Where do I begin? Most would say the beginning, but for me the middle and the end are what matter the most. My name is James Turn and I'm a very normal man with very normal goals and a job that isn't quite the norm. I'm a detective. I was a detective. I didn't really solve murder cases or anything, I was IA. Internal Affairs. I watched the watchmen. Everything was going the way it usually went, harassment complaints against cops. Often by some lowlife who thinks they'll get money from the city. On my way to check out a complaint against a fellow detective I got a call from a friend of mine. They needed help and they needed it bad. My arrival at their home was enough to get me to draw my weapon. The door was open, lights were flickering, a window was busted and I could smell burnt rubber in the street. Yeah, something went down. I entered the house, room by room I looked for signs of life. Nothing. Then there was a sharp pain in the back of my head and things went black.
I woke up in the hospital. It had been days, weeks, I can't remember. I couldn't remember a lot. I tried to stand but my legs buckled and I went crashing to the floor. A nurse entered to see what the commotion was. I'd be a cliche if I said I thought she was angel, but damn. She was Hispanic, maybe Italian, five foot and two inches, hourglass shape that wasn't diminshed by her scrubs one bit and black silky hair. If only she was one of those nurses most men fantasize about. "Are you okay?" She asked me, coming to my aid to help me back into bed. "I'll be fine." I told her, I didn't want her thinking I couldn't handle myself. "I was hoping you would wake up one day." The nurse said to me, it made me feel good to know that some stranger was rooting for me.
"Semper Fi." She then said, "What?" I wasn't sure what she meant. "You were a soldier?" She asked me, but I couldn't answer that question myself. "Um... what?" Soon that would become my favorite word. "Here." The nurse grabbed me by the hand, she guided my eyes down to the tattoo on my forearm. The Eagle, Globe and Anchor. I was a marine. "The memory will come back, it happens when you take trauma to the head like that sometimes. You're lucky it's just memory loss. You could have been out for the rest of your life." She told me, her words causing the pain I had felt that fateful to come back.
I took a bump, someone tried to take me out or I was just very clumsy. "I'm Angela." The nurse said to me, the pathetic romantic in me homing in on the fact that she had the word angel in her name. "I'm... uh... I can't remember." I responded, almost ashamed of myself.
"Oh! Let me get your files, I can tell you just who you are." The beautiful Angela said to me before she left the room. Once she left I finally noticed the others that shared the room with me. An old man, a teen and a man that was probably about my age. "Casanova." The old man said, prompting the other two patients to laugh. "I'm sure you'll be getting her number soon, get her out of that nurse outfit, right?" The teen said to me, "I'll try." I told him with a laugh.
"Remarkable!" I heard someone shout from the hallway, footsteps were approaching. Several people. All of them entered the room and wasted no time in crowding around me and staring. "I thought you would never wake up." One man said, he was blonde and a bit of an accent. German maybe. He was a doctor. He was THE doctor. "Check his head." The doctor told the others, one of the junior doctors lifting the bandage on my head to check my wound. "Uh.. he's healed."
"What?" I asked, "Wait... what?" The German doctor asked, it was starting to become the question that I'd have everyone asking soon. My head wound was gone, but that didn't explain the pain I felt. "This is amazing. You're a medical anomaly. A miracle." The German doctor said to me, "Someone get me all the information that we have on this man."
It wasn't much and that made my life harder than it had to be. I assumed the hospital had the information on me they should have had, but Angela never came back. And then I could smell it. Smoke. Fire. The fire alarms went off, everyone wasn't sure what to do at first until someone yelled, "Fire!" There you go. Now everyone was doing what they had trained for. Get the patients to safety.
I was given a wheelchair, a new nurse becoming my driver for the evening. She was pretty, but she was no Angela. As she pushed down the hallway another nurse pushed the old man from my room in his own wheelchair. "Some luck. You wake up and someone puts something the microwave that they sholdn't have." He said to me, "We'll be fine." I told the old man, "You'll be fine. My time is almost up. Failing heart, one working kidney, my legs barely work. I'm not pleasing the wife much either in here." He said, laughing. Smiling. For a man that little time left he sure was happy. "You're young and you're healing." He continued, "You have great things to do here. God put you on this planet to change it."
Great. He was preaching. "I doubt it." I told the old man, "You just don't know it yet." The old man said, "People like you who are given a second chance have many choices but so few." He said, "I don't understand." I told the man, as we neared the front entrance of the hospital. "You can either live to become the villain or die the hero, my son." Foreshadowing ass old man. Wasn't sure which would come true, but why the hell couldn't things go back to normal? "Ah, I get'cha." I had wished I didn't.
"No matter which way you go you'll do great things and change the world for better or for worse. And, the person that you are now will cease to exist." I didn't have a clue who I was in the first place. I let my eyes wander as the old man spoke, two beautiful legs were moving down a hallway. The body they were attached to was being dragged. "Shit." I said, pushing myself up out of my wheelchair.
I stumbled and I used everything around me to move. "Hey, you can't walk!" The new nurse yelled to me, "This is more stumbling, hopping and dragging." I said to her, I didn't know that the fire was spreading as quickly as it was until I reached the end of the hallway. Only one door and a lot of smoke on the other side. Bravest and dumbest thing I had ever done was run into that room.
Angel was there. She was on the floor unconscious. The room was torched, it seemed someone torched it on purpose. It was an obvious trap. "Angela? Wake up." I said as I kneeled down beside the woman, some of the strength in my legs returning quicker than it should have. I could hear the door slam, a man wearing a doctor's uniform was standing behind me. He had a pistol, I could feel it against my head. "Should have stayed in that coma." He had an English accent.
Fuckin' British. I was going to beat this until he pissed tea and crapped crumpets. Like an idiot I turned and grabbed his leg, pulling it from under him. Once he dropped I mounted him quickly,I slammed an elbow and then a fist into his face. "Wait! Stop! Someone paid me to do this. I really don't want to be in a burning building." He said, I understood his point. "You tried to kill me." I said, the pain in my head getting worse. It made me angry, I couldn't focus and I hated that. As a detective I needed to be calm and collected. The pain made it impossible.
The more painful it got the more angry I got. I wasn't sure why, but I grabbed the man's throat. I squeezed and I squeezed until the life left his body. I screwed up but the pain went away. I was definitely the villian. But the fact that I carried the unconscious Angela outside said otherwise.
I was greeted with clapping and several police officers. "Holy shit, it's Turn." One of the officers said, "You're a hero, the old man told us what you just did. Stupid, but sometimes stupid works." The cop said to me, "You don't remember me? I'm La Rocha, we went to the academy together." La Rocha told me, "Ah, yeah." I said, hell if I knew who he was at this point. As he spoke another officer took Angela from me, handing her over to paramedics on the scene.
"You're gonna be in the news, just watch. La Rocha said to me. And it was true. The media arrived moments later and everyone pointed them to me. It was about to suck for the rest of the night and I wasn't sure why I felt as good as I did. It was either because I killed a lowlife, rescued the girl, and got the attention or because I was healing faster than any human should have been able to.
"Yes, my approach to medicine made this man possible." The German doctor said, I'm sure he was a jackass. "If you should call anyone a hero, it's me and him." Yeah he was. At least that was over.
It wasn't. Someone still wanted me dead. Shit.
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