The woman smiled and raised her eyebrows, gesturing and twisting her face, noiseless. Hellstorm thought this odd. He leaned forward, and rammed his gut against leather straps. All was white and blue, and he was growing needles, needles leading to tubes, tubes laden with swollen plastic fruit. It was unsettling. Hellstorm wasn’t sure that he liked it.
The woman kept waving at him. Now she was holding up fingers. Her face annoyed him; did she have to keep gaping at him in the silence? Something around his forehead itched. He twitched his fingers. If only he could reach. Why would anyone tie him down? He noticed that his knuckles were sewn up in pretty patterns. At first he had not realized that they were his knuckles at all, because he could not feel them. He looked past his knuckles, and realized he had no legs.
The man to his right was all bloody, and not awake. He had a plastic mustache that ballooned out into a tank. The man to his right had his arm in a sling. Where was he?
The woman frowned. Why was she angry at him? She began to cry. He couldn’t hear her, of course, but he saw the tears. He blinked. It was uncomfortable. He didn’t want her to cry. Who was she?
Hellstorm was what he remembered. Presumably it was his name. What else would it be? Hellstorm--a strange name. His parents must have been strange but he couldn’t remember. Hellstorm, now exhausted, stared at the ceiling. He let the ceiling open up into all sorts of spirals and sinkholes.
The woman jolted, catching his attention. She opened her eyes wide and her mouth wider. Her face collapsed into a mask of fear. The transformation couldn’t have taken more than a second but he felt his soul collapse into the same fear, as if it were contagious.
A split second later he saw the blast. In that split second he remembered how it sounded. And he remembered that his name wasn’t Hellstorm at all, but at that point he was done with remembering because the real Hellstorm had come.
Copyright M.Kehl 2014
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