Free Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) by Richard Estep Page B

positioning it in the air right above my body. When he flipped the switch, I was pretty much blinded. The gang of nurses who had all been just shadows and silhouettes before, were now completely invisible to me, lost in the blinding white glare of the round lamp. In fact, it was so bright, tears started to form in the corner of my eyes. I squinted, tried to make out what was happening, but then the mask was pushed down firmly over my nose and mouth. I could hear the tell-tale hiss of gas flowing, somewhere in the background.
    “Mhmmhfmfhmmmfhff!” I said, which roughly translated to “What the hell are you doing to me, you creep?”
    Nurse Crazy must have understood me anyway, because she said: “Relax now, boy. It’s just a little something to help you sleep.”
    For a moment, I could almost have mistaken her for actually caring about me…if I could have forced myself to ignore the totally black eyes, that is. But then she followed that up with this little gem: “After all, you don’t want to be awake for the surgery, do you?” Her tone was way too gleeful for my liking. And so I did what any reasonable person would have done in my situation.
    I freaked.
    Thrashing and writhing against my restraints, I half-expected to feel the nurses start to force me down against the table again, but the leather straps must have been doing a pretty good job of keeping me under control. The only other possible explanation was even worse, and as my vision began to blur and the world around me started to lose focus, it was beginning to look like it was the right one.
    The gas was making me helpless.
    It felt like my head was stuffed full of cotton candy. My thoughts were starting to get foggy, and even stringing a couple of words together to form a sentence was starting to get difficult. “Wha…what…you…” was the best I could come up with, though what made it past the face mask couldn’t have been more than a weak little moan.
    “In conjunction with this, you are merely getting a combination sedative and analgesic,” the doc explained helpfully, holding up a glass syringe. With my blurred vision, I was seeing three needles. A goofy part of my brain wondered if he was going to stick me with the one in the middle.
    I felt a poke in the inside of my left elbow, but it seemed to be far away, almost as though it was happening to somebody else and I was hearing about it later. It was getting harder and harder to keep my eyes open. The doc was suddenly sounding way too chipper for my liking.
    “As Nurse Baker said, you are going to take a nice, long nap. After all, we wouldn’t want you awake during the surgery, would we, hmmm?” He gave a little snickering laugh that made me want to punch him square in the throat…if I could have moved even one single muscle, which wasn’t looking at all likely right now.
    Hey, wait a minute: “ Surgery? ”
    I fought to open my eyes again. It was harder than any push-up I was ever made to do under protest in gym class. Dimly, I could see the doc’s face swimming in front of me. Then he held something up, something long, shiny, and square. I blinked rapidly, was finally able to bring it into sharper focus for a second.
    Oh crap. It was a saw — a freaking saw. He flexed it experimentally, like I’d seen carpenters do on TV shows. Then he put it down on the metal tray and reached for something else. If anything, this next implement was even scarier. What the doc held up now looked like a bigger, nastier version of the pruning shears mom used when she was working outside in the little flower garden that she was so proud of; but these shears had evil-looking curved tips that remind me of the pincers on a crab. The doc snapped them open and shut several times, until he was satisfied with their action.
    I was so terrified, I wanted to pee my pants.
    “ Ja, surgery. Those ribs must come out, I am afraid, dear boy. After all, how else am I to get at your lungs, hmmm?”
     
    I woke up