Hel-Kat
…Temporal lobe…third degree…massive hemorrhage…busted legs…over seventy-eight percent…internal damage…pelvis split…bleeding in the abdominal cavity…inner sea leaking…spiral fracture…collar bone…scalp laceration …rotator cuff…big ol' whack…must be the shard…careful don't remove it yet…
These sounds came in the haze, like kites without streamers of meaning. They floated in dark, and were the only things besides the burning of pain. Pain, which filled the universe, for there was nothing else. Sensory deprivation torture chamber, that was it, wasn't it? Nothing had existed before and nothing would exist after, for it would never end. The pain was a living thing and it existed in every part of her and would go on living on and on and on.
Then one day the pain stopped. Except that was not right, the pain had not gone anywhere. She had gone, had floated, no, sunk, below it, sunk down to the depths below it, below anything, to where blackness had weight and was heavy, and breathing stopped, but that was okay, because while it was unpleasant while she liked breathing it was easier to be a little uncomfortable with empty lungs and not feel pain than to be in the place where you saw blackness but felt the burning red glowing all over you like chemicals it was okay it was good so just relax and don't worry and you know, hush, because there might be things in this blackness and things might hear and she might be dragged back into the pain or find something worse that made her jump back up to it so please be very very quiet or -
Two yellow eyes glowed out of the dark and behind them appeared a woman, naked and dragging herself along with her hands and soon she saw why because the woman was dragging her own legs along behind her and down below the waist she was dead, nothing but a blue and grey corpse.
She leaped back for the level above right at the moment when someone decided to reach down and pull her. Leaped because the half-dead woman was coming for her and would be waiting for her down just below the pain any time she should happen to fall and so she tried to get up, up past the fire and glow because the woman would not reach up for her but would grab whatever fell down, and someone was pulling from above. Air was pushed into her lungs and it was hot and used, but it was air, so as it escaped through her mouth and nose she tried to hold it in, but it rushed out and she tried to get it back, but it was no use. Her belly hitched with her effort but that only increased the pain there. Again the warm, used air was shoved in and it went in her mouth to the back and came up in her nose and tried to exit that way but hit a block where someone was holding her nostrils shut and the air stopped but the pressure there increased and made her ears feel full, but most of it went down to her lungs, which also felt strangely pressured. When it came out this time she pushed and choked and tasted blood, but then she whooped, and from beyond she heard some word of encouragement and whooped inward again, hurting her belly so she cried and the airway was opened. There were fuzzy distant cheers that she couldn't see for the red glow and a big slab of a hand on her forehead. "Good job," she thought she heard, "…a doctor..always…." A bitter taste filled her mouth and did not go away for a long time. But as it faded, so did the pain, and Helga Sinclair drifted off to sleep on the lulling current of the medicine.