Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
Oh Jesus, I thought, regaining consciousness, bit by bit.
What have they done?
Slowly, the room came into focus around me, but other than the flash memory of the oncoming Honda, I really wasn't sure where I was or what exactly had happened. I just knew that the two street racers coming at me over the hill was a mistake that I was now going to be forced to pay for.
Consciousness faded once more, taking with it the pain...
I came awake, hurting everywhere, but otherwise rested.
Apparently, I was still in the hospital, my left arm slung from a scaffold and wrapped from hand to shoulder. With my right hand, gently, I reached up to explore the bandages that encased my entire head and face, a shiver of horror racing up my spine when I wondered at the implications of that.
I heard the door to my room open, and watched quietly as a doctor came in, complete with lab coat, stethoscope, silver temples and clipboard.
He looked to be the poster child for shit news.
“Tammy,” he announced, shutting the door softly behind him.
“It’s time we talked about your options…”
Well fuck... I thought.
Thirty three months later…
There it was again.
“What is that?” I asked no one in particular, because as far as I knew, I was the only person within five hundred yards of where I sat reading and it had been that way pretty much since I’d recovered from the ‘EVENT’.
I had begun to think of it as the ‘EVENT’ in an attempt to lend a bad situation a modicum of humor, lest I go mad of loneliness and hate for the kids responsible.
For almost three years now, since being discharged from the hospital, I had experienced not a single touch that wasn’t meant to measure or repair something broken and at thirty-two years of age, I feared I may soon forget what sex had even been like other than a kaleidoscope of physical, mental and emotional stimuli, not to mention the hormonal exchange between sex partners.
The plaintive whine was barely audible from where I sat, so, putting aside the book I was reading, I rose, panning my good ear back and forth in an effort to zero in on the source of the sounds, and slowly moving in the general direction they seemed to be coming from.
There...it’s coming from below, down by the river. I thought, turning and craning my head that way for a better look.