AN: I don't know about ya'll but I've been missing Miles, the good new is that he's back (so yay. Not that ya'll couldn't tell, what with POV header being a few inches away from these very words). Anyhow, enjoy the chapter and thanks for reading.
***Miles***
I remembered everything and I was pissed. I didn't want to be, but I felt like bashing in someones head. Between thoughts of revenge details of my surroundings slowly trickled in.
The room around me was somewhere between a doctors office and an interrogation room, being a stark white, having a wall that was clearly a one way mirror, and containing little more than me, two chairs, a table, a video camera, and a man sitting across from me.
The man didn't move a muscle, just sitting there staring at me instead. As I tried to move, either towards or away from him- I'm not sure which, I realised that my limbs might as well me cast in lead for as heavy as they were.
Looking I saw that my hands were cuffed to the chair, not immobilized, just cuffed. There was the odd whir of a machine that had escaped my notice, being behind me, and angled down. And... was that a ring of salt on the floor?
"Miles Upshur, correct?"
I looked back up, barely remembering that a man was in the room. He was dressed in a white lab coat and seemed like he was in character as 'boring lab tech no. 593'
"Can you speak?"
No, I'm a silent protagonist in some bad video game, "yes"
"Good, please state your name and date of birth."
Sure, because i'm just such a cooperative person "No"
"Mr. Upshur, if that is your name, if you don't cooperate with me we will be forced to-"
"What? Shoot me? Because thats always worked so well."
He let out a suppressed sigh, I considered the most efficient way to kill him and escape "Do you know where you are?"
Probably some Murkoff facility, could be a hospital, another asylum, or a damn warehouse for all I knew. Shouldn't the Walrider have chimed in with some implausible information or something? I could really use things getting spooky to my advantage right now.
"No" I'd let him feed me information for now.
"As I thought. Mr. Upshur, what was your level of involvement regarding the events at Mount Massive in Colorado?"
Oh he knew full well what happened there. This was probably just checking to see if I was lying through my teeth. "You'll have to be more specific." I wasn't giving out any more information than I had to.
The man stopped, looked pensive for a second, then continued talking. Did he have some sort of an ear bud on?
"We know that you came there looking to expose the events that transpired there. We know that the Walrider escaped, and we know you are its host"
Lookslike the lab techs boss was going for the direct approach.
That was my cue to start messing with their heads "then how do you know that you're even talking to Miles?"
"Mr. Upshur, this is hardly the time to start playing mind games"
Speaking of mind games, it sure would be great if the Walrider decided to chime in.
Apparently I'd taken to long to talk back for his liking because he angrily told me "If you're not going respond then theres no point in continuing this interview."
Interview? "I was under the impression that this was an interrogation"
He gave me a narrow eyed look before quickly leaving the room.
What the hell was that about? I hadn't even threatened to do anything. I was now alone in the room, though I had the sneaking suspicion that there were more than a few people behind the glass watching me. Looking back at my surrounding I tried to get a closer look at the machine behind me.
Moving wasn't easy, and about all I could tell was that it wasn't making any contact with me and was about a foot away from the ring of salt.
Again i thought of the salt . Why the hell was it there?
For once I wished I could ask the walrider. I knew it was still there, I could feel the weight of it in the back of my mind, but for whatever reason it seemed to be behind a thin wall and out of reach.
The door opened again, this time it was a different man in a lab coat and a couple of people dressed in what looked like biohazard equipment. The suits started to move the table and other chair out of the room.
"Don't tell me you're kicking me out so soon. I only just got here"
The lab coat ignored me, instead deciding to bark out orders at the suits.
"Make sure that that ring isn't broke, establish a second parameter that reaches to the wall. no mistakes."
"Hey doc -if you're even a doctor- if everyone keeps ignoring me I might start to think that I'm unwanted."
He shot me a grave look from underneath a couple of caterpillar sized eyebrows. Suddenly my hands ached at a memory and I desperately hopped that he wasn't a doctor.
"Theres a solid ring sir" one of the suits reported.
"Good, set up the other EMP fields, I want this room locked down."
So thats what the machine behind me was. "shutting down the nanobots are we?"
scowled again, it seems like that's his default method of communication.
The suits scrambled in and out of the room hauling pod shaped mechanisms. One was set up in each corner of the room, outside of the salt ring. What was the salt for?
"The field generators are in place and fully functional sir." a suit reported in again.
"Good, gather the testing implements, disable the primary field."
Damn did he sould like every word he said came from a sci-fi screenplay. The two suits set to work, one switching off the machine behind me, the other carrying in a folding table. In a matter of seconds they had the little table filled with tons of fun looking toys. The thing was covered scalpels, needles, scarily labeled beakers, shady looking flasks, scissors, hammers, foresepts, a handgun, plants of unknown origin, and god knows what else.
looking at the line up I felt panic bubbling up. My arms felt just light enough to move; I spared no time in yanking against the cuffs. I wasn't about to sit quietly and take a round of torture.
The doctor pulled a tape recorder from some pocket.
"Subject: Miles Upshur.
Immediately following a fruitless interview the subject was prepped for experimentation"
This was going to shit much too quickly for my liking. The chains weren't about to give and the Walrider seemed like it was out to lunch. In what was now full blown panic I realised that little threads of the swarm were seeping out from under my skin.
Ha! Suck on that you scowling sociopath!
"The subject appears to be capable of wielding the swarm in a limited manner"
I'll show this bastard 'limited'. Even without the walrider yelling in my ear the swarm was picking up speed. One deep breath to calm myself down a bit was all it took to take the swarm under control. The dark clouded around me in stark contrast with the sterile white of the room. It wouldn't be long before I wiped the floor with his arrogant face. With all the ill intent in the world the swarm lashed out at the man.
And stopped.
The cloud screeched to a halt and flattened, as if it hit a solid wall. What the hell was that about?
"The ring of salt suggested in the mythology appears to serve as an effective barrier." he talked into that damn recorder.
"Salt?!"
"The subject appears to have been unaware of this limitation"
The Walrider could tear a person in half, screw up my body and read freakin' minds, but was stopped by table salt?! That's something I should have know about. With my concentration broken the majority of the swarm had retreated back into me.
The doctor had a smug expression painted on his face, "now" he set the recorder on the table and picked up the handgun to replace it.
"I will proceed with the first test: Subjects Reaction to Major Injuries"
He leveled the hand gun at me.
Oh shit.
***Waylon***
We'd Been in town for two days, there'd been two on the road, and one sense Chealsy's contact told her he'd be here in a week. That left only two until he made an appearance and Chealsy was still talking about only having half the clues. We sat in front of some small diner, Chealsy had nabbed some poor saps wallet. I'd come to notice that she sure did have considerable thieving skills. I wonder if Miles ever stooped to tricks like that. Not that it mattered, he was probably dead too.
"Alright, listen up" she was talking to me, had I just drifted off again? "We've got a day and a half before Micky shows up and we have to get all the shit we can out to the public. I've still got your camera, I just need to type up a kickass story, and… you know what would be a huge kick in the teeth to Murkoff?"
An actual kick in the teeth?
"If we posted an interview of you. I mean you already look like shit, and if we suddenly put a face to all the shit on the camera I'm pretty sure that mainstream media would explode with sympathy."
Every organ in my body squirmed from its place as if they were all fighting to tell me not to relive the asylum, as if every tiny fibre of myself was screaming an objection to that interview.
Ignoring what I was telling myself I replied with a simple "fine". After all I'd spend this much time ignoring my better judgement, why stop now?
"Hell ya, Waylon it sounds like you finally getting back into the swing of things. The camera says it has an hour of battery life left, thats long enough for an interview." she nearly bounced out her seat from the sheer force of her eitment. "lets go find a nice backdrop."
Before waiting to hear my reply she began to strut of down the street, like a dog beaten into blind obedience I followed her. She'd been having mood swings extreme enough for me to suspect that the incident back in Salt Lake knocked a few more screws loose than I'd first thought. A quarter of the time she seemed ready to rip my head off then she'd decide to be my best and closest friend. That was assuming of course that she wasn't conning some fool for money, or manically digging through public record for information on Murkoff and the Zeichner facility.
"This looks good enough"
She come to a stop at the threshold of some dingy little alley off an empty street.
"...yep this'll do perfectly, no foot traffic, you can't hear the ocean, no identifying signs, this could be any ally from anywhere in America, now way for Murkoff to tell that we're in California, and less than one car driveway from Zeichner."
She was talking more to herself than anything. I didn't dare respond, for fear that I might accidentally gain her attention and start a conversation of actual meaning.
"Go lean against that wall"
I did.
"No, not like that, pick a leg up"
I lifted a foot off the ground, mildly confused, but otherwise not interested.
"No, not like that, I mean have a foot against the wall, like that stereotypical bad boy pose, or like a cowboy leaning against a post. You know the one, so that one knee is raised slightly."
I obliged her, letting my left foot push against the concrete wall the I was already slumped against.
"There you go, now cross your arms. And stop looking so damn defeated all the time… On second thought act that shit up. If you look like a sad sack the sympathy will start rolling in waves."
No need to adjust for that.
"Ok, so I need you to respond with whatever sounds better. Really sell the story you know? Remember what we talked about in the car back in Salt Lake City? ya, do that."
By what she talked about she means. 'Be a man on a mission to save his family' that's what the idea had been. I wasn't anything but a shattered reflection of that idea now.
Barely sparing a thought towards it I looked to the camera that Chealsy had held in her hand.
"We're recording. Go ahead and introduce yourself,"
"I'm Waylon Park" I could feel my own lack of motivation.
I earned a glare from behind the lense.
"Ok, Mister park, tell us what you've been through"
I couldn't see the abandoned ally anymore. The halls of Mount Massive surrounded me. The halls flooded with blood and viscera, the halls housing nothing but the damned and the damning. In the back of my mind the raving growls of lunatics and the needle like buzz of saws drown out the words coming from my own mouth.
"I've been through hell."
"Yes, as we've all seen from the footage from the camcorder. Now, you used to work for the Murkoff corporation. Why did you take the job, and why did you first decide to blow the whistle on them?"
This is where she wanted the heroics, the bravery. A rebel with a cause routine. This is where she wouldn't get one. "My wife and children… we were on the verge of eviction. There was no hope for us. Then I got a job offer."
I had to stop for a second. The day I'd walked in with that 'merical' letter from the mail had seemed like one of the best in my life. How stupid I'd been! This was my fault, I should have know, I couldn't have know. I had to have… I should have done something. Anything. I…
"I've always heard that hindsight was twenty twenty" I said mostly to myself
"Excuse me, what?" had something in her demeanor changed? She seemed to be looking at me differently.
"Nothing. I… I decided to blow the whistle once I became aware of what they were doing at Mount Massive. I saw… well, impossible things. Unfathomable evil being done in the name of I don't even know what. Every god awful man working there had different reasons, most were just in it to make a buck, but some were… enthusiastic."
"What do you mean by that?"
The morphogenic engines pods sprang to mind, the few experiments I saw first hand blistered in my vision:
'Hey Park, you're needed in procedure room number 379-B'
I went there. I was supposed to be monitoring the system status during a routine procedure. Some patient had a buildup of lead in his body, I hadn't know how that was plausible at the time. A team of surgeons had been called in to remove it. The thing started as usual, then I noticed that they had not anesthetized the patient. That was the first "experiment" I'd seen. They justified that it was something about the lead causing a neurological blockage or some bull shit.
The fact that seeing golf and softball sized clumps of lead being pulled from a screaming mans bleeding intestines had faded into the background was almost as unsettling as the fact of its happening at all.
"What I mean is that people were tortured there, in the name of pseudo-science and profit. Living breathing people whose only crimes were being forgotten by society and their loved ones were cut to ribbons and turned into raving lunatics by people who had promised to be their caregivers and protectors. Mount massive was a psychiatric hospital, people went there expecting to be helped."
Where had that come from? It felt as if that little corner of my brain that wrote my notes to Lisa had come awake again. It was that little sliver that had called Mount Massive a place of 'moral genocide'. That little sliver still remembered that I wanted to stop them.
Chealsy took a shallow sigh, then regained a concerned professionals voice of questioning "You said you had a wife and kids, where are they now?"
I looked back at her. She knew where this was going. She knew what… She. That bitch.
For a second I did nothing but look at the camera. Every ounce of regret and pain a man could possibly hold rushed at me. For good measure a metric ton of guilt crashed over me and a blizzard of paralysis settled over my head. I looked at the camera.
"They are dead."
The look on her face might have been the closest Chealsy ever came to telling someone she was sorry. Though it hardly mattered, as she continued on "How did they… pass on?"
It might have been agner that crawled across my skin, giving me goose bumps and setting my hairs one edge. It could have been regret, guilt, isolation, sadness, fear, grief. It could have been all of them.
"Lisa was shot. By a Murkoff employee. In front of our sons, Connor and Garrett. She died on a concrete floor before I had a chance to tell her goodbye."
Silence heavy enough to crush a man's sternum settled in the alley.
"...and" I continued on "Connor and Garrett were kidnapped and taken to some place just like Mount Massive. They were used in experiments just like the ones i tried to stop."
Chealsy held the camera, not moving, as if she expected me to say more. I wouldn't, I was done with this stupid idea. So done. So…
Something hot and wet streaked down my face. Lifting my right hand I reached up to my face only to find it soaked wet. Pulling my hand into view the I could see unmistakable clear sheen of tears coating my fingers.
I looked back at the camera. When had I started to cry?