Awakening: The First Tale of the Trine (Trine Series Book 1) Read Free Page B

going to stitch me up. They got the tests done pretty quick, then put me back in a treatment room in the ER, room thirteen I think. It was a two-seater, and they had a curtain pulled between me and the next bed. I was in there for a bit before they took the other guy off for some tests. The doctor and the nurse came in a few minutes after he was wheeled out, with a tray of stuff to patch up my head.”
    “Ok, so leading up to this, did you notice anything unusual about the room, or did anything about the experience stand out to you?” Agent Donaldson inquired.
    “Nothing at all. I’ve been in more hospitals than I care to remember, and if anything they were doing better than most. The room was perfectly normal, from what I could tell. They had pulled the curtain back when they rolled the other fellow out, and there was nothing going on back there. The nurse had pulled it closed after they got him out, so I didn’t see...” Delmont stopped, and the agents noticed he had intertwined his hands so tightly his knuckles cracked in the silence. “I didn’t see how those…things got in there, not clearly….but I saw…” he trailed off again.
    “Take your time,” Agent Donaldson said. “And let us know exactly, moment by moment, what happened.”
    “All right,” Delmont exhaled noisily. “But I want to say first that I’m not crazy. If you two got a file on me you know what the military said about me. When I went to re-up they gave me a no-thank-you, and told me I was suffering from delusions, thinking I was invincible or something. I tried to tell them it wasn’t like that, and that I just wouldn’t ask a man to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, but...that shit hurt me, like nothing I ever felt in a fight. I gotta admit though, that sitting here now, thinking about it…this is gonna sound insane.”
    “We believe you,” Agent Donaldson said, interrupting Delmont. “And we’ve seen the surveillance from the hospital, of what happened in the hall. We know that something extraordinary occurred in that room, and that is the piece we’re missing. Tell us how those…creatures appeared in there, and anything else you can recall.”
    “Okay,” Delmont sighed, after taking another sip of water. “So the doc sits down on his little stool, and takes the bandage off my head. I’m watching the nurse get the tools ready while he’s poking at me, when the curtain dividing us from the back of the room suddenly flaps, like a breeze came through. There was a sound too, not loud or anything, just a little noise like a computer might make. A real fast ‘ bwoop ’, when the curtain moved. The nurse and the doc both heard it too, ‘cause they kind of paused for a moment. Then, all hell broke loose.”
    Both agents watched Delmont expectantly as he paused, obviously trying to find the words for what happened next. “The curtain settled, then we could all see…something on the other side gather a fistful of the cloth, right in the middle. With one jerk, the entire curtain gets ripped down, and those little plastic rings holding it up come raining down all over. The entire back wall of the room, it was gone, and where it used to be is was some sort of…corridor, leading into a room filled with…I don’t know, machinery, but nothing like I’ve ever seen. The corridor, or passage, whatever it was…it was hard to look at it, it was twisting the entire room. Then there was this man, or creature, that had torn down the curtain just standing there, only a couple of feet from the side of my bed. I think it tried to say something, but where its mouth and nose should be, it had some sort of armor. I couldn’t hear anything anyhow, ‘cause the doc kicked his stool over jumping up, and the nurse was screaming like a banshee.”
    Agent Donaldson held up a finger to pause Delmont. “Now this…man that was standing there, describe him specifically for us.”
    “He was tall, had to be at least six and a half feet. I