Chapter One

The cardiac monitor beeped out another alarm.

He woke up but all he could manage was silence and the opening of his eyes to the white hospital overhead lights.

From what he could see with his remaining gaze functions, he definitely was in a hospital room -- cool, moist, subdued -- he couldn't feel anything, any sensation but he had the feeling that's what this room would feel like. And from what remained of his memories of hospitals, he probably had wires going all the way to the monitor by his bedside, IV lines and catheters, as well as an NG tube for feeding.

Meds usually came like clockwork in the ICU. This much he knew.

He knew that he was in his bed, motionless but alive underneath clean white hospital sheets. His feet were most likely propped up by makeshift water balloons from sterile rubber gloves, and in his hands were silly red stress balls he couldn't grip.
His was the world of bleeps and alarms, and the rush through each of his doctors' day or the nurses' shifts.

But nobody else knew that he knew.

He had lost track of how long he has been in the state he was in. To the nurses and doctors who have slowly and sparingly visited him, he was staring out blankly into space, not being able to show any signs of recognition or any semblance of higher cortical function. He was muted by his disease. A "locked-in" syndrome was tossed back and forth between his neurologist and pulmonologist at one time, and a barrage of medical residents had chalked him off as a vegetable.

He too had nearly given up screaming from deep inside. He knew all too well that he was not reaching through the barriers of what was human understanding anymore.

So he stared out blankly once again at the immaculately white hospital ceiling. He knew that if he was capable of feeling, his back would be hot from all the lying down all these months. Were there any bruising? Open wounds already?

He blinked. One.

Again. Two.

And Again. Three.

The anguish of each minute passing buy with silence screaming more often than the sounds around him -- it was more than he could take. More than a few times, his thoughts had turned to how he could catch that train that kept passing him by to go into the white lights of heaven, but even that was beyond his reach.

Not now. Not yet.

She was coming.