Noise and voices were muffled, conjoined into background static. Reaching reverberating ears, making only partial sense. Conveyed through cloth, not cleanly carried on snow-filled air; tickling a nose-end he could barely feel. New car smell of Tao’s purely cosmetic breath caressing cheeks crusted in dry blood. Equilibrium seesawing, he had an impression of spinning rubber. Radials chewing powdered asphalt beneath desiccated will. Semblance of soupy words, grimly exhaled – up close and personal.

Subcutaneous darkness filling eyes and calcified lungs, without effort to breathe or see. Narcotic tilt accompanied by artificial heat, fighting to reach oblivious marrow; short-lived, like happiness. Drifting comfortably away from all voices. Savoring the diluted plasma cocktail; vasodilation rushing like winter rapids – hastening systemic failure. Ears heard only a rush of wind through the conch he passed off as a skull. Frantic, frenetic energies thrummed around him. Vibrations on a different, higher frequency – wasp’s wings too close to the inner ear. Epidermis smeared in someone’s agenda-based paste of hopeless hope.

More stream than blood in whispering veins, not so long ago screaming with abandoned child’s delight for a chorus of metallic mercies and cordite cologne. Painful, horrific light flooded protesting retinas. Basement level blood-sugar: euphoric disembodiment crashing against consciousness, like granite. Back on Earth with a bone-mulching thump. Spidery sensation of fingers dug in the meat of muscles. Several pairs of strong hands grasping thermo-resistant extremities. Shoddily conveyed along draughty concrete corridors, bathed in rusty-caged lamps. Inertia hummed throughout his skeleton, revived by hateful glare. Pin pricks in sharp triplicate. Chemical cornflour in his cocktail. Chattering voices. Muffled cadences agitated; interpreted by ringing ears.

Hard repeated pressure. Strong palms overlapped; fingers interlinked – pumping like pistons. Aching ribs, punctuated by panicked white noise. Rough bristled kisses on stale alcohol breath that somehow tasted male. Darkness’ welcome embrace. Synapses braking hard, frustration sparks showering broken track with the last available light.

Something shifting in the dark. God? No, not him. Whatever this was – it had teeth. Sharp enamel needle teeth. A handshake of biradial clamps. Passing images of a butchered blonde backstroking by in a lightless abyss, surrounded by hungry black eels. Her hand was just out of reach. An incomplete melody. A Dewar’s half finished. An alabaster and golden-hued symphony, percussed in lapis, cursed to only ever be heard again only in fragments.

Great sweeping archways, clothed in static electricity, lauded by a screech of train brakes. Murals, framed in unfocused flair of cheap wattage. Eroded, like so much else – long oxidized metal and minerals. A once vainglorious grey veined marble skin; varicose blue capillaries concealing aged concrete. Profane statements, stencilled in spray can colors. Echoing boot heels. Rattling shoulder straps. The faint tang of freshly oiled guns.

Malfunctioning eyes of lead apertures, struggled with scant recall. A reflection from a smashed mirror. A colorless kaleidoscope of faces – all chiselled in murderous intent, reeking of vacancy beyond sole purpose. Inhale painful lungs of chemically induced sterility. No mistaking that sweet and sour odour, even with five inputs dialled almost to zero. Whatever he’d been stuck with – he wanted more. Fluid chill sensation passed over and through, denoted a few thousand mikes of something nice. Magnesium sun, held in an orbit of stainless steel, hovered at arms, above upturned face.
He needed a fucking drink. Now.

Held tight in a prison of instinctual moment. Moving senseless limbs – impossible, but he still deserved an A for effort. Nothing. Not a single synaptic glimmer. More indiscernible conversation, hovering on the periphery. No fireflies danced in a galactic transom.

Sensation of weightlessness, scored with rhythmic cycling. Several thousand revolutions a second, carried along thick metal membranes. Wings and jet engines, perhaps. Frequencies tapped into his bones through deck plating vibration. Turbine noise, but indistinct – faint like everything else. Mumbling voices again, this time calmer.

Deep inhale yanked both wrists, aiding convulsions that turfed him off the slab of memoryFoam and back into the course sandy grip of consciousness.

Blackness.

Eyelids wouldn’t open. Swollen shut and heavily taped-over with sickly smelling medical gauze. The sensations were all too familiar. So was the neuron-splitting headache wailing in pursuit. A spike twinged in his arm and Jack realized he was attached to an IV of something making pain in his eyes and mind remotely bearable. Both hands shakily reached up to tentatively touch his face. He was a blind man again, trying to see himself through touch.

Sweat – stale, cloying. Clung to his pallid torso like a reluctant parting. Skin writhing, oily with secretion. He assumed his complexion, assumed a hell of a lot. Reverberating wet fingertips found resting patient face – half bandaged and sickly sweet with routed fever. Slight draught from some unseen source caressed bare chest, as he lay flat and motionless. Leaden arms hit the mattress, when muscles relinquished control. The sharp twang of a needle in his arm once more. Still medicated, then. He strained to hear, through the blindfold of perspiring gauze. Soft coral sponge, full of cool water, soothed a chest recently shaven to accept medical trodes. He was being sponged down gently. When his right hand searched for the source it withdrew abruptly. There was faint breath in the room, not his. Single source. Female. He tried to utter thank you, a dusty crack the only sound parting from chapped lips.