Necrosis

.

  Ardy

  Copyright 2012

  Andy Simon woke up that Friday morning with an extremely sharp, nearly crippling pain in his chest. He had never felt such pain. He had never used the word agony before, but in his mind there was no other way to describe it. For a moment there was nothing in his world but the pain and he sat up in his bed trying to scream and only managing a high pitched wheeze. His first thought was that it was a heart attack, but even in his agony he knew that heart attacks were felt on the left side of the chest and in the left arm. This horrible sensation was on his right side, and way too high to be his appendix, which, he would remember later, he had had removed years ago.

  “Oh, God!”

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” His wife Rebecca had also sat up and had gone completely pale at the sight of her husband holding his chest and making a futile attempt to scream. “Honey? Andy! What’s going on?”

  Andy could hardly hear her, and there was no way he’d be able to answer. She reached over and grabbed him by his trembling shoulders and the pain immediately subsided to a dull throb. Both relieved and terrified, Andy gasped for air in big, satisfying gulps.

  “Andy?” Rebecca asked. “Are you alright? What happened?”

  “It’s my chest,” Andy croaked. “I don’t know what it was, but it felt like someone stabbed me right below my right shoulder. It was like a heart attack or heartburn from hell or something.”

  “Really?” she asked. “That sounds terrible!” She looked more than a little concerned.

  “You have no idea, Bec,” he told her. “I thought I was going to die.”

  “How’s it feel now?” She was pushing his sweat soaked hair from his brow and looking worriedly into his eyes.

  “Better,” he said. “It’s just a dull throb now.”

  “Do you think we should call the doctor, Andy?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll just take some aspirin and see if that helps.”

  “An aspirin?” Rebecca asked. “I think this sounds too serious for an aspirin!”

  “I’ll be fine,” Andy said, doing his best to cover up the fear he was feeling. “It hardly hurts anymore. And if it comes back, I’ll call the doctor. I promise.”

  “If it’s as bad as you said it was,” she said, “you’d better call 911.”

  Andy glanced over at the clock by the bed. It read 8:55 a.m.. Hadn’t his alarm gone off? He was supposed to wake up at 7:30.

  “Damn it! I’m late for work!” he moaned.

  “What do you mean you’re late?” Rebecca asked. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

  Andy looked at his wife and said, “It’s almost nine, Bec!”

  “It’s seven twenty-nine,” she told him. Andy was about to argue with her that he had seen the clock and he was more than capable of telling time when the blaring beep of the alarm interrupted him. Instinctively, he turned and hit the snooze button and then looked in confusion at the digital readout. It said 7:30.

  “What the hell?”

  “What is it?” Rebecca asked.

  “I could have sworn it said eight fifty-five.”

  Rebecca put the back of her hand against Andy’s forehead. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay? Andy, you’re scaring me.”

  Andy looked at the clock for a long moment. He was certain that it had read 8:55, yet there it was just now turning to 7:31. Between the clock and the pain that had awakened him, this was shaping up to be a strange morning. Sighing and praying that the pain wouldn’t return, Andy got out of bed.

  “I’ll go make you some breakfast,” Rebecca said.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, heading towards the bathroom.

  “Pop tarts and coffee, Andy? You’ve got to be hungry enough for that.”

  “Fine,” he said, thinking that if the throbbing in his chest didn’t go away soon, he wouldn’t be able to eat even that. “Thanks, hon.” While Rebecca went down to the kitchen of their townhouse to start up the coffee pot and toast a couple of pop tarts, Andy went to the upstairs bathroom to shave, shower, and get ready for work. But the first thing he reached for was the bottle of aspirin on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. Even the throbbing was becoming unbearable. He struggled for a moment with the childproof cap and the popped it open and poured two pills into his hand. Then, feeling the throb spike for a moment, he took out two more.

  The pills seemed to work. It may have been the placebo effect, but by the time he had lathered his face with shaving cream be barely felt any pain at all. Humming absently to himself, he proceeded to shave. After a few strokes with the razor he noticed that the shaving cream he was rinsing off the blades was tinted pink. He was bleeding. He never cut himself shaving. He hadn’t felt a cut either. When he was done shaving he checked his face for nicks and couldn’t find a single one.

  Then he got into the shower. About a minute after the water started pouring over him he thought he heard the sound of sirens blaring nearby. That wasn’t unusual in this neighborhood, even at this time of day. Their townhouse was nice enough, and in a gated community, but just outside that gate was a dangerous intersection and a lower class neighborhood where the police showed up on an almost daily basis. But there was something about these sirens that bothered him. For one thing, they sounded close, as if they were right outside the townhouse, and it sounded like there were multiple sources; cops, ambulances, fire trucks. He turned the shower off for a moment to better hear them, but as soon as the water was off, the sirens stopped. He waited for a few seconds but heard nothing. Finally, shrugging, he turned the shower back on and finished up. He didn’t hear sirens again.

  When he got back to the bedroom he flipped on the thirteen inch TV on the dresser to check out the morning news while he got dressed. Even though he turned the news on every morning, he rarely gave it more than a passing glance. It was usually just background noise. The first thing he saw on the screen did grab his attention though. The words “Breaking News” were flashing boldly across the bottom of the screen and the pretty young reporter that he’d always had a little crush on was standing outside what looked like his office building.

  “A tragedy at the corner of North Street and Fourteenth Avenue this morning,” she said, revealing that it wasn’t his workplace but it was only a few blocks from it. “A car accident took the life of one man and sent another to the hospital. Police aren’t releasing any names at this point, but we can tell you that a white Dodge pickup truck crashed head on with a green Toyota sedan at the intersection. The driver of the pickup was killed instantly and the other man was rushed to Saint Mary’s Hospital. No word yet on his condition.”

  Andy hoped that nobody he knew was involved. And, to add to the strange events of that morning, his own car was a green Toyota sedan.

  The news then shifted to a human interest story about third graders writing letters to soldiers overseas and it was as if they hadn’t just reported about a man’s death. Andy went ahead and got dressed and by the time he was done straightening his pinstriped tie he was more worried about any traffic problems that the accident might cause than about whether he knew either of the victims. He flipped off the TV and went downstairs.

  The smell of coffee pleasantly filled their small kitchen and two lightly toasted pop tarts sat on a plate on the table. Rebecca had made herself two fried eggs and some wheat toast and she was halfway through her own breakfast. Andy, who wasn’t much of a breakfast eater anyway, wasn’t sure if could even eat the pop tarts. He wasn’t hungry and for some reason the thought of eating made him a little nauseous. He got himself a cup of coffee with cream and three sugars and sat down in front of the pop tarts anyway.

  “Feeling better, honey?” Rebecca asked him.

  “Much,” Andy said, barely remembering the sharp pang that had aw
akened him. “Was there an accident or something? I heard sirens.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she told him.

  “Really?” he asked. “It sounded like they were right outside the house.”

  “Nope,” she said. “But I did have the radio on while I was cooking. Maybe the music drowned out the sirens.”

  “Yeah,” Andy said, forcing himself to take a bite of his pop tart. “Maybe.” But Andy thought that those sirens had been so loud that there was no way the radio would have drowned them out.

  He had almost swallowed his pop tart when he realized that it had absolutely no taste whatsoever. He gagged and forced himself to swallow it anyway, but he found the tastelessness somehow more disgusting than if the pastry had actually had a bad flavor.

  “Oh, yuck!” he said. “What kind of pop tarts are these?”

  “They’re apple cinnamon. Why?”

  “They’re disgusting!” Andy said. “Don’t buy this flavor again!”

  “You didn’t complain