Freeze

By McKenzie H.

                I breathed in. Time felt like nothing, and what felt like blistering heat could have been –20 degrees. My skin seared with pain at anything that touched me, even the smallest speck of dust.

                Blurry sounds came at me. Stop, stop! I thought, Make it stop! How could I think? Breathe? Feel? See? Something touched me.

                “No, stop!” I screamed.

                “She’s getting her senses back, nobody touch her!”

                “No…” I moaned. Every part of me was alive; new, even though I remembered my life from before. I remembered.

                White visions were surrounding me; they looked like coats. The light seared the image into my retinas. The pain finally began to fade. The hours that had dragged past could have been mere seconds for all I knew.

                When I felt somewhat comfortable, I stopped moving. I hadn’t even realized I had started. My blood was polluted with adrenaline- if somebody asked me to I would have run 10 miles right then. Burning metal was stinging my skin like icy fire.

                “C-ear-me?” I heard somebody saying, “C-n-you-ear-me? Can you hear me” the voice repeated it over and over.

                One of the people who was wearing a white coat’s mouth was moving; not exactly moving, but it wasn’t what I knew to be stillness. Could he be talking to me? My mind was in a jumble, and couldn’t make sense of my surroundings.  Maybe what I saw as white coats were really just parts of the plain white wall behind them…

                What were the racks and sharp things on them? I wasn’t able to make a sane judgment of anything.

                “Can you hear me?” the voice repeated.

                I opened my mouth, but my tongue stuck in my throat. “Ah-.” Was all I could manage.

                “Let’s get her out of here” a woman’s voice said.

                I felt a small vibration coming from the hard surface I was laying on. It still stung like hot metal, but the bite it gave me was icy and uninviting.

                When I finally felt like I could talk again, I muttered, “What time is it?”

                I wasn’t sure if anybody could hear me, and I didn’t really care, because I was extremely tired.

The last thing I remembered before slipping off into a dream was the temperature rising quickly.

                “It won’t hurt, will it?” I asked

                “ No, not at all. The freezing is a quick and simple process.” Dr. Stantrom assured me. I had said my last goodbyes, and gone through enough tears to last two lifetimes. So hopefully I wouldn’t cry in my next life.

                I remembered laying down into a machine, similar to one you would get a CAT scan in.

                And that was it. I drew a blank after that.  Adrenaline still pumped in my veins, but I was extremely tired. It was sort of like waking up from a bad dream in the middle of the night.

                Hours later, after I had slept like a log, I was sitting in a room with Dr. Stantrom Jr. He was shivering like nothing else, even though the room was making me sweat.

                “Can you remember anything at all?” he asked me.

                “Hardly at all,” I replied, “just bits and pieces of stuff.” My words were slurred and uneven, but that was pretty good considering only a few hours ago I had been frozen in solid carbon.

                “Okay, you’re aware that you were frozen for 75 years, right?” He said.

                “Yup.” I answered.

                “Do you recall why you were frozen?”

                “Not exactly- yet. My memory’s starting to come back.”

                “Okay, in that case I’ll give you a little reminder; you were a very intelligent young woman, knew much more than the average 16-year-old. But unfortunately you were a victim of leukemia, and as of your freezing date, you only had a month to live.

                “So we asked if you would be willing to do this experiment on you- we would keep you frozen in a carbon block until a proven cure for your disease was found. I’m sure you’re aware of the rest?” He finished.

                “Yeah…” I continued for him, “I agreed, because if it didn’t work it wouldn’t have mattered. I was going to die anyway. Everybody was opposed to it, but I did it anyway.

“I also remember that you chose me because you thought I had the potential to make important discoveries for your company.”

Dr. Stantrom began to ramble on about details on my surgery to get rid of the cancer, but I wasn’t really listening. I hadn’t seen much of this new world, and I was already afraid of what else I would find. Why did it have to be me that was frozen for nearly a century? It didn’t seem right now, after it was too late to change anything.

     This small taste of what the people today are like has showed me that nobody cares about anything but getting ahead. Like nobody could remember what love was like. And I knew what I was going to do in this world now; I was going to show everybody what they’ve been missing out on.