APOCALYPSE AND THE BILLIONAIRE HEIR

CHAPTER 0003

                             Adam Smith

Beep. Beep. Beep.

My eyes peeled open to see the white ceiling staring back at me. The chirp of life support systems filled my ears, and my body felt strange, like I was trapped in sludge. I couldn’t move my hands when I wanted to, and breathing felt completely odd, as if I were doing it differently.

I wanted to move my lips, but couldn’t. Perhaps I had suffered paralysis. Fear struck my spine. Panic filled my eyes. I couldn’t remember a thing—how I got here, how I lost control over my body, what caused the beeps that throbbed in my head now that I had woken.

But just then, I heard voices. Voices that my mind recognized as familiar, though the faces that appeared in my sight looked strange. I couldn’t tell if I had seen them before, but they seemed concerned, and their voices floated in my head like a curse.

I shut my eyes to escape the chaos.

Suddenly, everything went silent. I was dreaming now. I was sure of it because I was seeing a face in my dream—a beautiful young lady watching me with a weak smile, reaching out to me from a distance. But as I reached to hold her hand, a bloodied group of zombies crept out of nowhere and dragged me into a goo of rotten blood.

I cried, “Rosa!”

Her face, as I took a last glance, was terrified, but then it slowly morphed into a wicked smile. A strong hand crept up her shoulder, another went around her tiny waist, and the face of a man, firmly in his mid-forties, appeared behind her shoulder, laughing at me.

I screamed as I sank deeper into the sludge, subdued by the crushing weight of the zombies. Just as the stinky gunk covered my face, I jolted awake in real life. A searing pain tore through my chest, but tough hands, like those of the zombies, held me down.

“Adam,” one of the voices called. “You are back. You are back, Adam. It’s been three years.”

The voice was mournful. I looked at the faces surrounding me. Everyone wore pitiful expressions, but they seemed more concerned than the faces in my dream, and they all looked alike.

I moved my lips. They weren’t stiff anymore. I felt as if whatever I had experienced so far had been mere hallucination, and now I was in the real world, dealing with real humans, because I could feel their touch and their emotions.

“Where…” I managed to utter. “Where… am… I?”

One of the five people around the bed, a smooth-scalped old man, clutched my hand and pressed his solemn lips against it, then pressed it against his neck and whispered, “You are safe now.”

The door popped open, and an Asian doctor walked in, flanked by three Asian nurses. One was carrying a tray of medication, another had a file for the doctor, and the last had nothing. The doctor had a stethoscope slung around his shoulder.

He stopped at the foot of the bed and nodded at the people surrounding me.

“You should let him get some air,” he said in English, heavily accented. “You don’t want to suffocate him.”

They all stepped away from the bedside and moved toward the door. One of the nurses asked them to leave, except for the old man, who stayed behind, watching me with pensive eyes.

The doctor checked my pulse and nodded. “You are totally okay, Mr. Adam.”

I narrowed my brows and let out a quick breath. “What happened to me?” I asked him.

He raised one brow, then lowered it. “You were in an accident, but you are alright now.” He turned and nodded at the nurse with the tray. She stepped forward to administer medication, while the nurse with nothing helped arrange the hospital gown I was wearing.

The doctor took the file from the last nurse and passed it to the old man in the room. “He’s alright now. We will enroll him in physiotherapy.”

The old man’s gaze softened as he took the file. “He could do that from home. Don’t you think so?”

The doctor weighed the option for a second and slipped both hands into his side pockets. “Don’t you think it would be better and faster here?”

The old man shook his head. “He’s been away from home for years, and he’s been here for the past three years. He’s definitely homesick.”

Three years? What was he talking about? I’ve been in this bed for three years?

I reached for my nose and touched it gently, as if it were a new organ on my face. Breathing no longer felt strange. My body no longer felt limp, but I had yet to place my feet on the floor. I hadn’t even felt the need to do so.

“Yeah, he’s probably homesick,” the doctor said, pulling a hand from his pocket and placing it on the old man’s shoulder, “but he has a lot of rehabilitation therapy to undergo. I said physiotherapy because it’s a common term, but he will also undergo neurological therapy. Or, let’s say, the next package is post-coma rehabilitation sessions. I insist he do it here.”

The doctor talked too much. I wanted to ask him to stop. I wanted to know how I ended up in the so-called coma and stayed there for three whole years. I wanted to know why I had been away from home for years, as the old man claimed. And I wanted to know who the old man was, and why he seemed reluctant to accept the doctor’s statement, causing the talkative doctor to keep talking.

The old man stubbornly shrugged the doctor’s hand off his shoulder. “He is my heir,” he declared in a rigid voice. “Get me whoever is conducting the post-coma therapy. The best of them—I don’t mind. I will pay. But Adam is going home with me tonight.”

The doctor wanted to speak, but the old man raised a firm hand. “You said he’s fine. He’s going home.”