Callum shifts on the hospital bed, and wishes he hadn’t. His bones, muscles, blood, and skin scream in protest, agony reverberating from inside out. He’s covered in burns, blisters and burns and bruises and blood. He grits his teeth, rides it out, and there are tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, but if he reaches up to brush them away, his arm might fall off.

There’s a doctor standing over the bed next to his, cataloging the injuries of his neighbor, and Callum wants to shout for him, but he thinks his throat and mouth and lungs would tear with the effort.

He hasn’t been here long yet, but its long enough for him to be sick of staring at the white ceiling, stained just slightly with the soot they have tried to clean from the five fire patients in the room.

Nurses had cleaned him and the others carefully, and someone had poked at his ears, but still there was nothing but silence when he should have been able to hear the screams and cries of his fellow victims.

Callum watches as a short nurse, the one who had checked his ears, he thinks, strides across the room to speak to the doctor, and even moving his eyes hurts as they roll in dry sockets. She touches his arm to draw his attention from the poor fellow on the bed, and he bends to let her whisper something in his ear. Well, he thinks it’s a whisper; for all he knows she could be screaming at the top of her lungs, but probably not.

The doctor glances up, at him he thinks, and nods. The nurse, he’ll call her Debbie, she looks like a Debbie, walks over to his bedside, and reaches for a needle. She draws some liquid from a small glass bottle, and lowers the needle to his arm, and holy shit that hurts, hurts, and he’s be screaming if he thought it would do any good, and then things… fade.

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Scene 4-XV

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