Read Out of the Dungeon for Free Online Page B

and his mom said,
"Make sure Roman sees the pole when you leave," and then everybody
at the table cracked up. Jeff's dad, and his brother and sister.
And of course I had to ask. 'What pole?'
    "The telephone pole at the end of the
driveway," Jeff's younger sister told me. "Jeff's hit that thing
four or five times over the years. In fact, usually one of us backs
the car out to the street for him."
    "'Oh, ha-ha, you're all so funny,' Jeff
protested, but he was laughing, too.
    "A half an hour later, his mom realized she'd
forgotten to get ice cream, so Jeff offered to go get some. And
what do you think he did?"
    "Hit the pole?" Dare guessed.
    "Damn straight. Put a nice scrape in the side
of the car. 'No more driving,' I told him, and he tried to protest,
but he doesn't drive when I'm in the car. I can't take the
stress.
    "Jeff does a lot of things well, and many
things perfectly, but not everything."
    Suddenly Dr. Rashaviak appeared in the room.
"I'll bring one of you back to see Jeff now, but just for a
moment."
    Roman stood. "Me," he said. "I need to see
Jeff as badly as he needs to know I'm here."
    "Go," Dare said. "Tell him – I don't know,
that I'm here, I guess."
    "I will."
    Roman followed the doctor through the double
doors and down the hall.
    Jeff didn't have a room so much as a glass
cubicle. Two nurses, a male and a female, were in the cubicle,
monitoring, well, apparently everything.
    Roman stepped up to the bed. He tried to see
Jeff, to recognize him somewhere amidst all the medical
paraphernalia. He couldn't.
    His vision tunneled and his legs stopped
holding him up. "God," he said, as he went to his knees on the
floor beside the bed. "Oh, my boy, my boy."

Chapter 7
     
    R oman tried to find
Jeff's hand. He had to thread his fingers around tubes and cords
and what not, until he touched Jeff's skin. And then he noticed
fabric cuffs attached to Jeff's wrist that were tied to the bedside
rail.
    He almost keened, almost keeled right over
then, but the female nurse put her hand on his shoulder. "It's
okay. I know it's shocking to see him like this, but he's doing all
right. I promise. He's stable right now, nothing terrible is
happening to him."
    "Why is he tied down?" Roman tried to ask,
but all he got out was the "Why?" as he pointed to the ties.
    "We have to do that. Some people fight when
the anesthesia wears off, they pull at tubes and thrash around, and
his neck is fragile. He needs to be quiet and heal."
    Roman was infinitely glad the others couldn't
come in. No one needed to see him shocked to his knees. He'd
imagined Jeff would be pretty bad off, but this was much worse than
he was ready for. He got to his feet and shook his head. He needed
Jeff beside him to deal with this. Jeff would prop him up, keep
things in order so Roman didn't stress. He had grown dependent on
Jeff. He would have thought it was always the other way around,
that Jeff was dependent on him, and yesterday he would have
defended this point of view. But it wasn't true. Jeff the slave
gave strength to Roman the Master. Not that Roman was weak, never
that, but that the two of them together formed a much larger and
more important alliance than anyone knew. They were ying and yang,
and the energy that flowed between them was mutually
beneficial.
    "Tell me what's happening," Roman asked the
room in general.
    The male nurse answered. "The blood pressure
cuff measures his blood pressure every fifteen minutes. If it stays
stable for two consecutive hours, we'll reduce the frequency to two
times an hour. The clip on his finger measures the oxygenation of
his blood. Tells us if his breathing is effective. Normal is
ninety-six to one hundred percent, dangerous is below eighty. It's
going to stay right around ninety-nine to a hundred per cent
because we've got him on a ventilator. He probably doesn't need a
vent, he came in breathing on his own, and that hasn't changed, but
he was taking shallow breaths, which is pretty normal when a person
has broken