The Alpha King Call Boy
Chapter 252

Alexander

I remember hearing Kayden's blessedly familiar voice, but it was distant and echoey. I couldn't make out what he was saying.

It was a whisper, I thought at first. But no- he was just very far away. He was shouting.. but he was too far off for me to hear.

I tried to reply, but couldn't speak. Couldn't even move my lips.

I couldn't even open my eyes.

I really tried to pry them open. It was nothing doing. I had no strength left in my body. Not even enough to lift my eyelids.

I wanted so badly to wake up. To get up. To keep fighting.

But I was just so tired, so very, very tired. And cold. And sore. And... numb...

And then, all of a sudden, a white -hot, shocking blast of extreme pain wrenched me all the way awake and I was all at once completely, agonizingly aware of reality. Reality right now was pain and movement and noise and light and more pain.

It was difficult to make sense of the sudden, intense sensations that overwhelmed me all at once, but I worked through it. I couldn't open my eyes, but I could use my other senses. I could feel that I was still lying on my back. But I was no longer in the cave. I was somewhere else, surrounded by deafening sound.

Voices shouting. And a lot of machine noise. Hands were on my arms and torso, lifting and pushing and pulling and poking.

My injuries were being treated.

I had been rescued

It was hard to feel much relief, though, even in light of that revelation. Because 1 had just woken up into a reality in which my body was absolutely made of pain, and nothing but pain.

It took me a couple seconds to identify the sound of the helicopter blades beating against a windy sky and the reverberations of their pulsing rhythm in my spine, but soon I puzzled it out.

Again I tried but couldn't force my eyes open; the lids felt made of lead. But I could tell now that I was strapped into a gurney, on the floor of a helicopter in flight.

Or perhaps we had just landed

Or perhaps I was continuing to drift in and out of consciousness... maybe I had gone to sleep and woken back up again. It was hard to say.

I was being moved now, though. And my pain had dulled a great deal. That meant I'd been given drugs. And that explained the heavy eyelids, and the way sleep kept coming back for me, kept stealing time from me and keeping everything a blur. I was being jostled out of the helicopter next, carried out into the cold, fresh air of night.

I think it was the feeling of that air on my skin - because it felt like freedom - that finally woke my body up enough that I could open my eyes.

I found myself looking straight up at the night sky.

It was beautiful. Ink-colored and scattered with stars that shone bright on a cloudless night. As my body was moved, the stars blurred in and out of focus, trailing sparkles and beams of light behind them as they danced in the indigo infinity of space... "He's awake! His eyes are open! Alex!" Kayden. That was my Beta's voice again.

He had been the one who saved me, I knew it. And he was right here by my side still. My heart swelled with gratitude, though when I tried to move my lips, I found I was still unable to speak

"Alex! Alex, can you hear me? You're gonna be okay, man!"

My friend's blurry face swarmed in front of my eyes for a split second. But then someone wearing a streak of white and green elbowed him out of their way, yelling something about needing to get me inside fast.I winced against a flash of electric yellow light, letting my heavy eyes clamp tightly closed in reaction.

Then I was being lifted up off the gurney - with difficulty, by people who weren't strong enough to lift my weight - and then dropped down clumsily onto something else... a stretcher, I assumed

Maybe whatever pain meds they'd given me in the helicopter were already wearing off. Or maybe that reckless handling of my injured body triggered the pain's return. Maybe it was both.

A dry, tortured sound wrenched from my throat. A foreign-sounding cry of animal pain.Somewhere a female voice called out to give me more fentanyl.

In the brief moment that followed, before they dosed me - heavily, this time - and I slipped back down into sleep, I had a single, distinct thought:

It was my back that was hurting worst right now. Not my legs.

And my legs had sustained the worst injuries on my body, for sure. Why didn't they hurt..?

Why...

The next time I came hurtling back into reality, I was under a blinding white light. Sterile medical smells filled my nose and helped me make sense of where I was.

I was flat on my back on an operating table.

I wasn't supposed to have woken up.

They weren't used to treating patients my size, I had enough wherewithal to muse for a moment. They kept not giving me enough of their drugs to keep me under. And I was definitely supposed to be under right now.

Because when I cast my eyes down, away from the blinding light, I looked down the length of my body, and... I saw something I knew immediately that I was not supposed to have seen.The skin and tissue of my thigh had been cut open and splayed wide with surgical forceps.

My thigh bones and all my muscles and connective tissues... everything was exposed.

The skin all around the cut-open area was shiny, slick with something deep amber in color.

A surgeon with a big plastic shield over his face was hunched over the horror show of my open thigh. He hadn't noticed yet that I was awake.

In one blue-gloved hand the man held a scalpel, the blade of which was slicked red with blood. He dropped the bloody instrument into a metal tray that a disembodied set of gloved hands held at his side and then retracted from my view.

Then the surgeon brought his other hand up, and I saw that in it he held a tiny bone saw.

The white-clad man made a small movement with his fingers around the handle of the device. The toothed, circular saw blade on its tip whirred to life.

I tried to speak, but my lips wouldn't work. Tried to move my hands

to let them know I was awake, but I couldn't do it.

The surgeon began to lower his little bone saw down slowly, aiming for the opening into my thigh.

But - than tucking god - at the very last second, he felt my eyes on him and froze his hands in midair. Slowly he turned his face and looked me dead in the eye. His face shield was filthy, I could see now.

Spattered and locked in pink, red, and white organic matter. Bits of my blood and flesh and bone.

"He's awake," the surgeon cried out, his voice distorted from behind his paper surgical mask and heavy plastic face shield.

The bone saw stopped shrieking its high-pitched song and the blade slowed down, then stopped.

Movement stirred all around me. Voices, maybe a dozen or more voices of all kinds were talking now, calling out to each other and interrupting and overlapping..

And then the world became a kaleidoscope. Everything my eyes could see divided and multiplied and sparkled and shimmered, and then zoomed away into blackness again.