Godspeed

Chapter 6

With shocking speed, I was wholly immersed, and struggled as if to breathe my last below the heaving sea of reality.

This awareness was nothing akin to the peaceful return from sleep one feels at gentle daybreak. There were no birds to herald morning. No streaming light of the sun's warmth peeking in through the edges of slight, rustled curtains. It was the violent, wrenching sensation of being ripped away from dreaming - from a place so safe and warm, no sane being would ever willingly vacate it.

The body that imprisoned my living soul felt foreign to me now; the soothing presence of the fireplace in Schuyler's bright red room surpassed by the feeling I was being consumed by the unquenchable thirst of the flame. It bolted as lightning through every inch of skin, shred of muscle, and the very marrow of bone. I felt not near the fire now, I burned in it.

I tried to scream but there was something in my mouth - against my lips - between my teeth.

It was a strap of sorts and smelled of newly tanned leather, though it was difficult to make out any other tastes or smells beyond the bitter, copper trails of my own blood on my swollen tongue.

My entire form convulsed. My teeth clamped down hard against the strap, and I made a sound that I had never heard from any being before in my life: not man, woman, or even pitiful animal mortally wounded in the hunt and near to death.

My eyes, which I forced open by sheer strength of will, refused to comply with my directive wishes and remained maddeningly beyond my control. I watched the ceiling quickly scroll past as my irises rolled up and back; another wave of heat and pain seared through my weakened, fragile flesh.

I shivered and somehow managed to shake, strapped though I was to a hard, narrow table in this space that appeared to be more laboratory than operating theater. The room was large, cold, and echoed with the sound of Godspeed's maniacally murmuring voice as he uttered words I hadn't a prayer to understand.

Even without that understanding, everything in me reacted to the sound, and internally I spun. The light, rapid fluttering in my chest told me that unconsciousness was intoxicatingly near, and I ached for it, wanted nothing more now than to escape the pain once more and vanish into the unknowing bliss of oblivion. If death were anything like unconsciousness, I thought, then I would not fight any longer a final descent into that silent, endless night.

Before I drifted off into those gentle, almost motherly arms, the paralyzing pain began again. I wondered if it was the greatest of the sacrifices Godspeed had said must be made to prolong my life. I wondered if it constituted the crushing confines of a new, eternally hellish existence.

I choked upon the strap as a resistant horse fights the bit. He reacted to the sound and rushed to my side. He examined me, a single nod acknowledged the swirling fear in my burning, arid eyes.

"Bite down," the doctor instructed. He turned back toward the panel of knobs, switches and levers behind him and analyzed it with obvious concern. "Hard."

A strong charge built in the very air around me, as mysterious and frightening pieces of equipment spun and chugged with quickening cadence. It was powerful, steam-driven machinery, and I heard an eerie, electrical snap followed by a loud thump as the energy discharged. Finally, I understood the origin of the pain I'd felt before, as again it burned through me, beginning on the left side of my chest then veering off in divergent directions: up through my head, to the side down my arms and to the tips of my fingers... to the soles of my feet, as though insistently seeking ground.

My heart rebelled in response, wanting to come to a full stop in protest of this abuse and manipulation of its limits. The force of the charge was too strong for it to deny, however. Irate as it was, and for as much as it made me suffer for its anger, it succumbed to reanimation, revived by the shock but never quite strong enough to truly absorb it.