Alternate: Chapter one, Part one

Alternate

                PART 1: AFTER

Voice

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. The sound brought me back to my senses.

Beep. I didn’t want to open my eyes for fear of what I would see. Beep. The constant sound started to get annoying. I opened my eyes so that I could find the source of the beeping and get rid of it. Beep.
  As my vision started to come back into focus I realized where I was, a hospital room. Beep. The sound grated on my nerves. Beep.  I let my eyes flit across the room while taking a mental inventory of what I knew. 
I knew that:
 1. I was in a hospital room.
2. I was alone
3. I had a bandage around my neck.
4. And I was in control, for the moment.
I stopped my mental inventory because I noticed a woman watching me from behind a screen of glass. The woman was young and had no-nonsense look about her. She was wearing a blue lab coat and was writing on a clipboard as she watched me. 
As she glanced over to me again she noticed that I was awake and went to the wall, pressed a button, and said, “She’s up.” Once more she looked at me before she whisked out of the room with her lab coat flowing out behind her.
Minutes later my grandparents came into the room holding on to each other as if they were too weak to move on their own.

When they saw me looking at them they stumbled back a step as if they saw a ghost.  For all I knew, it might seem like that with how she/ I acted when she took over I also didn’t know or care how well I looked at that moment.
I tried speaking to them, to tell them that I was okay, but I found that I couldn’t, I couldn’t speak. I tried again but my throat burned, I felt so weak. I fell back onto the pillows, trying to quell the burning. The nurse gave me a pitying look and came over to check the monitors all the while she was talking to me.
  She told me that they had gotten an anonymous phone call saying that someone was injured and would die soon if they didn’t get there immediately. 
“We came as fast as we could but we ended up having to revive you. And by that time your vocal cords were damaged so badly that we could not repair them.” I gave her a wide eyed look because I feared the worst.
                “You will never be able to speak again.” She said in a sad voice. “I am so sorry that we couldn’t fix that.”
                My eyes started to water. I was trapped inside my own mind, I would never be able to speak, and I was still alive while sharing a body with her. 
  The nurse told my parents to let me have some time to absorb that information as she led them out of the room. I was alone again. 
 I pressed the morphine button beside my bed so that I could sleep without dreams.

I woke with a start.  The morphine must have run out for I couldn’t feel the liquid pump into my IV line and run through my veins. That’s when I realized that I couldn’t hear the noise of the machines humming.
  As my eyes adjusted to the light I realized that all the machines that were monitoring my vitals and pumping medication into me were unplugged. She must have taken over last night and unplugged them in an attempt to kill me, again.

Before anyone noticed, I got out of bed and plugged-in all the monitors and machines and then went back to sleep.

A few days later, the doctors said that I was well enough to go home. I was dismayed that I wouldn’t have immediate help if she did something to me, but I was also happy that I would finally be free from those knowing glances and those watchful gazes.