Jaxon stopped mid-stretch when someone cleared their throat. A doctor stood in the doorway, watching him with a tablet in one hand. He smiled while he finished his stretch, not that he could do it properly with his right arm pinned to his side.
“As usual, you are trying to move around more than you should.” The doctor looked down at his tablet. “You remember nothing about the crash?”
Jaxon scratched his bearded chin, trying to remember. “I remember something dark and swerving not to fly into it. My controls malfunctioned as if from some sort of charge. I couldn’t get the eject mechanism to work.” He paused. “No, I definitely do not remember ejecting.” A shiver ran up his spine. “I remember seeing the ground coming at me.” He teetered but landed in the chair behind him.
“Take a moment if you need to.”
He nodded and worked on controlling his breathing. It took several minutes to get his heart to stop pounding its way out of his chest.
“Ready to continue?”
“Yes, sir.” Last night he felt sure of a rescue before the impact, but was he? “Let’s hear the next question.”
“What do you remember after the impact?”
“A very long, tiring walk with little food through a land where nature was recovering nicely without man in the way. I do not remember all of that either. This shoulder injury must have happened during the walk home. I learned my crash happened five months ago, but I can’t explain why that feels right.”
“But you only remember some of your walk out of the Tox Zone?”
“Correct.”
He stopped himself from repeating that he had walked through pristine nature. He tried to remember what had made humans gather in overpopulated cities with some synthetic food production in order to feed everyone. The Big One was a devastating earthquake, and the nuclear power plants he knew about had all gone under so fast little radiation remained. Some of the coast had changed though the tsunami caused by another quake elsewhere in the Pacific had done more than the quake. He had walked through an area that had once been a desert but now showed two decades of fresh growth to resemble a young, temperate forest and plains area. Some of the growth could only have happened because of animal migration and the storms that could have moved seed into the area. A lot of change for two decades.
“Care to share your thoughts?”
“Just trying to remember much of anything after the Big One. I have general knowledge and only a few clear snippets. Everything prior to that is clear as a bell.”
“You look more like a man who is finding reality is not what it seems to be.”
Jaxon narrowed his eyes and scrutinized the doctor. “So, what are you not telling me?”
The doctor dropped his gaze to the tablet he held. He tapped it twice and then turned it so Jaxon could see the screen.
“Oh, my God! Why am I still alive?” His skull looked like a jigsaw puzzle, meticulously put back together. It appeared to be healing well. “Someone fixed my head.” He massaged his scalp with his fingers, but could feel nothing out of the ordinary.
“General Sampson has a lot of questions for you, but I’ve kept him away so you could properly recover first.”
Jaxon lowered his hand and chuckled. “I’m sure that is no easy feat.”
“So, you remember some things about your career?”
“It’s like I recognize things as I see and hear them. Sometimes it triggers more memories.”
“What other languages do you know besides English?”
Jaxon arched a brow. “Irish.”
“The nurses couldn’t place it, but we’re sure you weren’t talking gibberish. They talked in English and you would answer back in the foreign language even while you appeared unconscious.” The doctor typed a note into the tablet before looking at him again. “Do you believe in aliens?”
“No.”
“You sound slightly doubtful?”
Jaxon shook his head. “I believe that humans may have pulled off the impossible and only some know of it for sure. It is definitely sci fi style stuff, but not little green men or other races created by writers.”
“You believe humans may have saved you from a crash and patched your head together?”
“I can’t remember, but I would say they are human.”
“I’m sure that will come up in your discussion, but that is above my clearance rating. You are suffering from a sugar imbalance, which is already a documented issue despite your usual diet and exercise regimen, a shoulder pulled out of its socket and reset, one broken rib and memory loss from head trauma. Not bad for someone whose plane blew up into a million pieces five months ago.”
The doctor shook his head while he looked at his tablet again. He opened his mouth to say something else, but snapped it shut when a uniformed man appeared in the doorway.
“If that diagnosis is true, is the patient ready to be discharged?”
Jaxon rose to his feet, finding himself quite steady now, though his mind still whirled with the depth of his impossible survival. The squadron patch made his eyes narrow.
“Seriously? Am I being whisked off to some secret place so no one can talk to me other than those with the right clearance?”
He received a steady gaze from the man in the doorway.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Not going and you will not like what happens if I am forced.”
Jaxon knew those that had patched him back together had other ideas. He could remember nothing concrete to place that belief on, but he had seen what was probably a drone checking him out the night before. Someone cared about his health. He kept his gaze on the man in the doorway. Pulling rank only gave him a brief reprieve.
The doctor jumped in. “I will not release him yet. His system is stable, but not without help. I need to verify he can sustain and then improve his health once the medications he was on have cleared his system.”
“How long?”
“At least forty-eight hours.”
“I will pass this information on.”
The man did an abrupt about face and walked away.
The doctor waited for the sound of the receding footsteps to fade down the hall.
“If I lose my job for doing that…”
“You were honest. I definitely have issues you can and need to sort out before they try further digging in my head.”
“True.”
Jaxon snorted and turned to look out the window. “What the hell was I thinking?”
He looked at all the towering buildings and the snow-capped mountains beyond. He had lost all of his family. Most of North America had seen devastation somehow. Even the east coast had to deal with winters that defied the records. But why could he not remember what had made him give up on God and everything his family had instilled in him? He slapped the window in frustration.
A loud clack of metal on glass made him look at his left hand. A ring with a fancy Celtic knot design caught his attention. It looked like the one his grandfather had worn. With some effort, he pulled it off with his right hand that was thankfully free of the bandages that kept his right arm pinned down. He held the ring up so he could peer inside, hoping to find an inscription.
He read the words he had been told and shown many times. His breath caught. He held a family heirloom presumed lost with his grandfather in the Big One. He quickly put it back on his finger.
The clearing of a throat behind him made him spin to look. He winced when his right side did not want to comply.
“You just remembered something.”
“From my childhood, which I remember well.”
The doctor’s look showed he expected to hear more. Jaxon smiled.
“You are only wearing it because we couldn’t get it off your finger, though it appears we should have been able to.”
Jaxon shrugged. At least that did not make his right side hurt too much.
“Anything else you want to share?”
“No, but anyone have a Bible around here I can look at?”
“Um.” The silence stretched.
“Or at least a Christian chaplain?”
“Give me a bit.”
“Sooner the better.” Jaxon smiled. “Oh, and I need a map of the new west coast.”
The doctor only nodded before walking out of the room.
One would help him reconnect with God and the other would hopefully jog his memory, though why a map? He turned to look out the window again and chuckled. He started humming to break up the quiet.
Thanks for letting me read this!
It is certainly interesting. You have a good hook!
plane blew up into a million pieces five months ago
It feels odd thst the doctor uses his exact words from his conversation with the secretary.
“My brain is still trying to digest things. I should be dead. I did not eject from a plane that is in a million pieces. I am sure I didn’t.”
And she had said the memorial was five months ago. Would there be a delay? Might the memorial have been only 4 months ago?
But if it is incidental the doctor saying "a million pieces" then maybe don't give him the exact words.
But if it is your intention that the doctor is using his exact words, maybe indicate that... whose plane blew into a 'million pieces' five months ago.