The lights were particularly dim on the morning when he finally visited me at the sanitorium. I felt saliva drool from a corner of my mouth, then my eyes flickered, and brain fog cleared as I slowly rose out of a drug-induced, semi-conscious state, clawing my face and hair.
Semi-solid Vomit had encrusted my cheeks and chin, the remnants of an emotional tsunami that had fried my brain after they treated me. My head lolled uncontrollably, and I slurred incoherent nonsense, hurling abuse at shadows that ignored me.
I blinked, frowned, and focused, recalling early morning events, chasing memories like ghosts fleeing through the corridors of my mind.
I was in the common room alone, looking through a bookshelf where old Dick Francis and Martina Cole novels had come to die, having been read ten thousand times. I’d selected a book and gone to the chalkboard to write its name, booking it out to me.
An orderly had stalked, then jabbed me in an ass cheek with a hypodermic needle when I bent over to retrieve a stick of chalk I’d dropped.
When I stood up, the mind-altering shit he pumped into me took hold, and the letters I’d scrawled on the chalkboard in our common room dissolved into a psychedelic alphabet conundrum, consuming me.
Becoming a patient at Arkhipo-Osikovpa was the only way I could track the men who killed my wife and son. I gained entry when sectioned by a local doctor after the police arrested me amid a bar brawl downtown.
I was hunting Red October.