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Chapter 2. Where Am I?

  I came to lying on a black leather couch in what looked to my doctor's-son eye like a doctor's office. The couch was against a wall and had a metal-framed, glass-topped coffee table in front of it. The opposite wall was bookcases, full of the kind of books my dad has, and in front of the bookcases was a wooden kneehole desk, on it a brass table lamp, the kind with a long narrow horizontal green-glass shade.

  The lamp was lit and the rest of the room was dim. It took me a minute to register what was odd about it—no windows. I looked down and discovered that I wasn't wearing anything except some very professional-looking bandages and a bright red cast that covered my arm from wrist to shoulder. I guess it was a cast. It seemed to be made out of plastic—or anyway something smooth and hard and shiny that wasn't heavy at all.

  I sat up, intending to look around for a robe or at least a towel to cover my nakedness, and discovered that despite the cast I could bend my elbow. The cast didn't have any joints that I could see, and I was bending and straightening my arm in an attempt to figure out how it worked when the door opened and my angel came in.

  Only now she wasn't a giant. I sort of nonchalantly draped the cast over my groinal area and looked at her. She was barely over five feet tall, I'd guess, and now that she was on a more human scale it was easier to realize that she was truly beautiful.

  She gave me a smile, a real one but quickly and without opening her mouth. "Good, you're awake," she said. "I'm sure you want to see your friend. Come on, he's awake too."

  Awake? Awake, as in not dead? The look on my face must have been an accurate reflection of how this hit me, because she grinned.

  "Yes, awake," she said. "Come on, please. There isn't a lot of time, and he shouldn't really be awake at all. They need to get to work on him as soon as possible."

  It didn't seem like a good idea to tell her I was naked. She could see that for herself and obviously did not consider it worthy of mention. So I got up and followed her, still holding the cast sort of strategically positioned.

  We came out into a nice wide hallway, brightly lit, that ended in double doors just a few yards to our left. She whisked me through the doors, and I was in what looked like a high-tech futuristic operating theater. The floor was covered with hard shiny seamless stuff like my cast, only it was dark blue and it wasn't slick. I guess it didn't actually look like the cast.

  I glanced to the left and realized that the room was a lot bigger than I had thought. The left wall had tiers of seats, like a small theater, five rows or so. Less than half the seats were occupied, maybe fifteen people. There were about a dozen people in green scrubs moving around the room.

  Seeing them reminded me again that I was wearing only the cast and some bandages, but nobody seemed to be noticing the fact and I didn't have time to dwell on it, because the crowd shifted, and I saw what was in the middle of the room.

  It looked like a rectangular box, maybe eight feet long and four wide and a yard high, on a pedestal. It and the pedestal were made of the same blue stuff as the floor. At one end a two-foot section was cut away, leaving a foot-thick shelf, and on the shelf Shep's head was resting, with the rest of him apparently in the box.

  "Go on," said my angel and gave me a poke. I walked toward the box and as I did so, there was a machinery hum and the pedestal lengthened, raising the box. When I got to it, Shep's head was about as high as my chest. He turned to look at me. He was really pale, there was a bloody gash in his hairline, and although his eyes were open, they weren't tracking together. Also one of his pupils was blown. This really scared me.

  "Hi," I croaked, then cleared my throat and tried to smile. "How are you?" It was a really dumb thing to say but all I could think of.

  "Better than you look, I bet," he whispered with a lopsided grin. "Now I'm going to sleep. See ya." He closed his eyes.

  I obviously couldn't give him a hug and slap him on the back, and there wasn't any hand or shoulder for me to squeeze, and he had the gash on his forehead, so I leaned down and kissed his cheek. "See ya, Shep," I said. "Get better."

  I backed away and as I did so the pillar shortened to lower the box, and the crowd surged around it, and I couldn't see Shep any more.

  A hand touched my arm. It was my angel. "He'll be all right," she said, leading me out the door and back down the hall. "I promise. If there'd been any doubt, they would have started on him already, but we knew you'd want to see him and speak to him, and he was in good enough shape to wait so you could do that.

  "You'll be able to rest and heal better now you've seen him and know he's all right. Down here." We had passed the room I woke up in. She took me down a hall to the right, then left, then right again, past a lot of doors that all looked the same, and finally stopped and opened one.

  "This is your room," she said.

  All I could see was the bed—I was suddenly so dopy and exhausted that I could hardly stand up. I staggered over, pulled down the covers, and sat down on it, then fell back against the pillows. She actually had to help me lift my legs in. She smiled and pulled up the covers and then kissed me, the way I'd kissed Shep.

  "Sweet dreams, Mitchell," she said and headed for the door, the lights dimming as she went.

  "Wait!" I remembered to say. "Where am I?" But at that precise instant I fell asleep, so I don't know whether she answered or not.