The Edge

The dream wasn't like that. It was as if I'd been hit by that water just a moment before there was, quite simply, nothing. Nothing at all. Just stillness, no pain, no questions, no fear, just an utter blank.

I swung my legs over the bed and stamped them hard on the ancient linoleum, savoring the sluice of pain that rumbled through my shoulder, my ribs, my collarbone, my right thigh, and other parts of me that were healing well enough so that gradually I'd dropped them out of my inventory. That delicious sharp pain brought me fully into my favorite hospital room, planted me firmly in the here and now, out from under water in a nightmare that had left me being nothing at all.

Still, when my feet hit the linoleum, the shock of the impact punched me back, and I nearly fell. I grabbed the bed railing at the head of the bed, took a deep breath, and looked around. My feet were still on the floor, flat on off-white linoleum that I'd come to hate in the past two weeks as much as those pastel green and tan walls. Leave it to the military to pick those colors. But you couldn't hate when you were dead, so I was glad there was something there to prove to me that I was alive.

I'd been lucky, they'd told me. The blast hadn't zeroed in on my heart or my head or anything vital. It was like I'd gotten hit by a two-by-four all over-a bit smashed here, a bone broken there, a muscle twisted out down lower. My feet and my back had escaped, with just faint bruises marching up my spine. The explosion missed my groin too, for which I was profoundly grateful.

I just stood there by my bed, breathing and savoring all the air that was here, all of it mine.

I looked down at my messed-up bed. I wasn't about to fall back into that bed because I knew the dream still hovered, just beyond in the ether, much too close, waiting for me to sleep again. I wasn't about to. I stretched, slowly and carefully. Still, every move brought a jab of pain from somewhere in my body. I breathed in deeply and walked slowly to the window of my hospital room. I was in the newer hospital, built in 1980, a massive building attached to the original hospital, built sometime in the 1930s. Everyone there complained about having to walk miles to get anywhere. I wished I could walk even a part of a mile, and complain with them.

I saw a few starburst dots of light from the five-level open parking building across the way. The parking building as well as half a dozen support buildings were connected to the hospital by long corridors. I couldn't see more than a dozen parked cars from where I stood. Lights spiked up from lamps set at close intervals throughout the landscaped grounds. There were lights even in among the trees. My law enforcement instincts told me there were no places for a mugger to hide-too many lights.

There hadn't been any lights at all in the dream, just darkness, wet darkness. I walked slowly to the small bathroom, leaned over very carefully, cupped my hands under the water tap at the sink, and drank deeply. As I straightened, water ran down my chin and dripped onto my chest. I had dreamed I was drowning and yet my throat felt drier than that wool-parched, blistering air in Tunisia. It made no sense.

Unless I hadn't been the one drowning. Suddenly, deep down, I knew. I hadn't been the one to drown, but I'd been there, right there.

I looked around expecting someone to be there, close to me, right behind me, ready to tap me on the shoulder. For over two weeks since I'd been pounded into the desert sand by the bomb blast, there was always someone there just beside me, speaking quietly to me, jabbing me with needles, endless numbers of needles. My arms ached from all the shots and my butt was still numb in places.

I drank more water, then slowly raised my head, careful as always not to move too quickly. I stared at the man in the mirror above the sink. I looked like oatmeal, gray and collapsed, like I wasn't really alive. I was used to seeing a big guy, but the person staring back at me wasn't at all substantial. He looked like a lot of big bones strung together. I grinned at him. At least I still had my teeth, and they were still straight. I felt lucky my teeth hadn't been blown out when that bomb exploded and hurled me like a bag of feathers some fifteen feet across desert sand.

When my friend Dillon Savich, another FBI agent, saw me in the gym, he'd probably just shake his head and ask me where I'd stashed my coffin. I knew it would take a good six months before I could go toe-to-toe with Savich again and have a slim prayer of holding my own with him at the gym.

I took a deep breath, drank more water, and switched off the bathroom light. The figure in the mirror was shadowy now. He looked a lot better that way. I stepped back into the bedroom, to the stark outline of the single bed and the huge red digital numbers on the clock some friends had brought me, wrapped with a bright crimson ribbon. I looked at the clock. It was just seven minutes after three A.M. I remembered Savich's wife, Sherlock, also an FBI agent, telling me when I was floating between pain and the oblivion of morphine that every minute that clicked by on the clock meant I was that much closer to getting out of this place and back to work where I belonged.