Hands gripped him from behind and pulled him away. He looked over his shoulder. Uniformed security guards were filling the room, subduing both men with weight and numbers.

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Ted tried to pull free of the guards holding him, but his muscles failed to respond.

“The thing!” he yelled, various body signals announcing he was beginning to panic. The word for the medical device used for injecting liquids through a needle had been wiped from his mind.

The thug was making noise—cursing in a strangled chicken squawk and demanding to be allowed to leave, though he repeatedly hawked up globs of thick blood. The tall male nurse ventured closer in an attempt to examine the Russian’s neck and earned a glancing kick to the side of his head for his trouble. The Russian croaked sounds that could not have been words and threw flailing punches. His eyes were dazed and unfocused, but he was still dangerous. The security detail backed off and let the police take over. In seconds he was facedown on the floor, his hands cuffed behind him. He kept on screaming in that hideous animal cry.

“He’s Russian,” Ted tried to explain to the police, believing that this simple fact would explain so much of what had happened.

“Syringe!” Ted yelled the second the word came to him.

A nurse found it tossed into a corner and held it up. It was broken. Ted gasped and tried to remember why this was important.

Two blue uniformed men took over from the security guards. They sat him in a chair. Nurses, both male and female, were shouting at one another. Ted tried to focus on relaying facts to the cops. Facts had become slippery, sliding through his fingers as he grasped at them.

The police listened to Ted’s story. The broken syringe and the puffy injection mark in his shoulder lent some credence to an otherwise unlikely story.

“I don’t feel well,” he said. “I need a doctor.” He was enormously proud of himself for getting those thoughts out. Forming sentences was a chore. He was tired. Exhausted. And at the same time, he felt on the verge of a panic attack, starting at sudden sounds and riding a whiplash of emotions. As he listened to himself explaining why he had attacked the man in Kenzie’s room, he heard only the gaps and leaps in logic. And he couldn’t seem to care. His voice tapered off and he went silent.

The head nurse and the police finally negotiated a settlement whereby the Russian, under guard, was delivered downstairs to the ER. The cops abandoned Ted in the ICU while the staff worked to determine what unknown substance had been injected into him.