Six rules undying book 2, p.7
Six (Rules Undying Book 2), page 7
She inhaled to scream, but all of that hard-earned air came flooding out as a powerful blow socked her in the diaphragm. She ended up hurled against the pavement, her head cracking against the curb. Everything grew hazy as she felt two huge hands grabbing the sides of her head.
Her attacker wore black from head to toe, including a black balaclava on a sticky spring night. The only thing she could see were very bright blue eyes growing wide as she started fading in and out of consciousness.
“Well, this was unexpected,” her attacker said in a soft Southern drawl. “Please understand that I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
She tried to let out a scream for help but only managed a squeak. Much to her surprise, her attacker grabbed her phone. She could hear him press three buttons, and then everything went dark.
“Paige? Paige, can you hear me?” she heard as she came to. Her parking lot at night had been replaced by a brightly lit examination room with a concerned-looking woman shining a light in Paige’s rapidly blinking eyes. Paige groaned as her head pounded, and she could still taste dirt and blood and synthetic fibers in her mouth.
“Ugh,” she managed to choke out. Even breathing made her wince.
“Easy, easy,” the nice lady in pink scrubs and a bun said. “You took quite a spill.”
“Where—where am I?” Paige managed to say. As she looked around the room, she choked with nausea until she closed her eyes again.
“You are very lucky that someone called 911 for you. Do you remember what happened?” a new voice said.
She opened her eyes again and saw a rather portly cop with gray hair standing just behind the woman in pink. The nurse-type woman gave the stranger dagger eyes. Paige closed her eyes again.
Much to her annoyance the woman in pink moved her bed a little, jolting the patient awake again.
“There was a guy. He attacked me,” she said weakly.
“Did you know your attacker?”
Paige shook her head.
“You have a boyfriend?” the cop asked with a rather accusatory tone in his voice.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure you didn’t know your attacker? Do you feel safe in your home?”
“What?” she asked, blinking again. “There was a guy all in black
—”
“A black guy?” the cop pressed.
“What? No . . . he was . . . everything black, but he had blue eyes. I remember blue eyes; that’s all.”
“I think she’s still pretty shaken up, officer. Why don’t you give her some space?” the nurse said. “I’ll let you know when you can question her again or if she says anything. Hey, honey, can you tell me your name?”
“It’s Paige,” she said. “Ow; I hurt.”
“I know,” the nurse said sweetly.
“Cal,” Paige managed to say. “Does Cal know I’m here?”
She managed to endure the next few hours of poking and prodding as various doctors kept looking in her eyes and asking her questions like her name and the date and where she lived. The cop came back and took a statement, and the cycle repeated with the doctors until she was finally greeted by a familiar face.
“Paige, baby!” Maria cried as she slipped into the room. She hadn’t bothered fixing her makeup and still wore the same skirt and blouse from dinner the night before. “I came as soon as I got the call.”
“Mrs. Carmichael, your daughter’s still recovering from a significant head trauma—” the nurse in the room started to say.
“Paige, honey, do you know who I am?” Maria asked.
“Hi, Mom,” Paige said weakly. “How do I look?”
Maria rushed to her daughter’s side. “Oh, baby,” she said over and over as she took in the scraped cheek and blackened spots on her daughter’s neck. Her mom looked up at the caregiver in the room.
“Your daughter certainly has a concussion and an injury to the neck and spine and most likely several fractured ribs. We need to do a lot more tests, though, and keep an eye on her,” someone in a lab coat said.
Paige started to drift off again, and one of the nurses urged her awake.
“Not yet, sweetie,” the evil nurse in pink said.
Paige half listened to the talk of concussion care and imaging being ordered. She licked her teeth over and over, grimacing at the taste that only seemed to be getting stronger in her mouth as the day pressed onward. She wrinkled her nose at the obscene amount of cologne her doctor wore and threw up after catching a whiff of her
next-door neighbor doing the same. She then proceeded to go through another round of poking, prodding, and tests while her mom yelled at the idiots hurting her baby.
This cycle continued through the night until she managed to get some very pleasant Pakistani resident to take her to get scans of her brain. Once the doctors had finally determined that she wasn’t bleeding to death within her own skull, she was given a little happy shot and allowed some sleep.
The next day Paige awoke to hear her laundry list of injuries—
five cracked ribs, an alarming hairline fracture on a vertebra, a concussion, multiple contusions, and a pair of loosened teeth.
“Basically, if I didn’t know any better, I would say you’d been hit by a car rather than punched,” the doctor said as he read her chart.
“That’s how I feel,” Paige muttered.
An hour later Paige endured round two with the policeman, who proudly informed that she had neither been robbed nor raped in her encounter with the human-freight-train-hybrid ninja. She tried to listen to him talk about how they found her wallet a few feet away.
“We still haven’t been able to reach your boyfriend, Miss Carmichael,” the policeman said.
“He works weekends,” Paige said weakly. “He was at Bobby’s, um, Robert Martin’s house. The number is on my whatchamacallit—”
“Your phone, sweetie?” Paige’s mom asked.
“There was no phone found at the scene, ma’am.”
“The bad man took my phone,” Paige muttered before drifting off again. “Why did the bad man take my phone?”
Paige’s exhaustion took over again, and she drifted into a fitful, painful sleep. Every once in a while a beep or a bloop from one of the multitude of machines would jar her awake, or she would shift in her bed and send fresh stabs of pain through her side. By the time she just managed to slip into a comfy position, the door swung open again, and it was time for more poking and prodding. This time it was the king of all sadists, the hospital dentist, coming to check on her two wobbly teeth.
“Well, I’ve got some bad news,” he said as he opened her mouth. “Looks like two have already fallen out, and I bet you
swallowed them.”
Paige let out a muffled groan as the dentist pointed out a few more loosened teeth. She could hear her mother hemming and hawing in the background as a list of boring instructions went into one of Paige’s ears and promptly out the other.
“She’s going to need a lot of work, I’m sorry to say—”
Paige responded simply by snoring. By the time she woke up again, there was Jell-O and her mom was taking her turn at getting forty winks in a rather uncomfortable-looking pink leatherette chair.
Paige’s stomach growled at the first whiff of artificial lime-flavored goodness. As she reached for her spoon, her tongue dared to slip across her aching gums. A weird lump two slots left of center made her pause. She winced as a fresh metallic taste touched her tongue.
Somehow she inhaled an entire cup of gelatin in a single gulp.
The taste of food in her tummy started a cascade reaction. At first her belly merely growled. Within minutes that growl turned into a roar. She hit the nurse call button and ended up begging for more Jell-O. Five cups later, and she was able to finally sleep again.
“It’s so good to see you with an appetite!” her nurse declared as Paige was already drifting back to sleep.
Finally, after an indeterminate number of naps and examinations, Paige made enough progress to make a limping trip to the bathroom and managed to nibble on some mushy potato-like substance. According to her insurance, this declared her cured and ready for treatment at home.
She stared at the mountain of papers on her bed tray. The words pain, sleeplessness, and mood swings made sense, but she couldn’t be bothered to read the rest. Instead, she begged for more lime Jell-O while her mom organized things and confirmed treatment.
“Now, Cal is going to take two days off to stay with you. You can’t work this week until they are sure your concussion is healed.
You’re not even supposed to think too much—”
“I could go to work then,” Paige joked weakly as she waited to get her clothes and her final discharge papers.
“Sweetie, listen to me,” her mom chided gently. “The doctors have given us a checklist of all the symptoms to be concerned
about . . .”
Paige nodded and started sorting the papers by how bright the toner was on the page. One set had a centimeter-wide band of gray speckles down the right margin, while another faded toward the left.
One of the army of pleasant but nameless caretakers came in, this one with even more paper. “Hi, I’m Marcy, and I need to discuss your bill with you before you leave us—”
Maria didn’t give the woman a chance to so much as breathe before growling, “Can’t you just send an invoice? The poor girl was beaten half to death. You have the insurance; suck it with the co-pay
—”
The poor old lady’s eyes nearly bugged out at the pure force of an angry Italian mother. She shook her head. “No, ma’am,” she said.
“I was coming to say that your entire deductible was paid. In fact, we owe you a refund of one hundred and eight dollars and sixteen cents.”
“What?” both Paige and her mother asked.
“I thought you’d have known—”
“Who paid?” Maria asked.
“A very, um, bookish-looking man,” Marcy said. “Long hair, glasses—”
Maria let out a deep sigh. “I guess your father can’t be bothered to come visit, but he’s willing to pay the bill. Why didn’t he tell me that he’s in town?” she grumbled.
“I didn’t think he looked that old,” Marcy said, scratching her head. “Anyway, let’s get this nasty paperwork done so you can get home.”
“Amen,” Maria said.
- 5 -
“Are you sure you’re OK? Let me get that for you,” Cal said as Paige paused in front of the oatmeal section of their local supermarket.
“I can lift up a box of grits, Cal,” she said as he fussed about.
She made quite the statement with her foam neck collar and delightfully greenish healing black eye. A few of the passers-by looked suspiciously toward her large boyfriend with the tattoos and shaved head, but Paige just glared right back. She even snapped,
“Mind your own business!” at one particularly nosy old busybody as they ended up both reaching for cream cheese while Cal was getting milk.
Paige stopped to lean on the cart, and immediately Cal rushed to her side. “Are you dizzy? Do you need to sit down?”
“Just give me a second,” she said as she rubbed her temples.
“You should be back home in b—”
“I am sick of bed!” she snapped. “It’s fine for me to do light activity—”
“But—”
Paige shot him a withering glance. Finally, he raised his hands in defeat as they continued toward coffee and their final sundries. He pointed to the little coffee shop beyond the registers.
“Make you a deal, babe. I’ll stop fussing if you get us both coffee and sit tight till I’m done at the checkout,” he said, pulling out his best overgrown teddy bear expression.
She eyed the tempting brown booths and the softer lighting in the alcove.
“Fine,” she said with a little eye roll. Still, she squeezed the big guy’s arm as she slowly walked past him. “Love you, babe,” she said with a pained smile.
Each step across the beige linoleum took an eternity, but she somehow managed to work her way to the end and around the less crowded express lanes. As expected, the poor girl behind the little coffee shop counter stared slack-jawed at the shambling mess of tape and bruises wandering into her domain.
“Oh my, are you OK?” she asked as Paige finally made it to the counter.
Paige smiled, careful not to show off her new gaps. “Just fine, thank you. You should see the other guy,” she joked weakly.
“Car wreck?” the ever-so-helpful girl at the counter asked.
Paige did her best impersonation of a nod and pulled out her wallet. “One large and one small coffee, both with room, please.”
“Oh, you go sit down; I’ll bring them over!” the girl said as she watched Paige limp down the counter. Paige smiled and acquiesced, taking the seat closest to the little bar with the milk and sugar. As she eased into the molded plastic, she noticed one other patron hiding behind a laptop at the coffee shop.
“I guess some people will go anywhere for free Wi-Fi,” Paige muttered. Her coffees were produced as promised, and the helpful clerk even walked over the cream and tossed some sugar packets on the table. “Thanks.”
Paige popped the lid and poured her cream. The moment the earthy aroma of coffee filled her nose, however, her stomach turned, and she ended up pushing it away. She tried to relax in her seat but began tapping her feet and fingers as she waited in her little booth.
The fake wood grain of the table held her interest for a while, as did folding and unfolding a napkin conveniently left just within reach. She jealously eyed the laptop and the girl at the bar who was now free to check her phone while she waited for anyone new.
Clickety-clack, the keyboard went in the other booth. Paige tried to tune in to the din of the shoppers and the beeps as items were passed down the conveyor belts, but the repetitive noise of click, click, click kept overriding the ambient sounds. Finally, she made the
effort to slide back to the end of the booth and inch her hips around so she could pivot her whole body. She could only see an arm in a sensible blue plaid button-down, some thick black-rimmed glasses, and an unattractive, slicked-back mane of dirty-blond hair. Indeed, this stranger was one pocket protector short of a perfect Revenge of the Nerds Halloween costume.
His spindly long fingers stopped abruptly as he saw her looking over. Paige blushed and eased back around to face the checkout lines. Clickety-clack, the racket started again. Now her nose wrinkled at some sort of herbaceous smell. The guy with the laptop was lapping up some sort of beige liquid from a lidless to-go cup.
“I need a new phone,” she grumbled as she tried tapping her fingers in the rhythm of the nerd’s typing. Soon the pair of them were making their own little dance of click, click, click, tap tap, tap, until finally Cal and his cart came wheeling up to the edge of the café.
“Hey, babe,” he said as he lumbered over to fix up his coffee.
Cal raised a brow at the geek and his herbal tea. “Wow,” he mouthed as he sat down across from Paige.
“You not having any?” he asked after gulping down half of his enormous paper cup.
“Just waiting for it to cool a bit,” she said, pointing to the place in her jaw where teeth had once been. Cal proceeded to regale her on the final tally of their shopping, including his marvelous conquest of the meat aisle, which left them the proud owners of eight pounds of discount pork loin. In the meantime, the geek in plaid had finished his tea, packed up his computer in an ugly khaki messenger bag, and schlepped clumsily away. Cal barked, “Hey, doofus!” as the guy bumped into their cart on the way out, but the guy just hurried on his way.
“So weird,” Paige muttered as she could still smell grassy bits of chamomile as the clerk rinsed out his cup.
“He’s probably late for picking up his mom and then watching some Star Trek reruns.” Cal laughed as he started cleaning the table.
“What’s wrong with Star Trek reruns?” Paige said in mock anger. Soon the pair shuffled out to the parking lot, and Paige got to
relax in the truck while her considerate boyfriend took care of everything. By the time they made it back to the apartment, the sun was just starting to set. Paige froze as the car door opened and she faced the shadowy path from their parking space to the door.
Cal gave her a few minutes and stayed right with her until they made it into the pool of light that surrounded the safety of their apartment. Paige winced as she felt her breath quicken with every step.
Cal gingerly put one of his bear-hands on hers. She smiled at the little squeeze. “It’ll get better, babe, I swear. Now you sit down, and I’ll do the groceries and get the mail, OK? Sit, sit!”
She stumbled over to the designated comfy zone and let Cal pull off her shoes and tuck her in with the TV and her new best friend, the memory foam pillow. She still jumped a little as he came barreling in with the first round of groceries, but by the time he was finished with the last pass, Paige had zoned out to watching some show on how saltwater taffy was made.
He disappeared and reappeared triumphantly with her still untouched beverage and set the mail on the coffee table before kissing the top of her head. Paige smiled as she saw a little brown box from her phone carrier on top of bills and preapproved credit card offers.
“You going into work tomorrow?” she asked as Cal tossed cans willy-nilly into the pantry.
“Yeah, but your mom has already called and texted to tell me that she is coming over tomorrow and cooking and cleaning and probably telling you how you should dump me for someone else.”
“Sounds about right,” Paige muttered as she managed to scoop the mail over to the sofa. “Hey, when you get a chance, can you bring over a knife?”
“Should I be worried?” Cal said with a wicked grin as he hopped over and popped the tape on the box seams for her. “Oh, a wise man never gets between a woman and her phone!”
