Meanwhile he took the proffered money and wondered what he was supposed to do next. Go back the way he came, presumably. He started off in that direction, hoping desperately for a clue to his location, his identity, what he was supposed to be doing, anything.
One of the kids staggered as he passed, almost fell into the nearer fire, and he reached out and grabbed without thinking, pulling the boy to safety. Nobody else reacted, except to laugh. He set the kid back on his feet and looked at him more closely, and then around at the others.
They were all drunk, every one of them. Not a little drunk, either. The ones on their feet were barely standing up. The boy he’d pulled out of the fire was swaying, giggling, and Sam caught him again just in time to lower him to the ground before he fell there.
Over at the edge of the clearing, one of the girls turned suddenly and vomited into a bush.
“Oh, boy,” Sam said in utter disgust. And then he looked at the keg again, and realized his own part in the party. Or at least, his host’s part. “Oh, boy.”
He was dizzy, off balance; suddenly he wasn’t carrying the keg any more, and it wasn’t dark. The air didn’t even smell right. A split second later he realized he was flat on his back looking up at a plain white plastic-looking ceiling, and the breeze on his face was artificial, from air conditioning.
He sat up slowly and looked around.
He was in a bed, and all kinds of monitors were stuck to him, with wires leading to a bank of instruments behind him. Over against one wall, some twenty feet away, a set of stairs led up to an observation deck, glassed in. Lights on the machines up there were going crazy, blinking on and off. He wasn’t wearing anything under the covers, as far as he could tell.
He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, cautiously opening them again after a count of ten. Nothing had changed.
It must be a hospital of some kind, but how had he gotten here? He didn’t feel sick or hurt, except maybe a sore spot on his arm where an IV tube was taped in place. And the only times he’d ever been to a hospital it was just to the emergency room, and there were doctors running around all over the place, and the place stank of blood and fear and medicine, and there was always lots of shouting and confusion, people sitting in chairs by the walls crying, arguing with nurses at the desk about insurance. It wasn’t like this.
This was quiet, as if somebody’d wrapped cotton wool around his ears, and empty. He was alone except for the machinery with the blinking lights.
Throwing the sheets aside, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and peeled the sensors off his chest and legs. He was getting the last of them when he happened to look down and really see his torso.
He didn’t remember having that much hair on his chest.
And he knew for certain he wasn’t that pale.
There were a few other things that weren’t quite the way he remembered them, either. He opened his mouth to ask the empty room what the heck was going on when a door just outside his peripheral vision opened, and he looked up to see a tall black woman dressed in a deep red dashiki sweep in. His first instinct was to demand, “Who are you?”
He heard the woman say, “Ziggy! Class three, stat!”
And then something warm hit him in the face and he folded over, not even having time to cover himself back up again, and the white room faded away.
The woman in the red dashiki paused several feet away until another woman’s voice, from out of nowhere, advised, “The atmosphere is clear, Doctor.” The air pressure creating a minor wind at her back—a wind that had kept the gas from her in the first place—abated. She strode over to the recumbent form, sprawled on the floor beside the examination bed, and sighed. “Well. Do you suppose he’s going to stick around in this one long enough to find out anything about him, Ziggy?” Her antecedents were a little confused; it didn’t bother her. Confusion came with the territory.
“If you’ll be so good as to roll him over so my sensors can scan more efficiently, you can remove the remaining medical monitors,” the disembodied voice said. The words were considerably more polite than the tone was. The woman in red gritted her teeth and did as requested. In the process she was careful to peel back both eyelids, revealing blank hazel-green eyes. A beam of red light made a swift pass before they could roll back up into his head.
“Scanning,” the voice said, suddenly toneless. “EEG readings confirmed. Elimination process proceeding. Positive identification markers noted. Scanning data banks for corroboratory material initiated.”
There was a pause, while the woman in red lifted with practiced skill and got her limp and unresisting patient back into the bed. It would have been nice to have help with this task, but there were security considerations. What happened here, on a regular basis, was known to very few, and she was committed to keeping it that way. She’d removed nearly all the apparatus, including IV tube and catheter, when the disembodied voice spoke again.
“Preliminary cross check through: birth reports, Selective Service records, state licensing agency records. Index check. Processing.”
The woman in red barely heard the words. She straightened the pillow, moved an IV pole back out of the way, and twitched a sheet into position. Then, gazing down on the recumbent body, the familiar face with the single lock of white hair drooping into its eyes, she sighed. “Dear one, when is all this going to quit? Mamma really does want to know.”
The unconscious body didn’t respond.
“I have a tentative
