Sleeper Seven Read Online Free

drawn. Observing no activity within, one officer holstered his pistol and climbed up to peer into the windshield. After ruling out terrorism in favor of a medical emergency, they radioed a request for the jaws of life, and only then did one of the cops take any interest in her body.
    Keeping his gun drawn, the officer skidded down the embankment into the gully to where her body was sprawled out in the brush. Holstering his gun, he scrambled towards it, issuing a "
Jesus
" between heavy breaths. He had seen enough dead bodies to know what they look like.
    The EMT's, close behind, maneuvered a stretcher through the craggy path from the highway to her body. Jess found it slightly amusing how much of a fuss was being made — she wasn't down
there,
she was up on the tracks, and felt just fine. More than fine. Taking a moment, she examined this new state of hers. Where a moment before she was full of adrenaline, in pain, drenched with sweat, and almost sick to her stomach, she now had none of those concerns. She felt calm, had no pain or nausea, no worry, and nary a drop of sweat. Everything was just grand.
    Something began to take hold in her consciousness, however, something just on the tip of her tongue — something she was forgetting, as if she had just awoken from sleep with a fading swirl of emotion, and was desperately trying to remember the dream from which it sprang. Then it hit her, and in an instant she became aware of the strangeness of feeling absolutely no concern for her body below. She needed that body to
live,
and right now she wasn't alive — not in the conventional sense of the word. Apparently, she reasoned, she was
dead
.
    Panic set in as she tried to move closer to that pale, mangled contraption that was her body below. The effort was made more difficult with the discovery that she wasn't exactly
walking
along the railroad bed; she was
gliding
over it instead, and had difficulty controlling her movement. Her anxiety increasing, she desperately began to swim down through the air towards her body. As she painstakingly closed the distance, she overheard the cop tell the arriving EMT: "Take your time, she's gone" — sending her further into despair.
    A few feet away now, she felt a revulsion towards this twisted wreck; there was no way she wanted to go back in
that,
but the thought of losing the rest of her life terrified her more than the disgust she felt. Positioning herself a few inches over her body as best she could, she closed her eyes, and willed herself to feel her legs, arms, torso, head — anything to reconnect to her human senses again. Within a few moments, a small tug at the back of her head burgeoned into a violent pull as she was yanked downward — head first, then torso, then limbs — and snapped back into place with a
thunk,
like a ping-pong ball caught in a vacuum cleaner.
    As her previous state of pure consciousness solidified within her body, she felt every cell of her being newly burdened with a distinct weight and thickness, a heaviness, a substantiality, a
humanity;
and it was, frankly, disgusting to her. This process of unification was accompanied by numerous high-pitched, descending tones, reminiscent of a poorly auto-tuned song, which finally resolved into a chorus of shouting voices and sirens.
    And then came the pain.

~ 5 ~
    "W elcome back, sweetie."
    Her eyes slowly opened, and after a few blinks, the cloudy haze cleared to reveal the smiling face of a nurse in blue scrubs.
    "I'll be right back, don't you go nowhere," she ordered, quickly shuffling out of the room. Jess could feel the pain lingering just behind whatever painkillers she had been given; a dull ache that she knew would catch fire once the drugs wore off. Bandages covered her arms and legs, and a sling supported her right arm, but she found, with relief, no Plaster of Paris anywhere.
    The nurse reappeared as promised, joined by three doctors: an older man followed by two young interns — one male, one female —