[1973, Hawkins]
THE LINOLEUM FLOOR still smelled like the acrid solvent used to clean during the night while Susan Prevett traipses through corridors, folders under one arm and steaming coffee in her hand, ready for another grueling shift.
She was hired as a nurse by the new building on the outskirts of Hawkins for some months now. She did not understand why a laboratory under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Energy had taken the trouble to hire nurses, but she soon realized something was going on.
Rather than nursing, her tasks were almost strictly bureaucratic and control, to compile folders associated with patients, feed them, entertain them and check that they did not flee for the laboratory. He had never given drugs, nor did he carry out any type of phleboclism or at least intervened when one of them seemed to have behaviors ... 'out of the norm'. She had been given precise instructions in this regard: if there had been any problem she would have to contact the internal emergency number and within a few minutes the doctors would arrive.
Many of them by now she knew them by sight, from time to time they came to check the general conditions of their cases and they stopped to have a coffee at the nurses' desk. But none of them had never accepted their help.
Sometimes they were accompanied by security men to escort them as they took the children to the lower floors for check-ups.
Susan shuddered as she sipped her cup of coffee, passing one of the many doors on which a babyish sticker was attached, in an attempt to make the environment more welcoming and less sterile.
She still remembered as if it was the first day the horror of finding out who those little numbers scribbled on the folders were assigned to. Children.
Frowning, she went straight in the direction, asking for explanations: why would children find themselves in the custody of the energy department? What was wrong with them for being interned without parents who never came to see them?
Dr. Brenner at least hadn't seen troubled in front of her distress, he had smiled at her as if the answer was obvious, right in front of her eyes ready to be grabbed and she was the only one who couldn't see it.
"They are sick" he explained to her with a hint of broken voice, as if there, among those children, there was his son "they came into contact with minor forms of radioactivity due to experiments conducted by foreign countries. We are helping them. Unfortunately, their parents did not survive" in front of her obvious concern, Dr. Brenner had made sure to point out that the levels of radiation in their blood is not high enough for none of his staff to be infected. Susan was so upset by the revelation that she forgot any other questions, so she was dismissed in her speechless horror.
From that day on, she could not look at those children with the same eyes and could not shake off that feeling of being in the dark.
Arrived in front of the counter behind which she would have spent most of her turn, she stopped to put down all the folders while she watched, frowning but not too surprised, the morning colleague climbing up a ladder to reach one of the tallest shelves in the metal closet where they kept most of the old annotations.
"Good morning Linda" she muttered, sipping her coffee "what are you doing ... exactly?"
The woman, a lady now close to middle age, muttered something very similar to words that Susan never thought she could repeat aloud.
"Don't see?" Linda asked, pointing to the old documents cataloged carefully "I'm doing the job that's a little scrape of Elizabeth should have done tonight!" she went back to checking the documents, mumbling until her eyes lit up when one of her fingers glazed with red stopped on the rib of one of the old notebooks "Ah! Here you are! " She descended in precarious balance from the small scale, that they always kept under the counter for this kind of eventuality, and slammed the document in front of her.
Susan didn't blink, she was used to the melodramatic mood of her colleague. She no longer noticed it.
She had learned after endless mornings spent to put up with her complaints that if she had not shown interest in her cascade of malice towards her younger peers, she would soon have gone in search of any other person who was much more mischievous than her.
"This folder was requested by Dr. Brenner, it had to be ready this morning! I had left it written in the deliveries of that lazy, brainless goose!" the old woman complained, her hand slammed against the document as if to give more emphasis to her words.
Susan moved the object in question to Linda, starting to leaf through the nursing journal of the first patient of the morning "Interesting and not tell me ... she didn't?"
"Don't tease me, Susan!" Linda's voice rose two octaves as she waved a gnarled finger under her nose "you wouldn't want to become like that fat disgrace ..."
"Do you mind if I take care of patient number 003?" Susan interrupted, rereading more carefully the lines left by the colleague of the night shift, the continuous screaming in the ears of the old nurse began to make her confused.
Linda looked at her confused, for a moment, before quickly recovering herself as she turned, with the much-discussed folder held in her arms as if it were the most precious of treasures
"Do as you like, as far as I can tell you can even adopt it," Linda mumbled, striding towards the end of the corridor.
Susan for the first time in all morning turned her attention to her "Where are you going? There are still rooms to be arranged and morning hygiene for the children to do"
A cawing laugh rose up in the middle of the room "Ah! If the folder had been fixed before now I would come to give you a hand, but instead no, I have to patch up the mistakes of others" Linda's grin spread across her face.
Susan squeezed her eyelids, grasping the root of her nose in an attempt not to verbally chill any excuse she was raised to put off what should have been her job. As if both were unaware of the fact that Linda would disappear for much longer than was necessary to carry a folder to the upper floors.
"And Dr. Brenner can't come and get that damn folder for himself?" Susan whispered between her teeth, mimicking a smile that, she was sure, it would make blood freeze in evil's vein even.
Linda stopped with her hand still on the door, any response died on her lips as she dropped the documents on the floor. The contents, mostly sheets, and photos, spilled onto the floor.
Susan watched the woman as she stood there, completely terrified.
"What the hell ..." Susan murmured, turning in the direction of the woman
"Did you hear that too?" Linda asked with eyes wide open.
Susan approached, leaving her warm coffee and patient files on the counter "What? I didn't hear anything"
Linda turned slowly to her, her face white as a corpse "O-one shot ...it was the sound of a shot, I'm sure"
Susan snorted "I'm sure it's not like that, probably it was just some door closed with too much force or some shelf that gave way"
"I can recognize the sound of a gun!" shouted the older colleague, tapping one foot on the ground.
Susan frowned at her "Oh! I didn't know that in your free time you went to practice at the shooting-range" her voice was sharp like a knife.
Linda gave her a chilling look, but in doing so, she didn't notice the door that was thrown open and hit her in the face, dropping her back on the floor. The blow had probably broken her nasal septum judging by the blood that had begun to stain her uniform and her hands, now tight on her face, as she writhed in pain.
Susan ran in her direction when a silver reverberation over poor Linda's head caught her attention. She froze, and her eyes crossed the terrified but extremely determined look of a woman, perhaps even younger than her. Her face was worn as if she hadn't slept for a long time, her eyes were sunken, her blouse was stained with blood and, shaking with trembling hands, he clutched a colt now pointed at her colleague still whining on the ground.
"What the fuck are you doing, Susan ?! Give me one han...!" Linda's words died in her throat when she looked up and saw the gun pointed at her "No! No! I did nothing! Please"
The woman continued to look between Susan and Linda, as if trying to decide what to do and didn't expect to find them there. Then suddenly, every trace of doubt and confusion disappeared as she gripped the gun firmly with both hands.
"Where's my daughter?" the stranger asked, pointing the gun to Linda first and then to Susan, who slowly raised her hands.
"What the hell are you babbling about?" Linda screamed in fright as the stranger advanced toward her.
"Jane Ives! She's three years old now! My daughter!" this time her voice was cold with determination but betrayed a certain urgency. She had the time counted and she knew that too. Now the guards were aware of her presence if not for the confusion they must have already seen what is going on from the security cameras. Probably all the security was already on her trail "you took her away from me! My little Jane ... now I've come to get her back! Where is she?"
Linda continued to sob and rail against her, meanwhile Susan couldn't stop thinking about the woman's words and her brain had begun to process information in an infinite loop. She didn't even notice that she had spoken.
The armed woman turned her full attention to her "What did you say?" The barrel of the gun shone in her direction and for a moment Susan felt a lump in her throat. She swallowed, closing her eyes as he tried to speak again.
"The subject 011 ..."Susan whispered "is the only girl of three years ..."
"Where?" The gun trembled as the woman asked. She was on the verge of collapse.
Susan cleared her throat"Rainbow room ... you need the keys"
For a moment she read relief in the woman's eyes as if finally, she had found peace in her thoughts and Susan's heart tightened in a vice far more difficult to bear than the lump in her throat that had overwhelmed her a little earlier.
She closed her eyes, ready for the gunshot, but nothing happened. She heard Linda scream again and found the courage to open her eyes again.
The armed woman had lifted her by the arm and was dragging her towards the corridor. "Show me where she is"she threatened her with the colt aimed behind her back and suddenly Linda became quiet as a lamb, although she trembled from head to toe.
"I'll do it ... I'll do it ... but please don't hurt me ..." Linda kept repeating those words like a mantra even as they passed her, but the woman was no longer listening to her, her eyes were now fixed on the corridor behind Susan and saw nothing else.
When they disappeared around the corner, Susan finally managed to breathe again, but she had to lean against the counter so as not to lose her balance and end up unconscious on the ground. Was she terrified? Yes. Tremendously.
Susan knew for now that woman would no longer hurt her. The woman had only one goal at the moment: find her daughter. If Susan had stood aside, letting that desperate mother find her lost child, she could hope to live a little longer.
She closed her eyes, trying to metabolize what had happened and what she had learned.
Suddenly, every doubt seemed to disappear. That perfect and fragile bubble that contained all suspicion, every remorse of conscience, all fear of the truth had broken out.
With trembling hands, she grabbed the keys fastened to her belt with an extensible thread, the same copies that all the nurses in the lab had, and she headed into the corridor on the opposite side to the one where Linda and the woman had disappeared. She could still hear the nurse crying in the distance.
She began to sweat even though her skin was shivering. Her heart pounded in her ears at every step as she approached the door at the end of the corridor. She stopped, the keys still clasped in her fingers, and her gaze fixed on the teddy bear sticker attached to the dark mahogany.
She was on the horns of a dilemma.
Susan could have continued to believe in the lies of Dr. Brenner, to accept that what she had discovered today and all the suspicions of those months were too much to handle for her, to pretend not to see the desperation of a mother as she searches for her daughter, to believe that woman was a delirious fool, put the keys back and run to warn the vigilance and resume with her life.
Or she could have chosen not to close her eyes and pretend not to see what it was consuming under her nose, every day. To believe in those documents that in the last few months someone had tried to show her, but she had found hard -or didn't want to- to believe it. It would have been too irrational and monstrous to accept.
Now, with that intrusion in the laboratory, she had the opportunity to implement that crazy thought that sometimes kept her awake at night, but that she had always driven away like an annoying fly. No one would have noticed her absence, at least not immediately, not with that chaos.
As an employee nurse in the laboratory, she could take advantage of her position. She could do it. But maybe it was just the adrenaline to talk, yet at that moment, it was the necessary push to make her take that leap that she had always feared.
While she turned the key in the lock, Susan Prevett didn't know that she had made a choice that would change not only her future but also the fate of Hawkins's people.