Free The Brain Vault (Stephanie Chalice Thrillers Book 3) by Lawrence Kelter Page A

she had never been able to adjust her sleeping pattern and often ran out of gas at about this hour. She had at first tried ducking into an empty room to get off her feet, but was always being walked in on by randy interns. Nowadays, the chair was good enough. She’d conditioned herself to fall asleep within seconds. Twenty minutes was all it took. It was better than working groggy. God forbid she made a mistake with someone’s medication. She felt her eyelids lower and was almost out when she heard the scream. She was used to almost every noise a patient could possibly make: moaning, crying, heaving—she had heard it all and had learned how to ignore or sleep through most of it, but this scream, this one was serious. She had hoped it would be a single outburst, but no, it was followed by another, and yet another. She jumped out of the chair.
    It wasn’t difficult to follow the screaming to its source. In a moment she was standing over John Doe. “Quiet now, Honey. Calm down.” She placed her hand on his shoulder and tried to calm the comatose patient. “I thought you were in a coma. Easy now, it’s alright.” Doe continued to scream. She could hear the rest of the floor waking up around her. She paged the attending physician and continued her attempt at calming Doe. “What’s going on in there?” she said as she stroked his head. “What’s got you so worked up?”
     
     
    John Doe lay motionless in his stark, white room, searching within for the courage to set himself free. Somehow, the spark of life within him had reignited.
    He was once again naked upon a bed in the room he had been imprisoned within from the very start.
    The surface of his skin, his tapestry of scars was growing in detail and complexity with each passing day—like ancient hieroglyphics, they chronicled his history in the white room. Cigarette burns, needle punctures, electrical burns, and bruises: each a badge of honor, a testament to John Doe’s will to survive.
    Still here. I’m still here. These words that once tormented him had become his mantra. He had once wished for death, but the end never came, and the torture never stopped. “I’m still alive, goddamn it. I’m still here.” He was not a brave man, but extreme circumstances had forced him to find courage.
    A tab each of Valium and Ambien had been squirreled away in the crevice between his cheek and mandible. He’d discard them when he was fully awake, but for now, the soft, uncoated pills leached just enough medication into his bloodstream to produce a semiconscious stupor.
    A coroner stood over him in his dream. “John Doe is a male Caucasian, approximately twenty-five years old.”
    “I’m Brian,” he mumbled in his sleep. “My name is Brian.”
    “Height, approximately sixty-eight inches, weight, roughly one-hundred-and-forty pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. Note: the corneas appear to be damaged. More on that to follow. Apparent cause of death—”
    “I’m not dead,” he said, refuting the coroner’s observations. “I’m alive, I’m still alive.”
    Running his hand over his leg, he noted how loose the flesh had become over his quads, quads that were once taut from competition track and field. They had begun to grow softer after high school, in the years in which he allowed himself to languish—too much dope, too many lazy days—one piled on top of another, years lost in the blink of an eye. His muscles had further atrophied from lying in bed. He knew the exact placement of every scar on his body and could find them with ease, his fingertips reading the raised surfaces on his skin like brail—each conjuring a horrifying memory.  
    One-by-one, Doe’s eyes snapped open to explore the hazy darkness. A small light had been left on to prevent him from tripping. He was now virtually blind, his corneas damaged from caustic applications of Drano. The small light was redundant. Doe knew how to maneuver in the dark using his sense of the room’s layout, arms