Something else broke through the static: a man in a white robe, watching him from a distance that wasn't really far. Not a memory. Not quite a hallucination either. Something in his gut insisted the face was familiar, though John could not, for the life of him, remember why.
The woman rocked him gently, cooing, her voice full of quiet, unreasonable joy. He wanted to scream at her to stop, to stop calling him this name, this thing.
But all he could do was wail. The only sound his present body knew how to make.
John Whitaker — once the most powerful man in the room — was now an infant with no papers, born in the corner of an overflowing shelter. Every second felt like an eternity as he kept trying to piece the fragments of his memories back together, trying to make them mean something.
But there was nothing to make sense of. Every flicker of memory was distorted, torn at the edges like old photographs. Nothing felt permanent — not the sound of Maria's voice, not the warmth of her body, not the smell of antiseptic and sweat that hung thick in the air.
Hours passed. Maybe weeks. Even time had become a blur, broken only by hunger, exhaustion, and fits of rage he could not articulate.
As he blinked in the unfamiliar brightness of the room, the space slowly revealed itself. Gone was the pristine hospital suite where he had taken his last breath. In its place were stained walls, cracked tiles, flickering fluorescent lights, the rhythmic beeping of monitors, and the constant shuffle of shoes across worn linoleum.
He wasn't alone either. The room was crowded. It was a whole orchestra of newborns crying in ragged, uneven harmony.
This was not hell as he had first believed. It was a place where people lived, struggled, loved, failed, and kept living anyway.
He hated the rough blankets, the loud voices, the foreign tongue crowding his ears. And most of all, he hated her, the woman who rocked him and kissed him and whispered lullabies he couldn't push away.
Her name was Maria. And she loved him. He didn't know what to do with that.