Legacy of the Defender (The Defender Series Book 1) (25 page)

Light exploded into my eyes.  The door to the room flew open.  More nurses flooded in.  My lungs wanted to explode from the panic attack I was suffering.  What was real?  Where did reality start?  I cannot take this.  My head felt like it was erupting out of my ears.  A gentle hand touched my forehead.  Warmth began to spread through the tumultuous waves of fear that held my mind captive only moments before.  The light that had felt like it was searing my mind was an ambient glow from the closed blinds mixed with the dimly illuminated light next to the door. 

The only shadow I saw was backlit by a radiant light.  It felt like I gazed upon an angel for just a moment when the light dimmed and my favorite nurse's face came into focus.  It was her hand upon my brow gently stroking my hair back. 

"I am having such horrible dreams.  They are so real it feels like I am losing my mind.  Then just when I wake up, the shadows come at me.  I can't take this anymore."

"You are safe," she whispered.  "I have you.  The doctor is on his way.  He will be here in just a moment."

I wept quietly.  Slow tears started a journey they did not finish.  For each time one crossed my cheek and was about to roll off, her hand tenderly wiped it away.  Several moments passed.  Her soothing gestures were the only thing I felt or heard.  Silence blocked out every sound in the room.  I did not even notice the others had left.  She sat there for some time while the bustle of nurses and doctors came and went.  My eyes never left her.  She gazed at me while her hand caressed my face. 

I fell asleep.

XVIII

Darkness

“Dieter, my name is Dr. Price.  I am the onsite psychologist.  The staff and I have been monitoring you for years now.  You have a condition that none of us knows quite how to explain, but there are theories.”  He paused for a moment to flip through some files in a large box.  I could tell he lost his train of thought...or perhaps did not have a cohesive one.

Okay, that was a scary start!

“How are you feeling?” the pretty nurse asked, pressing the balloon as the blood pressure sleeve tightened on my arm.  I looked at the cuff, at her, and back at the cuff. 

Feeling?
  I thought. 
How am I feeling?
  The walls of the sanitized room looked pale.  There is an I.V. embedded into my upper arm.  A monitor of some kind intermittently beeps while I try to sleep.  A half-eaten sandwich and a plastic cup of green Jell-O, and a cup of ice chips that I attempted to eat just before the doctor arrived taunted me.  There were other machines with numbers and displays.  More tubes.  My lower back throbbed, and the pillow under my head felt stiff.  The nurse finished another round of vitals and left, not taking the time to repeat the question.  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.   

I was so grateful to her for the tenderness earlier.  My lips could not even muster a smile, but my eyes did manage a squint at her that probably looked like a drunken attempt at a wink.  The last few hours had been touch and go on my sanity.  Without her there, my chance of survival would have been severely diminished I felt.  The door closed behind her.  My mind drifted.

“Tell me what you remember about the dreams,” his voice casually probed. 

I looked up.  The psychiatrist was back.  Perhaps it was my attention returning.  I was concerned he might have actually been talking for a few minutes before I snapped back to...Doctor what’s-his-name.  I searched for the right words to begin describing my scrambled thoughts and found myself falling into a deep hole in my mind.  The words bounced off me repeatedly, like a pinball falling back to the flippers because they held no sway over gravity.  Just when I thought I wrapped my mind around an answer, the words fell away again slowly...only to pick up speed and then poof.  This visual image happened several times, in the few seconds it took him to ask again.  Then I found myself asking my own questions internally – a process that seemed to last for hours.  The answers were being elusive.

What
did
I remember?  I remembered darkness; lots of pain, and being scared… terrified…that is all.  No matter how many different ways the psychiatrist asked, the three elements arranged themselves differently every time.  Deeper depths availed, only if my psyche allowed.  To tell him more might begin a journey that was more than a pursuit of the truth.  I worried about what else I might see.  The reality was no matter what truth I told him, things would not go well for me. 

My thoughts turned to what had happened.  If I spoke about that day, he would think I was nuts.  Confusion set in for a moment while I took a breath.  There were memories of blood...lots of blood, but the color was too dark – and too red.  How I knew it was blood was unknown to me.  However, I
did
know.  It felt like a shadow cast over my eyes like a veil kept me from seeing anything more.  The fear was prevalent, and the muted color made it worse.                                                                                          

How dark is darkness really?
  Some call it blackness.  I like to think of darkness in another light, beyond just describing different degrees of light.  You hear the term “That is really dark,” or “The darkness in his heart.”  To me, darkness means something beyond evil, or miscreant.  Malevolence is another good word, but even it does not quite hit the mark.  Malevolence is a choice.  Darkness just exists…everywhere.  In the physical, the clinical, and the crusade-like judgments.  Darkness simply is. 

Darkness has a way of measuring the shadows that steer us one way or another.  I may not be the only person in history to refer to the evil nature of man as dark, but my understanding was felt to be greater than most.  I did not yet know why.  The comparison of blackness to the purity of the night would not allow the two concepts to relate.  The simple purity of the night hid all the complexities of the heart and soul. 

The soul is like a canvass; everything we do adds color for good or ill.  In the end, we have a picture detailing our lives, good and bad, light and dark.  These colors camouflaged themselves when one stood in the darkness.  We simply existed.

Up until now my canvas had been plain, not having seen or done anything horrific.  My head would not fully wrap around this concept and forced me to take pause as images of my child hood raced forward.  Drunken so-called "parents" made up the extent of the atmosphere I knew.  As I walked around inside my mind, wondering what kind of picture I painted…my own question lingered on the horizon of my thoughts.

"Was the artistry of my deeds worth seeing?" 

For most of my life, I had felt like a large cloud hovered over me.  The cloud cast a shadow across my young life’s canvass.  I wondered how God viewed my life.  Was he proud of my actions as a good child?  Did it matter at that young age what kind of man I
was not
?  Let us face it, the Dark Ages aside, teenagers nowadays were nothing compared to what they had been during the dawn of man, when you were a soldier and killing by fifteen or earlier.  The necessity to stay alive stripped common sense from my generation.  Survivors lived on the streets or in neighborhoods where they carved respect out of their enemy’s skin.

This cloud followed me always, but it did not physically exist.  Still, I felt its presence hiding me from the world.  Sometimes it seemed as if the cloud influenced every decision of mine somehow.  

Since childhood, I had felt an evil presence in my life.  Ever since my parents split before I was six months old, I never felt like I belonged anywhere.  Life took a tragic turn.  My mother remarried a rather unpleasant man named Larry, who had already raised his children.  He took no interest in me.  The abuse started at a young age. 

It took me years to put my finger on it – that the cloud I felt started with him.  The fear I felt was explainable.  Maybe it was just my gut reaction to this feeling of darkness.  Something inside me might have hatched and wreaked havoc on the unsuspecting world had I allowed his example to mold me. 

The darkness was invisible to my mother.  There was no doubt in my mind that if she knew about it, she would ignore it.  She saw the abuse, of course, as it was right in front of her.  It seemed at times that there was something more behind his eyes.  I vowed never to be like him.

Children are fragile only if you work too hard at protecting them.  Do not get me wrong, I would have loved to avoid the pain physically.  At the time, I did not realize that physical abuse actually built mental toughness too. 

Looking back, I was not a fool either.  Staying out of my step dad’s way was much easier on my wellbeing than if he caught me in the open.  That was the biggest reason why I preferred the night.  Hiding was easier.  Gazing outside with the lights off, I noticed the gentle illumination from the streetlight in the driveway.  Sitting quietly, I could take in the world without the world knowing of my existence.

Sleep eluded me often even when exhaustion was just over the horizon.  My thoughts turned to the outdoors during my teen years.  Exploration became paramount when I met Jason.  We used to spend a lot of time in the woods or walking the roads to some unknown destination, sometimes without saying anything for hours.  There were also times we ran from tree to tree pretending an assailant gave chase, or that we were the hunters on some quest to find some mystical monster newly created that day.  I do not even remember the name of it to tell you the truth.  And through these adventures many times the only light we had was that of the moon.  It always bathed everything in an eerie glow, almost iridescent at times, adding a certain element to the hunt.

At night, the woods seem to come alive.  Although I have only been in the city a few times, night is not the same there.  Sure, Jason and I were afraid sometimes.  Each sound we heard, whether it was a twig suddenly snapping or some animal calling out, added to the ambience we tried to build together.  I never admitted to Jason how scary it was at times.  There was a dark swamp, and to this day, I always felt there were eyes on me, looking out from the mist that seemed to shroud the water like some sort of protection from prying eyes.  We could never see in, but whatever it was could see out. 

When I got scared or worried, it made me that much more aware of our situation.  We were alone by choice, and we liked it that way.  We never truly felt it.  There was never any proof to back up our feelings so we did not go there that often.  We saved that for special occasions when something bad happened.  It was a method of forgetting your problems and just staring out at the water as if being called by something or someone.  Yet out there, it made sense to fear the unknown.

Jason used to tell me stories of living in Seattle.  He used to tell me how after 5:00 in the evening the town flipped over and another breed of human walked the streets.  Sometimes this breed came into his neighborhood in spite of how rough the neighborhoods were.  The nineteen eighties saw many changes to Seattle.  He lived there until he was thirteen.  That is when we met.  Therefore, he had more time spent in a truly hostile environment than I did, even though I lived in one, too.  That explained why he was so tough.  His parents enrolled him in karate with hopes that he avoid fights up or get beat down living where they did.  It was some place called Rainer Avenue South; also known as Rainier Valley.  

Apparently, that is where many of the gangs were, so he had to learn to survive in a racially challenged neighborhood, where no matter you’re your skin color, there was violence spread evenly if some one crossed to the wrong side of the street.  I never had a problem with the concept of separation, if it kept people from killing each other.  We all bleed red; some people just have a problem getting along with anyone, regardless of race or culture.  Let them live apart then.  Unfortunately, the concept never works and there are always incursions onto rival turf.  That is what most of the fighting was about.  Especially if your parents were idiots and did not even think about the consequences of where they lived and how it would affect their kids.  Jason’s parents at least gave him a fighting chance.  It was the fact that he could fight that eventually led him to my world, albeit much later.

He was good at fighting; hell, he could kick my ass.  We used to spar on a regular basis.  I was clearly no match for him and he knew it.  At times, the thoughts arose that he used to do it to try to toughen me up.  Survival had become a way of life to him so he would get a crazed look in his eye when we horsed around.  That made me nervous.

One day Jason finally told me a story about a bad scrape with some friends before we met.  There were three of them, all from his karate school
,
so they had some training.  Still, it was not enough.  When you have three to one odds, training helps if you have had practice in the tactics needed to survive the odds.  Only Jason walked away.  He never spoke of it again, but I understood now what he experienced.  He had seen death first hand and it changed him.  The pain he felt from it surfaced and ran along the lines of his generally smiling face.  He always thought things were funny, just not that day.

I can see it now in our combat lessons.  He positioned himself as if he was outnumbering me.  The attacks always came from different locations around me.  Yet his teaching worked.  My confidence was shaky most of the time, but as soon as I got a little cocky, he would smack me down.  It was at these times his inner demons would surface when he was losing the upper hand, which was rare.  It never lasted long, and always turned into an ass kicking.  He never went full on with me, but he lost himself enough times.  From this, I could defend myself to a point, but I could never strike. 

My first year with him as friends taught me a lot about defending myself, but I lacked the experience needed to lock it in mentally until the time came to defend myself for real.  However, I went to a private school and did not have to worry too much about fighting.  That was until my ninth grade year and a bully eight inches taller wanted to get into a tumble.  He was a doughboy and had no speed, no form, and no strength, relying on his size to intimidate me.  I tried convincing him he could be hurt without trying to actually hit him.  The show of force was good until I walked away.  He hit me from behind.  After I regained my balance, he was sorry he laid hands on me.  It was luck, not skill, which helped me prevail.  Looking back, it could have gone either way.  His size was his advantage as my speed was mine.  Winning a fight at school did earn me some respect.  Soon after that, I finally expressed my interest in martial arts to my parents, but they shot the idea down.

To them, it was only mind control.  They were too narrow minded and set in their ways to consider anything that did not “glorify” God.  That line of thinking always made me laugh, and the anger I felt because they denied me lingered just below the surface.  It did not make sense that it was not from God.  Did he not send his people to fight his enemies?  Shortsighted people frustrated me and not knowing how to defend myself was foolish. 

My stepfather had Special Forces training.  They trained him to kill.  What was wrong with my desire to have all my teeth still when I graduated?  They did not see it that way...even boxing was not in my future.  I was mad.  They denied me anything that would help me defend myself.