GAMMA BLADE
Tim Stevens
2015, Tim Stevens
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License Notes
This ebook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.
Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith at JD Smith Design
Table of Contents
Title Page
Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
THE END
FROM THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY TIM STEVENS | John Purkiss series
Martin Calvary series
Joe Venn series
Shorter stories and novellas
Chapter 1
The first thing the man understood when he opened his eyes was that he was blind.
Panic gripped him in its steel jaws.
He bucked off the surface on which he was lying, feeling his torso weighted down, which added to his terror. Then he realized his limbs could move freely, and the mass bearing down on his chest and abdomen was in fact several layers of blankets, rather than restraints.
His fingers scrabbled at his eyes. He felt fabric of some kind, and pulled at it.
A ceiling came into sharp view, dimmed overhead lights nevertheless causing his eyes to close involuntarily.
As he squeezed his lids shut, the after-image of the ceiling and the lights still vivid on his retinas, he grasped that he wasn’t blind after all. The material wrapped across his forehead – a bandage, he assumed – had been lowered across his eyes.
The man cracked his lids once more. The ceiling was still there. The lights were soft, blue-white panels.
He turned his head, and immediately a bolt of agony jabbed up through his neck and exploded in his head.
His stomach roiled with nausea, and he lay very still, fighting down the urge to vomit.
To his left was a nightstand, and beyond it a door. The door had a window in it, obscured by blinds.
Slowly, taking care not to provoke another stab of pain, he turned his head in the opposite direction.
The room was a small one, extending ten feet or so to his right. Immediately beside the bed was a trolley on which stood a contraption with several screens, across which flickered red and green displays. Wire leads snaked from the contraption toward him and disappeared beneath the blankets.
He recognized the machine as a cardiac monitor.
So: he was in a hospital bed. Through the closed door to his left, he could make out the bustle and clatter familiar to anybody who’d ever spent time on a ward.
Through the curtained windows to his right, he saw that it was night time.
The man gazed up at the ceiling once more and concentrated on his limbs. One by one, he clenched his fists, flexed his toes.
Everything seemed to be in working order.
He had no pain anywhere but in his head and neck. So he hadn’t been shot, or stabbed, or hit by a car.
He could move his limbs, his eyes, his facial muscles. He could think logically. Which suggested his brain hadn’t been damaged to any critical degree.
But he couldn’t recall what had happened to him.
The man raised his head a couple of inches off the pillow. The pain flared, but not unbearably so. He appeared to have full movement in his neck. And that probably ruled out meningitis. Though an inflammatory process like meningitis wouldn’t have accounted for the bandage around his head, anyhow.
Gingerly, with infinitesimal care, he groped for the side of the mattress and took hold of it and used his grip to leverage his legs sideways so that they extended over the edge of the bed. His head screamed in protest, but he rode out the pain.
He swung up into a sitting position on the side of the bed.
The room rocked, and he felt the bile rise in his throat without warning. Even as he dropped back onto the sheets, the acid tang seared his mouth and escaped his lips.
He lay back, heart hammering, registering distantly that not much had come up, and that meant his stomach was almost empty.
A woman’s face appeared in his mind’s eye, quite suddenly.
He tried to focus on her. She was young. Pale. Dark hair – he thought. Unsmiling.
Pain and an awful sensation of pressure made themselves known at the back of his head. Except they weren’t real. They were memories, just like the woman’s face.
They were linked to the sight of her face.
He grasped at the memories, feeling them slip away.
Had the woman hit