that maybe she wouldn’t become so agitated that Henry would have to intervene.
“We won’t be a minute, Alex,” the nurse whispered to him.
Alice. That was her name. “Thanks, Alice. I understand.”
He watched Jax out of the corner of his eye as she moved out of the way so that Alice could squeeze in between the bed and the chair. He was worried about Jax.
Alex wanted Alice and Henry out of the room so that he could find out why Jax had become so upset at hearing the word “gateway.”
Henry looked embarrassed to have to intrude and cause a scene. “I’m sorry, Alex,” he said as he came closer. “We’ll be out of your way as soon as we make sure she takes her meds.”
Alex nodded, moving farther down the bed, trying to give the nurse room. As she stepped closer she held the tray up out of the way, in case his mother took a swing at it.
Jax, deep in thought, turned away. Upon hearing the word “gateway” she’d said that she knew what they wanted. Alex wanted to know what she’d figured out, what this was all about. He wanted to find out what had her so upset and distracted.
Whatever it was, it appeared that they had found the answer they’d come for.
“Leave me be!” his mother yelled, snatching for the tray.
“Come on now, Helen,” Alice said, holding it out of reach, “settle down.”
The next time Alex glanced over, he saw Henry with a syringe held partially out of sight. He knew that the orderlies sometimes brought a syringe along when they thought there was the possibility of trouble. They’d told him in the past that they would rather give his mother a shot when she became violent than try to restrain her physically and risk hurting her.
“I told you before, Alice,” his mother yelled, “I don’t know anything about a gateway!”
Jax looked over sharply.
As she did, Henry snatched her by the hair. At the same time he stabbed the syringe into her rump. Before she knew what had happened or could react, he jammed the plunger home.
Alex was already diving over the corner of the bed toward the man. Henry turned and swung a meaty fist at him but Alex blocked the blow with his forearm as he dove inside the man’s defenses.
Behind him, as he crashed into Henry, the nurse swept another syringe off the tray she had been holding up out of sight and rammed it into Alex’s behind. Alex felt the hot stab of the drug cocktail being injected into his backside as Alice shoved the plunger all the way into the syringe. Having his hands full with Henry, he hadn’t been able to turn in time to stop the woman.
Jax landed a full-force side kick in the woman’s ribs, sending her flying. Alice knocked his mother back into the chair before crashing headlong into the wall by the headboard. The tray clattered against the floor. The lamp attached to the wall broke off as she snatched it for support on her way down. The bulb shattered with a pop, sending glass everywhere.
As he struggled with the big man, Alex saw Jax reach for a knife at her waist. There was no knife there. She faltered, stumbled, and then started to go down even as she tried to swing at Henry. She missed by a mile.
Alex was lost in rage. Grappling with the powerful orderly, he growled in fury as he swept a leg around behind the man’s legs to take him off his feet. It upended Henry and they both went down, Alex on top of him. They hit hard, Henry on his back. Alex followed up immediately with a blow from his elbow that crushed Henry’s nose.
Henry cried out in pain. Out of the corner of his eye Alex saw another orderly charging into the room.
Alex tried to swing his fist as the second man jumped him and swept an arm around his neck, but his own arms were tingling and going numb. They wouldn’t respond to his wishes. He tried harder. When Henry punched him in the middle Alex reflexively rammed his knee up into the man’s groin. Henry cringed in pain. Alex struggled to get up, but the second man at his back had him securely by the neck.
Out of the corner of his eye Alex saw Jax trying to crawl toward him to help. Alice planted a white shoe on Jax’s neck, pinning her to the floor. Jax moved as if she were mired in mud. She cried out his name, but it came out as a slurred murmur.
The world began to blur. Everything looked small, as if it were at the distant end of a dark tunnel. Alex yelled Jax’s name, but only a whisper made its way out.
His fingers found hers, then. Both of them held on for dear life as the room dimmed.
Alex felt himself being engulfed by thick, tingling blackness. It was all happening too fast.
His last thought, before thought ceased to exist, was of Jax, of the terror in her eyes.
30
ALEX DIDN’T REMEMBER OPENING HIS EYES. He didn’t remember waking. He merely became gradually aware that he was awake. After a fashion.
Everything looked soft and fuzzy, unreal, distant, dim. He could hear snatches of sounds but he didn’t know what they were. Figuring out what the sounds were didn’t strike him as at all important.
He was aware of the world all around him, but it seemed far away, not something he was a part of. He was alone. . somewhere else.
His whole body tingled in a thick, numb, twilight way.
With the way that everything seemed less than real, it occurred to him that he might actually be asleep and only dreaming that he was awake. He couldn’t decide which was true. He didn’t know how to find the solution to such a puzzle.
Try as he might, Alex could not, simply could not, form a complete, coherent thought.
Fragments of ideas, bits of things that seemed as if they might be important, floated beyond his mental reach. He couldn’t pull them in, couldn’t make those fragments come together into a complete thought. He knew that he should be able to, knew what he wanted to do, but his mind wouldn’t make it happen. He could not exert enough willpower to bring himself to think.
It felt like his brain was shut off. He struggled to form a complete sentence in his mind, but his mind could not pull anything together. He would start a thought, but it would trail off into nothing as his brain simply failed to complete the task. He could not coax it to stay on track, to work, to think. Monumental effort didn’t help.
Somewhere in the back of his mind his inability to form complete thoughts, to think deliberately, was giving rise to a vague, distant, claustrophobic panic. Those feelings, even as they began to surface, sank back down into the black depths of indifference, never to fully surface, leaving only fuzzy emptiness.
The panic somewhere inside him could not manifest itself into something solid enough to concern him.
Alex wanted to be angry, but there was nothing there to form anger.
Every time he struggled to feel emotion, he only fell back into feeling nothing.
He turned his dim perception away from the futile effort and realized that he was sitting in a chair. He tried to get up, but his body didn’t respond. With great effort he looked down to see his hand resting on the arm of the chair. He tried to lift it, but it only levitated a few inches. He couldn’t make himself care enough to accomplish the simple task.
He squinted, trying to make out the fuzzy white shape not far away, trying to understand what it was doing.
“You awake, Alex?”
He thought it was a woman’s voice.
Answering was too unimportant to even try.
“I’ll have your bed made in a jiff. Then I’ll let you be so you can get your rest.”
That was what she was doing: making up a bed. She was tucking in sheets. Just grasping that much of the mystery around him felt like a profound accomplishment, but the accomplishment failed to be satisfying.
He didn’t know if he knew the woman in white. He couldn’t make himself concentrate on her face long enough to tell. His gaze kept sinking to the floor. The gray swirls in the linoleum echoed his thoughts.
He wanted to break down in tearful despair at not understanding any of it, but there was nothing in him that knew how to cry, so he could only sit and stare.
