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He jumped nearly two feet from his bed, his heart racing, beating so hard it hurt. He swallowed and turned on the bedside lamp, the painful wail still in his ears. It kind of echoed. He shivered. The scream had
crept up on him during that trance-like state between sleep and
consciousness, startling him from his peaceful state. He sighed, still
shaking, and climbed back under the blankets, not bothering to turn the
light off. He screamed with it, this time. It jerked him up from the dark, rattling his bones and chilling his skin. What was it? Who the hell kept screaming? It was unearthly, disembodied, and full of pain. It was someone's dying scream, someone's last cry of "unfair!" on this plain and it felt like it cut through JD's soul like a sharp blade. He groaned and hid his face in his hands. He began, officially, to sleep with the light on. It was fucking with his head. In
the week the night-screams occurred, two of his patients died. On the
same nights as the screams. He wasn't sure what to make of that. He was beginning to slip. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't eat, he couldn't concentrate. In his mind, the screams played on a faulty loop, reminding him of it at the strangest of moments. (Once, he was standing at the urinal and he thought of it. He had jumped and ended up wetting the floor. The Janitor was PISSED. Har har.) He was sent home, forced to go on sick-leave. He couldn't concentrate, he couldn't focus. He was too tired to focus. And before he drifted off, sitting in the corner of his living room, the scream came again. He jumped up, his heart once again in his throat. He couldn't bring himself to try to rest again. He paced the living room, patting Steven every time he passed him. His phone rang five minutes later. Mr. DeMill had died five minutes ago. He pressed his forehead to the shower floor, the hot water beating down his bare back. His skin was turning red. He
listened to the sound of the water, wanting it so badly to replace that
horrible death-wail. But, still, it echoed with the sound of rain
behind it. For the past month, he realized, it had been foggy. The sound must have carried through the watery atmosphere... The screams had stopped, but JD couldn't stop thinking about them. They cut the electricity, and Turk had stopped calling and visiting. He missed his Chocolate Bear. The screams carried him through night and day. The police had busted his door in, and paramedics swarmed around him like flies. Busy, hungry, helpful flies. He doesn't remember being strapped to a gurney, or an oxygen mask slipping over his nose and mouth. He remembered the screams, though. They came loud and clear.
(And they reverbed.) They brought him to the hospital. JD realized, with a twisted, painful laugh as they left him in his own room, that people died here. Daily. |
Wail
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