"What Doesn't Kill You"

[JustAnotherHornyGirl]

"What Doesn't Kill You"

Closed:
I think I'm going to write this alone,
as a story, not a roleplay.

(I would write it out in the story section
of Literotica as a chapter story,
but I plan on the
replies being too short for that.)​

Hayima struck a pose meant to emphasize her delicious curves. It drew the attention of a man jogging toward her down a path in the park, causing him to slow, to shift to a quick walk, then an even slower one as he ogled her up and down and all around.

She smiled in return to his attention, attempting to appear delighted and yet surprised. She wasn't either, and regarding the latter, Hayima had actually been expecting him, waiting for him. The man was a creature of habit, taking this same jog in the same park at the same time of the early morning day after day. It was a dangerous thing to do for a man in his line of work: international espionage.

He wasn't alone, though. Trying to appear as if they were just two additional joggers getting in their miles, the man's bodyguards ran side by side about twenty yards back.

"Not exactly earlier morning jogging wear," the man said of Hayima's tight fitting dress and modest heels. He closed, getting slower with each step as he added, "But I approve."

"I'm glad," she said with a flirty tone. She peeked past him to the two bodyguards, who had slowed as well but were coming up on his flanks, concerned about this new development. She asked the man, "Friends of yours?"

As he opened his mouth to answer, Hayima quickly raised the little .38 revolver she'd been hiding behind her shapely leg. The suppressor eliminated all but just a light popping sound as a round shot forward at 755 feet per second, penetrating the eye socket of one bodyguards. A second perfect shot entered the skull of the second bodyguard, dropping him to the path just as quickly, easily, and silently.

The primary target looked to his dead escorts, then to Hayima with his hands raised: "Don't shoot me!"

When she didn't follow up a third shot, he added, "I can give you anything you want. Money, you want money? Ten grand. Twenty. Just don't--"

"I want answers," she cut in. She pointed the weapon at the man's face, gave him a moment to understand the danger facing him, then asked, "What am I?"

She didn't get her answer, though, as a third bullet from a very different source flew through the air and ripped through the back of her thigh. Hayima had been unaware of the second pair of bodyguards in an SUV paralleling the jogging path on the park's access road. The SUV had skidded to a stop, and one of the men had leapt out with a scoped rifle and -- hurrying his shot -- shot too low yet still put a round through her.

Out of spite, Hayima put a shot through the jogging man's knee before turning to run. The pain surging through her and the loss of motor control in her damaged muscles limited her speed, but she thought she could reach cover and then escape. She heard another round whiz past her head, then a slamming in her back was accompanied moments later with a pain like she'd never felt before...

...................​

Hayima awoke in the ICU of the local hospital. A nurse milling about, checking the machines monitoring her vitals, looked at her with a delighted but still seriously surprised expression. "You're awake!"

The nurse moved up closer to check Hayima's vitals first hand, telling her, "You are quite a lucky girl. The doctor says you're going to make a full recovery, which is just amazing because you--"

"Nurse," a male voice cut in. A man at the door with a gold shield on his jacket shook his head. The nurse departed, after which the cop stepped up, inquiring, "Do you feel up to a few questions, ma'am?"

Hayima didn't respond. He asked if she remembered what happened to her. She did, of course, up until she passed out from blood loss, but still she shook her head faintly. He explained that a fisherman had called 9-1-1 after she'd stumbled down a bank into the park pond. He asked, "Can you tell me your name?"

Hayima only stared.

He asked, "Can you tell me who was shooting at you then? And why?"

Once again, her head shook. She finally spoke up, though, asking weakly, "What else did you find? You know, in the park."

He shrugged. "Should we have?"

It was pretty obvious that her target's men had hauled away the men she'd killed, not wanting their boss to be indicated in a shooting right in the middle of the city.

The detective asked more questions, but Hayima gave no answers, only shaking her head. He repeated what the nurse had said, that she shouldn't have survived the bullet in your back nor should she have even been able to run as far as the blood trail indicated she had.

"There'll be an officer outside your door," he told her, "for your protection. Doc says you'll be here for a while, couple of weeks at the least, months at the most."

He hesitated to see if she had anything more to say, asked if she needed anything, and when she again only shook her head, asked, "Is there anything more you can tell me? Or want to tell me?"

Hayima only shook her head yet again. The detective turned at the sound of the doctor's arrival, chatted with him about the patient's prognosis, made his farewells, and departed.

(To be continued)

 

[JustAnotherHornyGirl]

The man speaking to the detective shared a handshake, a farewell, and some final whispered words, then headed over to a display and flipped a switch. As the screen illuminated with a six by six block of smallish Xrays, he looked to Hayima with a smile and asked, "How's my miracle girl this morning? I don't know if you remember me 'cause you were pretty out of it when we took you into surgery, but my name is Doctor Howard. You can call me by my first name if you want, though, because it's Howard, too. Yeah, my folks had quite a sense of humor: Howard Samuel Howard."

"Why does everyone keep calling me that?" she asked, already knowing the answer in general but wanting to hear specifics from him. She clarified in case he didn't understand, "Miracle."

"Well, because you are," Howard answered, looking back to the monitor. He tapped an Xray, causing it to fill the vast majority of the screen. "This was the film we took ... well, not film ... we don't use film anymore, obviously, but then, that's not really important right now, is it? What's important is that this is the shot of your back that we took when you were admitted 22 hours ago. The bullet that hit you in the back came in here..."

He pointed to a dark spot right over a rib that was obviously smashed, then tapped another image to bring it up, continuing, "...and this is where it came out, what we around her call and through and through. If you watch any television, you know that."

Howard switched back and forth between the two images, sometimes including a third, as he listed all of the various bits of damage the bullet did to her ribs, her muscles, her lungs, her vessels, and even a portion of her liver, where a fragment of the bullet had ended up.

"We opened you up to repair the damage to your right lung and extracted the bullet fragment," he continued, now reviewing the chart and describing in more detail the procedure. "You stabilized in ... well, unbelievably fast considering the damage. We planned on two more procedures to do some work we had to initially put off, but..."

When Howard only flipped pages in her chart, Hayima asked, "But what?"

He shook his head as he read, then returned to the Xray monitor, tapping a new image. "Well, this is the image they took about an hour ago, as we were prepping an OR for the next surgery."

Just as he had described all the damage done by the bullet, now he described how most of that damage had already healed in varying degrees far faster than anyone could have expected. He said with some humor in his voice, "I mean ... I'm a great surgeon, the best in the hospital ... best in the known universe..."

Howard looked to Hayima, hoping for a laugh or at least a smile but only getting that same emotionless stare she'd been giving him. He went on, "But this ... I didn't do this. Yes, I fixed the damage to your lung and removed the bullet fragment from your liver ... but ... well ... I, I just can't explain this. I wouldn't have expected this kind of inherent recuperation and internal repair in anything less than ... two, maybe three months for some of it. Some of this damage your body shouldn't have been able to spontaneously repair at all. It's ... it's just not how the human body works."

There was a knock at the open door, and the detective again asked the doctor if he could speak to him. Howard met the man, spoke shortly, then returned to tell Hayima, "Detective Baker would like to ask you some questions if you are up to it ... I'm sorry, I still don't know your name."

"I'm not," she said, feigning a cough and a grimace of pain, clarifying, "Up to it."

Howard smiled, noting that she'd skipped giving her name. Deciding to give her one for now, he said, "Okay, I'll ask him to come back later."

He spoke to the cop, who was obviously unhappy about being turned away yet still departed. Howard returned to Hayima's bedside again, scribbled in her chart, then turned it to show that he'd put Miracle Doe. He smiled, explaining, "I'd put down Jane Doe, but that'd be a pretty unremarkable temporary identity for such a remarkable young woman."

Hayima finally gave him a weak smile, then closed her eyes, telling him, "I'm tired. Sorry."

"Get some rest," he told her, putting her chart away. "I'll come back and check on you in a couple of hours, and in the meantime the nurses will be right outside at the desk. Just buzz them if you need anything ... or, if you want to talk to me, about anything."

Howard made one last review of the Xray's, cycling through most of them: for each pair, he looked at the image from the day before, then the more recent one from the same perspective. If he didn't know any better, he would have thought he was looking at two sets of Xray's from two different people.

This simply wasn't medically possible.

...........................​

Howard returned to his rounds -- today was a non-surgical day -- and stopped by Hashima's room almost two hours to the minute after he'd left. The uniformed police officer who'd been stationed outside the door that was open but also had a drape pulled closed across the opening was absent. Howard didn't mind that at all, though. He'd been on duty one day a couple of years back when a mentally challenged man had gotten his hands on a cop's weapon and shot four hospital workers before killing himself, so Howard was perfectly fine with not having firearm toting police officers on his floor.

"Miracle Doe," he called from just outside the drape, "It's Doctor Howard. May I come in?"

She didn't answer, and after Howard had asked twice more and got no answer, he waved one of the female nurses over to step inside first. She did, and after mumbling something to the effect of Holy fuck, she threw the drape open to show an empty bed.

"Where is she?" Howard asked, entering to look on the other side of the bed, finding no one. He told the nurse, "Check the bathroom."

The nurse did, and laying on the floor was the police officer, unconscious. The nurse ran out to call Security, and a search was begun for Miracle Doe.

She wouldn't be found.

(To be continued)

 

[JustAnotherHornyGirl]

Six days later:

Doctor Howard returned home from another busy day of emergency room surgeries to down a much needed drink, take an equally much needed shower, and then wander onto the patio of his McMansion in the city's more upper scale neighborhood on the lake shore.

Howard was high ranking enough on the hospital staff to choose his own hours, and for reasons no one else could understand, he'd adopted a 3am-noon, four day on, four day off shift. He liked it because after his shift, his drink, and his shower, he regularly crossed the patio to the glass enclosed arboretum to take in the wonderful scents of the exotic plants before laying in his lounger there, slipping a thick blanket over him, and falling fast asleep. How many people had a bedroom like this? If you weren't a wilderness hermit or a fairy, probably not many.

Today was no different, initially. Howard spent a few minutes walking about the glass enclosed garden, performing a few tasks more for the fun of it than for the need of it, then found his lounger and blanket and fell easily to sleep under the shade of a massive palm's frond for which he'd been caring for almost ten years.

The initially part ended just shortly after the sun had dropped behind the house, which of course was in turn behind the arboretum. The drop in temperature always awoke Howard, and typically he would don the long, thick jacket he'd brought out with him to ward off the cold during his walk back to the house.

Today, though, his jacket wasn't hanging from a hook near the door, though. After Howard had called out Lights and the voice activated system had illuminated the twilight, he found it instead wrapped over the shoulders of a young woman sitting on a stool near the potting bench.

Howard studied her for a moment, despite already knowing exactly who she was. Trying to conceal his surprise and confusion, he said as he moved slowly forward, "Miracle Doe. How nice to see you."

"Doctor Howard," she said with a slight smile, rising from the stool. "Interesting place to take a nap."

"I like it," he responded, looking about himself as he explained, "The mix of plants I keep provide a soothing scent that seems to aid me in falling to sleep, something that is often difficult for graveyard workers."

His shift wasn't precisely graveyard, of course, but the explanation seemed to satisfy Hayima as she simply responded, "I see."

"What are you doing here?" he asked, adding quickly, "And how did you learn where I live. This address is not listed with the typical biographical sources ... phone book, hospital directory, online publications ... and so on."

Still nearing her slowly, he suggested, "Makes me believe that perhaps you have been watching me."

"I have," Hayima said simply. She caught him tremble a bit as the chill of the arboretum caught up with him and sent a chill up his back. "Would you like your coat, Doc?"

"No, you keep it," he said, being gentlemanly. "My mother would be ashamed of me if I took it."

"You didn't answer my question," he said, wishing he knew her real name. "Why are you here? And ... how are you? You shouldn't have left the hospital in the condition you were in. In fact, you shouldn't even be standing, let alone skulking around other people's homes in the dark of night."

Hayima answered Howard by pulling his coat from her shoulders, revealing herself to be wearing a pair of sweat bottoms and a mismatched, tight fitting tee shirt that seriously emphasized her firm, round breasts and their ever-pert nipples. She laid the coat over the stool from which she'd dismounted, then reaching to her waist, easily ripped the tee up and away from her now fully exposed upper half.

Her body could easily be described with any number of adjectives reflecting what most would consider her womanly perfection. It was that perfection that she wanted Howard to notice, of course...

She turned slowly to show him her backside, then facing him again, said, "I'm sure you have questions."

"There are no scars," he murmured in total shock. He moved closer to her, slowly, cautiously, not wanting her to think there was anything sexual in his desire to be nearer her as she was now topless and looking simply delicious. "Where are the ... why aren't there ... oh my god ... how can this be?"

"That's a question I have for you, Doc," Hayima said.

She turned her back to him again and pushed the sweat bottoms off her hips and down past her tight, shapely ass to her knees, enough to reveal the back of her thigh. Where the surgeon assisting Howard had sutured her bullet wound with more than 20 stitches there was now no sign whatsoever that she'd ever been shot.

"Any thoughts?" she asked, looking back over her shoulder at him to find his gaze shifting between her thigh, her ass, and her thigh once again. She smiled, clarifying, "About my leg."

Hayima pulled the sweats back up again, and retrieved her tee, her back still to him. Howard moved to within reach, actually did reach, then asked before his fingers found her, "May I?"

She pulled the tee over her head but stopped with it laying on her shoulders as she nodded. Howard touched his fingers to where he thought he remembered the bullet entry point being. He pressed light on it, asking, "Is there any pain?"

Hayima shook her head, saying simply, "No."

Howard ran his finger over the perfect skin, then asked, "May I see the exit wound?"

She turned to face him again, pulling the tee down enough to hide her breasts but not the rib cage where the majority of the bullet had exited. Howard smiled at her sudden turn of modesty, then examined her frontside as he had her backside.

"I don't understand," he murmured again, as much to himself as to her. "This ... this isn't possible. This shouldn't be possible."

"Tell me about it," she said, finally pulling the tee down to cover the rest of her torso after Howard had pulled his hand back. "And yet, it happened. And this isn't the first time."

Howard's eyes widened. "This has happened before? You were injured, and the physical trauma ... the damage--"

"It just went away," Hayima responded, confirming what Howard was about to say. She handed him his coat, seeing him shiver with a chill again and his skin breaking out in goose flesh. "What would you think about inviting me inside for a hot coffee or cocoa and we'll talk about this in comfort."

"Of course, of course," Howard said. He donned the coat, gestured her to the doors, killed the lights with a couple of words, and led Hayima up the lit path to the house. "Oh, what do I call you? Unless you want to stick with Miracle Doe."

(to be continued)

 

[JustAnotherHornyGirl]

"My name is Mayima" the woman who Howard had been calling Miracle Doe answered. In the house, she looked about, getting the lay of the land, including points of exit and likely locations from which she could be ambushed. She looked to Howard, who rolled his hand in an is there more than that gesture. "Just Mayima."

"Okay, Mayima," he said, heading off toward the kitchen to put on a kettle of hot water. He reminded her again of the hot drinks he could provide, to which she said, "Herbal tea if you have it. No caffeine."

She wandered about the living room while he went about his task. Howard's home was very nice and, obviously, something about which he cared very much: a place for everything, everything in its place, and whatnot. He was eclectic in his tastes, with modern art and antique furnishings both. The music library in an entertainment center on one wall included a wide variety of musical tastes and came in everything from vinyl albums to digital devices, all neatly categorized for quick selection.

"You were going to tell me about how you could possibly be as healed as you are," Howard said when he returned with not just Hayima's mug of tea but with a thick, warm house coat as well. He added, "And how this wasn't the first time this had happened to you."

She took the tea but waved off the jacket, telling him, "I don't get cold. Ever."

"Everyone gets cold, Hayima," the knowledgeable man of medicine said. "It's part of being human."

"But am I?" she asked. When Howard only stared at her questioningly, Hayima clarified, "Human, I mean."

He struck up a fire in the hearth, and they sat close so that Howard could enjoy the heat and Hayima could at least act as if she needed the warmth, too, and she explained:

"I work for an organization my handlers simply call the Home Office. I don't know much about it to be honest. I do my job, I do it well, and I don't ask questions. I--"

Howard interrupted, "What do you do for this organization, this Home Office?"

Hayima hesitated before answering cryptically: "Whatever they ask me to do. Most recently, I was tasked with gathering some information from some people who weren't very eager to share it with me."

She hesitated to see if Howard was going to further his inquiry, and when he didn't she continued, "I was doing my job when one of those people who didn't want to share happened upon me and put a bullet through me."

Hayima pressed a fingertip to her right clavicle. "The bullet smashed the bone in two. Fragments of both bone and bullet spread throughout my upper chest cavity. I escaped into the woods and spent six days evading capture by hiding by day and quietly traveling by night."

She stopped to sip the still steaming tea, adding, "When I came out of the woods into the city to arrange exfiltration ... the only visible signs of my having been shot were the bloody blouse and slacks I was wearing."

"The bullet hole, the broken bone ... all healed?" Howard asked with obvious amazement.

"They cut into me the next day to remove the bullet fragments," she told him, "and even those incisions were gone after a few days."

"Have you always been this way, Hayima?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, sipping again before clarifying, "I have no memory of my life before January of last year."

"January of last year," Howard murmured, "so, what is that, 18 months or so. How can that be?"

Hayima only shrugged.

"So, this job you do. This organization, this Home Office. Between January before last and now, they trained you to--"

"No," Hayima interrupted. "They didn't train me to do what I do. I ... I just do it."

Howard's expression showed his obvious lack of understanding, so she explained: "My oldest memory is of 14 January of the year before last. I was in a facility ... a medical facility. I was restrained, strapped to a gurney. A man in a lab coat removed the leather strap around my right wrist for some purpose or another ... and I reached up, grabbed him by the collar, and pulled his head and upper body downward so quick and with such force that when his head connected with the side of the gurney, it broke his neck."

Howard's eyes had begun widening farther as Hayima's description of the event went on, and by the time she finished his mouth would be hanging partially open with shock.

"I got myself out of my restraints, got myself out of the lab," she continued. "Then, for reasons of which I had no knowledge, instead of escaping, I slipped through the building's security and defenses to collect a hard drive being kept in a hidden safe, then got out and made my way more than a thousand miles away, through four European countries, to pass the drive onto my Home Office handler.

"I have no idea how I knew how to do any of this: kill a man so brutally but easily, evade top level security systems, find a hidden safe, open it not only with a combination I knew but with the print of a thumb that I had somehow known to slice off the man in the next room over with a scalpel I'd somehow known to bring with me from the lab ... then get out of one country I have no recollection ever traveling to and travel by auto, bus, train, and boat over a nine day period to meet a man I don't ever remember having met, let alone worked for, at an office I had no recollection of ever having been to."

Hayima went silent finally, sipping at her tea and just staring at Howard as if it was his time to speak and make sense of it all. Instead, he only drew a calming breath, sipped his own drink -- a Hot Toddy, heavy on the whiskey -- and said, "I don't think we're going to figure this out tonight, the two of us. You can stay here if you wish, Hayima. There's a bed all made up in the guest room. Are your tired?"

"I could sleep," she said, not telling Howard that she hadn't done so since leaving the hospital six days earlier. She finished her tea, asked for a bathroom, and after that, let Howard show her to the guest room. He found her a sleeping shirt that he admitted had once belonged to a female friend, and as he was about to leave the room, Hayima said with a serious tone, "I hope you understand that what I have told you could get both of us killed if you were to share it with anyone."

Howard studied the young beauty a moment, trying to determine from her body language and expression just how serious a warning that had been. He was still trying to process all she'd told him: he was alone with a trained killer, possibly an international spy, and she'd just given him the old I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you line.

"I have no intentions of telling anyone anything," he reassured her, adding, "about you or about what you've told me."

Howard reached the door and began to pull it closed, pausing to tell her, "Get some sleep. I don't work tomorrow, so I'll be here when you wake up."

He smiled to her and as she began to remove her clothes once again, hesitated just a moment, wanting to see her beautiful body again. But he diverted his eyes as the tee came off, then closed the door almost entirely before heading away to sit and the fire and contemplate this strange and fantastical story in which he now seemed to be a part.