Page 11 of Thrust into the Light

“So her name is Farlen. She’s twenty-four years old. She is scared of pretty much everything. Bright lights hurt her eyes. She wouldn’t talk at first. The first words she said since she was in the hospital were when she met me. While I was feeling like I was being hit with a train, had my heart ripped out, couldn’tbreathe, and was watching my entire universe begin to gravitate around her.” Stephen laughs at that. He knows what it’s like. “I just found out a few hours ago that she was in foster care since she was two years old, left at the steps of an orphanage. She bounced around from house to house until she was six. She then spent the last eighteen years chained up in a basement.”

Credit to Stephen he didn’t hit a single car with that statement. Even though he jerked the wheel hard enough to tip the SUV over.

“Dad, please be careful. She’s been through enough. She doesn’t need a car accident to add to the list of shit that’s happened to her.”

“Fuck son, again, you need to reacquaint yourself with a damn dictionary. ROUGH does not cover it. It would be more apt to say she crawled her way through the pits of hell and came out the other side than to say rough!”

“Dad, I don’t even think that is accurate enough to describe what she’s been through.”

“I will keep this from everyone else for now son, but you need to promise me something, as soon as my soon-to-be daughter mentions the fucker that did this to her, you let me know, and you let me know the second the last syllable of his name is out of her lips. Fucker doesn’t deserve to be alive.”

“As long as I am there for it too, Dad.”

He smiles at me in the mirror, a smile that promises pain and retribution. My heart feels so full, especially seeing as he’s willing to protect her with me, at least until she finds her other matches, and we can exact our vengeance out on him for what he did to Farlen.

14

Farlen

This bed gets better and better every time I lay down in it. The head bed feels so much softer and fluffier. It must be dark outside, it’s dark in my room and it’s a lot quieter than it was during the light time. I gradually open my eyes and am terrified. No longer in my room at the hospital. I’m in another place completely. There are no white walls, no square on the wall, and there are three doors in this room. Black cloth is against two of the walls, but not all the way across the walls. It reminds me of the blanket that was on the pole in the shower.

Don’t make a sound. Don’t make a sound. No screaming, you know you get hurt more when you make noise. I try to calm myself down, ready myself for whatever pain is coming, as I hear footsteps getting closer to one door. Where is Connor at? Where is Agnes? Where am I? He said he was going to make sure no one hurt me again.

The door opens slowly and a bright light comes through the open door.

“Farlen, calm down, please. It’s just me.” I hear the door shut and relax. Connor. He didn’t leave me. He is still here. I open my eyes and look at him. He has his arms out and is bent over funny. He walks into a pole that is on one end of the bed.

“Hey, now that isn’t funny. Not all of us have as good of night vision as you. I can’t see a thing in here.” He makes it to the bottom of the bed and walks along sideways until he’s near the spot where the head beds go. I hear him laugh.

“Head beds is a new one. If you’re talking about these, they arecalled pillows. Now, before you start freaking out again, you’re at the academy. After your uh nap, they released you from the hospital. Agnes left you some clothes and dressed you before we left. The blankets on the wall are called curtains. They cover up the windows to make it dark in here so it doesn’t hurt your eyes. I have something called sun glasses that you can wear while outside during the daytime. Hopefully, they will help you. Now, we have to go meet with the healer here. He’s going to make sure you are healing. I have some food out in the kitchen for you. I’ve tried to make it as dark as I can for you, but it is still pretty bright out there. So let’s try a little test and put on the sunglasses and we will see if it is tolerable, okay?”

I don’t know what tolerable is, and he showed me the sunglasses as he was talking. They look a little like his glasses, but not really. These are black and made of something, not metal, and the inside of them is dark. I put them on and can’t see anything. Remembering that I need to work the muscles in my mouth more so it isn’t so hard to talk, and knowing that Connor won’t hurt me for making noise, I look towards where he was.

“I can’t see.”

“Alright sweetheart, let me turn on the light so I can help get you out of here.”

I hear him move around the room. He did something that made him go oomph. Abruptly it gets really bright around the outside of the glasses and I push them more on my face.

“Sorry about that. I should have warned you when I was going to turn it on. How bad is the light right now?”

It’s very strange. The room looks like it did while it was dark, but I can see more things in the room. The pole at the end of the bed has weird bumps on it and there is one on each end part of the bed. It hurts a little with the light coming in through the sides of the glasses, but it’s a lot better than it has ever been when I’ve been in the light.

“It’s not bad.”

I look at Connor and just look at him. When I first saw him, it was hard to pay attention to how he looked, other than hiseyes. It was hard because of how my face felt like it was on fire. Connor is very tall and has lots of very big muscles on him. He doesn’t have a big belly like HE did; he doesn’t even have a belly at all, and it’s all flat like mine. His eyes are still the same piercing green with brown streaks in them. He still has his glasses on. His hair is brown and short. When he smiles at me, two little holes form near his mouth. He is wearing different clothes than he did when he was on the wheeled bed.

“Your leg!”

“It’s okay Farlen, my leg is okay, here look.”

He lifts his leg clothes up and shows me the leg that had the bone sticking out, and there is no blood leaking out of him. There are no marks left on him from it. I don’t understand. Every time HE hurt me, I woke up with more marks on me.

“A healer healed the broken bone and mended the skin. That’s why there are no marks on me, sweetheart. Maybe the healer we are going to go see can do something about your scars. First, I need to make sure you have something to eat before we leave. The door over here is to the bathroom, and the door over here is for your clothes. Which is something else we are going to need to take care of soon. Why don’t you use the bathroom, then come out through the door here, and let me feed you?”

I nod to him. I do need to pee, but I don’t want to say anything to him. He leaves out the door he told me to come out of to eat. I go to the door, he said, is the bathroom and look around. It’s so dark in here. I see a white rectangle on the wall that looks like the one he was standing near when the lights came on, and there is a white thing poking out of it, looking like it is pointing down. Trying to push it, and nothing happens. The one in the other room looked like it was pointing up. I try to move it up, and the room gets lighter.

There isn’t a shower in here, there is a big bowl, the toilet, and a sink. And when I say big bowl, I mean big bowl; it looks like it would hold twelve Connors. I used the bathroom and washed my hands like Agnes showed me. I only jumped a little when I “flushed” the toilet this time.

---