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Page 11
Chapter Six: Eden
 …I awakened, lying on my side on the patio back at the time share condo, as if nothing (much) had happened. Well, except for the cell phone that lay dying and sputtering in muddy water, and a bunch of torn leaves and twigs all around as if I'd been in a mighty struggle during my sleep. I lay in a heap, and the patio around me was a debris field. Not a bird twittered nor a bee droned. I must have terrified them all with my hollering and thrashing.
Voices prodded me from my deeply unconscious sleep.
"Alina!"
"Girl, what are you doing!"
"For god's sake, are you okay?"
Dori and Sheri and Laura came running. I could hear their sweet heels on the slate patio.
Sheri and Laura lifted me into a sitting position, while Dori felt my pulse at one wrist.
"Should we call an ambulance?" Laura asked.
Dori frowned. "Get her into the deck chair over there. Her pulse is strong, and I'm not sure it's anything more than another hallucination like the MD said."
The girls, my dear friends, helped me upright.
I was shaky, but I waved them off. "I'll be okay."
They insisted on helping me walk to the deck chair, where I had originally sat.
Wow, what an ordeal.
"We tried calling," Sheri said, "but your phone seemed to be dead."
"It's lying in a puddle, shorted to death," Dori said.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I must have dropped it."
"You were dreaming, girl," Sheri said.
"Well guess what," Dori said. "Over in the city, there's a big police action going on. They have found four men who were seen at the bar last night. Someone or something tore them to bloody shreds. There is nothing left but messy pulp, along with shoes, underpants, and some tattooed skin. Whatever it was, it must have been huge and almost ate them while it tore them to pieces."
Laura added: "Police said on the news that the men had a bottle of date rape pills in their glove compartment."
Dori said: "As a nurse, I called up the police and explained our situation. I told them to check and see if for sure it was the same thing they slipped in your drink."
I cleared my throat as Sheri handed me a glass of water to drink. "I'm sure it was," I said quietly.
The three women looked at me a bit puzzled, amid all that crazy news.
"How can you be so calm and so sure?" Dori asked while kneeling near the foot of the deck chair.
I shrugged, and looked around me at the world.
The fog had cleared.
Sunshine, balmy air, rustling palm trees, it was all back to normal.
Sailboats prettied up the blue lake water, which twinkled with many borrowed patches of light, much as the city in my hallucination had shone with thousands of yellowish windows in the fog.
Bees droned about. Little birds darted here and there. Lizards wriggled on a warm garden wall.
"It's good to be alive," I said quietly. "We have a lot of work to do to make sure and keep this world going the way we know and love it."
My three friends rose up, and Dori declared: "Yeah, she's feeling better."
"You're going to be fine," Sheri assured me, and Laura nodded.
Dory's cell phone warbled, and she sat at the table to take the call. We all looked at her as she nodded, with a serious face, and eyes that brightened as truth became clearer. "Thank you," she said and rang off. Then she told us: "That was the head of security at the hotel. They looked through the surveillance cams from the halls and at the bar that night. The dead guys by the river are the same ones who showed up at the bar and stood right near you, Alina. The drugs in their car were the same new type, very rare, that they dropped in your champagne."
"Case solved," Laura said.
"Oh man," Sheri said, "I'll never go anywhere alone again."
I added: "Yeah, and hold your drink close, and keep a hand over it to protect yourself."
We all took a deep breath, and let out one huge collective sigh.
"We have a few days left here before we go home," Dori said.
"We can still enjoy ourselves," Sheri said.
"Eyes wide open," Laura said.
I said to all of them, and nobody in particular: "Older and wiser in a hurry, for sure. Isn't this yard just glorious?"
Butterflies danced and flapped in their colorful dance. A cute little hummingbird poked its beak in a red blossom while hunting around for a safe spot to build a nest. Two big blackbirds had a learned discussion up in a tree crown. A prowling fluffy, black and white cat stopped to look up at them with green eyes, decided not to argue with their moral position, and instead blinked patiently, and then went to find his favorite toy to play with. And that's what we all did that day. We put the insane movie (Bambi meets Adolf) behind us, and prettied up to go out and enjoy the rest of our time by those blue sparkling waters with their red and blue and white sails, and the aromas of fresh baked lunch drifting through the balmy air while palm trees rustled and the occasional passenger jet left a silent contrail high up in a perfectly blue sky.
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