Episode 50 – Restart

Was it his imagination, or was it real.  It just felt like he had 20,000 volts sent through him.

In the periphery he could hear rather than see a loud noise, and them it seemed like an involuntary jerking movement.  It seemed like there were flashing lights all around him.

Was he in the middle of a UFO landing site?

“We’ve got a pulse.”  A strange distorted voice was nearby and Harry didn’t recognise it.

“Is he going to live, that’s the question,” a rasping voice, one that came from a man who’d probably smoked all his life.

Harry could smell cigarette smoke wafting on the gentle breeze, an odd sensation because his nose felt like it was blocked.

He blinked his eyes and in the time it took for his vision to clear, and see what looked to be a man in a dark blue jump suit or overalls, he heard the man say, “He’s waking.”

He heard another man, on the other side, breathe out heavily.  “Not a good idea right now.”  It was accompanied by a sharp prick in my arm, and then, words drifting on the breeze, “we have to get him to the hospital.  It’s a bloody miracle someone found him, and an even bigger miracle he’s still alive.”

A miracle, Harry thought.  That’s what his mother had said when he was born..  And, that was it.

It was cold.

It was bright in the room from an overhead light, and curtains covering the window.  There was a table beside the bed, on one side.  On the other, a tower of equipment, beeping and flashing.

Vital signs, an indication he was still alive.

Right then, he wasn’t feeling any pain.  Perhaps he was dead, and this was the first stage of his next journey.

He heard the boss tell his men to kill him, and that’s what they’d done.  He was sure of it.  An injection and then it was lights out.

The end.

Until someone started shaking him.  Some old man, shaggy hairdo and beard, smelly clothes, odd that, he thought, that he could smell, and a strange language, none of the words he could understand.

A foreign language.  Or had he been an alien off that UFO?

Not long after he heard a wailing sound, police, ambulance, air raid, something that he couldn’t quite comprehend.

But one thing he fairly sure about.

He was still just barely alive.

© Charles Heath 2016-2019