by Kyle Andrews
“What's going on?” Collin asked.
“It doesn't concern you,” Mig replied.
Mek made a disgusted sound which seemed somewhat like a growl before he turned to Collin and said, “She sent Dor on a mission.”
Of all the things that Mek could have said, Collin was expecting this the least. Dor was not a runner, nor a soldier. She was a journalist, and a junior journalist at that. She was under Collin's guidance. She was his responsibility. His family, or something like it.
The feeling that ran through Collin wasn't exactly anger—not at first. It was more like the dizziness that runs through a person who hasn't eaten all day and stands up too fast.
“What are you talking about?” Collin asked Mek. He turned to Mig and asked, “What did you do?”
“She will be fine,” Mig assured him.
“You sent four guards with her,” Mek spat back.
If Collin was like the protective older brother to Dor, Mek was like her gun-toting over-protective father. As angry as Collin was in that moment, part of him was more concerned for Mig's safety than Dor's.
“Where is she?” Collin asked.
“KCTY,” Mek answered.
“Doing what?”
“Infiltrating.”
Okay, Collin was starting to feel a little bit more anger now.
Mig gestured toward Collin's office, wanting to take the conversation away from the prying eyes of everyone in the Campus.
Collin led the way back inside. When he saw all of desks with all of the people sitting at them, each facing the doorway, Collin quietly told them, “Give us the room.”
Without hesitation, each of those people left the room. Mek closed the door behind them.
As quietly and calmly as he could possibly muster, Collin turned to Mig and asked, “What does he mean, 'infiltrating?'”
“Dor came in... with a proposal. She wanted to get inside the station's building so that she could look at the video from the game.”
“To see what was cut off,” Collin nodded, and his mind was already moving down the same avenues that Dor's must have been. The seven second delay. He was as curious as anyone, but that didn't stop him from saying, “Why would you let her go?”
“Because she was going to go either way. Because she explained what she wanted to do, and I knew that I could help her do it. And because it was something worth doing.”
“She is a child,” Mek spat back.
“There had to have been a Freedom member in the stadium. Maybe if we just waited...” Collin said, trying to sound rational.
“Dor is the same age as any so-called 'kid' out there, who is being assigned to HAND. She is older than a lot of the people we've already lost in this war. And yes, we may have had someone in the stadium. Not from the Campus, but I'm checking around with other bases. Until we find someone, what would you have me do? Sit and wait? That seems to go against your own teachings, doesn't it?”
“You should have brought this to me,” Collin told her, hearing the anger in his own voice. He hated having his own philosophy thrown back in his face.
“I don't report to you.”
Collin took the anger out of his voice as he repeated, “You should have brought this to me.”
“I understand that the two of you are worried. I'm sorry about that. And yes, I could have handled this better. But you have raised a very capable girl. A girl who can defend herself, if need be. A girl who is smart enough to pull off something like this. She doesn't deserve to be stuck writing comic books for the rest of her life, just because you worry.”
There was a knock on the door and one of Mig's men poked his head in. He looked a little bit nervous as he said, “Mig, you're needed in the tech room.”
“I'm on my way,” Mig replied. She turned to Collin and Mek and said, “I'm trying to get a handle on the situation. I have people at the stadium, gathering intel while we wait for Dor to get back. The two of you are welcome to come along and listen to whatever news we get.”
Without waiting for a response, Mig walked out of the room. Collin looked to Mek, who still seemed rather displeased with the situation, whether he bought Mig's explanation or not.
Collin found it hard to fight Mig's logic about Dor's mission, and he hated that fact. He wanted to remain angry, but he couldn't justify his anger.
Without speaking another word to Mek, Collin followed Mig out of the room and to Aaron's tech room. Mek was close behind, and when they entered the room, Mek stood back and observed without taking an active part in the conversation.
The first thing that caught Collin's attention upon entering the tech room was a computer monitor, which was displaying one of the daily news broadcasts. On the screen, a male news anchor was smiling as though it were business as usual in the city.
“—apparent electrical glitch at the stadium, which cut off power to the broadcast equipment, as well as the lighting and scoreboard. Stadium officials tell us that the game will have to be delayed until the cause of the glitch can be discovered, in order to avoid any potential danger that may accompany the power outage.
In other news, what has four legs, floppy ears and a medical degree? The latest graduate of—”
Someone muted the TV, cutting off the news broadcast, and Collin turned his attention toward Mig and Aaron, who were standing with another man that Collin didn't recognize.
The man was shaking his head and saying, “It was no power failure. What I saw was chaos. People were angry about something. They were trying to get at the Mayor and Governor. They wanted to kill them. Openly. They didn't care who saw them out there.”
Aaron turned to Mig and gestured toward the man, saying, “Mig, this is Paul. He's one of my people from the Garden. He went to the stadium, to check things out for us.”
“I couldn't get very close,” Paul apologized.
After nodding and breezing past the introduction, Mig asked, “Did they actually get to the Governor or the Mayor?”
The man shook his head and said, “No. Not that I saw. But...”
The man stopped talking and turned to Aaron. After taking on a decidedly more somber tone, he told Aaron, “I did see Justin out there, and he took a pretty bad blow.”
“Is he alive?” Aaron asked.
Simon was sitting at his desk, facing his computer. Collin saw him turn his head just slightly, waiting to hear the answer without wanting to barge into the conversation of his superiors.
Paul shook his head and said, “I don't know. I saw some of the other HAND officers grab him and throw him into one of those new trucks. They probably took him to the hospital.”
Aaron nodded and put a hand on Simon's shoulder. Simon didn't hesitate to stand up and walk out of the room. Collin watched him go, wondering what job a tech expert could possibly have, which would take him away from his technology.
“We need to figure out what happened in there,” Paul said to Aaron.
“Any word from Dor?” Mig asked.
Aaron shook his head, “Not yet. It'll take some time.”
“We need to make sure that Justin's okay,” Paul told Aaron. “I could go—”
Aaron held up a hand to cut Paul off. He glanced in Collin's direction before looking back to Paul and saying, “We're taking care of it. You should get back to the Underground and tell them what you saw at the stadium. Make sure your people are ready to move. I'll send Mek back with final details when we have them.”
“You're expecting a fight?” Mig asked.
Aaron turned back to the computer monitor, where the news was continuing to report on everything but the biggest story of the day. On another monitor, there was a frozen image of Mandi Hollinger's scared face.
Aaron took a deep breath and answered, “I'm expecting something.”
10
“Marti, we need you in curtain three,” one of the doctors called as he ran across the emergency room. His name was Oliver Sampson. He was a well educated, wealthy man, from a well educated, wealthy famil
y. He looked down his nose at Marti and anyone else who came from the lower class.
Marti wanted to drive a pencil through his eye. She'd been dreaming about it for months, ever since she transferred down from the maternity ward.
“On my way,” she called, running after him.
The emergency room was like a war zone. Something had happened at the stadium and the place had been flooded by men in suits ever since. Some of them were covered in blood. Others were trying to secure the area, so that yet more men in suits could be treated for the injuries sustained when their luxury boxes failed to keep them isolated from the commoners.
They were all the enemy, and not a second passed when Marti saw them as anything more than a plague. It was her job to patch them up and make sure that they were okay, and she would do that job... at least until an opportunity presented itself. If given the chance, she would kill any one of them.
Also pouring through the doors were HAND officers who had been injured while performing their job. These were the men and women who were sworn to protect the men in suits. These were the people who put themselves in the line of fire for the sake of their masters. These were the men who were bleeding the hardest, screaming the loudest and dying the fastest. Yet, when Marti followed Dr. Dumbass to curtain three, she found one of those men in a suit, sitting on the bed and holding a towel to his head. The officers would have to wait.
The man was in his fifties. Fat, because why wouldn't he be? Sweating like a pig. Sucking air through his teeth because his injury hurt so much that he could barely tolerate it.
“Okay, let's have a look,” Dr. Sampson said in a warm and soothing tone as he took the towel from the man's hand and exposed the wound.
It might have been one of the smallest scratches that Marti had ever seen. There was maybe one drop of blood on the towel.
“Yikes, that is a nasty wound,” Dr. Sampson said to the fat man.
“Do you want me to clean it out and put a bandage on it?” Marti asked, smiling warmly at the fat man.
“I'll take care of this,” the doctor told her.
“What can I do?” Marti pressed, wanting permission to leave and find more urgent patients to tend to.
“You'll assist me,” Dr. Sampson told her, as though she should have known that she would be standing around, pretending to be needed for that one barely-injured man, while other patients bled out just down the hall.
She spent the next forty-five minutes handing Dr. Sampson cotton swabs, watching him stitch up a wound that was probably less severe before it was stitched, and listening to the fat man in the suit go on and on about how traumatic his day had been. Finally, when the doctor was done, he said, “I'm going to order a scan of your head, just to make sure that there isn't any swelling. Marti will stay here with you until they're ready to take you upstairs.”
Marti smiled politely at the fat man, then turned her back to him and whispered to the doctor, “Shouldn't I be helping to treat the more critical patients?”
“You should be doing what I tell you to do, nurse. Most critical doesn't always mean most important.”
'Pencil. Eye. Stab. Stab. Stab.' She ran through this mantra a few times in her head, trying to calm herself, but it wasn't working.
Marti could barely keep the disgust from reading on her face. The only thing that finally soothed her mind was remembering that those other patients were HAND officers. If they died, they deserved to die.
Well, most of them. Marti hadn't heard from Justin since the violence at the stadium broke out. She might have worried earlier if that were unusual, but it wasn't like HAND officers had a lot of free time to call people.
He'd be okay. Justin was always okay. Besides, she was sure that Sim would have his back. Sim was a good and reliable friend. That thought alone caused Marti's head to hurt. Sim was a loyal HAND officer, yet he had proven himself to be a friend to Justin, and eventually to Marti.
“I feel nauseous,” the fat man said to Marti, pulling her attention back to him.
She moved closer to him and said, “It's just the medication that the doctor gave you. You should probably lie back and close your eyes for a bit. I could give you something to help you sleep, if you'd like.”
As she offered, Marti silently urged the man to take the drugs. She wanted to knock him out so that she could get on with her life.
The man looked Marti up and down, as though he hadn't been sitting in the same room with her for nearly an hour already. He was looking at her in a way that made her stomach turn.
“I don't think I ever got your name, sweetie,” she said to the man, acting sweet and caring.
“Nos Lanstrom,” the man replied.
“That's a fancy name,” Marti grinned. “What do you do, Mr. Lanstrom?”
“I'm the Commissioner of Rehabilitation for the state.”
Marti looked at him with a confused expression and then shook her head to let him know that she had no idea what that meant.
“I oversee the rehab—the reeducation facilities. Corrections.”
“Where the terrorists go?”
“Some of them,” Lanstrom smiled.
“You make them better and send them on their way, like we do here,” Marti smiled back, though she'd never actually met anyone who had made it out of a reeducation facility. As far as she knew, being sentenced to one of those places was a death sentence.
“Well, Commissioner Lanstrom, I still think that you should try to rest. Are you sure that I can't convince you to take a nap?”
She thought that a hammer to the head might help him sleep.
“Maybe I will rest a little,” Lanstrom said. “Could you sit with me?”
He tapped on the bed as he sat back on it, wanting Marti to come and sit beside him.
Like the dutiful little nurse, Marti went to his side and sat down. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You'll feel better soon.”
“I hope so.”
“Close your eyes.”
Lanstrom closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Good boy,” Marti said softly, stroking the fat man's slimy head.
She then jammed a needle into his leg, and within seconds the man was asleep. Marti pulled the needle out and held onto it, thinking about how easy it would be for her to kill the bastard. She could make it look like an accident easily enough, or maybe even a heart attack. The man looked like he could keel over at any moment anyway. All she would have to do was inject him with the right medication and his eyes would never open again. It wouldn't even be the first time she had done it.
But if she killed every person that she wanted to kill, she would be revealed as a Freedom member in no time. After all, Marti wasn't working in your run of the mill hospital. This place wasn't being flooded by citizens who had gotten caught up in the stadium fight. This was the place where HAND officers or members of the elite class came to be treated. This was the place where doctors actually cared whether or not their patients lived or died, depending on the situation and the position that their patient held.
For years, Marti had lived with her nursing assignment, and unlike most of the people that she knew, she didn't mind it that much. She started out working in a normal hospital, treating people who were never going to get the best medical care possible. She would go to work and she would do her best, only to see the innocent suffer and die because the best she could offer them was simply not good enough.
Now the tables had turned. Now Marti could help to save the people who came in seeking care. She had access to equipment and technology that she never would have dreamed of at her old job. She could get her hands on whatever medication the patient needed. She could feed them real food. The only downside was that most of the time, she wanted these people to suffer and die. Every time she saw a patient come in with a HAND uniform on, she wondered if this one killed Uly, or that one stormed the Garden.
It was difficult to do her work, knowing that she was helping to make the enemy well. She no longer t
ook pride in helping the injured. But the job did have its perks. The world didn't come to an end just because someone was in the hospital. Politicians who came in still needed to make their phone calls. HAND officers were still listening for orders over their earpieces. And most of the time, those people were so self-involved that they didn't even see Marti working in the room with them. She was nothing. Just a common citizen.
“We need help out here!” someone yelled, and Marti didn't waste any time getting up and dropping her needle into the sharps box on her way out.
She hurried across the ER, toward the latest batch of casualties who were coming through the door.
The first man she saw was young. Good looking. He had injuries to his face and was breathing a little hard, but didn't appear to be dying. His eyes might have been the bluest eyes that she had ever seen in her life, and they locked onto hers as she walked along with the gurney, listening to the paramedics run down the list of injuries and what they had done to treat him on the way to the hospital. There was a female doctor walking with them, and another nurse, but the injured man didn't give any of them the same creepy stare that he was giving Marti.
He looked somewhat familiar, but she couldn't place him.
“The guy who helped me...” the man said, straining to speak.
“Shh. Try not to talk,” Marti replied, as sweetly as possible.
“He was injured,” the man said.
“We'll do our best to take care of everyone.”
“He was an officer. He saved my life.”
Marti nodded and took the man's hand. She looked into his eyes, which seemed to soften under her gaze, and said “We'll do our best. You need to worry about yourself. I will check on him as soon as I ca—”
Before Marti finished that sentence, she looked up at the gurney that was being brought in behind this man. She couldn't see who was being brought in, but she saw the man walking next to the gurney with concern in his eyes.
