He loved this moment. He looked forward all through the tedious day to this moment. The moment of escape.
Of freedom.
He keyed the accelerator and felt the 8.3 liter, 500 horsepower engine come to life, startling a pair of seagulls into dropping the French fry they’d been fighting over.
Armo roared down Morning View Drive, pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway and was hit so hard by a gasoline tanker truck that the Viper went airborne for fifty feet, spinning in mid-air as Armo thought, Uh-oh: that was a mistake.
The Viper landed on the far side of the PCH, bounced over the low metal railing that fronted the beach, and came to rest upside down on the sand, knocking a three-inch crack into Armo’s thick skull.
For a long time, a very long time, Armo saw, smelled, tasted and heard nothing.
Nothing. A very long nothing.
And then . . . a sound! Meaningless, but something rather than the nothing.
Two days after that single sound, Armo opened his eyes and saw blurry figures.
The next day he opened his eyes again and saw a man’s face. There was something familiar about the face, but he couldn’t place it, just vague, distorted memories of previous brief emergences into consciousness. His grip on awareness was still extremely weak, in and out, with no way to know how much time passed between each brief contact with reality.
The next day he opened his eyes again and said, “Water.”
“Your fluids are in your IV,” a male voice said. “You are in a medical facility. Your injuries are healing nicely.”
“Whuh?”
“I’m Dr. Park. You are safe, you are in a medical facility,” that blandly comforting voice said. Armo squinted and sort of saw the doctor, a plain-looking, middle-aged Asian man with graying hair. “You’re going to be all right.”
“A damn sight better than all right,” a female voice with a hint of the old south said, but he’d have had to turn his head to see her and found he couldn’t quite do that.
“Tomorrow we’ll get that neck brace off you and try some liquids,” Dr. Park said. And Armo went back to sleep.
The woman’s voice said, “One more day, Park. Then he’s mine.”
The next day Armo was feeling much better. He could see clearly, though the dull beige hospital room was nothing much to look at. He saw himself, most of himself, stretched out under a white sheet. He tried to move a leg and it moved. Tried to move the other leg and it ached, but it too was still attached. Hands? There they were, right in front of his face, and he could count to ten on his fingers.
“So, how are we today?” Dr. Park bustled into the room.
“Water?”
The doctor poured from a plastic jug into a paper cup and held it to Armo’s parched lips. The pleasure was exquisite.
“What happened to me?” Armo asked.
“Well, you had a disagreement with a tanker truck. Broken leg, broken collarbone, multiple contusions and abrasions, the most serious matter being a cracked skull.”
“Is my . . .” Armo pointed with awkward fingers at his crotch.
“Yes, your penis and testicles are undamaged.” Dr. Park rolled his eyes.
Armo sighed relief. “My car?”
“Totaled, I’m afraid.”
Armo fought back tears. “Is my mom or dad here?”
“We’ll talk about all that later,” Dr. Park said. He did something with a small toggle on the clear plastic line that ran into the veins of Armo’s wrist and a wave of weariness flooded him. Armo closed his eyes, but he did not lose consciousness—Dr. Park was not an anesthesiologist and gave him a dose that would put a normal-size person under, but Armo was not a normal-size person.
Armo listened as a second person walked in. He’d heard this voice before, the tense female voice out of the south. The last time it had said, A damn sight better than all right.
“How’s our patient?”
“Much better. The spinal fracture is almost completely healed. The skull fracture is knitting up well. His vitals are steady, in fact—”
“So he’ll recover completely?”
“He’ll likely have some memory loss,” Dr. Park said.
“So much the better.”
“I don’t think we—” Dr. Park began in a chiding tone, but the woman cut him off.
“It may well make him more manageable. Anyway, we’ll give him enough to fill whatever hole is in his memory.”
Armo heard the woman walk slowly around, from his right side to his left, then back. “You must admit, he’s a nearly perfect specimen. Big, strong and not overly bright.”
Armo frowned at that, but quickly resumed a blank, unconscious expression.
“I don’t know about that, Colonel,” Dr. Park said. “According to his school record he’s a rather difficult character.”
Colonel Gwendolyn DiMarco, US Army, laughed. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing he soon won’t be quite human.”
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