--=-Chapter 44: Follow Me--=-

I followed Alice into the patient prep area of another operating room. This one was just across the hall from the waiting room. Looking through the observation window, the room was very similar to the one I'd fought Crowdent in, even down to the signs of a struggle in the surgical bay.

"Here, take off your coat and sit down," Alice said, pulling out an office chair for me. "We'll need to shave away some of that fur to clean and stitch things up."

This was where Alice's surgical team had been when the vortex touched down. Every time the day looped, Alice found herself holding a memory crystal she'd ripped from a suddenly screaming Mr. Peterson. She pulled out the crystal just before his open skull healed and closed over it. The next moment, a monster spider appeared, which apparently led to a mess.

I didn't imagine getting stitches would feel nice, and I wasn't sure it would be worth it. It wasn't like there was any risk of an infection or bleeding out. The day would loop before a fever would have a chance to take hold.

This was the latest into the day that I'd lasted, but according to Sori, the day reset at the same time each loop. Assuming he was right and not just speaking out his ass, there couldn't be many hours left before the reset. It seemed like it would be a better use of our time to regroup. As far as I knew, there was still the other monster crow to worry about.

Ultimately, it would take longer to explain what I thought than to just accept the stitches. Besides, whatever my insights into the situation, I didn't want to be the random guy telling the woman doctor how to do her job. Better to avoid obvious cliches when possible.

It was a bit delicate removing my lab coat. Blood was already drying the coat to the rents in my flesh, but I eventually peeled out of it and sat down in the rolling chair.

Alice pulled out some supplies, including a pair of hair clippers and a notebook and pen. "Here, take your hand away while I shave this area. I know you can't speak, but try to draw what happened."

After washing her hands, she probed my wounds, taking the clippers to a few different spots. "Whoah, your skin is really black; I hadn't expected that." The skin underneath my fur was so black that, if the clippers hadn't left stubble, the shaved area would have looked like a hole in reality itself.

She moved on. "I guess I should catch you up, too. After we made sure you weren't going to suddenly stop breathing, we finished clearing most of the floor, except for the ICU and emergency room. It wasn't long after that that we heard the sound of something trying to break through one of the doors." Alice said, speaking with a bit of a raised voice to be heard over the sound of the clippers.

I did my best to draw quick sketches of what had happened to me, starting with sitting next to Jessica while she talked.

"Here, scoot over next to that sink," Alice said. Nearby was a sink with shower head on a hose. I dutifully rolled myself next to it, and Alice gently rinsed the areas she'd shaved.

"You should brace yourself. I need to scrub those wounds, and it will probably hurt worse than the stitches." She said as I began to relax.

As a rule, doctors are not gentle when scrubbing wounds, and Alice was no exception. It hurt almost as much as getting shot, and I groaned at the radiating pain.

It must have sounded like a growl because Alice pulled back her hands. "Hey now. Are we going to have a problem?"

I tilted my head out of the way so she could have clear access. I also turned my head away in case she was nervous my wolf-snout would suddenly snap. It gave me the added benefit of being unable to watch her scour my wound.

Nodding, Alice resumed cleaning. Unpleasant as it was, it was done relatively quick. True to her word, when she started stitching, it didn't hurt nearly as much, and I was able to resume drawing.

I ran into trouble when I accidentally drew a speech bubble. I drew it without thinking about it, and it looked fine, but I didn't have anything to put in it. Suddenly, I couldn't remember how to convey that Jessica was talking in the picture. I could picture comics, but it was as though it was unclear which parts were associated with talking. Even the bubble itself seemed like just a random blob.

Stolen story; please report.

I decided to move on and consider how to convey the events around Mr. Peterson letting in the demon.

My mind went blank. I couldn't come up with anything.

I started to panic, suddenly terrified that my communication issues were getting worse. I tensed, my chest tightening and my heart racing in fear. Drawing was one of the few ways I could communicate; I didn't want to lose it.

Alice, not noticing my existential dread, kept talking. "We held off the attacks for the next few hours, but our doors were buckling. More than once, we had to chase the demons off. Then things went quiet. It was like the demons had given up on trying to get in. It only made us more nervous."

She finished stitching the wound on my shoulder and covered it with a bandage. "Ok, ready for me to scrub the next one?"

I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths, both to prepare for the pain and to clear my head of my crisis. The truth was, the feeling wasn't new. I'd felt it before, more than once.

Almost every time I looked at a blank page, I'd had a similar struggle, as though an unfathomable divide prevented my pen from reaching the paper. Communication wasn't getting harder; this was just the same divide of uncertainty that blocked any project at some point.

That was fine. Even if my struggle with communication had infected or co-opted the mechanism of my writer's block, I had strategies against writer's block, and I knew what the scene was supposed to be.

I let Alice finish scrubbing a wound on my left arm before flipping to a clean page. This time, I used the page as a scratch pad to occupy my hands while I listened to Alice and let my thoughts wander.

Alice continued. "Eventually, we got up the nerve to unblock some doors to see what we could learn. We couldn't find anything in the immediate vicinity. That's when Nia showed up. Since it was quiet, we sent Jessica back to keep an eye on you, Maebe, and Mr. Peterson. She needed a break; I could see she was on the ragged edge."

The doodles were far from my best work and would probably be mostly meaningless to Alice. Still, by the time she stitched closed the first two wounds and started cleaning a third, I had several thumbnail sketches I could redraw. The idea was to just get something on the page, anything, even if it was terrible. Sometimes, you only need a concrete starting point, and blank pages aren't that.

As I began to redraw the doodles, I kept it simple, as I had with the comic I'd drawn with Sori. I drew the next best thing to stick figures, with pointed ears and a snout on the one that represented me and long hair on Jessica's. I gave Mr Peterson large vacant eyes hashed through with a bunch of lines to show there was nobody behind the wheel.

"I shouldn't have let Nia stay. The demons came back. Thankfully, we got some unexpected help and managed to kill them. There was a moment—before help arrived— that the door buckled. I'd told Nia to run and hide. Anderson, Denis, and I were terrified, but all we could do was tighten our grip on our golf clubs and wait."

In the first panel, I drew Podperson standing with his hand on a door that was swinging open, with lines to show motion. In the second, I drew the dog pile in which Crowdent gutted Mr. Peterson. Next, I drew it chasing Jessica while the drone held my foot, and finally, a depiction of throwing the trauma monster into the vortex. Each was minimalistic and missing a lot of context, but hopefully, they were straightforward enough that Alice would understand.

"That's when Jon showed up. The first demon poked its head through the barricaded door and got a bullet to the head. The other one was killed a moment later."

I was excited to find out that, not only was Jon doing well, but he was with people who were working with me. Mostly. Reuniting with him might be tense at first, but between having Alice to introduce me and the comic to explain how I was really Sam, things might finally work out.

I had to wonder if the monsters Jon shot were Crowseph's trauma crows. Crowdent had been after Jessica and was clearly a crow-themed trauma monster, so it had to be one of Crowseph's. There shouldn't have been two monsters trying to get in unless there was another trauma monster I hadn't seen yet.

"In my relief, it took me a few minutes to realize I didn't know where Nia had gone. The battle happened just outside the lobby by the breakroom. Oh, we killed the demon you were keeping in that closet. Sorry, I don't know why you wanted it kept alive, but it was too dangerous to have at our backs. We checked the nearby rooms for Nia, and when we didn't find her, we split up. I came to get Jessica and check on the situation. I guess I should have come sooner."

"Alright. Well, we're done here," Alice said as she finished bandaging her stitching. "Do your best not to stretch the skin there, or you'll tear open your stitches."

I handed the sketched comic to Alice; she took it to examine and nodded after a minute. "Ok. And Jessica?"

I wasn't sure where she was. But as long as Alice understood that she'd run away and I'd fought the rat, I didn't need to tell her I didn't know. Instead, I took the notebook back and drew a picture of the rat on my back biting into my shoulder. Then, I drew a picture of myself holding my shoulder while standing before a stick figure of Alice.

Alice had pretty cute hair, with short sides and a longer puffy top, stylized with some product, if I had to guess. In my drawing, it mostly just looked like a Fro. It was a limitation of my quick and dirty line-art style. Something to work on, I supposed, especially if I was going to be stuck communicating like this for the foreseeable future.

"You killed the demon, and then you found- I'm going to assume that's me? Well, at least you weren't flattering to yourself, either. Ok, well, hopefully, one of the others found her and Nia both. I need you to follow me, though. I've got a couple more questions."

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