Excerpt: The Murder

[WARNING: This pretty much sucks. Read at your own risk.]

Chapter One

The lights were bright in my face when I woke up. They made my head hurt, but at the moment, I wasn’t thinking too much about that. There was a feeling in my gut, something terrible. Something was wrong. Horribly wrong.
I started to sit up. But something stabbed me painfully in the side and I gasped, which only hurt more. I closed my eyes against the bright lights, but they seemed to glare right through my eyelids. The wrongness in my gut was twisting, changing, becoming something more than wrongness. It was becoming terror, and I’d staved it off for as long as I could.
Calm down, I thought. Assess your surroundings. I had to figure out what was going on. I sucked in a breath. Even that hurt. I wondered what the hell had happened to me, that breathing hurt. I couldn’t remember anything.
My immediate needs took precedent over anything else. I tried moving an arm, but it wouldn’t even twitch. I tried my other but got the same result. Same with both legs. I tried to push my torso up, but couldn’t. The terror in my chest bulged, and my heart thumped a panicked painful rhythm against my ribcage.
I moved onto my eyelids. Those I knew would move. I opened them, even though the searing light was giving me a horrible headache. My blood pounded in my temples. But something had changed. The light was there, but so was darkness. Fuzzy shapes moving around in front of me. They were shaped like people.
I heard a sound and realized it had come from my mouth. It made my throat hurt to speak, but I kept at it. The terror was exploding within me. I couldn’t breathe, my blood pumped faster, and I thought I’d die if something didn’t happen soon.
What’s going on? Where am I? I tried to ask, but the sounds that came out were garbled, malformed words that made no sense. Panic overtook me. I started to talk louder, and louder, until I was screaming. The words tore through my throat, wracking my body with pains, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know this kind of fear was possible. I couldn’t move, and the people bending over me were coming closer and closer, some of them with their mouths moving, others with their mouths hanging open. My eyes focused a little bit more, and the expressions I saw weren’t friendly ones. Some looked angry, some looked disgusted, and some never met my eyes. I didn’t know why, and it scared me even more. I pulled back, but still I couldn’t move.
I turned my eyes away from the shapes, trying to see, but I couldn’t make out much beyond them and the lights, still burning holes in my retinas and making me think I’d go blind.
Some of the shapes started talking to me. I saw their lips moving, even heard some of the sounds, but I couldn’t figure out what any of them meant. Something was wrong, so wrong, and a feeling deep inside me told me that these people in front of me were somehow responsible. They’d hurt me, and they were going to keep hurting me, and there was nothing I could do, because I was stuck, immobile.
Screams tore out from me, again and again, until I saw one of the shapes duck away. It returned with something I recognized, something that sent fear shooting down my spine along with the burning agony that every movement caused. It was a needle, full of some liquid, and it would do something to me I didn’t like. I knew it, somehow, that it was no good, yet I couldn’t stop the person—a man, I now saw—from leaning over me, his fingers lightly touching my skin. I jerked away, and immediately saw stars dancing in front of me, the pain was so intense. I screamed, crying No, no! in my head, unsure of whether the words were translating into speech or not. The man didn’t speak to me. Instead, he held my thrashing arm still and inserted the needle into my skin. It burned like fiery hell, causing me to scream more. My vision blurred again, this time from tears, but slowly, a cool fog descended upon me, and the fire started to burn out. My breathing slowed, and for a moment, I thought He’s going to kill me. Maybe that needle had been poison, poison that would put me to sleep for good.
But why would he do that? Why did these people want to hurt me? I started to think about it. I tried to remember. Why was I so certain that these people were bad?
I searched my memory for something, but I realized I’d never seen any of these people before. Not that I’d gotten a very good look at them, but even the one who’d been close to me, the man with the needle, hadn’t registered as someone I knew. So why was I so afraid of him?
I struggled with the question for a while longer, maybe seconds, maybe hours, but then I heard a voice speaking quietly, right next to my ear. After a moment, I realized with a start that I could understand it.
It was a man’s voice, the same one who had given me the shot in my arm. I turned my head sluggishly to look at him.
“What?” I said, or thought I said. I still wasn’t sure if my words were understandable.
“You’re in a hospital,” the man said. “I’m a doctor. You’re seriously injured, but we’re trying to help you.”
I stared back at him uncertainly. How did I know I could trust him? I didn’t even know him.
“Try not to thrash around,” the doctor said. “It only makes things worse. You’re restrained for everyone’s protection.”
Something about what he said registered as odd. It made a shiver go through me.
“Everyone?” I mumbled.
He nodded. “Yes. You were severely injured. You can’t move around right now. Just sit tight. This won’t last very long.”
“What won’t?” I rasped. My voice sound hoarse and scratchy, like rubbing sandpaper together, but he seemed to be understanding what I said. That was something, at least.
“The investigators are here to question you,” said the doctor.
“What—why? About what?”
“About what happened.”
“What happened?” I asked.
He paused. He glanced over at the other people surrounding me. There four others. A woman with short dark hair. A man wearing a lab coat, probably another doctor, or a nurse. And two large, muscular men in police uniforms.
My heart thudded to a grinding halt, paused, then jumped back into gear again. The sight of those policemen sent shudders through my body, in spite of whatever medicine the doctor had given me to relieve my pain. Something about the blue uniforms, the way the light glinted off the badges on their chests—it sent terror rushing through me again, and I jerked backward, pulling against the restraints that held me down.
“Relax,” the doctor muttered. “They’re only here to keep an eye on me.”
I turned my wild gaze back to him. “Why? What’s going on? Who are you? Tell me what happened!”
“You don’t remember any of it?” The doctor said.
“I’m asking you because I don’t know!” My voice was getting louder. Now that I couldn’t feel pain, I was getting bolder, a bit more energetic. Adrenaline was hurtling through my veins at breakneck speed, and I felt myself trembling.
The doctor’s brow furrowed a bit. He glanced over at something a little past me, to the right, something I couldn’t see, and then looked back at me.
“Who are you?” he said finally. I heard a few murmurs coming from the other four people in the room.
“What do you mean, who—” I stopped. Even as I started to retort, my brain attempted to answer the question.
But it couldn’t. I couldn’t. My name, something that should have been so familiar to me that it rolled effortlessly out of my mouth, wouldn’t come.
“I’m….” I faltered. “My name….”
I concentrated. I focused so hard, my headache came back. But I couldn’t remember my name. I gazed back at the doctor with a mixture of confusion and fear.
Instead of answering me, the doctor turned and looked at the dark-haired woman. “I knew memory loss was a possibility,” he said. “But I didn’t realize it was this severe.”
“Will her memory come back?” The woman’ voice was low and calm. I found it comforting, but I didn’t like the way she looked at me. Too penetrating, like she could read my mind.
That makes one of us, I thought wryly.
“It’s impossible to say,” the doctor answered the woman. “I’ll need to do much more extensive testing to determine the amount of damage. Many concussion patients regain most or their memories. Or at least some of it. She may not remember the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
“Naturally.” The woman sighed. “Well, see what you can do. I’d still like to talk to her.” She turned to look at me again. “Maybe something will jog your memory.”
“What’s going on?” I asked the woman this time. I flinched from her stare, but I needed to know. The terror in my gut was mixing with the desperate need to know who I was. “What did you do to me?”
“You did it to yourself,” the woman said. “You were resisting arrest. You ran from law enforcement when they attempted to bring you into custody.”
I stared at her, trying to process the information. “I did….what?”
“You were seriously injured during the pursuit. You fell quite a ways.”
“What—why?”
“Why were you running from the police?” I nodded slowly, as much as my stiff neck would allow, and she stared right back at me, never blinking.
“Because you’re a murderer,” she said.