XXXVII: Witsonee Border Patrol Station.
Tarquin Vierra, 16
Applicant #4
Tarquin, unlike everyone else present during that awful second, shuts down completely.
It must hurt to do so, but Icarus throws himself to the floor and leaves Tarquin standing there abandoned as he frantically inserts himself into the middle of whatever's happening on the floor. Ferrox, almost predictably, navigates around him to join the fray - even the guard lurking behind him leans around his shoulder to get a better look and then says something into the radio. Every word is lost on Tarquin, like he's speaking another language entirely.
He's not breathing, that's what Emmi said. Not breathing meant not breathing, to some people, but to him it meant super, clinically dead.
He had a lot of experience with what that looked like, after all.
"How long?" he asks, but nobody pays him any mind. The most important person in this room right now suddenly isn't Ferrox Mervaine. That honor belongs to someone dead for the time being, someone who wasn't dead the last time he saw him. "How long?"
It's Ria that looks up at him, finally. She's crying, he realizes. Silently, two matching trails down each side of her face.
"I don't know," she answers. It doesn't help. "I don't know how long it took me to notice, but he doesn't have a pulse—"
Someone's hands are moving through the thickness of a crowd made up of only five people. Four, really, because one's lying on the floor dead. Soran's not taking up much of anything. Compressions, he hopes. Ferrox's hands, he hopes even more, because he's not sure anyone else could do it.
How he wishes they could do the same to everyone else.
Ferrox looks through him rather than at him. It's definitely his hands that are moving. "Get your doctor, tell them to set-up whatever they have. And get a hand on some morphling."
Oh, not him. The guard. He obeys, for once, and disappears down the hall without so much of a word. The alarm is still blaring, the yellow-orange light at the next junction snapping back into his eyes every half-second. Maybe it's that which urges him forward, dropping carefully to his knees on the outskirts. He reaches forward, and from this distance can just barely close his fingers around Soran's left wrist, just under the makeshift bandage and scraps of cloth.
His skin is cold, as cold as Icarus said it was. There's still some warmth lingering underneath, just enough.
They can fix this.
Or they're trying to, in the very least. He can practically hear the rhythmic thumping, but it's not his heart. Not yet. It's the hands against his chest. There's a crack and he flinches like he can feel it in his own bones.
"What the fuck— he's bleeding again, why is he bleeding again?"
Tarquin can't see, doesn't really want to.
"If his insides are messed up, there's no telling what compressions will do to it," Ferrox manages. "The second he's back, we need to get him up and get the fuck out of here. He's gonna be in a world of pain - you're gonna have to ignore it."
Ferrox is acting like this is going to work, no questions asked. And asking them to ignore pain, at this point. They've been doing that for so long and now they were finally allowing themselves to feel it...
He really feels it, right about now.
"Wait," Emmi interrupts, voice hesitant. "I think—"
"I need guarantees right now, not thoughts."
Tarquin really is trying to feel something. Emmi's got a hold on his other wrist, he can tell now. Where she feels something he can't find it, can't focus because of the light flickering through the door, the constant blare of the alarm ringing in his ears, the eerie remembrance of the bullet tearing through that guard's neck, her endless questions before that.
"No, she's right," Icarus snaps, voice too far into hysterics. "I can feel it."
Tarquin can't feel it. Why can't he feel it?
"Lobby's down the hall, left then right, up the stairs. Go."
He doesn't realize he's being spoken to, can't see Ferrox's eyes from here. Ria gets to her feet and grabs him around the arm, dragging his rather lifeless form up to his equally useless feet before she pulls him from the room. He has no concept of what's actually happening around him, just that they start going the opposite way, passing right beneath the flashlight light at the end of the hall. His feet are burning worse than before.
A right, and then a left. He tracks the motions as if he's following them from above his body, floating because it hurts too much to walk. There are the stairs, up six and then back six more. To think they carried them down here, locked them up like they were wild animals.
He sort of feels like one right now.
Ria pushes at the door, which gives way with a clang. She's still holding onto his arm, fingers painfully tight, bitten and torn nails sinking in even through the layers.
It's too bright, all of a sudden. More yellow than even downstairs, natural light from the outside spilling in through the front windows, the glass entrance door. There's some chairs along the wall, a long closed-off desk on the opposite wall. There's even a little rug leading from the door all the way to it, like it was an attempt at being homey, like it wasn't awful.
There's even a few people, too, unfamiliar ones dressed more casually, and a woman leaning over the front desk, half-open mouth shutting at the sight of them.
"Oh, shit," she says, almost quietly. As if something's been confirmed.
He realizes who she is a second before the door bursts open behind them. There's a group effort going on to navigate through the door, carrying Soran between them. It's a good thing his hands apparently hardly work at all.
"Watch them!" Ferrox shouts. "Where's the—"
One of the people beyond the desk points down the hall before he can get the words out, and another steps out, gesturing to them as if to follow, eyes wide.
He stands there still as stone, and Ria doesn't let go of his arm, which leaves the two of them standing there as everybody else rushes away, down the hall. Gone.
But not really.
It leaves them all but alone, only two people left behind the desk to stare at them, owl-eyed, while Cambria fucking Mervaine approaches them almost cautiously, like they really are wild animals.
Maybe they are, or maybe he's the only one that thinks it, because he's the one that keeps making the comparisons.
Like he said, he feels it.
Ria's hand tightens a fraction around his arm, but she stops two feet away of them, previously extended hands falling silently to her sides.
"What the fuck?" she asks, and an hysterical laugh nearly bubbles up out of him before he shoves it right back down. Ria just shakes her head, an appropriate explanation. He wants to scream, kind of. That and cry all over again. He wants to sink to the floor and never get back up. Maybe just sit down in general.
"We're alive," he says weakly, obviously, and then does just that, right in the middle of the lobby.
Tarquin registers little blips, blurs where events should be.
He sits on the floor for a while, nearly dragging Ria down with him. Cambria eventually crouches down in front of him and hands him a water bottle from the shaking hands of one of the desk clerks.
He holds onto it for a while. Doesn't do anything with it.
A few guards file in and out, some frantically and some not. He nearly throws up at the sight of them.
Eventually, distantly, the alarm coming from down the stairs stops, and he gets up.
He's still not sure how; it feels like someone ought to have helped him but he doesn't remember any assistance, just the feeling of invisible strings putting him back on his feet. It still hurt but now he felt sort of numb, maybe from the unintentional, spur of the moment break.
He has no clear idea where they end up, either. Somewhere still in the building, above ground this time. The outside world doesn't look as different as he thought it would. The vaguely orange-brown mountains off in the distance, the golden cast to the dirt and the roads in every direction. There's not much out this way, at least not that he can see. Even still inside he finds himself gazing out every window he can find, unsure why.
Eventually he finds himself seated at the very end of a bench in a nondescript hallway. One of the lights is burnt out ten paces to his left. No one else is there.
Well, besides Cambria. She's lurking at the end of the hall, stature not very bodyguard-like but mannerisms certainly pointing in that direction.
But still, no one else. He doesn't even know where Ria went.
It probably, hopefully, doesn't matter too much. If something awful was happening elsewhere he'd know.
Again, probably. He'd probably know.
A door opens, nearly halfway between him and Cambria. They both turn to look at the not-so-new arrival, a woman he's seen milling about for the past while. She looks haggard at best, a cruel word coming from him and his truly tragic state, but there's no other word to describe it. Her eyes are shadowed, a few gray hairs escaping from her otherwise slicked-back ponytail.
The doctor, he knows, although she hasn't spoken to him yet. He only knows because of the coat and the name-tag he can't quite make out.
She holds out a hand. "Dr. Vasquez. I'd like to take a look at you, if you don't mind. I'd put you in an examination room but there's only one."
Right. It's not him that belongs in there. "Is he okay?"
He hasn't taken her offered hand, hasn't really agreed, but she sits down beside him on the bench and pulls on a pair of clean gloves. There's a little bit of blood underneath her fingernails, which can't be sanitary, but he can't be fucked to care.
"He's alive," she answers, which is less of an answer than he'd really like. She takes one of his arms, fingers at the edge of the worst burns. "There's probably some skin grafts in your future."
"Can you do that here?"
"They're transporting you to Fairfeld Memorial shortly. Approximately a half-hour from here."
"Just me?"
"No. All of you. There's only so much I can do here, and unfortunately heavy-duty stitching and complex surgery is not one of them. It's all I can do to keep you all in one piece for transport."
He can't imagine a doctor willingly withheld her care from them, so who did it? Did they even care what happened to them? It doesn't seem like they had a heavy interest in keeping them alive, or they wouldn't have let things go downhill so quickly.
And ha, one piece. He should probably tell her that his foot is going to detach from his ankle any day now.
"I'm going to go get a few things quickly," she tells him. "Stay here, please."
What the hell is she going to do? Everything he needs isn't here, apparently, except the water bottle that's still sitting next to him on the bench. He's only managed to take a few, even sips, and every single one has tasted like ash going down his throat, burning all the way through like everything was melting as he sat here.
Until now he's been leaning against the wall incrementally, but now he properly lowers himself back until he's slouched over, head in his hands because it makes the pulsing in his temple lesser, somehow. There's a thump on the bench beside him, but he doesn't move.
"Doctor looked at you?" Emmi asks.
"Doing that right now."
"Where is she?"
He shrugs, and feels Emmi lean back against the wall as well, shoulder brushing his for a second. "What about you?"
"Not much she can do about the multiple holes in my stomach, so I guess it'll have to wait."
He looks up at her, finally. Ria is sitting on her other side and he blinks a few times, ever surprised by the total silence she carries around. It's so quiet it almost is a noise itself.
Emmi snorts. "Believe me, you don't wanna see."
"Never said I did," he mumbles, and lowers his head back down. He doesn't want to do much of anything, really, except both of their faces look at least vaguely scrubbed clean, like someone allowed them access to running water and some soap. It's almost tempting enough to get up and ask for, but not quite. Cold water would probably just hurt.
There are more footsteps - he waits for the doctor to return, to pry his hands from his face as is if her life depends on it, but a near silent weight takes a seat on his other side and nearly knocks his water bottle over. He turns his head towards the sound and catches Icarus leaning against the wall, too, turning his very vacant eyes to the ceiling.
They're all staring at him like he's a sideshow freak, so he doesn't feel too bad about being the only one.
"How is he?" Emmi prompts. Icarus shrugs.
"Weren't you just in there?"
"They kicked me out," he says hoarsely, and then closes his eyes. Tarquin figures the conversation is about done, at that, expectantly. Icarus looks about as dead behind the eyes as he feels. Comrades in arms, and all that. If Icarus could walk properly he figures they would've heard a bit of commotion, experienced a bit of a fight put up about that. Or maybe he did, and Tarquin was just too out of it to notice.
He can't even begin to imagine what the four of them look like sitting here, all in a row, in various states of alive. They're riddled with too many holes, for one. Hungry, exhausted, still on the verge of dehydration, brain's all a soupy mess.
No longer bleeding, though. He feels like he should be, but he isn't.
He closes his eyes, too. He almost wants to be.
This would all make so much more sense if he was.
Cambria Mervaine, 49
Former Head Gamemaker & Master of Ceremonies
She's getting too old for this shit.
It's the only thing she can think as she settles back down in the car, leaving the keys dangling from the ignition but not doing a damn thing about it. Ferrox looks similarly stunned into silence in the passenger seat.
That's a fucking rarity if she's ever seen one.
"So," she says slowly. "That was a surprise."
"Is that what we're calling it?"
"If you'd rather call it our son is detective material and probably going to be smug about it for the first time in his life than we can do that, too."
He doesn't smile. She didn't expect him to. "They're sending a team over."
"Of who?"
"Representatives is what they told me. So whoever fucking Tate feels like he wants to send to confirm that we're not two dickhead liars."
"But we are."
"Oh, we are," he agrees. "But like, the motherfucker can't fly down here to check that five kids from a Program he approved are still alive after the other nineteen carked it somewhere in the desert? Fucker."
She considers that. "Dominika would have come."
He nods, a fingernail stuck between his teeth. "They're on orders to lock down a ward of the hospital, swear all the doctors and nurses that attend to them to secrecy."
"And how long do they think that's going to work?"
"You know the Presidency. They'll keep secrets for as long as they can."
Of course they will. They've been doing it since the beginning of time. Dominika did it the whole time she knew her, before she decided that murdering her seemed like a better option. Of course now they have Tate, who seems even worse, in retrospect. At least Dominika gave a shit. Even thinking about her that way seems odd, so many years later, but she did. It's impossible to deny.
"Those kids are a mess now," Ferrox says. "But once that stops, they're going to be angry. Full scorched earth angry. Someone did this. Someone that's still alive."
"Want me to put Atlas on the case?" she asks, and his lip quirks up. That'll be a solid no from both of them; someone would have to step over their two dead bodies before they let either of their children get actively involved in this. One may have figured this out, the other may just be angry enough herself to willingly involve herself, but there's no way.
This wasn't really their thing, either, but now it is.
She looks at him, again. The two transport vehicles left for the hospital fifteen minutes ago.
"We're not going home, are we?" she asks.
He sighs. "Nope."
Another shorter chapter - apologies for that. They can't all be behemoths. But on a nicer note this is by far the shortest left and most of them are much, much longer. To be seen if that's a good thing or not.
Until next time.