“Take my hand!” His lips mouthed the words. I couldn’t hear what the medic standing over me was saying, and nothing. I tried to get my body to work. It felt like a thousand needles in my fingertips, that same feeling you get when your extremities fall asleep. Or if you lay on your arm too long. I tried to look at the medic. At least, that’s what I assumed he was, what with the black scrubs he was wearing. I could feel myself swirling through time and space, and then – the world went black.

“His pressure is stabilizing.” I heard voices talking around me. Everything was blurry. I tried blinking a few times to clear the blurriness. It didn’t help. “I think he’s coming around,” I heard a woman say. “Doctor, he’s waking up,” said a different voice. I wasn’t sure of the gender of anyone in the room other than the first voice. She was definitely a woman.

“Doctor Johnson,” a third voice – or was it the woman? I wasn’t sure of anything, not with the blurriness. I could see a few people standing over me, and I could feel the IV in my hand. It stung like a constant bee sting that I couldn’t get rid of. I wanted to scratch it but couldn’t move my arms and legs. “Doctor? Can you hear me?” I tried to answer, but my mouth felt full of cotton, and my tongue was gritty like I had been sleeping with my mouth open. That was a common occurrence for me, so at least that was one thing that felt somewhat familiar. “Nod if you can hear me.” I tried to move my head. It felt cemented to the pillow, yet, for some reason, I could feel the pillow. All of this was very strange, totally surreal. “Okay. Try blinking. Can you blink?”

I blinked so that whoever was speaking could see me respond. “Good. Can you see me? Blink once for yes and twice for no, okay?” I blinked once. “Okay. Doctor Johnson? I’m Doctor Farrah Templeton. Doctor Templeton or Farrah. I answer to either one, okay?” I blinked once. “You are in an emergency evacuation unit outside Chicago, I think, what?” Doctor Templeton asked the others standing around. “100 miles? Maybe a little further?” No one said a word. I’m guessing they were nodding. “Are you thirsty? You can have a little water. I don’t think that will hurt you.” I couldn’t see the cup or the straw; they were just blurry shapes. “Doctor, can you see me?” I blinked twice. “Is everything blurry?” I blinked once. “Would you like to drink some water?” His sentences were simple, the kind you’d ask a three-year-old. When you can only blink to respond, you have to do what you can. I blinked one time. Doctor Templeton had an accent I was unfamiliar with, somewhere outside the United States, but I couldn’t place it.

I felt a straw touch my lips, and I closed them around it. I took a deep breath. The pain, excruciating pain! Thousands of tiny barbs touching my internal organs. It felt like little electric shocks radiating from my lungs. I’d never felt my lungs before. Now, it was as if I couldn’t stop feeling them. Wincing, I ignored the pain, taking a sip. Water. Ice cold water. I had never been more grateful for a drink – in my life! Dehydration I’d felt a few times in my forty-six years on Planet Earth, but this? This was a new level of being exhausted and dehydrated. I tried to speak. “How?” I croaked. “How. Did. I. Get. Here?”

“I guess the water helped.” I nodded. It was the first time my body cooperated. I wasn’t sure what happened. “You were transported here by evac roughly twenty hours back. There was an explosion in a few buildings from the lecture hall you were leaving.” Flashes of the seminar I was attending, people in attendance, a few other faculty members, and fourteen students. The students were part of a pet project at the university, something about genetics and engineering, although, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what. The one in charge of the project, one step above me, was new to the university. I couldn’t remember his name, only that he had a military haircut – high and tight. Always clean-shaven and sharply dressed. He struck me as one of those people who could slide right into a uniform and fit. A Bus driver. Custodian. Or a Freedom Fighter, slash Mercenary. A military uniform seemed too perfect for him. “Do you remember what your students were presenting? All the data, every report, and every person in attendance, except for you, Madison Richland, Todd Boyd, and your graduate assistant, Tami Preston, is dead. Miraculous doesn’t seem to fit here. It’s like you and the whole team were targeted. Why, we’re not sure.”

“Government?” I croaked. The straw was close enough for me to take another drink. My extremities started working again, although it took every ounce of energy to raise my finger to point to her. “You?”

She smiled. “Yes. Part of Homeland Security. When an explosion goes off on a college campus, that’s considered an act of aggression against the United States of America. That’s when I get a call. Injuries sustained in a blast like that need special attention. I’m an expert in these kinds of blasts. And I’ve seen my fair share of detonations close to buildings like the one you were in.”

My brain was reeling. Who in the world would want to attack college students who were working on a project that, in my mind at least, seemed relatively innocuous?

“Your project, Doctor? I need data about your project. I need you to tell me what it was you and your students were working on? Can you tell me who this man is?” She showed me a picture of my ‘uniform man,’ the one I couldn’t name. “He’s the one person missing from the room, the roster, and all university records. No one has any information on him.”

The guy looked like every hard-nosed military general from television or movies. In an old film, I watched with my grandfather before he passed away. I think I was ten, maybe eleven years old. There was a character, not an actor, a toy. It was a lame movie. Why Grandpa enjoyed it was beyond me. Momma made me watch it with him, saying it would bring him joy. But that guy? He looked just like that toy! His haircut. Build. Almost as if he modeled himself after this character: Major Chip Hazard. What was the flick? “Small Soldiers,” I croaked. A film over eighty years old. And someone chose to look exactly like a character from that movie? Seemed more than a little bit odd.

“What was that?” Doctor Templeton asked. “Small soldiers?” Her face went white. Grabbing the closest person, she whispered something into her ear. The nurse, or whoever she was, nodded and bolted out of the room.  “Is there anything else you remember?”

“Not that I recall,” I said. I felt like my voice was coming back. I blinked a few more times. Finally! My vision was clear, and I could see Doctor Templeton. Jet black hair fell just to her shoulders, tied back with a hair tie, wrapped in a bun. If it fell out of the bun, it would’ve touched her shoulders. At least that’s what I was thinking. Her accent, southern India, but what region I wasn’t sure. My attention was drawn to the small red dot in the middle of her forehead and the tattoos on both her arms. I wasn’t sure what the designs were supposed to represent, but they were beautiful. Her skin was smooth and clean, even with a small amount of makeup; lipliner and a little eyeliner, from what I could see.

“Get some rest. I’ll be back to check on you later.” Doctor Templeton hurried out, three interns, nurses, or other doctors right on her heels. I wasn’t sure what the three people were in connection with her, but whoever they were needed to keep up.

One nurse stayed at my bedside, holding the water. “Would you like more, Doctor?” She wore a mask, latex gloves, and black scrubs like the others I saw in my room. I wasn’t sure if I was in a hospital or a field hospital. Nothing looked right, if it was indeed a hospital. Like everything was slightly out of place, such as electrical outlets and the windows, to start with. I felt like I was in a familiar building, somewhere on campus. But that couldn’t be right.

The nurse put the water down on a rolling tray, in front of me. A second nurse injected something into the IV line, and I felt the room start spinning until the light disappeared, engulfing me in blackness.