Bump

  Chapter 4

  The next few days were a disjointed blur. The hours when Ryan was asleep or on heavy medication seemed to pass like seconds, while the times when he was awake and conscious in the hospital bed, or later in his bed at home, seemed to drag on. The pain was slowly and steadily lessening, but it was a long, unpleasant road.

  Vanessa and Eli came by regularly, which helped break the tedium of house arrest. The homework they brought for him also relieved the boredom, though by the time he was neck-deep in physics equations, Ryan began to long for a little tedium.

  By the next Monday, two weeks since he had first woken up in the hospital, Ryan was well enough to go back to school. His joints were stiff and his injuries still harassed him with pounding aches, but he was more than willing to put up with it if it got him out of his bed and out of the house.

  For the first time since Ryan could remember, the shrill beeping of the alarm on his phone was a welcome sound. For Ryan, waking up to a good old alarm was the first step in getting back to his old life.

  He shrugged into some clothes that smelled clean enough, dumped his books into his bag, and slipped downstairs and out the door as quickly and quietly as he could. If his mother had the opportunity to stop him, to come up with some excuse to keep him home another week, she would take it. That was the last thing Ryan wanted.

  As he eased the front door closed and stepped onto the porch, Ryan immediately regretted two things: that he hadn’t grabbed anything to eat on his way out, and that he hadn’t thought to bring a jacket.

  Ryan had been indoors for too long and somewhere during that time, the weather had turned to full-blown autumn. The October air was biting and the stiff breeze whistled through his t-shirt. His body shook in an uncontrollable shiver and his teeth clacked against each other as he rushed the curb where his old Jeep Cherokee Sport was parked. He fumbled with the key then scrambled inside in an attempt to shut out the cold as quickly as possible.

  Unfortunately, his car was not much better. The enclosed space protected Ryan from wind chill, but every other kind of chill was inside the car to greet him. With trembling fingers he turned the ignition and the aging Jeep coughed once in the cold then sputtered to life. Ryan turned on the heater and was hit with a blast of cold air.

  The car had seen better days; many, many better days. The exterior paint had once been a navy blue, but was now a faded blue with rust highlights. The upholstery was worn or missing altogether in some sections of the back seat, everything inside rattled, and the “Check Engine” light had been on since the late nineties. The heater took at least five minutes to live up to its name, and in the meantime it pumped in air from the outside, which on this morning made it much closer to an air conditioner.

  Ryan made tight fists to try and warm his fingertips on the insides of his palms and it helped a little. He leaned over and flipped open the glove box. His numb fingers rummaged around for a moment, grazing users manuals and ketchup packets. He removed a cassette tape, the only thing his car stereo could play, and shut the compartment.

  It was AC/DC’s Back In Black, a thrift store find he had made years ago, and Ryan saw to his delight that he had rewound the tape, a rare occurrence. He clicked the cassette into place, shifted into drive, and pulled onto the street as the music began to build. Today was going to be a good day. He could feel it.

  Ryan arrived at school much earlier than he usually did. He made the rounds with most of his teachers and explained a little of what had happened. To his surprise, they were all very sympathetic. A few even let him off the hook for his assignments altogether.

  He still had twenty minutes to spare before class, so Ryan walked up and down the brown, muted halls as they began to fill with students. He hadn’t been to school in what felt like forever, and the near-death experience made things seem even more alien. Still, what comforted Ryan the most were the things he had never taken much notice of before: like the long lines of students in front of the vending machines who wouldn’t be able to form complete sentences until well into their first Diet Coke. He strolled past the rows of students sitting in the hallways, their backs against the walls and their noses just inches from the assigned reading they were supposed to have finished over the weekend. The smell of fresh-brewed but still-terrible coffee wafted towards him from the teacher’s lounge and, for perhaps the first time in history, a high school student sighed with contentment about being at high school.

  Ryan made his way to the bathroom, one final stop before he headed off to first period. Things hadn’t changed a bit: the oversized plastic trash can was tipped over and spilling yesterday’s paper towels all over the floor. The second urinal from the left was overflowing into the others. Slayer still ruled on the mirror at the far end. It was as if Ryan had never left, and that was a nice thought.

  As he looked at himself in the mirror however, his mood changed. Staring back at him was the reminder that he had left. That he had experienced something terrible that would be with him for the rest of his life. That he would never be that Ryan, the old Ryan, ever again.

  He lifted up his sleeve to examine the bite on his arm. All the doctors and nurses, even Dr. Webster, had been stumped. The wound had not even begun to heal. It looked as red and raw and fresh as the night he had received it, even though the doctors had stopped the bleeding and bandaged it over and over. It no longer hurt, but the puncture wounds were just as deep as if they had been inflicted an hour ago. He ran his hands over each of the marks in the curving row. It looked as if it should be painful to the touch, but it wasn’t. All Ryan felt was a strange heat radiating from it, as though this particular section of arm was a few degrees hotter than the rest of his body.

  Ryan pulled his sleeve down. He had stared at the arm countless times over the previous days. Nothing had changed: he still didn’t know why it looked that way or, more importantly, what the thing was that had made it. He had laid in his bed for hours with his eyes fixed on the ceiling but his mind far away.

  Ryan had been trying to piece it all back together, everything he could remember about the creature. In fact, Ryan was afraid he had overthought it. He had tried so hard to remember that now he wasn’t sure which of the details were truly accurate and which ones he had convinced himself of over the passing weeks.

  He shook his head. Ryan knew he shouldn’t be worrying about it right now. He needed to focus on school, on getting back to normalcy. None of these answerless riddles were going anywhere, just like the bite on his arm.

  He turned on the squeaky tap and splashed some water on his face. Ryan grabbed a paper towel and knew he was fortunate there was one to grab. In the next hour or so, all the dispensers would be empty and all the toilets and drains would be stuffed with their contents.

  As he dried his face, Ryan stared at himself in the mirror. Most of the scratches and bruises on his face were healed or scarred over, and the rest were fading quickly. His dark green eyes looked normal, with all traces of his black eye gone. His jaw held the majority of the scrapes that had yet to heal, but they were mostly beneath his chin, which made them much less visible. He turned on the water again, warm this time, and he ran his wet hands through his short, dark blonde hair. The water didn’t do much of anything; Ryan’s hair still stuck out at odd, perpetually mussed angles the way it always had.

  He wiped the excess water on his jeans and sighed. His good mood had all but disappeared, replaced by a slightly nauseated feeling as his mind wandered to the truth he had been trying to avoid for the last two weeks: the creature was still out there. There was nothing to say that it wouldn’t come back for him, or that it wouldn’t attack someone else. Ryan also knew that if he really wanted to get to the bottom of things, sooner or later he was going to have to find the animal again, and that was a thought he did not relish.