Fallen Souls (3 page)

The policeman came back and stood
beside the medic, looking grim. Ash frowned. Girl? Bleeding? That
important thought came back, teasing along the edges of his mind,
but darkness began to play in the corners of his vision, shutting
everything else out. He fought it off, trying to keep the policemen
above him in focus.

“
It’s going to be okay,
son,” the policeman said. “We’re going to do everything we
can.”

Ash didn’t hear him. He was too busy
looking at the man standing behind the policeman, his red eyes
glowing in triumph. Then the world, the noise, and what was left of
the light went dark. Everything faded away, leaving only the red
eyes of the mystery man.

Ash began to re-gain
consciousness
some time later. He had no
idea how much time had passed, but he felt like he’d been having a
terrible dream. There was an annoying beeping to his left, and
something that sounded like wind. There was something lying across
his face, too, and it was stuck to his nose. He lifted his hand to
move whatever it was. His head still hurt, but it was a dull, heavy
pain rather than the sharp one he remembered. When he opened his
eyes, he saw a familiar facing sitting next to him, looking
distinctly tired and anxious.

“
Ash!” The frantic sound
of his mother’s voice jerked him fully awake. Both of his parents
stood next to him. His mom’s dark brown hair was disheveled, her
eyes puffy and bloodshot, and her face splotchy with crying. His
dad had tears in his eyes, and his normally smooth chin and cheeks
were covered in rough stubble. They looked like they hadn’t slept
in months. What on earth was going on here? Had something
happened?

Then images began flooding his mind …
a policeman and a medic, a dark night, a roadside, flashing lights
… his sister bleeding and hurt … and another man. Ash fought to
recall what he’d looked like, but the memory was fuzzy. He’d had …
red eyes? At the thought, panic hit him and his eyes shot around
the room, taking in the bed, the machines that surrounded
him.

Suddenly, everything from that night
slammed back into place. They’d been at a party. There had been a
strange man staring at Grace, and he’d convinced her to leave. The
man had terrified him, and they’d both been frightened. He’d driven
away from the house, watching the road behind them. He’d been so
obsessed with making sure that no one was following that he hadn’t
been looking at the road ahead.

He’d crashed the car. The thought hit
him like a ton of bricks and stole his breath. All of a sudden he
felt light headed. It wasn’t a dream, or a nightmare. It was real,
and Ash was in a hospital. That meant Grace …

“
Grace?” he gasped. His
throat was raw, and made his voice sound raspy. At the mention of
his sister’s name, their mother began crying uncontrollably. Her
shoulders sunk down and she buried her face in his father’s chest.
His dad closed his eyes and turned his head away to look behind
him.

Ash’s own eyes followed, to find Grace
lying in the bed next to him. She was as pale as the white hospital
sheets, except for the black and blue bruising across the left side
of her body. Long red cuts covered her left arm, face, and neck.
The heart monitor attached to her beeped slowly. A tube ran into
her mouth, and something that seemed like an accordion moved up and
down with her chest. She looked awful.

Ash stopped breathing at the sight of
his sister. The machines he was hooked up to went nuts and alarms
started beeping in the hallway. Two nurses ran into the room, one
holding a large needle filled with clear fluid. This only
intensified his panic. He began to thrash around, his only thought
that he needed to get to Grace. Make sure that she was
okay.

“
Ash, calm down, honey,”
his mom tried to say through her sobs. He paused, waiting for the
assurance, but it didn’t come. She didn’t say that Grace was going
to be okay, and that told him all he needed to know.

“
It doesn’t look good,”
the policeman had said.

Before he could ask the question
burning in his mind, though, the nurse injected the fluid from her
needle into the tube connected to his arm. A moment later, a warm,
fuzzy feeling enveloped him. He tried to fight the sleep, which he
didn’t want. He wanted to help his sister. He wanted to wake her up
and beg her forgiveness. He tried to ask his mom, tried to sit up
again, but within moments the drugs took hold of him and wrenched
him into the unwelcome darkness.

Ash woke to the
rhythmic
sound of the hospital machines. A
doctor was standing at the end of his bed, checking his charts and
talking quietly to his parents. When the doctor saw that Ash was
awake, he came over to him, shined a light into his eyes, and
glanced at the monitors.

“
You were lucky to survive
the crash,” the doctor said firmly. His voice was flat and void of
any emotion – the voice of someone just doing his job. “You have
some minor bruises and lacerations, a few broken ribs, and a broken
wrist, but that’s extremely lucky considering …” His voice and
sentence faded off and his eyes darted to the bed next to him,
where Ash knew his sister lay.

“
What about Grace?” Ash
asked, his voice little more than a whisper. The doctor’s face went
grim.

“
Her side of the car took
the most impact.” The man’s voice was masked with indifference, but
the sound of tragedy couldn’t quite be covered. “The truck turned
at the last second. It wasn’t enough to avoid the collision, but it
would have been much worse if it hadn’t. You would both probably be
dead.”

A knot formed in Ash’s
chest, and a new pain gripped him.
Both
, as in one of them wasn’t going
to make it? He could feel his heart breaking, piece by piece. He’d
never experienced pain so all-consuming before, and could hardly
believe it was real. Surely this was all some bad dream. He looked
up, praying that there was good news coming.

“
She hasn’t woken up, and
she probably never will,” the doctor finished bluntly. “She still
has a lot of internal bleeding, and extensive damage to some of her
vital organs. We’re keeping her in a drug-induced coma. We have her
on life support for the time being.”

Ash couldn’t speak. He could barely
breathe. He turned to stare at his sister, surrounded by tubes and
wires. Her face, though damaged, was still alive, waiting to wake
up. The world tilted as he tried to process the fact that she might
never wake. That a machine was keeping her alive, nothing
more.

“
I’m sorry,” the doctor
added before walking away. His apology was offered as an
afterthought. The final ‘to do’ point on his textbook list. He
stopped at the door and turned back, no doubt trying to be
comforting. “We’ll do everything we can.”

And that was it. He turned and left
the room, and Ash’s mom lost it. Sobbing uncontrollably, she dashed
out of the room, without sparing a glance toward him. His dad
managed to give Ash a sympathetic but heartbreaking look before he
took off after her. Then he was left alone to think about what he’d
done.

He’d killed his sister,
and there was no way around it. He’d been driving, and because of
him Grace was going to die. She’d always been so bright and bubbly,
the first person you saw in a room, the one you tried to make laugh
… larger than life. Now she was dying, right next to him.
No,
he thought. She
couldn’t … He forced himself slowly into a sitting position,
determined to do something. Anything.

He struggled to shove the railing of
the bed down and throw his legs over the side. The movement took
his breath away, and a sharp pain ripped through him. He waited for
the machines to slow, to keep the nurses from swarming the room
like a swat team again. He didn’t want to go back to sleep. Once
the monitors had returned to normal, he stood up, leaning against
everything and anything he could find as he moved to his sister’s
side.

“
Grace,” he whispered in a
weak voice. Tears began to well up in his eyes. “Please wake
up.”

He reached out to touch her, brushing
his fingers up and down her nose in their secret childhood
greeting. But she didn’t respond. He stood for the next hour by her
bedside, crying and begging her to wake up. Finally he returned to
his own bed, exhausted and heartbroken.

The next few days
went
by like a dream. Ash spent his time
in a daze, trapped in his own world of sorrow and guilt. He was out
of the hospital bed now, and had gone home to shower once, but
returned immediately to his sister’s bedside. Today the doctor had
come in to talk to his mom and dad. By the sound of it, it wasn’t
good news.

“
She probably won’t make
it through the night,” the doctor said quietly. “Even if she does,
time is running out. If she hasn’t woken up by morning, the brain
damage will be too severe …”

Ash’s mom turned into the arms of his
father, heartbroken. The doctor waited a moment before
finishing.

“
My advice is to stop the
machines at that point. Particularly if you want to donate her
organs,” he finished. Ash closed his eyes on the scene, trying to
control his breathe and stop from screaming. He knew that the
doctor was just giving his professional medical advice, but that
didn’t stop it from hurting. His dad pulled his mother’s face up,
and they exchanged a deep and painful look. Then his mother nodded
to the doctor.

Up to that point, Ash
hadn’t felt much. Everything had passed right by him. Now, though,
he was filled with rage. Were they actually going to just let her
die? Pull the plug, and that was that? They weren’t even going to
give her a
chance
to wake up?

“
I’ll be back first thing
in the morning,” the doctor said. He paused to look at Grace for a
moment. Ash followed his eyes, horrified. Less than a day for his
sister to wake up, or she’d be gone forever. He began praying,
then, for her to open her eyes to twitch her hand. Anything to show
she was still in there, fighting.