The Minus Faction, Episode One: Breakout (2 page)

"Back at the VA. He's got a wife workin' two jobs and kid on the way. But he's not gonna get help when he's hiding inside your pills. So that means you're gonna stop selling to him."

The young man raised his watering eyes to John. He glowered. He didn't like being given orders. He wasn't used to it. He wasn't a soldier.

"I don't care what else you do. I don't care whose life you fuck to make bank. But you and all your buddies are gonna stop selling to him. You're gonna spread the word. Corporal Gonzales is off limits to you and everyone else. Do you understand?"

The kid nodded, but he didn't mean it.

John moved the gun and shot the sleaze in the knee. Point blank. The bullet ran clean through baggy jeans and flesh and impacted the hardwood with a crack, throwing up little splinters.

The kid joined the baby in an alternating duet. He grabbed his leg with his good hand and rocked back and forth again, yelling and cursing at the top of his lungs.

John put the barrel to the young man's head again. "See? Hurts less than the first one, right?"

Baggy Pants's chest shook in tiny convulsions. He didn't know the tricks. He was going into shock. He didn't have long. But there were sirens in the distance. They were never far. Not in this neighborhood.

John pressed the gun barrel hard to the young man's temple. "Convince me, asshole."

"I'll stop! Fuck, you crazy muthafucker! Fuck! I'll stop. He's off limits, man." His voice heaved. "I'll tell everybody. He ain't fuckin' worth it."

John nodded. He looked at all the gold hanging from the kid's chest, like a nineteenth century admiral's, studded in medallions. John looked at the tattoo. That was his insignia, like the US Army star. Regent pressed the barrel of the gun to it. "You think you're some kind of soldier, huh? Street war or something? If I have to come back here, I'll show you what war is
really
like. Am I clear?"

The kid nodded in pain.

"Say it."

"I got it, man! Fuck . . ." His voice was broken.

John looked at the other two. They didn't move. The mother—she was cute; must be somebody's girlfriend—clutched the baby's face to her chest and looked at the floor.

Regent stood. "What are you doing? Bringing
a baby
to a place like this." He motioned to the table full of drugs.

She was silent. Her eyes stayed down. She rocked back and forth.

"GO." John pointed to the door with the gun.

The young woman stood, still with her eyes on the floor, and scurried out of the room clutching her crying child.

John shook his head and followed her with a hobble. "Jeff's" leg was soaked red, and Regent stumbled down the stairs and out the back as he rubbed the gun clean of prints. He dropped it with the sunglasses and fake mustache into a storm drain and walked onto the street as the police and ambulances arrived. People watched from behind narrow pines and old two-story apartment buildings. John lay down on the sidewalk and felt the sun on his face. He slowed his breathing. "Jeff" wasn't in the best shape. He'd lost a lot of blood.

When the medics leaned over him, John said he didn't know who he was or how he'd gotten there. And when it was clear they had everything in hand and "Jeff" was going to live, Captain John Regent took a deep breath and left the man wounded on the field.

T Minus: 052 Days 17 Hours 09 Minutes 22 Seconds

That wasn't how it was supposed to go.

Regent took a gasping breath. He was always groggy after coming back, and he shook his head to clear the fog.

And then he felt it. He could almost hear it. Like a skin-shriek, an agony-wail from his skull to his shins.

Pain.

Every time he hitched, he could almost forget.

Almost.

He bit down hard. It hurt.

He was back in the hospital. The lights in his room were off. When he left, he had been in the hall outside "Jeff's" room. Someone must have thought he was asleep and wheeled him back. The shades were drawn. Sunlight peered in from a crack in the curtains and made a long triangle on the floor. Monitors blinked in faint colors. Everything else was gray: the bare narrow walls; the wheeled bed, part stretcher, part cage; the closed drawers full of plastics and cotton; the empty closet; the mirror on the back of the extra-wide bathroom door. And then the familiar smell, like bleached sickness.

John looked at his reflection. He was a wreck. He wasn't human. Not anymore. He was the shattered remains of a once-potent man, a soldier. But that man was gone, replaced by something else. The taut-skinned burns that covered a third of his body, including half his head, didn't just give him a slight speech impediment and pull his limbs into odd gestures when he slept. They gnawed. They stabbed. They writhed. They gave him phantom limbs he'd never had. Inhuman limbs. Grasping, angular, insect-like appendages that came and went and were never the same again.

He looked down at his left hand, shriveled from the burns and atrophied from the nerve damage. The skin looked like demon flesh, mottled and stretched, lighter than the rest.

It was eating him alive. Or that's how it seemed.

John reached for the bracing bar that hung from the ceiling and pulled his six-foot-two frame out of his chair with one bulging arm. He crawled into the long, white bed with a grunt, dragging limp, near-lifeless legs.

He had been left-handed. Before. Now it was his right or nothing. In fact, his right arm was just about the only thing in his body that worked the way it was supposed to. It fed him. It operated his motorized chair. It dressed him. It flipped the cap to the morphine button up and down. Up and down.

John laid his head on the starched white pillows and tried to sleep. Hitching wore him out. Wrangling the heavy bull of the subconscious required a strong grip, an all-consuming concentration. He had to be close to hitch, had to be able to reach out for it. And if he lost it, he'd slip away and leave a body unconscious in the street. There was no way back.

A tingle of pain, like a massage ball covered in razor wire, rolled across John's chest up to his neck. He shivered and tossed in the bed.

His doctors urged him to use the pain killers. He could have as much as he wanted, they said. But when he took enough drugs to do any good, they blunted his mind, made it just like the rest of his body. He couldn't focus, couldn't meditate, couldn't hitch. Medication made him helpless, trapped him in a hazy prison where pain poked through the fog like a wandering searchlight and half-forgotten memories of caves and torture bubbled up from the ground.

It was the same place that Gabe was hiding. You can't stay there. No one can.

An hour after his return, John had done little more than doze, snatched from sleep each time by tooth-clenching pain. His burnt skin crawled like it was trying to get off him.

Noises echoed from down the hall. Doctors and nurses argued about the strange return of a coma patient no one had known was missing. Apparently the man had been shot. Apparently he'd busted a drug house. Saved a baby. Or some shit.

Somebody used the word "hero."

Regent snorted. Heroes don't take other people for a joyride. They don't implicate them in an assault. They don't almost get them killed.

As he lay listening to faint echoes of increasingly fanciful tales, John's conviction only grew. He couldn't stay.

He didn't know what "Jeff's" real name was. He didn't want to. He didn't want to think about how he'd just changed the man's life forever.

Regent gritted his teeth under a wave of needle-jabs. It triggered an involuntary sneer. He took a deep breath and sat up.

There was no getting around it. He had to leave. But the only place John could go was the last place in the world he wanted to be. He'd almost rather be dead. He looked down at his clenched, atrophied left hand.

Almost.

John liked to think he wasn't afraid of anything, but it wasn't always true. He had made the call that morning. It was a condition of the deal he made with himself. He could have one more trip. One more hitch. If he called
first
.

Happy to have him at the house, his dad had said. Of course he could stay. As long as he wanted. They'd pick him up Monday. Be there around 2:00.

After that, what little freedom John had left would disappear under his stepmother's burning gaze.

There was a soft knock on the door. Nurse Brand poked his head through the gap and saw Regent was awake.

"I hear you were looking for me."

John grabbed the bracing bar and pulled himself up as a ruckus erupted from the nurse's station at the end of the hall. "What's going on out there?"

"News crew." Ethan Brand stepped into the room. He was thin with neat blond hair laced in barely noticeable gray. His face narrowed at the chin, and he had a gathering set of crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes. His fingernails were manicured. He wore dark blue scrubs.

"News?" Regent did his best to feign ignorance.

Ethan walked across the room to check the morphine drip hanging from the back of John's chair. Unused. Pulled out. The needle trailed the chair like a tail. Ethan wasn't surprised. "You didn't hear? There was big a commotion today."

"I made the call." John wanted to change the subject.

"Time to take your stats." So did Ethan. He turned to open the shades.

"Already?"

The nurse stood by the window as light poured in. "I suppose that means you want me to put in a discharge request."

John nodded and squinted from the sun.

Ethan stepped to the wall near the bed and removed the blood pressure cuff from its holster. He wrapped it around John's good arm. "I wish you would stay."

"It's time." John had been at the hospital for months. It was the only place he'd been since his return.

Ethan held Regent's hand as the cuff inflated. It wasn't necessary, but the nurse held it firm.

John nodded. He was going to miss his friend. He thought he better say that. Out loud. He liked to think he wasn't afraid of anything, but it wasn't always true.

"I'll miss you guys."

The pair had met John's first day at the hospital. That was five months ago. John was mean back then, but Ethan met the anger with compassion. Everyone always wanted to rush in. They were just trying to be nice, helpful, and it pissed John off. He'd been hurt plenty of times. He knew how to handle it. If he needed help, he'd fucking ask.

But Ethan was different. He let John try things first. After his shifts were over, Ethan would often stay and listen with the other patients as John told stories from his missions overseas.

John realized he might not see his friend again. He didn't know Ethan's schedule. That meant it was now or never. "Can I ask you something?"

"You can ask me anything." Ethan ripped the Velcro and replaced the cuff on the wall.

"Why here?"

"What do you mean?" Ethan reached down to check John's colostomy bag. It was a testament to the men's trust that he didn't need to ask.

John lifted his shirt and leaned out of the way. "I mean, why soldiers? You're good. You could work lots of places. Why here?"

It was a special hospital, a joint program between the Veteran's Administration and the U.S. Department of Health, a halfway house for returning soldiers with major trauma or a home for anyone having real difficulty adjusting to civilian life. There were sister complexes, equally new and high-tech, in St. Louis and Sacramento. Attendance was voluntary, but for some strongly encouraged.

"Ohhh . . ." Ethan nodded. "So it's my turn to tell a story?"

John shrugged with his good arm as his nurse checked his pulse. "Don't wanna pry."

"No, it's okay." Ethan walked around the bed to the wall-mounted computer near the door. He touched it and the screen lit up. "When I was a kid—twelve I think—I got beat up by some neighbor boys for carrying dolls."

"Carrying?"

"I was bringing them to my sisters. From a family friend's house. I think I was looking at them or whatever, probably imagining too. I suppose that counts as playing. But I didn't think of it that way. I didn't like dolls any more than the other boys. I played video games. Soccer. I just didn't think dolls had cooties." He entered John's stats into the machine with taps of his finger.