Steel Orc- Player Reborn Read online

  Tripp had passion, but he wasn’t a coaster. He wasn’t an artist who didn’t work and always told himself he’d make it big someday, so there was no need to bust his ass.

  His mother had instilled a work ethic in him. Even though they were wealthy enough that she didn’t need to work, she’d kept a nine-to-five job at a children’s charity. She treated it as a normal job, never missing a day, always doing her best. Man, he missed her.

  Thinking about his mother always led him to think about his dad and what he’d done, and Tripp couldn’t take that right now.

  Better to try to figure out how he was going to get out of this mess. Even with Aunt Bianca offering him a way out if Tripp would only get an official Aunt-Approved job, he stuck to his principles. He worked like hell, and he’d finally gotten back on an even footing. Or so he thought, but his payment to the power company must have bounced again.

  Maybe not, though. This wasn’t a loss of electricity. It was something much worse.

  He realized something. His eyes weren’t adjusting to the darkness, not even a fraction. If this were normal darkness, he’d see the outlines of his room, he’d see…

  His breath caught in his chest.

  I can’t see.

  Panic stirred in him as he opened his eyes as wide as he could and saw nothing but black. It didn’t matter how hard he strained, nothing would get through the darkness. Had someone blindfolded him?

  Someone coughed beside him, and he almost leapt out of his skin.

  “Easy now,” said a voice. “You’re alright. Don’t panic.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Benner.”

  “How did you get into my apartment?” Tripp said. His words sounded slurred, like his tongue was too thick.

  The doctor laughed. “You’re in a hospital, you dope. The painkillers are messing with you. I wasn’t happy with the dose, but it was either that, or agony.”

  Dope? Did doctors normally call people dopes? He needed to get a look at this guy.

  He reached out to move the bandages from his eyes, only to feel skin rougher than sandpaper. Touching it made his stomach churn.

  A hand touched his own and gently moved it away from his eyes. “We sealed the wounds and stopped the risk of infection, but don’t touch anything yet, Tripp.”

  “What wounds?” he said, feeling like someone had just poked a hornet’s nest in his chest.

  The hand squeezed his shoulder. “The brain blocks out painful memories.”

  When he tried to remember, he saw a void. A darkness similar to the current state of his vision, but with faint sounds in the background. Music, maybe?

  “Trauma can do that,” said Dr. Benner. “but I can help. This will feel strange, but it’s only a memory patch. It’s designed to help pull your memories out of the mire.”

  He felt something pressing against his temples, like band aids but cold. Things started to stir. It was as if his mind was a flat battery and Dr Benner had attached jumper cables. He saw things now. He remembered.

  “Tell me what you see,” said Benner.

  “I was in a bar celebrating something. But celebrating what… Oh yeah, the commission.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’d finally grew the balls to open my own business. I passed my apprenticeship and worked for Tommy Jonas & Sons Carpentry for years. I’d been saving to open up my own shop, and then I got my first commission. A rich lady with an eight-bedroom house in the country wanted me to make her antique wardrobes for each room.”

  When he got the call, Tripp couldn’t believe his luck. Well, maybe not luck. He’d earned it, he’d worked for it. It was that place in-between luck and work but whatever you wanted to call it, Tripp was happy.

  He felt buoyed , in the best place of his life, excited about the future and the start of his career.

  “So, you were in a bar. What then?”

  “Then I heard the scream.”

  Dr. Benner touched his shoulder. “You’re getting stressed. Try this meditation technique. Imagine your memories are just thoughts, and you can choose to watch them impassively. Don’t let them affect you.”

  Tripp knew what Benner was saying. He used to have anxiety when he was younger, and he’d learned how much mindfulness could help when you were losing it. He concentrated on his breathing until his chest didn’t feel as if a giant was trying to squeeze it anymore.

  “Okay.”

  “Better?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “What happened after the scream?” asked Benner.

  “Two guys on a motorbike pulled up by the curb on the other side of the road. The engine sounded way too loud, and there was a hell of a lot of smoke. They were wearing black riding gear, and helmets covered their faces.”

  “The woman was screaming at them?” asked Benner.

  Tripp nodded. “One of them was trying to steal her handbag.”

  They talked about this kind of thing all the time on the news. Motorbike muggings were happening everywhere in the city, and it had made him pissed. What right did they have to do that?

  He always felt like someone should do something about it, but what use was thinking it? That didn't solve anything.

  It was time to stop being a bystander.

  The memory of what happened next hit him the strength and surprise of an uppercut. “Geez, what the hell was I thinking?”

  “No judgements, Tripp, just memories. Go on.”

  “I must have been drunker than I thought. I ran over to them and I shoved the guy on the back of the motorbike, and he fell on his ass.”

  “Then what?”

  “The woman stepped back. Her face...I've never seen someone so scared. The guy on the front of the bike looked at me. Something flashed in his hand.”

  The memory chilled him.

  Was it a knife? Surely not a gun?

  No. Something worse.

  “Do you remember anything else, Tripp?” Dr. Benner said.

  He tried but his mind was an eighties disco, full of smoke spewing from machines and noises drowning everything out. It was impossible to remember anything except a scream, and liquid splashing on his face.

  Then there was the pain. So much of it, worse than when his appendix had nearly burst when he was a kid. People rushing over to him…

  A sudden thought hit him with the force of a nuclear warhead. He shot upright.

  “Where’s Tidus?”

  “You mean your dog? Ah.”

  Ah. Never before had a two-letter word filled him with such trepidation. Nobody ever said ah for a good reason.

  He reached out to the doctor’s arm, only to swat the thin air. “Doctor?”

  Benner spoke in a hushed voice. “Give me a second, Tripp.”

  The doctor’s footsteps trailed out of the room, and a door whined open and then shut again, leaving him alone. His thoughts turned to bile. Consumed with worry for his best friend, he found himself wrenching his hands.

  Ah. The word – or was it a sound? – bounced around the walls of his mind.

  The door opened, and he heard footsteps again. Not just the doctor’s, though. Pattering footsteps joined them, and Tripp heard a whine that he’d heard thousands of times, one that greeted him every day when he got home. The sound almost made joy burst in him.

  “Up,” said Benner.

  Tripp felt a weight jump on the bed, and then a tail whacking his legs again and again. Tidus crawled up his chest and then Tripp felt his tongue slurp over his face.

  “Tidus! Buddy! You’re okay,” he said.

  He hugged Tidus tight, smelling his fur, suffering his way-too-excited licks. He felt himself choke up. There was something about his best friend coming to see him that made his emotional dam spring leaks. He tried to hold them back.

  “He can’t stay for long,” said Benner. “I had to pull so many strings that I have rope burns. Nurse Compton is busy turning a blind eye as we speak, and I’m going to owe her five hundred cupcakes by the time t
his is over.”

  “Thanks, doctor. I really appreciate it.”

  Tidus’s tail worked in overdrive, smacking Tripp’s legs over and over. Tripp hugged him some more and then broke away, and he felt his schnauzer buddy settle on his lap.

  “I’m so sorry I left you alone for so long, Tidus,” he said.

  “Luckily you left a key with your neighbor. When she heard him whining, she let herself into your apartment.”

  “Yep, that’s Mrs. Grain. She knows all our comings and goings. Bet she keeps a diary, or something. I left her the key for emergencies. Damn it, I’m such a jerk. I was only supposed to go for a couple of beers. Two hours, at most. I didn’t expect this.”

  “I can usually tell a lot about a man by who or what they ask about when they wake up here. Most people ask about family, others only ask about themselves and their injuries. Tidus must be important to you.”

  Tripp ran his hands through his hair. “I need to find someone to look after him.”

  Benner cleared his throat. “As it happens, I have two schnauzers at home, and I’d be glad to welcome a third into the pack until you’re on your feet.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “The poor lad is going to miss you. My dogs will keep him company.”

  Tripp was caught between wanting to shake the doctor’s hand, and cursing himself that he let this happen.

  With that thought, a tide of panic hit him. The idea of making arrangements for Tidus set him along a path of thoughts about everything else. His vision, how long he’d be in hospital, his whole life.

  His career, his business, everything he’d worked for. He was going to lose it all if he didn’t do something.

  “I need to make calls. I should tell Mrs. Fostworth I can’t finish the commission, or see if she’ll wait while I…while you…Can you get me my cell?”

  Dr. Benner gently squeezed his left arm. “Deep breaths, Tripp. If you’re in pain, press this button, the one the nurse has placed next to your left hand. Don’t try to move.”

  “I have to make this right. If I let down my first client, she’ll leave reviews online. My business will sink before it’s even cast off.”

  “You’re worried about work at a time like this? Tripp, you need to face up to this. I don’t wear kid gloves, so I can’t treat you with them. The only thing I can treat you with is medicine, and no amount of sympathy will strengthen it. I have to give this to you straight. Right now, you need to be thinking about the possibility that you won’t get your vision back.”

  The words burst through him with the power of a tornado, fast and hungry for destruction. If his stomach weren’t so empty, he’d have thrown up.

  “Can you get my cell? One call, that’s all.”

  “No, Tripp. Not now. I’m the one with the medical degree, remember? In here, what I say goes, and I say that right now you aren’t to even think about work. I’m not holding you prisoner, but I have experience that you don’t. You that you need to process what has happened before anything else.”

  Tripp nodded. “You’re right.”

  He sensed Benner reaching across him, and then floral scents assaulted his nose. “These came from the woman who you helped,” Benner said. “She visited yesterday, but you were asleep.”

  He tried to picture her now, but her face was hazy. “What happened after I confronted the muggers?” he asked.

  Dr. Benner’s face clouded. “Ah.”

  Ah. There it was again. Only now, the word seemed to slither from Tripp’s mind and spread panic through his body.

  CHAPTER 5

  “The world is full of bastards, and bastards have a talent for improvisation when it comes to violence,” said Benner. “Random assaults are rampant. Acid, baseball bats, even dog attacks. Bites, bludgeons, burns. The three B’s, I call them.”

  Worry stirred in Tripp. “Acid?” he said, struggling for more words, but they kept leaving him. Finally he blurted it out. “I’m blind, aren’t I?”

  Dr. Benner shook his head. “Blind is generally a term for people who see nothing but black, yes.”

  “Your bedside manner is appalling, you know that?”

  “Treat a man likes he’s weak, and he’ll stay weak. My bedside manner won’t fix you.”

  Weak was too mild a word for it. Tripp felt powerless. Of all the senses to lose…at least if he’d lost his smell or his taste, he could get by. Now, he felt like a sinkhole had opened and his whole life had fallen through it.

  What could he do? There had to be something, some kind of procedure. And why was he stuck with the world’s most unsympathetic doctor?

  Deep down, he knew that Benner was right. Sympathy wouldn’t fix him. He needed to keep calm. Getting worked up would only make him panic, so he had to try to trust the doctor.

  He needed to know the full extent of the damage and what they could do about it.

  “When people wake in a hospital bed it’s usually because they were stupid or unfortunate,” said Benner. “Unfortunate because something happened outside of their control, like an accident or illness. Stupid because they did something…stupid. Guess which category you fall into?”

  “Ever heard about kicking a man when he’s down?” said Tripp.

  Benner sighed. “My point is that even if it feels like playing the hero is right, the world doesn’t give a damn about heroes. They end up with acid in their faces. I don’t doubt you were full of bravado when you saw the muggers, and adrenaline can make a person do crazy things. But I’d much rather that the woman was filing a police report about a stolen handbag, then having you in this room.”

  Tripp felt like an idiot. He shouldn’t have helped her. Then again, if he hadn’t then he’d have watched her get mugged. He’d replay the scene in his head again and again, kicking himself. The universe damned him either way.

  It was hard enough to process the blindness, but he realized something else. “Why can’t I move my arm?”

  He tried to move his left arm but there was nothing. There was no response, no feeling, a complete refusal to cooperate.

  “Deep breaths, Tripp.”

  His throat was too dry. “I could use a drink.”

  “Here,” said Benner, with a smile. “Let me give you a hand.”

  “Is that an arm joke?”

  “When you’re down and out, sympathy is like someone laying down beside you. You don’t feel as alone, but it doesn’t get you back on your feet. I prefer to treat people like adults, and I prefer humor.”

  As much as that made sense, Tripp couldn’t help wondering why he was stuck with the craziest doctor in the hospital.

  “Is there any hope for my eyes?”

  “To get back to full vision? Not likely. The best we can say is that with your father willing to pay for a stay in a restore unit, we can work back some of your vision. Enough that you’ll see shapes and outlines. The tech is still a baby, Tripp. You were born thirty years too early to see its full potential. The things we’ll be able to do in the future…”

  “You spoke to my father?”

  “Is that a problem?” asked Benner.

  It was a hell of a problem, but Tripp didn’t want to get into that with Benner. Too many ugly feelings. It made him think of his mom, of what he called ‘the dark years.’

  Hearing that Dr. Benner had spoken to Dad was a gut punch, and he didn’t want to dwell on it.

  “Okay, doctor. Give me a run down. Lay it on me straight.”

  “I don’t know any other way to lay it.”

  Dr Benner explained that aside from his eyes, Tripp’s arm took most of the damage. Damage was too soft a word for it, though. The chemical had completely ravished his arm, burning through almost everything it touched.

  It was stupid, but all Tripp could think about then was the woman with her eight bedrooms and her wardrobes. How he’d need to tell her he couldn’t do the work for her. He’d disappointed his first customer before he’d even set foot in her house to take measurements.

 
; This thought was a pebble plonking into water, and now the ripples spread. His career was over. The skill he’d worked for years to learn was useless to him. His business was finished before it had started. His future, once so certain, was murky.

  He’d never drive again. Never see a sunset, a cityscape. Hell, it sounded stupid, but he even worried about television, about books. Why did the human mind always jump to irrelevant things?

  A rush of despair hit him then, but he pushed it back. He wouldn’t show it in front of Dr Benner even though it was like trying to hold a door closed when a bull was charging into it. Instead, he stroked Tidus and felt his buddy nuzzle against his hand.

  “I’m sorry this happened to you, Tripp, but as I said, there is a way. There’s a treatment for tissue regrowth which has passed almost every clinical trial. It will fix your arm completely, and it will at least give you some sight back. You won’t be doing crosswords for a while, but at least you can play blind tennis,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

  Despite everything, Tripp was starting to appreciate the doctor’s humor in a dark sort of way. It was a distraction from his worries, even if it only accomplished that for a few seconds. The man was right; sympathy wouldn’t help, so maybe he could use a laugh.

  When Benner spoke next, he sounded closer to him. “Let me tell you about the procedure without bombarding you with technicalities. That's the last thing you need after everything you’ve had to process. Simply put, we have pods that stimulate tissue regrowth. You would spend time in the pod in a medically induced coma while we treat your eyes and arm.”

  “A coma? I don’t know about that.”

  “Worried about brain damage?”

  Tripp nodded. “A little.”

  “That should be the least of your worries, Tripp. There’s nothing to be concerned about on that front, nor is there a danger in the regrowth process. As I said, it passed every trial without complication. The only issue would have been money.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes, ah. Like I said - I contacted your father.”

  Hearing about his father always sent a flood of emotions through him. There was a nostalgia about being a kid, and sadness that those years were gone. After that, years and years of hating the guy.