“Very well,” she began, “we will start with what I know about you.”

Ana resumed her perch on the same metal stool, apparently unmoved since their last meeting. “What is the last thing you remember before waking up here?”

He opened his mouth to answer and paused. Thom had given that exact question a good deal of thought in the handful of days since finding himself in this room. To be completely honest, he had not yet come up with a good answer. He remembered walking away from Heather in that hotel and wandering an underground parking garage in a daze, looking for his car. He remembered his hands shaking as he drove and thinking that he needed to stop before he killed someone. Most of his memories after that are a hazy collection of bars, smoke, and alcohol.

He remembered the papers. Try as he might, though, he could not recall anything after opening the manila envelope holding his divorce papers. Did he even talk to an attorney?

“My wife filed for divorce. That’s the last thing I remember.”

Ana frowned. “A pity, I was hoping for more. It is common, though, in cases of head trauma, to not recall events leading up to the responsible incident. I suppose we’ll never really know how you ended up in the coma.”

“Once I became aware of your….situation, I began looking for background information. Eventually I managed to locate your original hospital chart, but it was partially damaged and large sections were missing. From what I can tell, during the spring of 1997, you suffered a massive head injury and became comatose.”

“Was there anything about what caused it?” Thom asked.

“Not that I found, and my search was extensive. If the computer system at the hospital had been operating, I might have found out, but electricity is not universal anymore.”

“Well,” he mumbled, “it was February, I think, when I got the papers. Maybe I drove myself into a tree or something.”

“Perhaps,” she allowed. “Regardless, you ended up with a significant head wound and a very negative prognosis. No one expected you to ever be conscious again. You were you lucky, though, that the hospital was participating in a medical study regarding coma. As a result, rather than being shipped off to whatever establishment your family could afford, you remained there for nearly ten years. You apparently received a variety of experimental drugs intended to boost your brain activity. You were very closely monitored and well cared for, until Charon.”

“So everyone got super-flu and died, but I didn’t get it? How’d that happen? And, even if I didn’t get it, how’d I manage not to starve to death. Don’t people in comas need feeding tubes or something?”

Ana smiled wryly. “Yes, feeding is necessary. I don’t know exactly what happened when everyone else died. As I told you, though, there are those that survived, but they are largely…different…not really exactly human beings anymore.”

“What do you mean, different?”

“We’ll get to that. The important thing is that somehow they found you, and they had to have found you relatively soon. You could not have survived long, helplessly comatose and without food.”

“Ok, fine. So someone else, some people like, what, the Road Warrior guys, took care of me for three years and kept me warm, dry, and fed? Great. I don’t care how screwed up they are or if they’re a bunch of psychos or elves or something. Whatever. They kept me alive. I should get them a card or something. I need to say thanks.”

Ana jumped up from her stool. “You will make NO attempt to do any such thing!”

“Whoa, lady,” Thom began.

Her eyes narrowed in the moonlight and she pointed at him. “No. Listen to me, carefully. If you ever try to return there, you will surely be killed. You were held by a very twisted man for three years; kept alive only because, well, you weren’t dead already. I only just found out about you a month or so ago and I spent every waking moment trying to devise a way to sneak you out of there. You cannot go back. It isn’t safe. You have to trust me.”

“Ok, ok. Calm down. But why? Why would anyone want to kill me, especially now? What the hell were they doing with me all that time?”

She sighed and dropped back onto the stool. “Experiments, Thom,” she said quietly, “hundreds, maybe thousands of them. What do you think made those circular marks all over you?”