"Kat Richardson - Greywalker 01 - Greywalker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richardson Kat)

and pass out. Then the jerking started pulling my head up.
My long hair was stuck in the gates and rising as the elevator sank toward the
ground floor. The thought of being hung by my hair upset me enough to move again.
My vision had squeezed down to a distant point of dim light, floating on a dark red
sea. My grip was weak, but I began sawing at my trapped ponytail. I wished I had
sent the knife out to be sharpened when I'd had the scissors done. I pushed myself
to stand against the wall, hacking away, long strands of brown hair falling past my
face as the car dropped. I was up on my toes when the last hank split. Heaving,
nauseated, and dizzy, I crumpled onto the elevator floor and sprawled through the
opening gate.
After that, things got disjointed: people yelling; someone's shoes; aching in my
chest and arms; someone flicking something against my eyelids; a man with an
accent; a throbbing in my head like a kid kicking a merry-go-round into motion. I
think I threw up. Then I slept.
That had been April first...
I'd woken in the hospital a couple of days later feeling so horrible I'd figured I was
going to live. If it felt that bad dying, no one would go.
Now weeks had passed, and the aches and pains, the bruises, scrapes, and
lacerations were fading, but the bash on the bonce wasn't clearing up so well. The
bouts of weirdness after I'd leftтАФsome minor problems with my senses still a bit out
of whack, some not so minor-had brought me back to the hospital.
Dr. Skelleher was a stranger to meтАФthe only doctor on urgent care duty when I'd
come in. He looked barely thirty and in need of coffee. His hair was short and spiky
from a lack of style rather than an excess, and the dark bags under his eyes could
have passed for fanny packs. His clothes under his white coat were environmentally
correct. A narrow leather thong peeked over the back of his collar and disappeared
below the placket buttons of his raw-cotton shirt.
The "incidents" ran past my mind's eye like fast-spinning film as I told the doctor
about them.
Sometimes things just looked misty and impressionisticтАФlike the reflection in a
steamed-up bathroom mirror. At the hospital, I couldn't always tell when people
were really in the room. They seemed to float in and out, changing shape and detail.
My hearing was just as unpredictable, all buzzings, mutterings, water gurgles, and
cotton wool. I'd been told this was normal for concussion patients and would get
better. But... some of it had gotten worse.
And sinking through the hospital bed had been unsettling.
I wasn't supposed to get out of bed without a doctor or nurse around. Call me a
bad patient: I didn't like peeing in the cup, so I decided to use the toilet like a human.
That part of the job hadn't been so bad, though it was no waltz with Fred Astaire.
Getting back to the bed was harder.
Coming out of the bathroom, I'd started feeling sick. The lighting in the room had
dimmed a bit and the bed seemed much farther away, deep in the steamed-mirror
effect. I struggled toward it, chilled and sweaty, feeling sicker by the minute, picking
up a whiff of something like autopsies and crime scenes. I plunged through the cold
steam as my vision went gray, then smoky, heading for charcoal. The bed was a
vague and shimmery pastel block. I reached it with a shin first, grabbed a steel rail,
and dragged myself into it. For a moment, I just lay like a stunned fish on the cold,
soggy mattress, panting. Then the bed shifted and I fell through.
The lights had brightened and the room snapped back into focus as I fell. A nurse
came in just as I hit the floor. She scolded me, of course. Then she called an orderly