The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) by Scott Mariani Page A

impossible. The paramedic helped him patiently over to a rock, where he sat and bowed his aching head between his hands. He felt the wetness of his palms and stared at them in the flashing blue light. They were slick with blood. He touched his face and realised where the blood was coming from. It was all down the front of his T-shirt and spotted over the blanket that someone had draped around his shoulders. He put his fingers to his blind eye.
    ‘Try not to touch it,’ said the paramedic, her words sounding clearer now. His cheek felt swollen and hurt badly to the touch. He wiped the blood from his eye, and found he could make out blurry images with it again. He remembered that he’d been hit there. Hit very hard. He remembered the baton. Recalled the man holding it.
    ‘Kristen,’ he mumbled, his voice coming out garbled and indistinct. He looked around. ‘Where’s Kristen?’
    A policewoman appeared out of the confusion and spoke to the paramedic. Ben heard her say, ‘We need to ask him some questions.’ The paramedic replied, ‘He’s got to be seen to first.’ And something about a hospital. It didn’t feel as if they were talking about him.
    ‘Where’s Kristen?’ Ben repeated. ‘I have to help her.’
    The paramedic said something that sounded like, ‘You can’t help her.’
    ‘Those men … they were attacking her,’ he protested. But nobody seemed to pay any heed to what he was saying. Couldn’t they understand?
    Finally he stopped trying to speak, as his voice was slurring and his eyes wouldn’t stay open. He felt himself being lifted and laid down on a stretcher.
    Time seemed to drift. Then there was the sound of doors slamming and an engine, and he could sense he was in a moving vehicle. Someone was with him, maybe the same gentle female paramedic. Maybe someone else. He was somewhere very far away. He floated off and felt numb.
    Then suddenly he was in a new environment, hard white light dazzling him, walls rushing past either side of him. Faces peering down. He realised he was lying on his back on a gurney being wheeled through a white corridor.
    ‘I’m okay,’ he tried to protest. ‘I just need to find Kristen …’ Then he passed out again.
    The next several hours were a blur. How he got from the gurney to the couch in the curtained cubicle, his bloodied clothes replaced by a hospital robe, seemed to pass him by. He was half-conscious of the activity that milled around him. People came, people went. More faces looking down at him, as if he was some kind of specimen under observation. The nip of a needle, followed by a tickling sensation, he realised was the gash in his scalp being stitched. He vaguely remembered all the occasions in the past when he’d been sewn back together. This was nothing. Twice he tried to tell them so and get up, but dizziness overcame him and he slumped down against the couch.
    His eyelids felt heavy, but they wouldn’t let him sleep. ‘I feel much better already,’ he kept saying. Still, he’d been through this routine enough times to know that was the procedure in suspected concussion cases. A grey-haired consultant named Dr Prendergast, sporting a florid bow tie and an ironic sense of humour to match, shone a light in his eyes and asked him a lot of questions about his headache, his vision, whether he felt any weakness down one side of his body, which he didn’t. Nor was he showing other telltale symptoms – he wasn’t vomiting, his skin wasn’t pale, his speech was no longer slurred and he didn’t have one pupil dilated larger than the other.
    But Dr Prendergast seemed concerned about the severity of the headache and the dizziness. Ben was wheeled off to have his head X-rayed to check for a skull fracture before being taken back to the cubicle, where they still wouldn’t let him sleep, plied him with pills and as gently as possible refused to answer his questions about what had happened to Kristen, where she was, whether she was all right. He