store. The first time he'd moved out to this place and met Cody. They seemed to him like events he'd read out of a story somewhere or seen out of a movie, not real people and real things that had happened to him. But he didn't want to think about them. They no longer existed. His friends were dead. His parents were dead. There would never be another reunion with either. Ah, this damn pain in his head…
He looked down at his gnarled arm in frustration before letting a troubled sigh fall from his chest. No friends or loved ones to rely on. Maybe he really had been relying on other people his entire life, emotionally anyway. Though through most of his life he had kept to himself and been on his own, he had never once thought that those people would be gone completely. Now they were. And he began to think that maybe he had needed them without realizing it. But he himself? …Well he had never been needed. No one had ever needed to be near him or needed to stay with him or talk with him. Not his parents, not his friends, not his occasional lovers. Certainly Ana and the others didn't need him, he was a pest at most. He was truly unneeded, the world could take him and leave him, but somehow, accidentally, it had left him breathing.
He didn't want to be here. But in reality, he didn't want his old life either. Not if he had truly been useless that entire time. For twenty-four years. He'd never once thought of himself that way, and now he saw how arrogant that was. Nothing of him was needed, by anyone he knew. What had he been thinking?
He let his head fall into his hands, remembering breifly his mother's laugh and the way the streets of Salem looked on a winter morning. The car his parents gave him on his seventeenth birthday and the way Cody managed to spill something on himself every time he ate. The taste of strawberry margarita and tequila shots and how much asprin it took to kill a hangover versus how much it took to kill you if you weren't careful. It didn't matter that it was gone because none of it had ever mattered in the first place. And for the first time, in such a long time, since long before the disaster had even started, Tyler began to cry. His long-endured wall of numbness and shock from his surroundings fell away as he buried his face into his hands and sank into a series of muted sobs. He felt like such an idiot.
He heard someone approach, but he didn't think much of it. Not until he realized that Ana was right beside him. "Tyler…" she said sympathetically, obviously confused.
He looked up instantly, tears spilling down his face in shock. "Ana, I uh-." He gruffly wiped away his tears and stuttered. "I'm sorry, I didn't see…"
"It's alright." She said in a hushed tone, nervous about the state he was in. He knew she must've thought he was cracking.
He desperately tried to get rid of his tears, but they were more persistant than he was. He hated looking like a pitiful sap who couldn't take the pressure. He could take it fine, the emotion just…caught him off guard, that was all.
"…We've all cried, Tyler…" she tried to assure him as she sat down. "I understand."
He looked away angrily, still wiping his eyes. "I…"
"Just don't worry about it…" she tenatively put a hand on his shoulder.
"I'm sorry…" he repeated, not turning to face her.
"Tyler-"
"I know you don't like me to apologize, Ana…" his tone was stern as he cut her off. "But I'm sorry. I am."
Ana cringed and bit her lip, kneading her hand gently into his shoulder. "You shouldn't be. None of this is your fault."
He didn't say anything for a while, at least not until he was sure that he'd stopped crying. "…I was just thinking about…things I should've forgotten. I'll be fine here, and it's late, you should go back to camp."
"I'll stay here, if it's all the same to you…" she said quietly, letting both hands drop into her lap. "I don't want to leave you out here alone."
"I'll be fine." He said again.
"I won't." she countered boldly.
He blinked a few times, taking a glance over at her and drawing his gaze back to the sand as a sudden sharp pain stuck him in the head again. "If you're sure." He muttered over it, putting his head back down in his hand. All of his emotional pain was suddenly replaced in entirity by a physical one. It buzzed in his brain and numbed down to his jaw, making him grunt and clench his eyes shut.
"Are you alright?" Ana's voice broke through his haze and he slowly opened his eyes.
"Just a sort of…" he stopped, his vision was spiraling madly. He couldn't make out the images. Everything blurred and he rubbed his eyes harshly. There was something wrong with his vision, he was sure. There was something different, something…something…he looked down at his hands and stared in amazement, stone still.
"Tyler? Tyler, look at me, what's going on?" he snapped to attention at Ana's voice, eyes wide and focused on her as he tried to process his shock. She nearly jumped when he smiled, almost as though he was seeing something surprisingly familiar. "What the hell is wrong?" she asked, in the dark about his strange behavior.
Something was definitely different about his vision. "You know something…" he began, still smiling lightly. "Your hair really is a pretty shade of blond."