Nick showed Alan over to a squared off area, lined with dashed yellow markings. A supervisor stood in the center and motioned to the metal beams stacked next to them. Nick gave Alan a signal and pointed at the beams. Nick lifted his hand into the air, and one of the beams creaked and groaned as it lifted off the rest of the stack.
“You try to get your field underneath the beam,” Nick shouted over the noise that was building all around them as other Magnets began their work. “The foreman will show you placement, and you have to get it close enough for Muscle group to slide it into position.”
Nick shifted his weight to the left, and Alan watched the beam float in a direct, efficient manner across the lot and onto the concrete foundation the supervisors had been standing on before. Nick then lowered his right arm so that his hands were one on top of the other. The beam then rotated vertically, and Nick slid his arms – and the beam – across the concrete foundation; then a Muscle worker grabbed it with gloved hands and pushed the beam down into holes that were designated for the metal supports.
“See? Easy peasy,” Nick exhaled. There was always a certain level of mental exhaustion involved with moving such large objects.
Alan looked back at the beam and saw Marshall’s eyes glow white-hot, and a spark ignited at the beam’s bottom section, welding it to the foundation’s support structure. Everybody had a job - even Castor, who was sulkily cooking pots with his hands – and nobody seemed to care much about who was telling them what to do. Alan figured it couldn’t hurt to go with the flow, and let his co-workers lead the way. If people who had been doing this, seemingly for years, then he certainly could swallow his pride and be part of the system too. Even if he was building the next precinct’s government processing office.
“Okay, Alan, now I’m going to lift a beam. Now I want you to do the rotation for me. It helps for the higher elevation. Do you think you can handle that?” Nick explained, his voice becoming higher pitched and patronizing.
Nick’s eyes were wide, burning into Alan as they waited for him to acknowledge Nick’s authority. Alan rolled his eyes and nodded back. Nick turned his back from Alan, and Alan let out a deep sigh.
The next beam screeched as it scraped across the rest of the stack and finally lifted off and came up over their heads. Alan lifted his hands and rotated them like Nick had done before. The beam struggled as it rotated.
“I can take it,” Alan shouted back to Nick.
“You’re not ready, kid,” Nick yelled back over the din of construction chatter.
Alan pushed on Nick’s field, wresting control of it from him. Nick could tell what was happening and pushed back. The beam groaned as two forces pushed on it from different angles.
“Knock it off, kid!”
“I can do it,” Alan shouted back.
The beam couldn’t handle the two forces and as the fields changed angles, the beam spun out of control. Alan watched as the beam fell toward them. Alan and Nick fell to the floor as the support beam came down on top of them. Alan closed his eyes, waiting for the crunch of bones and for his brains to spill out on the ground. But the crunch never came. Alan opened his eyes. Marshall was standing over him; his arms hoisted upward, beam in hand. Marshall was a rare mutation. Alan had heard rumors of multi-mutations, but he’d never met one before.
“Kid, you wanna’ move.”
Alan slid backward away from the beam’s shadow, and Marshall settled the beam back onto the ground.
“What is wrong with you, kid? I told you to let me handle it. You had one simple job, and you couldn’t even do that,” Nick was yelling in the silence of the moment. Everyone had stopped working for a brief moment to witness the accident, and the silence was now filled with Nick’s whining.
“I didn’t mean to do it. You could’ve just let me handle it instead of trying to take control back,” Alan justified.
Nick’s nostrils flared, and an errant metal rod flew toward Alan’s head. A hand jutted out and caught the rebar before it could impale Alan. Marshall held the rod as it strained to reach Alan. Marshall looked sideways at Nick; his eyes glowing.
“You don’t want to do this, Nick.”
The supervisors were chattering through walkie talkies, and a man clad in black, including black helmet, entered from the gate entrance. He reminded Alan of the military guards at the 305 building, with their covered faces and their forceful commands. Alan could tell that the guard was looking their way. Nick didn’t see the man coming towards them. He was too busy thinking about what it would be like to ram a bar through Alan’s cranium.
“Stand down, Magnet,” the man said in a stern tone.
Nick finally realized he had an audience, but it was too late. Marshall bent the metal bar and began advocating.
“Everything’s fine here, officer. Just a little disagreement. Nick is very sorry, and this will never happen again,” Marshall said with confidence. “We’re sorry to bother you.”
The man didn’t even look at Marshall. He didn’t know the situation, and he didn’t care really. There was a zero-tolerance policy for fighting on job sites.
“Nicholas Bradford, you are cited one strike for insubordinate behavior and attempted assault. This is your third strike. Come peacefully,” the man stated in a rote, memorized speech.
“It wasn’t my fault. That freakin’ kid…,” Nick whined. The agent lifted his forearm, his fist balled in a fiercely tight grip, and Nick found himself floating in a mad rush toward the officer. It was an ability Alan had never seen before. It wasn’t magnetism or strength, but something much scarier. Alan could feel a cold sweat wrapping around his skin and his gut was on fire. The agent pulled specialized restraints from his vest and violently cuffed Nick, wrenching his arms uncontrollably to Nick’s back where he was locked in place. The guard pulled a charcoal colored sack from his satchel and pulled it over Nick’s face in one frenzied movement. The agent raised his head from Nick and pointed to Alan among the crowd.
“Alan Mitchell, you are cited one strike for insubordinate behavior. This is your first strike. Cease further insubordinate actions or you will be cited again,” the agent rattled off the sentencing efficiently and without emotion. “Please return to your work.”
The agent walked out of the work camp in silence. A woman was standing at the front entrance, and, as the gate shut, a piercing blue light blinded the crowd for a brief moment. Then they were gone, the work crew left only to guess where they had vanished. Marshall looked back at Alan, a confusing mixture of disappointment, anger, and compassion lining the wrinkles in his face.
“I’m sorry, Marshall, I didn’t know…”
“It happens, kid. Not usually on the first day, but it happens,” Marshall sighed, and he picked up Alan’s hard hat off the dusty ground, and then placed it back on his head.
Alan looked over and saw Athena standing outside the truck, her hand gripping the back door. Her eyes were wide, her mouth agape; but when she realized Alan was staring at her, she looked away and went back to work.
The rest of the camp went back to their work as well. After a brief scolding from his new supervisor, Alan went back to work with his magnet group. The noise returned - the hushed voices crowding together with the hum of metal beams echoing as they scraped and slammed into place - but all Alan could think about was Nick Bradford, his five-minute-boss, and the inevitable appointment Nick had with the Board.
Alan felt a large knot tug at the anchor in his chest. Everything seemed to blur into the background as everyone carried on with their work, but Alan was left wondering what this place would make of him in the end, and if he would share in Nick’s fate soon enough. One strike on the first day? The pattern didn’t set a great precedent, and Alan was worried that he would soon be with Nick, wherever that might be.
four
Alan didn’t eat well at dinner that night. He almost forgot to eat at all. He arrived late to the cafeteria, something that looked transported straight out of Alan’s old high school. He th
ought he escaped that prison, but it was now some new trap.
He stared down the row of cafeteria food, picked over and festering in grease, and felt something gnawing at the pit of his stomach. It was the bottom of the barrel. He scraped a spoonful of sloppy joe meat onto a faded pink tray, cracked plastic from several years of use and ill-repair. He drizzled some cream corn onto another compartment on the tray and called it a complete meal.
Alan left the hallway of lukewarm food, to find a similarly tepid response from a large room with cafeteria tables and a few stragglers pretending to eat what passed for food.
Alan sat down at a long table - a cheap pressboard plank with matching attached benches painted a sickly green hue - and proceeded to poke at his food with a flimsy spork. He sat a long time by himself, poking at the yellow kernels of corn and rolling them around in the sauce. He tapped his spork on the edge of the faded pink tray, his eyes fixated on the slop.
“Hey, kid. I told you not to be late,” Marshall quipped, looking down at Alan’s food.
Alan looked up as if snapped out of hypnosis. Athena rolled her eyes in a playful manner and opened the foil wrapper around her pudding cup, a rare find that she traded two cigarettes for.
“I was just…,” Alan’s voice trailed off as his mind gave up on whatever excuse he was trying to conjure.
“I remember my first day on the job too,” Marshall joked and slapped Alan on the back, a bit too hard for him. Alan coughed a bit and went back to poking at his food. “It gets better. Well, it gets easier.”
“It doesn’t,” Athena retorted, her eyes on her pudding. “But you can trick yourself for long enough.”
“Thanks,” Alan replied sarcastically. Athena slowly blinked her eyes and looked up from the pudding.
“I’m just being honest, Alan. This place doesn’t change. You change. We all change. Enough to get through another day. Sometimes that’s enough.”
“Athena,” Marshall said, his voice sounding stern and corrective.
Athena shook her head, her fingers tapping against the lunch table pressboard like keys clicking on a typewriter. She drew in a heavy breath and laid into Marshall.
“Marshall, stop patronizing him. He knows what situation we’re in. To say otherwise is to treat him like a kid, and he’s not. None of us are anymore. We don’t have that luxury,” Athena spoke in a rush, as if there was no time to take breaths between thoughts, “And don’t tell me I’m being pessimistic. I’m a realist. This is the shit we’re in, for better or worse.”
“Get out of my head, Athena,” Marshall replied in a lower tone, his arms against his chest. Athena rolled her eyes and pressed her hands to her throbbing skull.
“I’m not in your head, Marshall. We agreed I wouldn’t do that to you. But I’ve known you long enough to know when we’re in for another one of your ‘sunshine speeches’, and I’m not having it today. Nick was an idiot, but he was our idiot. And I know, Alan didn’t mean to get him in trouble, but he did.”
She was a Reader. Alan didn’t think to ask before, but now it was right in front of him. Athena could read people’s minds. Could she read his mind too?
“Only what’s on the surface,” Athena replied out loud to Alan’s thought, and then she exhaled deeply, “But I try not to do it.” Athena looked over at Marshall, “I’ve been told it’s not polite.”
Marshall uncrossed his arms and leaned toward Athena.
“Athena,” Marshall said, his voice higher pitched and repentant. Athena pushed herself away from the table with one shaky, violent push.
“Don’t worry about it, Marshall. I wasn’t that hungry,” Athena groaned, looking at her half-eaten pudding cup. Her lips pulled back, a pained smile on her face. “I’m going to take a walk.”
Athena left Alan and Marshall alone at the cafeteria table.
“That would’ve been good to know about Athena,” Alan said to Marshall. Alan cleared his throat, his hands pressing the side of his face. “I mean what if…”
“Kid… Alan, if Athena wanted to know something about you, she’d figure out how to get it. But she doesn’t care. So don’t worry about it. I would’ve told you if it had crossed my mind. Enjoy your dinner.”
Marshall got up and walked out of the cafeteria, leaving Alan to stare at congealing cream corn.
✽✽✽
After dinner, Alan took a walk around the complex, seeing how people kept their rooms. Nothing seemed different from his own stark room. A few people had colorful curtains instead of the drab gray ones that were in his room, but everything else seemed the same. He saw a few guys standing around in one of the doorways, mostly a few guys from the Magnets group. They gave Alan rude glares, so he guessed they were Nick’s friends. They dispersed and Alan saw that it was Nick’s room they were standing around.
Alan stared at the front of Nick’s room, somehow hoping he would just appear in the doorway and punch Alan’s lights out. But the doorway was empty. The door was opened, and the room had been stripped of any sense of living. The bathroom light was on, and all Alan could see was a mattress without its sheets. It was as naked as his heart felt.
Back home when Alan ran his mouth or took a joke too far, he’d get popped in the face and that would be it. Now, Alan was responsible for a man being locked up. Well, more locked up than he already was.
Alan felt like he was fourteen again, waiting for his parents to come home from a date. But this time they weren’t coming home. In fact, they weren’t coming back, and they had abandoned Alan in this purgatory between the real world and death.
Alan felt his index fingers scratching at his thumbs. He raised a shaky hand to paw at his hair. His eyes darted from Nick’s bathroom sink to the empty dresser to the doorframe to the concrete balcony walkway beneath him. Nothing here was going to be easy. There were no goodbyes. There was seldom a thought as people passed out of existence.
Marshall cleared his throat as he approached Alan. He was on his way back to his room, when he noticed Alan transfixed by Nick’s former room.
“You okay, kid?”
Alan felt the color rush out of his face, and he turned back, standing in Nick’s room like the ghost that was haunting him.
“Yeah… uh. I’m… fine?” Alan muttered, his voice trailing off in a high pitch.
Marshall turned his body, leaving the doorway open next to him. He motioned for Alan to follow. Alan looked back at the room and thought of the erased man who used to call it home. He looked back at Marshall, who motioned his head in a more pressing fashion. Marshall cleared his throat and held his arm out the door. Alan finally rolled his eyes and gave a half-hearted nod. He followed Marshall back to Alan’s room.
“Kid, if you didn’t show up to work today... Heck, if you never showed up to our camp ever, someone would’ve set Nick off; and he’d be seeing the Board anyway. Did you stop to wonder how he got the first two strikes?”
Alan opened his door, but Marshall kept talking.
“Sometimes you can’t stop people from doing what they want to do, and sometimes what they want to do is be self-righteous, or angry, or in charge. And you can’t fix people if they don’t want to be fixed. Nick Bradford had his issues long before you messed with his beam.”
Alan sat down on his bed, pulling a bunch of rough cotton blanket into his hand. Marshall leaned on the doorway, and continued talking, regardless of Alan’s silence.
“Don’t think about how you can control his situation. You don’t owe him the patience. I can’t count how many times I tried to help Nick; kept him from getting caught, tried to work with him on his temper. He never wanted to get right. He got comfortable being a jerk, and he didn’t feel like changing,” Marshall explained in calm, controlled sentences, “Now, I don’t know where he’s gone, but if they just moved him to a new camp; it’ll be the same there. If he’s not… well, if he’s not, then that’s on him. He knows the world we live in. You didn’t send Nick away, kid. That’s just how things are here, and Nick knew that alre
ady, and he still chose his path. Now, go to bed before lights out. You already have one strike.”
five
“Get up, Mr. Mitch-,” Finch’s voice was cut short when he peered into Alan’s room and saw that he was already up and dressed. “Five minutes.”
Alan nodded and grabbed his vest and hat. One week. It was exactly one week since he joined the 308th precinct, and he still didn’t sleep well, but not from living arrangements.
No, Alan couldn’t sleep because all he could think about was Nick Bradford’s horrible fate. He heard some of the magnet crew walking by his room as curfew began the night before. They were talking about Nick, hoping they would see him again. One of the voices shouted, “You idiots, we’re not going to see Nick again. They never come back. You see the board; you don’t see nobody ever again! So, shut the hell up.”
The Department for Mutated Persons (Book 1): The Department for Mutated Persons Page 3
