12
Re-United

Sunday 2040.11.04

Rangan’s world came back in fragments. Painted concrete ceiling, directly above him. Bare LED pointed down at him. Tiny room. IV bag, hanging on a hook nailed into the wall.

The young woman standing above him, with the long honey-blonde ponytail, the George Mason University sweatshirt, the blue nitrile gloves – turning towards him, then away, towards him, then away.

“Wha?” he said.

She turned towards him again, and smiled. “Well,” she said brightly. “You’re with us again.”

He tried to clear the fog from his brain.

“I’m at St Mark’s?”

“Yep. Lucky to be here too.”

“You’re a doctor?”

She smiled wider. “Closest thing you’ve got. Fourth year med student. I’m Melanie.”

Rangan lifted his head and looked down at himself. He was stripped to the waist. There was a fresh bandage at his side. His ribs were wrapped. The IV entered at his elbow. The pain was a whole hell of a lot better than it had been.

“How…” How bad is it he wanted to ask.

“You’re going to be OK. The burns are mostly first degree. One broken rib, left side. I injected a bone growth accelerator, but it’s still going to be weeks before you’re a hundred percent.”

Rangan looked up, and noticed that long hair again, those green eyes, the way she ticked things off on her fingers as she talked. “Thanks.”

“…And,” Melanie was saying. “You’ve got a souvenir.”

She turned away from him, then turned back with a tiny plastic bag, a small black something inside it. Rangan reached up, took it with his free hand, held it up between his face and the light.

“A bullet,” he said.

She nodded. “It was moving slow by the time it hit you. And it missed everything major. A few inches over and things could have been pretty bad. You got lucky. Really lucky.”

Rangan stared at it. “I can’t believe that cop just shot me. Fucking asshole.”

Melanie’s face clouded over at that. Her smile disappeared. Her lips compressed into a thin line.

“That cop,” she said, carefully, enunciating each word, “was evacuated to Charlottesville with second and third degree burns over half his body. He’s in a lot worse shape than you.”

Rangan stared at her. “He shot me. What if the kids had been in the van?”

Melanie shook her head. “He thought he was doing his job.”

“That makes it OK?”