Joe was about to say something, but he heard his name called over the intercom and his shoulders slumped in defeat. “Damn it…”
“Duty calls,” Erin said dully. “You’re a busy guy. It’s too bad. I like talking to you.”
“Same here,” Joe said. “I’ll be back in an hour or two to check up on you. I think we’ll be continuing the psych evaluation in the evening just after six.”
Erin turned her head to look at the 25-hour clock that Joe had stolen from the lunch room for her and she smiled. “Sure thing. I’ll see you then.”
Joe left the room and took off down the hall at a brisk pace. He already knew what the intercom call was going to be about, and he was already dreading going into his boss’s office. Sure enough, when he entered through the door there was Doctor Singh glowering at him and he silently sat down with a grimace. The two stared at each other for a few moments until Doctor Singh finally turned her computer monitor towards Joe and used an electronic pen to draw a digital circle on the freeze frame that she had taken with the hidden camera in Erin’s room.
“Care to explain this?” Doctor Singh asked harshly.
Joe looked at the clock in the red circle on the screen and bowed his head. “It’s just a clock. It’s hard to tell the time on this planet. I figured it would help her develop a routine. Her sleep schedule is all over the place…”
“That is not the reason and you know it,” Doctor Singh said coldly. “She is asking you for things and having you perform tasks. This is control through sympathy. Hector used the exact same tactics to fool Doctor Holtz.”
“Not every patient we get in is another Hector,” Joe said, with a sharpness that he never meant to use. “Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
Doctor Singh’s eyes narrowed dangerously on Joe and he felt himself shrink away as she stood up slowly and leaned towards him with a dangerous air. “Do you think that I am being paranoid?”
Joe involuntarily pushed himself back slightly in his chair and swallowed hard. “I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that she could just be a normal person asking for normal things. I knew you were going to be angry, but she’s bored out of her skull in there. I would be too.”
“That is neither your concern, nor your call to make,” Doctor Singh snapped. “You have never shown this much resistance towards me in the six years that we have been working together. I would like to know what has changed between us and why it has changed.”
Joe shrugged looking a little moody. “Nothing has changed, doc. I just can’t picture Erin being some sort of nut job. She’s not like the rest of them. And besides, whatever happened to us doing the usual good cop, bad cop routine? You and I have always assumed these roles and perhaps your role is an act, but mine isn’t. I can’t fool her like you do. I’m too nice and connected.”
Doctor Singh fell back into her chair with a sigh. “Joe… If you disobey me or do another thing behind my back, then I must remove you from this assignment.” Before Joe could protest, she tapped her monitor and resumed the live feed and pointed to Erin. “What do you see?”
Joe looked hard at the monitor and his eyes narrowed in puzzlement. After a few moments, he looked back at Doctor Singh with a dumbfounded expression. “How did she get the clock in her hand? She’s tied down.”
Doctor Singh nodded. “Yes, she is tied down and had no way to reach for it, but let’s back it up until just after you left the room.”
Doctor Singh rolled the video back and as he watched the events of what had happened just minutes before, his eyes widened as he saw Erin twist her wrist at a very peculiar angle and undo the restraint with nimble fingers.
“What the hell?” Joe asked.
“She has hyper-extensible joints, or as most people call it, she’s double jointed and can manipulate her extremities into otherwise uncomfortable dimensions. She has been loosening her restraints since the day she woke up in that room and now she has a toy to play with. More specifically, a toy that has small micro fusion batteries powering it that can easily be turned into a small bomb given the right know-how.”
“That’s… Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Joe asked with a hurt expression.
“Because I did not wish to drop any hints that I knew of what she was doing during her alone time,” Doctor Singh said with composure. “Right now, she is opening up the casing of that clock and digging around its insides. She’s looking for something useful and I think she is resourceful enough to find a solution to her problem, whatever it may be. Never underestimate the ingenuity of a convict on death row with nothing but time on their hands. She has not been lying there accepting her fate. She has been thinking without pause and though we cannot see her end goal, she can.”
Joe continued to look at the monitor in disbelief as Erin deftly pulled out the batteries and tugged tepidly on a few loose wires to examine them. She was clearly formulating a plan in her head and by the look in her eyes, she was nothing like the diffident woman she had been painting herself to be. She was confident, sly, and focused deeply on the issue at hand.
Doctor Singh gazed at Joe with her dark eyes and read his expression perfectly. “Do you understand now? Can you keep this to yourself and not give her anymore electronics to rip apart?”
As Joe’s world was flipped upside down, he nodded absently and he felt compelled to stare at the live feed in the hope to predict what Erin had in mind.
“No more toys,” he agreed quietly.
“Good,” Doctor Singh said. “Now excuse me. I must come up with a new game plan to deal with Misses Wilco.”
Chapter 13 – Terminal Disease
Erin heard the familiar sound of the key turning for the door to the airlock, and quickly went to work reassembling the clock with deft fingers and put it on her bedside stand exactly how it had been before. She was tepidly expecting a few hours to herself, but she was determined not to truly expect it. It took just under one minute for a person to go through the airlock to quarantine, which always bought her enough time to keep up appearances. Just as she had finished looping the leather cuff over her wrist and pulling it tight after relocating her thumb, Doctor Singh came into the room and she was slightly surprised.
“Uh oh,” Erin said dully. “Doctor Mom is back and she looks pissed. I hope you’re being nice to Joe. He gets a terrified look on his face every time you call him over the intercom.”
“Nurse Hisaishi is fine,” Doctor Singh said without any emotion. “He needed to go home early and check on his son.”
Erin was taken aback by that. “He has a kid? I didn’t know that…”
Doctor Singh silently scolded herself for accidentally dropping personal information about her employee to a convicted killer and moved on as if nothing was amiss.
“I was not aware either,” she lied dully. “Seeing as we are most likely still on shaky terms with each other, I would like to give you a peace offering.”
“Oh?” Erin asked with intrigue. “Please tell me you found a ripped hunk named Julio to give me my sponge baths from now on.”
Doctor Singh nearly smiled at that, but she repressed it with an unparalleled force of will. “Not quite. Nurse Hisaishi convinced me to pull some strings and get you a television in here.”
Erin smiled. “You don’t say? Joe is such a sweetheart.”
“More than I am,” Doctor Singh said. “Do not expect this to be a regular thing though. I only decided it ten minutes ago and have already received a dozen letters demanding that I resign my position.”
“Really?” Erin asked in shock. “Over a TV? That’s a bit extreme.”
Doctor Singh nodded as she jotted down a note on her clipboard. “Dusk is not a kind colony and you will most likely only find people conforming to extremes in such a place.” She then looked up at the bullet scuffs on Erin’s window and grimaced. “The protesters outside either want you torn apart by rabid dogs, or set free and turned into some sort of revolutionary leader.”
�
�What?” Erin asked in disbelief.
Doctor Singh nodded once more with a tired look. “Just between you and me, this entire colony feels like a mental institute and the dividing wall between the workers and prisoners is a fallacy at best.”
Erin blinked once in confused thought and stared at Doctor Singh. “Are… are you trying to open up to me and connect? Because if you are, it’s more awkward and unsettling than I ever thought it would be.”
Doctor Singh glared at her and stayed silent as she pulled up a chair next to Erin’s bed. “If that is how you feel, then perhaps it would be best if we simply remained professional and finished this evaluation sooner than later.”
Erin let out a dull sigh. “I’m sorry… I actually feel bad about saying that.”
“I have thick skin,” Doctor Singh said with her eyes on her clipboard. “Please, continue your account from where you left off. If I remember correctly, you had just finished sending your friend’s ashes into space.”
“You just dive right into it, don’t you?” Erin asked a little put off.
“Neither one of us has the luxury of time,” Doctor Singh said harshly. “The sooner we get through this, the sooner I can commit myself to treating your disease and lifting this damn quarantine. I’ve had people stuck here for weeks now and the mood is becoming hostile.”
Erin frowned while silently noting that it would most likely be impossible for Joe to leave the hospital to check on his son while a quarantine was up. She had found another one of Doctor Singh’s lies and she immediately became hostile towards her.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but cry me a fucking river. You do understand that you’re talking to someone that was stuck aboard a derelict space station for months with monsters scuttling around in the vents, right?”
“These little creatures you speak of have yet to be proven,” Doctor Singh said.
Erin rolled her eyes with an unapologetic dismissiveness. “Don’t worry doc, I’m working on it as we speak. I’m almost certain that all of the hard evidence is either in lock up with my legs, or beneath this very mattress that I am lying on. If only you would remove the restraints so that I can prove it to be true, then we can start making some real progress.”
“Is this another bad time?” Doctor Singh asked dully.
Erin looked up at her IV drip and then back at Doctor Singh. “No, I’m just being pissy because you still haven’t come clean about drugging me with agitators last time. I get this picture that you were holding Joe’s job over his head if he didn’t comply and lie about it not being your orders, so I’m having a hard time respecting you because of that.”
Doctor Singh then became slightly agitated and a small fragment of her composure cracked in that moment. “The liquid within the bag was clear. There was no way that Joe could tell the difference between the two. You claimed that the liquid was another color, but this is a lie, Misses Wilco, and a very obvious one.”
Erin cocked her head to the side and smiled as if she had just won a small victory. “Who said I was looking at the liquid? I simply said that I looked up by my IV and that it was a different color. You’re the one that assumed I was referring to either the liquid or the bag.”
Doctor Singh tried her best to refuse the bait, but she took it all the same and stared at Erin’s IV bag and the area surrounding it. She had no idea what she was supposed to be looking for and felt like a fool that had been drawn into Erin’s game. Erin saw Doctor Singh’s discomfort and agitation building and her smile became smug.
“Do you want a hint?” she asked impishly.
“Just tell me or I shall revoke your television privileges before you even receive them. I do not have time for games,” Doctor Singh said with a hint of frustration.
Erin rolled her eyes. “You’re no fun… Look at the light refracting through the bag. The nutrient smoothie you guys are pumping into me right now refracts a very subtle hint of green against the wall and the pain killer cocktail refracts more of a yellow hue. That agitator you gave me, though it was also a clear liquid, refracted subtle light that was distinctly violet.”
Doctor Singh finally saw the emerald chips of light behind the bag of nutrient liquids and she felt like it should have been obvious. “You are quite observant…”
Erin shrugged. “Don’t worry. Soon I’ll have a TV to distract me during my 25 hours of boredom each day. I promise that I’ll become much less observant after that.”
Doctor Singh wrote a few more notes on her clipboard and Erin had to repress a snicker at how forcefully she was stabbing the paper with her pen. After a few moments of silence, Doctor Singh resumed her stony composure and went back to business as she sat in the chair next to Erin’s bed. “If you don’t mind, I would like to move this psych evaluation along.”
“Alright,” Erin said with a grimace. “I guess I couldn’t avoid it forever…”
Doctor Singh’s eyebrows twitched slightly at the words and she realized that Erin had been trying to buy time with silly games. “Whenever you are ready.”
“I’m ready, I guess…” she said miserably. “After Dale’s suicide…no…funeral… After that whole nightmare, the rest of the group started to listen to our claims of little grey gremlins stalking the station. It was a tough sell, much like it is right now, but Major Tom always had my back. He believed in me and I think his trust in me bled through to the others. My rangers also had a good reputation and seeing one of them succumb to madness must have aided in the urgency of the matter.”
“Was there wide-spread panic?” Doctor Singh asked.
“No, not right away,” Erin said with a distant look. “But there was a tension in the air before everything went to hell. Major Tom personally led an expedition to Romeo Delta 2 and after four long days of waiting, they came back wearing enviro suits. They asked me and my rangers to follow them for an emergency briefing and we gathered our things and followed them to a ruined conference room. We should have known something was up. We should have noticed how the service men were keeping their hands on their weapons…”
“Why were they wearing their enviro suits?” Doctor Singh asked.
“Why do you think?” Erin asked rhetorically. “They had decided that they needed to be protected from us and asked us about the spores.”
“You mean that grey dust that hit you and your team when you breached Romeo Delta 2?” Doctor Singh asked.
Erin nodded. “Yeah… There was a mold growing in there and we had agitated the spores when we broke through. In the back of my mind, I kind of already knew that something awful had covered us, but… I guess I wanted to pretend that I had come out clean and I think the rest of us thought the same thing because none of us spoke about it until Major Tom asked us directly if any of us had touched the stuff. I was at a loss and pretended that I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t want to be seen as a danger and have people decide my fate while I was in a quarantined lockdown… It’s kind of ironic that it happened here anyways.”
“So, you lied about the spores?” Doctor Singh asked coldly.
“At first, yeah,” Erin said with a hint of shame in her voice. “I came clean eventually, but back then I was more concerned about the creatures in the dark. In my mind, we had two crises on our hands. A possible wide spread infection in a place where we had no resources left to battle disease, and a pandemic of homicidal creatures that were hunting us. We could only deal with one of those issues with any real certainty, so I lied about being touched by the spores and asked Major Tom if he had seen the gremlins.”
“And did he?” Doctor Singh asked skeptically.
Erin nodded and sunk a little in her bedding. “Yeah, he had…and they were hunting them…which is why we were called into the office.”
“Did he wish for your help in hunting them?” Doctor Singh inquired.
“No…” Erin said regretfully. “He was trying to figure out if they were hiding amongst us.”
“Are you speaking of paranoia?” Doctor Sing
h asked.
Erin shook her head. “It’s not paranoia if they’re wearing your friend’s skin and walking amongst you.”
“What?” Doctor Singh asked, clearly taken aback.
Erin sighed, knowing exactly how crazy it sounded. “You heard me… Those gremlins are awfully good at hiding out in the open and making you believe they’re not there. It didn’t take long before shots were fired and there were screams echoing out of our conference room. I remember it happening so fast and without warning as Major Tom shielded me from the gunfire. He was holding me and yelling orders to cease fire and when the noise finally stopped ringing in my ears, I saw my rangers, Markus and Johan, dead on the floor, but I am not sure if it was the gunfire that had killed them…”
“Meaning?” Doctor Singh asked.
Erin began to shake slightly as her fingers nervously tapped the metal railing of her bed. “Their skin was grey and their glassy eyes were feral even in death…”
“The gremlins?” Doctor Singh asked.
Erin shook her head. “No… Markus and Johan… I think that they may have been dead for quite some time. Ever since we opened that void into Romeo Delta 2. They were dead and infected and they had been walking beside us in plain sight for days. I doubt that they ever knew they were dead. They moved and talked just like us, but… It was confusing and I don’t know how to fully explain it without sounding like a lunatic.”
“Just say it,” Doctor Singh ordered.
Erin closed her eyes as if trying to shut something out, but it was no use. “Something was living beneath their skin and mutating their bodies from the inside out… I think… I believe that is what Dale killed himself over. He knew…”
“Erin…” Doctor Singh said coldly. “Do you believe that you are infected with the same thing that Dale and the others had?”
Erin turned her head and stared into Doctor Singh’s dark eyes. “What do you think?”
Chapter 14 – Footsteps in the Dark
Romeo Delta 2 Page 10
