Her eye glowed red.

The doctor had been talking for maybe a minute. She had paused twice - was she asking a question? But no eye contact. She had not once looked him in the eye. The man thought this was strange.

"The symptoms of your dehydration were so severe, that frankly, you should have been dead. Okay? Are you listening to me now? You should have been dead. Your body lost too much water. A normal body might start to experience organ failure at around 7% loss of body weight. Death around 10%. Your body had lost 25% of its body weight."

Another pause. The man did not know what to say.

"It is not unheard of for an athlete to lose a similar amount of weight while cutting weight for a competition, but that would be extreme even for an athlete. And they cut weight under a controlled regimen. You were walking naked in the middle of the desert for days, by all indications."

Ah Christ. That explains the headache. I wish I WAS dead.

The man thought back to when the doctor entered the room. She had startled him from a numb slumber. Not sure why I was surprised she was a woman. I was expecting the doctor to be a man. A clean view of the hallway behind her as the doors swung shut. Two men in army fatigues and antique ballistic rifles slung over their shoulders.

"So in a way, you owe your life to the President."

She paused again and finally looked up as if to gauge his reaction.

He looked questioningly at her.

"President Trump and that wall, I suppose. No wall here so that stretch of the Sonoran desert is a crossing for immigrants. If the border patrol hadn't found you... I mean, any body would have to die. Your body would have to have died. You would have been dead."

That was a strange way to phrase things. And why did she sound hesitant?

The doctor stopped talking. She took a deep breath, then opened the folder on her lap. She lifted up an x-ray of a skull and spine. Back to no eye contact.

"We treated you for some unusual injuries. This..."

The doctor was tapping at the base of the skull in the x-ray.

Christ, the savages wouldn't... they didn't...

The man reached his hand up to the back of his neck and encountered a bandage.

The man finally said something. He spat it out as he abruptly sat forward and grabbed the doctor by her collar.

"You removed my jack? You savages removed my jack! Didn't you!"

He released her and slumped back into the bed. It made more sense now.

This feeling. Something inside of my brain. Controlling me. That is just my brain dealing with the loss of the jack. The loss of that much input. Of course it feels like I am not in control of my own brain. And who knows what damage they did while they removed it.

The doctor gasped and once again met his eyes. Her left eye glowed red and the man could see a reptilian skull inside her head.

"It was badly infected! The... jack. We had to remove it!"

Was that really a reptilian skull inside her head? The man blinked, hard, and blinked again. Her eye was not glowing red now. Without the red glow he could not see inside her head. Was her eye ever really glowing? And what had she said?

President Trump. Christ this is the 2000's. The frickin' twenty-first century.

The man closed his eyes. Sun burst patterns of strange designs, vibrant colors against the inside of his eyelids.

All words and art by moi. This is part 4 of an ongoing series.
Part 1: A crumbling machine found in the desert
Part 2: Surface Expedition Report
Part 3: Disorientation