The man with the iron hand
After a thousand years in dark stillness, everything suddenly begins to move at an incredible rate.
Even for Scout, who has lived an entire life in fast-forward, struggles to process the sudden flash of detail, the laughter, the whispers, and the cold hand pulling him upright. He tries to focus on the face before him, a kind and round one.
The man's southern accent is a practical assault on Scout's east-coast sensibilities. "He ain't no BLU, if I ever saw one." Around him, a sense of concurrence spreads. Scout doesn't recognise the word. He wants to ask –to get out some words, but his voice is meek and rusty, and it starts up in slow-motion.
Behind him, an accusation. "He a civilian?"
"Looks like it." The man turns back to him, and stretches out his cold hand. "Name of-"
Scout backpedals so fast he nearly ends up falling again. Not once does he dare to touch the –the thing, out in front of him. The man with the iron hand doesn't seem a bit bothered by it. As if to demonstrate the good nature of the metal extremity, he flexes the fingers. "It's no cause for alarm, son."
Scout if thoroughly out of breath. His lungs are not equipped to issue oxygen as fast as he needs it. It's a very real concern that he'll do something awful, like faint.
"You mind tellin' us exactly why you took to hidin' in that locker?" The mirth is obvious in the man's voice. It makes Scout angry, but in the way a child becomes furious. There isn't a bit of man left in him.
"I was s'pposed t' –s'pposed t' go get a physical." The desperation in his voice is clear. But he fights the instinct to look pitiful, as he knows each one of the faces belongs to a criminal. Whatever they have done: they're not like him. They're different, somehow. Worse.
The silence extends. Some of them are now going back to undressing, and light patches of conversation resume.
The man with the iron hand is trying to help again. Scout doesn't know if he wants to accept it. For all he knows, the man could be the sort that strangles prostitutes and the like. The pleasant demeanour is probably as thick as a chocolate-coating. Ma always said that when the devil came, he's have nice hair and say he worked for Amnesty International.
"Miss Pauling tell you to do that? To go down to the infirmary?" Scout nods. He trusts his silence. The man with the iron hand rises, drawing to his full height, a few inches below Scout, and nods. "Right, son. You're with the Doc."
"It can wait."
Scout searches around for a face that fits the voice. None react, of course. The man clears his throat.
"Hey, Doc?"
A taller, older man turns. There is something spattered across his nose –too light o be just blood and too dark to be just dirt. It reaches the lens of his spectacles, obscuring one eye slightly. In the thickest, and most bizarre accent Scout has ever encounter, the man grumbles. "Is the patient dying?"
Scout says nothing. The iron-handed man sighs. "Well, no-"
"Is the patient under any chronic or acute pain? Any bleeding, fainting, vomiting or dizziness?"
The small man rolls his eyes. "Not that I'm aware of, no." But that doesn't stop the other man's stride.
"And are you quite certain that the patient's appendix won't burst, causing serious trauma?" The silence says enough for all of them. Pleased, the man turns, and gives them his long back once more. "Then it can wait."
Suffice it to say, it's not the warmest greeting Scout has ever been given. It is much easier to imagine what area of illicit activity the doctor has dabbled in, though, so Scout continues to keep his mouth shut. It's not a regular habit for him.
The smaller man has nothing else to say on the matter. He gives Scout a parting piece of advice. "You best go wait down by the doors for him, at the end of the hall." Scout nods, still mute, a if he is terribly enthusiastic about understanding the statement. As he goes, some last words follow him. "And don't go jumpin' into any more lockers, alright, son?"
-
Ma doesn't believe in doctors. Scout doesn't, either.
They all stopped believing when Seymour killed himself. After his time in Vietnam, he'd gone to that head doctor to stop feeling so sorry for himself. Nobody could say with any certainty if it was the war, the doctor, the drugs or just life that had made him out the gun to his head that day.
But dead is dead, regardless.
Scout doesn't trust the man's strange, alien accent. He doesn't trust the flutter of the birds, in the cage. Are they test subjects? Pets? He doesn't trust the low hum of the generators. Nor the diagrams on the walls, and the sterile, coy wink of instruments, sharp and essential as sunlight.
The man, who he is instructed to address simply as 'Medic', never quite catches his eye. The man glosses over him as one does a set of parts, or a task. As if, despite having such power over life and death has caused him not to idolise it, but to stop believing it's novelty altogether.
It happened to Seymour because of the war. It would have happened to Walt, too, Scout's only truly light-hearted brother, but he was shot to pieces on a muddy hill just three months after leaving home.
He tries not to think about it. He tries to start up some conversation.
"S'cold down here." Scout says. He rubs his hands together and breathes on them. "Nobody to foot the heatin' bill, huh?"
Medic says nothing. He seems comfortable giving the boy his back. As if the words are obviously unworthy of his time. The gargantuan man, Heavy, stands behind Scout, enormous arms crossed over one another, thick as tree trunks. It makes Scout so nervous that he has to speak.
"I guess you're jus' gonna check stuff, yeah? My eyes an' ears, an' all that?" The silence he's being met with i infuriating. "You gonna say anythin'?"
Medic waves a hand. "Can you see?"
Scout pauses short. He is unsure if the question is a trick. His eyes swivel around the room. Their detail is fine. "Sure," He says, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "I can see fine."
"And I presume you are able to hear me?"
Still, he remains facing away. It appears that he is washing his hands. Scout sighs. "Well, sure. Accent an' all."
Medic laughs at that. It is a short, sharp little bark, and then it goes, as if that's all the joy that the man has ever and will ever feel. "No need to check your eyes and ears, then." He clears his throat. "We may skip straight to the procedure."
Scout tenses, and takes a single step backwards before an enormous hand plants itself on his shoulder. He wants to speak, but cannot, his mouth trembling in a stutter. Questions ring like alarm bells in his head, and as he staggers backwards he feels the brick wall of body behind him.
Medic sighs. "Don't start panicking now. It's all standard."
Scout's mouth is very dry. He tries to steady himself, but the panic is instantaneous and intolerable. It's only worsened when Medic turns, advancing with gloved hands, a long needle poised in his left hand. That's when Scouts starts, terrified, feeling two massive arms circle around him like stone, fixing him in place.
Scout starts to kick violently. It's useless –useless, he knows, but he has to do something. Every step closer causes him to become more violent. He doesn't trust that Medic, with the strange look in his eyes, and the manic, half-open smile as if he takes pleasure in Scout's distress.
In his desperation, he manages to free one single hand, and stretches it out, as if to fight or bat away the advancing man.
"Kommen jetzt, Junge." The man says, near-fondly, twisting Scout's hand up, rendering it useless in his grip. The needle slips near-painlessly into his upper-arm. That's it. That's all it is. In the strangest, softest voice, Medic sighs to him, "Dies ist nicht der Zeitpunkt für Feinde."
He releases Scout's arm, that goes soft and limp, a lax fist falling onto the man's shoulder. Scout's vision begins to soften, as if seeing the world through seawater eyes. Afraid, he tries to swim up, or pull away, but can do nothing but fall against Heavy behind him.
He feels his head fall back. They move towards the examination table. He is not conscious of being placed upon it. Then, there are blue eyes above him. He thinks that it's Ma, at first, singing him to sleep as a child, but there is something vaguely sinister about the echo of her voice. She is further away than it seems.
Scout's eyes close.
When they open, he perceives himself laying at the bottom of a lake. Above him, Seymour's tags are floating. It takes all of his strength to reach up a single arm. One finger closes around them, but the chain shifts in the water, and they start to float away, and higher. Scout doesn't dare to lose them.
Slowly, he kicks his feet, and pushes himself off of the bedrock. The water sustains him and he swims up, not conscious of breathing. Only of Seymour's tags. The trouble is, they're fast. As much as he propels himself further and faster and harder it isn't fast enough.
Scout doesn't give up. He follows them higher, to the light green waters, where bean green pours over blue. The tags become stuck, and at last, he seizes an opportunity to grab one of them. It sits hard in his wrist as he jerks them towards him. But the more he jerks, his efforts bear no fruit. With one hard tug, Scout pulls himself to the surface, gasping suddenly, as if it is his first breath.
Suddenly, there is no water. No lake. The tags are looped around Seymour's neck. He's pale and bluish, his temple bloody and oozing black blood. His eyes are practically dead.
Scout drops the tags. He staggers back with a stomach full of bile. He turns away.
"Go away." He grins out, over his shoulder. "I don't need you anymore." But Seymour doesn't leave. He remains standing there, half-aware, with that goddamn awful half-smile on his face. Scout wishes it had never existed.
Seymour is still there when he turns back around. "Ma doesn't talk about you no more." He says, quietly. "She doesn't need you. Nobody does!" In a moment of weakness, he shoves Seymour hard, but doesn't move the man. His voice dissolves back into a hard, venomous whisper. "Jus' go away!"
Seymour never says a word, and Scout has no other course of action left but to scream.
"Goddamnit Seymour, leave!"
-
Later, on dry land, he wakes up with a dry cough.
His chest is dull and warm, but doesn't actively hurt. It leads him to suppose that's where most of his 'procedure' took place. Medic isn't in immediate sight, and so Scout's anger dissipates. The day has worn on, and he wants to have a warm meal, a hot shower, and a cold bed. A phonecall, too, just to get his affair in order.
Ma had asked him to write her. She's said –even though he wasn't a great writer like Seymour, and couldn't read all that well anyway, he ought to squeeze out a couple of words for her. Just to tell her he was okay.
Scout has been told not to tell lies. He isn't okay at all, and so he decides against writing to her until he can muster the strength to lie. To make her believe everything is okay.
Slowly, feeling like a very sorry man, he slides himself off of the examination table and stands. His legs are trembling, but he manages to walk himself over to the mirror, eager but terrified to see the damage.
On his upper arm is a small red pinprick, no bigger than a star at night, but there is otherwise nothing. No gaudy marks or scars. No poppy bruises or jagged lines. Not a hint of blood. Naively, he believes that he's fine until a sharp and seizing pain makes his chest give, and he clutches it, swearing sharply. A deep wheeze scares him, but it does lessen the pain.
He is caught in the act.
"Mister Daley." He hears her voice before turning. What a dissonant chord Miss Pauling is. Words tough as iron but a look soft as leather. "I trust you're acclimatising yourself."
He laughs at that, but turns, fearing that he'll be perceived as rude if he doesn't face her. "It's jus' Scout."
She does no return the smile. Her mouth, in a hard straight line, does not so much as flicker. "If it's all the same to you, I think I'll leave it at Mister Daley." She crosses around a small table and places a wrapped brown paper package on the table Scout had been lying. "Your uniform."
Scout crosses over to it, and tears away the top layer of soft brown. He's met with bright red fabric. "Uh," He coughs, again. "Thanks."
She folds her arms. "It's regulation." And then, as if realising how cold she sounds, she continues. "I have the key to your room. You can unpack in there before dinner."She hands him a small, silver fob attached to a small pool ball. His room number, presumably. "Dinner is mandatory. It's at seven. Breakfast is at eight. Be punctual, or don't eat."
He tries careful to process everything she's told him, afraid to make a mistake. She is impossible to read. A naturally soft, and once-smiling face is obscured by her harsh eyes and straight mouth and meticulously neat hair. He cannot guess or tell a lie apart from who she is or once was, and doesn't dare to.
She departs then, her heels snapping on the tile like an empty lighter. Over her shoulder, she says, "Goodnight, Mister Daley." And he is left to find his own room.
In the next room, the eponymous Medic is whistling, boots hooked by the heel as he leans back in his chair, polishing some kind of scalpel. Behind him, Heavy is rubbing the man's shoulders as he whistles. Scout feels like such an intruder to cross the floor, facing down. The tiles are slightly blurry. His vision is still soft.
The whistling pauses. "The procedure was a success." He says, to Scout. "Though, I was generous with your anaesthetic. You've been out most of the day."
He still doesn't know what the procedure was. Or why he had to undergo it. Frankly, he's too nervous to ask.
-
With whatever earthly possessions he has left with him, Scout finds a long corridor of doors, and eventually, room six.
Scout is raw with exhaustion. He envisions a soft bed, and time alone, and a chance to sort out his stiff, hard neck from that awful sleep on the shuttle. He's so terribly tired, and wants a chance to sleep without such strange dreams. It's only been a matter of hours and he's tired of RED base and it's strange, hostile inhabitants.
He unlocks the door with relative ease and sighs, stepping inside and going to the bed that he sees. The sheets are white, but the walls are red. As he goes to reach out a hand, to touch the sheets, disbelieving that they're really there, he hears the scrape of something on the wooden floor, and realises at once that there's someone behind him.
Suddenly, there's something terribly cold at his throat and his every instinct thrills as the essential blade of some long, dangerous knife makes itself known to him. Without hesitation, Scout's hands fly up to his collar to moment the blade tightens around him. It takes less than a second for the blade to begin eating through the skin of his hands. Scout cries out in panic.
"Who the hell are you?" Comes the hot, foreign whisper to his left. Scout tries to squirm away, gasping out in pain. The blade has stopped moving forward, but his hands are still incredibly tender,
blood beginning to come in two ugly slices. "Who gave you that key?"
"M-Miss Paulin'!" He whimpers, trying to stagger backwards. "She told me that this was –this was my room..."
The man behind him pauses. At a rate of tiny increments, the blade withdraws and Scout is shoved onto the bed in front of him. Breathless, and emotionally exhausted, Scout steadies himself, leaving poppy-red marks blooming on the crisp, white sheets as he sits himself on the bed. Half-wheezing, Scout licks his hand sourly and glances up at his assailant.
The man is tall, thin, and doesn't look a bit sorry when he says, "Key or no key, you're gonna knock." The use of imperative isn't lost on Scout, who, as the younger, smaller and newer, feels that telltale urge to obey, soundlessly and wordlessly. His alert had numbed the pain of his hands, but now that his breathing is evening out, the sting is returning to his palms. They cannot curl without causing further bleeding.
When Scout looks back up at that man, unable to read anything from the careful fortified defence of hard, yellows instead of eyes. The man straightens visibly under the scrutiny.
"She tell you if this arrangement was temporary or not?"
Scout shakes his head. "She didn't even tell me I was gonna be sharin'."
Some might be inclined to sympathy on Scout's case. Because he swears, he isn't like them. He stumbled upon all of his crimes, all of those grand theft autos and nasty scraps over nothing. At least in his own mind, Scout is an innocent, corrupted by entirely external forces. It doesn't seem to occur to the stranger. That's because the stranger is a criminal.
"You sure better hope this arrangement's temporary." He grumbles, brusquely. Arms akimbo, he shakes his head. "Either way, you better keep to your side a' the room." He raises a finger as if earning Scout. "Don't leave your shit out. I don't-" For a second, the hand in the air waivers. "I don't do mess."
Scout wonders, very briefly, if the man is here, incarcerated and locked up, deemed a danger to the public, because he killed his previous roommate over mess. It doesn't sound totally improbable.
He tries to muster his strongest voice beneath the rubble of the day, clearing his throat dryly. "I'll-" He coughs, again. "You won't even notice I'm here. I'll be quiet as a goddamn corpse."
It's the first time in days he's seen another human being laugh. It isn't a large or golden sound.; the man's shoulder lift and fall in a single, amused chuckle. It's enough for him to be reminded that even if he isn't one of them, they are still vaguely human. Scout doesn't offer much more than that, though. The imminent and very real threat of the blade has left enough of a mark to dissuade him from chattering too much.
In fact, all he can say is, "I don't guess you got any bandages or nothin'? S'jus', you cut my hands up pretty bad an' all."
The tall stranger plants himself firmly on the bed across from Scout and roots his hand around in the drawer besides the bed. As he goes to turn away, a white roll of bandage knocks him on the shoulder. Gingerly, he grasps it in his palm, feeling the weave of the fabric against the moist tenderness of his palm.
"Just this once, alright?" the man grunts, now fully turned away. "Don't be expecting any bloody handouts."
Scout expects nothing. He hums in agreement and unravels the roll, stretching out his left hand first and wrapping the cut up neatly, covering his hand from his knuckles down to the middle of his wrist. He does the same with the right, too, holding them up afterwards to admire his own handiwork. It's probably not the most efficient or effective means, but the end result has an aesthetic he could get used to.
It takes him all of about ten minutes until they're finished and reasonably tight. When he turns towards the other bed, attempting to give the remainder of the bandages back, he finds the tall man lying limp on the bed, the long brim of a hat over his eyes.
Scout doesn't say a word for fear of disturbing the other man: he's sleeping.
At the end of the small room are two identical desks parallel to eachother. Scout occupies the small chair and tests the stationery provided. The paper is thin. The ink is an awful dark red, but he tries his best to get something out. After all, he doesn't want Ma thinking he's dead.
The pen feels like a deadweight in his hand –a gutterball. He never could write like Seymour, and has trouble putting the words together, before the letters fall apart. There's a fancy word for it, that the school nurse used to use; Ma called it stupid. It would take him a miracle to have words to look at.
Scout knows he has to write something, but fears he doesn't want to depress her with chronicles of the painful, confusing and altogether sinister nature of his days so far. When he tries to write, his hand shakes.
'Ma, I am here at New Mexico. It is hot and sandy.'
It takes him several hours to write those 12 words.