2 July, 8:30 AM
When Jake came to it and opened his eyes, he realised three things, all in a quick succession: he wasn’t in Kansas anymore, he was not in his hotel room, and the back of his head still hurt like hell.
He rolled on his side, and with his left hand reached for the source of radiating pain. His fingers grazed the hair, and underneath it, a lump that made him wince when he touched it. Then his body remembered about the other pain, across his back, from when he tripped and fell over in the hotel corridor. Tripped over the body – alive? dead? – of the blonde-haired guy who - Jake tried to reconstruct what happened - shot Jake’s police guard with his pistol, before... Before what? Or maybe it was the balaclaved stranger who shot the cop, and...
It hurt too much to think. One person possibly dead, maybe two, who knows. He himself sucker-punched in the back of the head and taken by the parties unknown to... wherever he was. Somehow all this seemed strangely abstract, as if it wasn’t happening to him but to some other person, and he was merely observing, or better still, reading about it in a newspaper or a book. It must be the shock.
He rolled on his back again and made an effort with his elbows to pull his body up the bed so that his head rested on the pillow. Yes, he was on a bed, he realised, which seemed like maybe a good sign, or at least better than a dungeon floor, chained to the wall. But what would he know. The crawl made his upper back hurt even more, and his head too, but now he could at least see the room.
It wasn’t worth the effort and the pain. The room was small, painted off-white, with the bed the only piece of furniture, save for a simple varnished wooden chair in the corner. To his left, a window, wholly hidden behind full-length cream curtains, to his right a closed door. The room told him nothing.
Jake raised his wrist to his face. The watch showed it was half past eight. It was still moving, and the bright morning light was filtering into the room despite the curtains. So he must have been out for some fifteen hours. Good God.
At least you’re not dead, he thought. That’s a good start. But that’s where it pretty much finished, at the starting line. There were many possible scenarios to contemplate but bearing in mind the events of the past few days, most of them did not bear contemplation.
With some effort Jake rolled to the edge of the bed and swung his legs to the floor. He was feeling ill, groggy and nauseous. The fact that he had been out of it all that time in his clothes just added to the malaise. A kingdom for a shower. And a return to normal life. Where people around him don’t try to kill him or don’t get killed all the time. If that’s some sort of a local thing, no wonder his grandfather wanted to get out. The only surprising thing was he thought it would be safe to go back, even in the form of ashes. Thank you, grandfather.
Get a hold of yourself, the more rational side of his brain chimed in, slowly starting to get over the blow. As if your grandfather would have knowingly exposed you to all this. Shit happens; stop blaming others.
He took the first, tentative steps towards the window and pulled away the curtain. The window was closed, its glass murky with the unwashed grime of many months past. He could still see though well enough though. He was up on the top floor of a tenement, looking into a common courtyard. Rows of windows probably not unlike his own, broken by occasional balconies, stared back at him across the chasm. Above them, the roof. Above the roof, the blue sky. Not a cloud in sight; another scorcher to come. Nothing else in sight either by way of any landmarks to give him a chance to pinpoint his location in... he assumed still Czernograd, but a lot could have happened during the unconscious fifteen hours.
Then Jake heard the door open behind him and turned around as swiftly as his body allowed him. It was slow but even that hurt and made his head spin.
“It’s good to see you are awake,” said the woman on the threshold in pleasant, accented English.
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash