Patchwork

Her face was numb.

She licked her lips, feeling them with her tongue, but they were unable to feel her tongue in return. She wrinkled her nose and felt the motion draw her lip over her gums. But she couldn’t feel her nose. She tried raising one hand. It felt strangely heavy, but she hauled it up to her face, running her fingers over numb cheeks.

She felt strange bumps all over her face. They were on her cheeks, her lips, her eyebrows and forehead. Picking at one with a fingernail, she managed to pull it slightly away from her face before it got stuck. Giving a sharp yank, she pulled it off. A drop of what was probably blood landed on her hand.

Her eyes opened on her command, though she couldn’t feel it. Blinking to make her eyes focus, she held up the thing she’d picked off her cheek.

At first the tiny loop of black string didn’t make any sense to her. She stared at it for a minute, then set it on her lap to look around her. The bed she was lying in had plastic rails along the side, and sheets that were blindingly white. An IV was in her arm, the tube running to a computerized IV tree. What she could see of the room was tiled in white and muted blue. A curtain hanging from the ceiling blocked her view of the rest of the room and any door there might have been.

Sarah looked back at the loop of string in her gown-clad lap, and her brain brought up two words: hospital and stitches.

She looked up at the curtain again. There was a fire burning its way from her stomach all the way up her throat. Rage, she realized. Furious rage at the people who had sewn up the cuts on her face. Rage at the people who had dressed her in this ridiculous gown and stuck a needle in her arm. Rage at the person who had brought her to this hospital.

Rage at these fools who came too late.

She yanked the needle out of her arm with a snarl, ignoring the trickle of blood and the sharp beeping of the computerized IV tree. She went after her face with both hands, pulling stitches as fast as possible out of her unfeeling flesh. All the while she kept up a constant stream of furious snarls.

The curtain was shoved back, and Sarah froze. She stared at the nurse hatefully, while the nurse stared back in shock. Flexing her bloodstained fingers, she growled. Her rage was so strong she couldn’t have formed a complete sentence if she’d wanted to. Picking up the small pile of bloody stitches in her lap, she flung them at the nurse, shrieking. The woman turned and ran, followed by Sarah’s enraged snarls and the sound of stitches being ripped from flesh.


--


Gordon waited in the hospital lobby, staring at the mass-produced prints on the wall. When he’d received a call from the hospital requesting his presence in regards to Sarah Parker, he’d been happy. The doctor had said he would call the commissioner when she awoke. But when he’d got here, instead of giving him Sarah’s room number, they’d told him to wait here for her doctor.

It made him nervous.

The previous night, he and the SWAT team had arrived at the fourth warehouse on the list an hour and a half after sunset, to find Sarah lain out on the ground in front of the door, wrapped in a rough trench coat. There was no one else in the area. When Gordon had first seen her, coated in half-dried blood and unconscious, he’d feared she was dead. But there was a piece of paper pinned to the jacket, with a rough sketch of a bat. Gordon remembered looking up, and seeing what might have been the barest glimpse of someone dressed in black disappearing over the edge of the roof. He had taken her to the hospital himself, unwilling to wait for an ambulance.

What could be going on?

A man coughed politely behind him. Gordon turned, spying a man in a doctor’s white coat standing at the entrance to the lobby, clearly waiting for him.

“Doctor,” he said carefully, shaking the man’s hand. This was not the same man who had taken over care of Sarah last night. “I’m Police Commissioner Gordon. I was told there was news about Sarah Parker?”

The doctor coughed lightly. “Yes, well, there certainly is. Perhaps we could walk and talk?” he asked. Gesturing for Gordon to follow, he headed for a bank of elevators.

“Of course. Now, what is the situation.”

“The situation,” the doctor repeated, hitting the elevator call button. “The situation is very strange.”

Gordon waited for him to continue, but in vain. “Perhaps you could describe the situation to me?” he prompted, only a little testy.

The doctor gestured for Gordon to enter the elevator, and followed him inside. He hit the button for the eighth floor and waited until the doors closed before answering.

“Let me give you the basic rundown,” he said, suddenly businesslike. “Sarah presented with a lot of injuries, not all of them obvious. There were the cuts to her face, neck and chest, of course, but there were also knife wounds on her arms, injuries on her knees and palms. Her hip was partially dislocated, her shoulders muscles strained, she has several broken ribs, a cracked cheekbone, severe bruising of the throat and windpipe, and head injuries that I can only describe as vicious.”

Gordon blinked.

“In addition, if what you say is correct, she was forcibly detained in the company of a confirmed psychopath for three days, possibly four. We need to consider the possible emotional and psychological damage that a man like that could have inflicted given that amount of time.”

Gordon nodded slowly, not liking the route this conversation was taking. “What are you getting at, doctor?”

The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out. About to walk down the hallway, he was stopped when the doctor stretched out an arm.

“Sarah woke up four hours ago. The first thing she did was to pull out every stitch we put in. She was snarling like a wild animal, according to the nurses. We had to hold her down to administer enough morphine to make her calm. We tried stitching her up again, but when she woke up she just ripped them out again. We had to restrain her to get her to leave the damn stitches in. She came damn close to clawing an orderly’s eye out when we did. In four hours, she hasn’t done more than shriek and growl. She hasn’t spoken a single coherent word.”

Over the doctor’s shoulder, Gordon caught a glimpse of the directory sign. There was a little star next to the floor they were on - eighth floor, psych ward.