The Meridians(16)

The something was a rock. He hit it face first, and pain exploded through his head. He felt like someone had poured molten lava over him. He popped up instantly, clapped his hands on his face, and ran screaming toward his house.

Halfway there, he felt something strange on his hands, and managed to pry them away from his burning skin long enough to glance down at them.

They were covered in blood.

Benjamin screamed then as the thought came that he might be bleeding to death, right there on the street where he had lived his whole life. Still, he managed to maintain enough rationality to continue running home.

His mother, hearing his screams, ran out of the house when Benjamin was still a good fifty feet away, and that was when he knew he was going to die. Because his mother, an avid churchgoer who would never dream of breaking a commandment, definitely took the Lord's name in vain. Loudly, in fact, screaming "Oh my God" at the top of her lungs and running to him.

She scooped him up into her arms and rushed him to their bathroom, where she took a towel and began wiping what seemed like quarts of blood from off his face. When she had finally taken it all off, she sighed in relief.

Benjamin, crying, managed to say, "What?" in between sobs.

His mother explained that the blood had all come from a cut not even an inch long. Benjamin didn't believe it. All that blood?

"Heads bleed a lot, Benjamin," she said. Then, upon closer inspection, she added, "Still, I think we may need to get you some stitches."

Benjamin started crying that much harder. Stitches were bad news, he knew. They were what you got when you were bleeding so bad that it wouldn't stop. They were what soldiers got right before they Bled Out and Needed Morfeem and Died Horribly. He knew because he had seen a war movie on TV once, and that happened to one of the guys on the show.

In spite of his fears, however, his mother packed him and Gina up in the car and took them to the hospital.

And it was awful. He did get stitches, and though he did not Bleed Out or Need Morfeem or Die Horribly, he was most uncomfortable, especially when the doctor had to inject his face with something called anesthetic which was supposed to take away the pain of putting in the stitches but which itself hurt horribly and what was the point of that then? The doctor didn't seem to even notice when Benjamin screamed loudly as the needle sunk what seemed like about six or seven feet into his face.

But the nurse did. She was a kind-faced, quiet older lady who was helping hold Benjamin steady through the procedure, and at the moment he was at his most panicked, she let go of him and put a calming hand on his. It was like sunshine soared into his soul at that moment, calming him, giving him peace.

The rest of the procedure was no problem, and Benjamin knew it was because of the nurse. His fate was signed, sealed, and delivered from that moment: he would be a nurse.

And never once did he regret the decision...until the night of his twenty eighth birthday. The night he was doing rounds in the NICU. He had several children he was monitoring, checking oxygen saturation levels, watching for the telltale signs of distress that would mean a doctor had to be called, and generally acting like a mother hen in her coop.

Suddenly, the hairs rose on the back of his neck. A strange pressure built up in his mouth and nose, as though he were in an unpressurized airplane that was rapidly rising into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. His ears popped.

He turned around, and, impossibly, there was someone else in the NICU. It was a man, his back turned to Benjamin, standing next to one of the incubators. The baby in the incubator was a preemie, a sweet baby that the hospital staff was calling The Angel. Partly that was because the baby's skin was so translucent it almost glowed, and partly because his middle name was Angel, but mostly it was because the baby just had a certain presence about him. That seemed silly to those who hadn't seen the child - how could any baby, let alone a preemie, have enough of a personality to have such charisma? But it was true. Something about the baby was...powerful. Magnetic.

Now there was someone standing over The Angel, and Benjamin shuddered. The man had his back to him, so all Benjamin could really make out was that the guy was wearing a gray suit coat with matching slacks.

"Excuse me?" said Benjamin in as strong a voice as he could muster. "How did you get in here?"

The man turned to look at the nurse then, and Benjamin stopped moving toward the man. He was old, looking almost like he was in his mid-seventies, and he had the grayest eyes he had ever seen, deep and non-reflective as slate.

"When am I?" asked the man.

Benjamin's mouth dropped open as he realized that the man's face was a mass of scar tissue, the result of massive wounds in the not-too-distant past, and he was sporting what looked like an open bullet wound on his shoulder. "Are you okay?" asked Benjamin.

The man ignored him, simply swinging back to look at The Angel. "The baby," muttered the man, and then said something else, so low that Benjamin couldn't hear him.

"What?" said Benjamin.

The man turned back to him again, and in a calm voice, as though explaining nothing more interesting than the weather, he said, "I've been living in Hell."

Benjamin's open mouth turned into a positively gaping maw of surprise. The man looked back at The Angel, and added, "I have to kill this baby."

Benjamin was hardly a world champion boxer, or a karate expert, or anything even remotely related to violence. But when he heard that, he felt all the muscles in his body bunch up. He realized that, as a nurse, he was not only prepared to minister to the sick, but to harm the healthy if that was what it took to protect his patients. His hands balled into two tight - though unschooled - fists, and he dropped into a pre-lunge position, ready to throw himself at the man.