“Look into the light.”

“Mr. Fuller, please follow my pen light please.” The Doctor waved the small, bright, white light back and forth right in front of his face to regain his attention.

It took him a second to realize the Doctor was talking to him.

The last week felt like it had passed in a haze. He was in an out of consciousness, and he wasn’t sure why. Nothing really hurt, as far as he could tell he wasn’t injured, but an inescapable exhaustion seemed to have seeped into his bones. It felt like the worst case of Mono ever.

“Please, Mr. Fuller, we need to assess you for possible traumatic brain injury. It’s incredible you survived unharmed, but you were found unconscious, and you’ve only stopped dropping in and out of consciousness over the last few days. We need to rule out any head trauma before you’re released.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Gerry sighed and shook his head.

Since he’d woken up in a pile of rubble, only bits and pieces of his memory had come back to him. He’d learned his name, date of birth, and where he resided from his Driver’s License. He learned he liked being called Gerry instead of Gerald because the dozens of people who interviewed him called him Gerald and it just felt wrong.

The cops, the fire department, the Army, the FBI, it didn’t matter who they were. They’d all taken their turns sitting beside his hospital bed with fake smiles, and even faker attitudes. Even their words felt fake in his ears. On top of that, they all asked the same questions, and were pissed when he gave them all the same answers:

“I didn’t see anything. I don’t remember anything. What do you not understand about that?”

“The first thing I remember is some guy pulling me out of the rubble and me being buck-ass naked.”

“No, I didn’t see two giant creatures fighting outside my building. I’m not fucking crazy.” The last answer got him a lot of unsure stares. Apparently, not believing in three-hundred-foot dueling monsters made him the weird one.

Gerry shook off the recent memories and refocused on the cute Doctor. At least she normally would have been cute. She looked like she was going on seventy-two hours without sleep, and the only thing keeping her on her feet was a coffee IV. He focused on the light even as it burned his retina.

BURNING

It felt like something grabbed his head and started to squeeze. A memory burst inside his mind like a water balloon filled with acid, but it wasn’t complete. There were shadows, blank spots, and scenes seemed to shift around with no coherent focus. What he remembered was pain; searing agonizing pain that started in his chest and seemed to consume everything.

He tried to catalogue what he was seeing, but it all slipped away as soon as he thought he had it. He could feel the pain like an echo, and his hand shot to his heart.

“Mr. Fuller…Mr. Fuller, are you ok?” The Doctor moved the light away from his face and pulled her stethoscope from around her neck. She put it to his chest and listened. “Your heart is going a mile a minute. Just calm down, Mr. Fuller.”

Gerry imagined himself reaching out and yanking the Doctor’s head to the side and spinning it one hundred and eighty degrees around.

After the brief hallucination of destruction, the murderous daydream should have cranked his confusion and anxiety up another notch. Instead, the imagined violence seemed to soothe him.

“It’s ok, Mr. Fuller. You survived something traumatic, but you’re safe now.”

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Somewhere deep in his gut, Gerry didn’t believe a word she was saying.

“Normally, I’d keep you another night for observation, but we really don’t have the room. I’ll have them process your paperwork and we’ll get you out of here,” she gave him a weak smile and opened the door out of his room.

The screams of pain, the cries of the desperate, and the sounds of medical technology floated in before she shut the door. Gerry only caught a small glimpse of the hallway lined with beds. A few had spare sheets thrown over the recently deceased until they could be moved, and some faces were new, but other than that nothing had changed.

Every inch of the hospital was filled to the brim. They were operating beyond capacity and anyone else being pulled from the rubble was getting shipped nearly to Greensboro or Columbia depending on what side of the city they were found on. After a week of searching, those finds were getting few and far between. Any longer and all they were going to find were starved and dehydrated corpses.

All things considered, the hospitals around Charlotte were lucky. They were closing in on one hundred thousand confirmed casualties, but less than one percent of those were injured. Ninety-nine percent went to the morgues. It was a morose way to look at it, but if there were more injured and less dead every hospital within hundreds of miles would have been overrun with patients. As it was now, they were doing ok with the help of the extra Red Cross and FEMA mobile aid stations that had been shipped in.

As he sat there waiting for his discharge paperwork, Gerry heard people crying, cursing, and just wondering why this was happening.

“What did we do to deserve this?” was the most common phrase uttered.

There was a sense of gloom hovering over the hospital, and the entire city, but Gerry didn’t feel any of that. He didn’t feel bad for anyone. He didn’t question why any of this had happened. In fact, he felt a sense of justice; like this was supposed to happen. He didn’t say any of this out loud because people would have beaten him to death in his sleep, but coupled with the hallucinations and violent daydreams he seriously wondered if something inside him had snapped.

Even sitting here and waiting he wanted to end of the other men in the room. The guy snored in his sleep, and Gerry’s mind kept dancing back and forth between murder by blunt force trauma or smothering him with his drool-covered pillow.

“Mr. Fuller.” The Doctor finally returned with a stack of paperwork, and ended the fantasies. “I just need you to review these and sign here.”

The hospital had killed a whole lot of trees just to say that once he left the hospital nothing that happened was the hospital’s fault. Since he wanted to get the hell out of here, he didn’t waste any time signing.

“Thank you, Mr. Fuller, I hope we don’t see you back here.”

“You and me both, Doc.” He gave her a wink, gave the snoring man one last look, and then slid off the bed and onto his feet.

Gerry knew instinctually he was a powerfully built man: six-four with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, legs like twin tree trunks, and well-developed muscles all across his body. The Doctor coughed and turned away as red spread through her cheeks. Gerry was similarly gifted below the belt.

He literally ripped off the hospital gown with the embarrassing opening at the back, and shrugged into a set of clothing the Red Cross volunteers had brought him. The gray sweatpants looked like someone had used them for painting at some point, but they fit his large quads even if he had to cinch them tight at the waist. The T-Shirt was a XXXL and felt like a tent even with his big frame, but it was better than the gown. There was a shortage of shoes, but a company had donated footwear called Crocs that were easy to slip on. His were highlighter yellow and they didn’t go with his paint-stained, too-large ensemble.

He had no idea what ‘worst’ he was thinking of, but he was confident this was nothing but a mild embarrassment.

Lastly, he gathered the wallet that was on his bedside table. They found nothing else near him when they’d found him, so this was literally the only thing on Earth he owned. Still, he felt he’d be alright.

He gave the room one last look and his gaze focused on the snoring man. Something inside of Gerry pulled him toward the vulnerable sleeper. All it would take was a few pounds of pressure and the snoring would end forever. He could feel the urge to kill the man building in his gut, and even worse, he knew by doing that he would get something in return. Whatever it was, it would be worth it.

He took a step toward the man…and the door burst open.

“Coming through!” A nurse shoved him out of the way as a four-person team carted a new patient into the room and plopped him on Gerry’s old bed. “You, get out of here.” She shooed him away, and the tired but fierce look on her face spurred him into motion.

The sun was setting outside, and he had nowhere to stay tonight. He didn’t know anyone, he barely knew himself, and he wasn’t going to be reaching the home on his license anytime soon.

He’d seen reports on the news. That is where he would spend the night and then figure out what to do in the morning.

The hallway was packed with beds and people trying to move around: cops, EMTs, armed soldiers, and the hospital’s medical staff all jostled each other around as they walked down the hallway. Gerry adding his bulk to that didn’t help, so he kept his head down and avoided other people’s eyes. Something in his gut told him he didn’t want to draw any attention.

He did such a good job of ignoring people that he missed the two young women that stopped and did a one-eighty at the sight of him.

“Well, spank my ass and call me Shirley,” the teenage girl pushing a bed, handed over the task to her accomplice, pivoted, and started to follow him out of the building.