Disclaimer: Still don't own any of the characters having to do with Withouta Trace, nor do I have any financial claims with CBS or its affiliates. Or if I do, am still waiting for the inheritance from rich grandfather who happened to own CBS thirty years ago. I can still hope, can't I?
A/N: Okay, I'm about halfway through this thing, maybe a little more, so I'm just taking a quick minute to say thanks to all my reviewers and to warn yall about this next chapter. It's a little vicious at the end.
When my eyes finally opened a few hours later, I bleary looked into the faces of a circle of familiar people standing around the couch I was sprawled upon. Dr. Aldersyde, his nurses, and the attacker all watched me with a curious strangeness. I jolted upwards onto my elbows when I saw the man who attacked me and was instantly detained by Dr. Aldersyde hands setting me back onto my upright pillow
"Are you insane?" I hissed, glaring at Dr. Aldersyde and clenching one of his wrists in my hand. I was more afraid and unsettled than angry, but he didn't need to know that. "I could have been killed! What were you thinking? When I agreed to controversial treatment, I didn't think it would threaten my life, Dr. Aldersyde. I don't remember ever consenting to this yesterday on that lovely little pre-battle trail ride, thank you! In fact—"
"But the point is," he began with a relieved, almost happy look smeared across his face, "you remembered." I stopped talking, but my mouth fell open slightly, making me look like an extremely dried out fish.
"What?" I breathed. He motioned to the nurses and they backed away from us. The doctor grasped my hands.
"Don't you get it, Sam?" He whispered eagerly, "You remembered! In all your other attacks except for the one which sent you here, you would wake up the next morning feeling fine and totally unaware of what happened the day before! But, here you are, three hours later, with a clear memory of what you went through." He gave me a moment as the realization washed over me.
"Does this mean I'm cured?" I asked in a hushed, hopeful voice. Dr. Aldersyde sat down next to me on the couch and smiled bashfully.
"Not quite, Miss Spade," he chortled, running a hand though his salt-and-pepper brown hair. "This is truly remarkable. Do you know how incredibly swift this recovery is coming along? Most patients that I've treated with this syndrome experience this sort of health three, four years after their diagnosis. You've been here six months and already your progress is unfathomable." He stopped, glancing at my gaping expression, and sighed. "What's driving you, Sam?" Dr. Aldersyde asked quietly.
"Huh?" I responded intelligently.
"The pure desire to just get out of a psyche facility can't be fuelling this recovery of yours," he explained, watching me to see my reaction. I closed my mouth finally and blinked. The question rolled over and over in my mind, but I honestly couldn't come up with any other answer except to heal my wounded pride, which is what I told him. He snorted and shook his head in dismissal. "Well, it's not for me to pry into that, I guess. It's just…I couldn't begin to imagine what sort of power your motivation is bringing you. Get some rest."
He stood up and the nurses returned to administer a small sea of pills to me. However, Dr. Aldersyde pointed to two or three of them and the nurse cleared them away into a small bottle. The nurse saw that I noticed the reduction of my medicine, and smiled. She said she almost felt like congratulating me. I said I almost felt like thanking her. Then, I froze when the attacker walked over to me, now redressed in a formal gray suit and tie. He stood next to the couch and removed the hat he wore.
"No hard feelings, miss," he muttered shyly. He offered a hand in apology and I was surprised by how gentle the beast that could have easily killed me really was. "I was only following orders." I managed a weak smile before he left the room. Then, I leaned back my head and rested against the pillows.
The doctor gave me the two weeks off to rest and spend as I pleased. He said that with the effort I showed him today, he was eager to get to work the next day or so, but understood that these things couldn't be rushed. However, as I watched his excited, jittery words sputter off of his scientifically fascinated lips, I knew we felt the same anxiousness to proceed.
When night fell and morning rose the next morning, I awoke at six thirty or so in anticipation of the day's ride. To my surprise, the nurse didn't come for me until nearly ten o' clock in the morning, informing me that today's therapy would be conducted in the clinic which disappointed me greatly. The prospect of spending hours inside a small, four-walled room with nothing but a doctor, a two-way mirror, and a giant poster which read "Bee Happy" with a smiling, cartoon bumble bee in the center for company, did not appeal to me. I removed my chaps in submission and tied a robe around the shorts and tee shirt I changed into.
"Good morning, Sam," Dr. Aldersyde greeted when the nurse had escorted me into the same white-washed room I had visualized. He did not look up from a chart on which I saw my name typed neatly in the right-hand corner for a few more moments and then only to release the nurse.
"I had to admit, Doctor, when I woke up I was expecting another trail ride, not a…" Dr. Aldersyde handed me a pair of large, cushiony earphones, cutting me off with a loud cough. I frowned at his uncharacteristic frostiness and took them from his hands.
"Please, lay back on the table," he instructed, pointing to the padded examination cot atop several drawers like a doctor's office. I obeyed and he rolled a mobile contraption of wires and knobs and switches until he and the thing were adjacent to where I lay. I was silent as he attached several cords and pressure-sensitive wires to my arms, temples, chest, and stomach. He indicated to the headphones and I put them on, trying to interpret his sudden change of mood.
"We'll be conducting a few tests on your memory today," he said simply. "Please relax and breathe deeply." That was all he said before he left the room and shut the door with a quiet click behind him. I nervously glanced towards the mirror which I knew he stood behind, and leaned my head back on the pillow. I could hear nothing for a few seconds before a quiet whirring softly blocked out all other noise in the room. I almost felt compelled to utter a quick prayer, but the shock of color and sound which bombarded my mind caught me off guard and I was left stunned and unmoving.
From the earphones, a horrendous melody of whistling and an inhuman screeching triggered flashes of reds and blacks and whites and blues to streak across my mental vision. The sound was intense, and I felt my body twitching in an instinctive response to it. My face was contorted, and I wanted desperately to rip the paraphernalia off of my skin, but bit my bottom lip hard and held fast. More than anything, I wanted the colors and forms to take shape, to make sense, to be able to understand what the purpose was. It built inside of me a growing feeling of fear and apprehension that climaxed as a burning white film enveloped my mind before it suddenly faded away.
I panted as the white slid out of focus into a peaceful neutral setting. Then, it was as if someone had set up an antique movie reel inside my head. The colors took form and created pictures and scenes. Of my past, I noticed. I saw myself as a little girl in a play pool I had forgotten even existed until now. Glimpses of my mom and dad sitting in old, wooden recliners beneath an even more ancient oak, birthday candles with four, six, twelve, seventeen candles illuminating them, sleepovers, firsts and lasts, all there in front of me. It was almost pleasant to see them all, but my body was still tense as if bound in rigor. There has to be something more¸ I thought to myself suspiciously, this can't be all…
I never finished the thought process because a terrible scream ripped from my lips and I gripped the sides of the bed in a panic. The faces and images of friends and family shattered. Instead, a horrible nightmare unfolded in my mind. I heard the ricocheting bangs of multiple guns erupting in my ears as a series of brutal flashbacks pressed against my mind. Except, they weren't flashbacks. I'd never seen them before. One after another, I saw men, women, children, mothers, and babies…all smothered, shot, hung, or asphyxiated. Somehow, I managed to count them as they forced themselves painfully into view.
A man, hung from the ceiling of a log cabin in the woods, eyes wide and unseeing, blue veins pulsing to his face. One. A woman, her face covered by a blood spattered pillowcase, with a knife jutting out from her chest. Two. Another woman, black, surrounded by a murky blue darkness I took for water with blood pouring from a gunshot wound in her back. Three. A teenaged boy with bound hands and feet abandoned in a small, lightless shack, head forced into the mouth of a live gas oven. Four. A young girl smothered by a pillow sprawled on a small bed, naked except for a small, stained shift. Five. A man, face down in a plate of rotted food, poisoned. Six. Hispanic woman curled in a fetal position on an expensive marble floor, her neck twisted in a backwards, broken stance. Seven. An older man in his sixties sunk to the bottom of a murky, algae-infested pool, drowned. Eight.
I felt sweat pouring down my face, and I questioned how much more I could take of this before my heart exploded and I died, right there on that table. I searched through the chaos in my mind for another murder, but, as quickly as they had come on, the images quieted, and just a tired blackness reflected against my eyes. The sound ceased, and all was still. As I struggled to regain a steady control over my breathing and clench my hands together to stop their trembling, I heard the door open and the sounds of rushed footsteps over to where I lay.
"Get this goddamned thing off of me," I hissed in a tired but strangely relieved voice. He ripped the wires from my skin and handed me a damp towel to wipe my face with. I tried to sit up, but the exertion of the experiment had stripped me of all energy that remained inside of me. He jammed a long scroll of printout paper into my file and threw it on his desk. I opened my eyes and was offered a glass of cold water which I took readily, sipping the welcomingly cold liquid down my throat.
"I couldn't say anything to you before the procedure," he explained apologetically, standing back for a moment and watching me with a hushed awe and something like fear. "So as not to adulterate the results. Audiomemoria therapy. It's new. Eastern. It triggers memory with sound and portrays what the person is seeing on a digital screen linked to these wires. Not many doctors in the US use it because it can be so ineffective, but I had the idea to try it on you and…and…" He let the air whistle out from between a slight gap in his teeth. "Jesus Christ, Sam, what the hell have you been through?" I finally managed to sit up.
"Who were those people?" I asked in stronger yet still broken voice. Before he even told me, I knew the answer. Eight murders. Eight. Eight. Goddamn, did I know who they were. And when they happened. And how they came into my memory. And who did nothing to avenge them. Faintly, amid the rushing of blood I which pounded in my ears, I heard Dr. Aldersyde tell me that he believed these were the eight stimulants which triggered my attacks. Eight murders, he hurried on, that he believed all were climatically linked with the man in New York who had brought on the last one I had, but I was far ahead of him. What I needed was time to think.
Weakly, I smiled, and told him of this requirement before rushing out of the room and into a bathroom stall as nausea quickly overcame me.
A/N: Well, you survived it, good. ;-D Sorry about the really abrupt ending, I've got lots more to add in the next chapter, but it was getting really late and I wanted to post something up because I don't know how hyper my computer is. (It erased like five articles I needed to hand into my page editor a couple days ago.) Reviews welcome!