Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Lantigua buttoned his coat, looked at the camera, and stated the date, location, and the people in the room. “We are here at Mr. Waters’s request, including one media representative, as he wants to make a brief statement. He has made this decision after full consultation with counsel, though he is proceeding against her advice. I myself have interviewed Mr. Waters at length about this procedure. I reluctantly conclude he is competent to do so, no matter how ill advised.”

He looked around the room, nodded, and said, “As we have all agreed, there will be no questions. Mr. Carter, do you have your recording device?”

Sully took the slender recorder from the inside pocket of his backpack, turned it on, hit the ‘record’ button, and slid it toward the front of the table. “It’s directional,” he said. “It’ll pick up from there just fine.” He pulled out a small notebook and a pen as backup.

Lantigua nodded. “Okay then. Mr. Waters. Proceed.” He walked to the back of the room, standing by the video camera.

George looked up. His shoulders were rounded, the eyes distant. He looked as he had when Sully first walked into his cell earlier in the day.

“I, uh,” and he coughed, bringing his hands to his mouth, covering it while he coughed again. “Thank you all for, ah, coming. This will only take a moment.”

He rolled his neck, audibly popping the vertebrae. When his eyes opened again, they were still muddled, and he looked either down at the table, or up at Sully. He started speaking slowly and picked up speed and volume as he went. Making eye contact, Sully, leaning forward into the edge of the table, looking at the irises, would swear what he saw in them was fear.

“My, um, statement is, like…” He coughed again. Nervous. “My, um, name isn’t Terry Waters. Never has been. It is George Harper. This, uh, as of today, became known to Mr. Carter. I killed Barry Edmonds not for or against any Indian cause. I could give a shit about that stuff. I had petitioned him, about the care of my mother here at St. E’s, before her death here seven years ago. He was, ah, her local representative at the time, the representative of the place where she had come from. And, ah, Edmonds, he, well, I’d say he ignored that. He ignored what I told him. Or tried to tell him. There were letters, lots of letters, with documentation, and I, ah, called-about what was happening here, to patients here. So time went by. I had to figure out a way to arrange my own meeting. My mother, Frances, as Mr. Carter no doubt knows by now, was mutilated by a lobotomy by Dr. Walter Freeman, the patron saint of this shithole, as was my grandmother. My mother spent the last twenty something years of her life here as a… a vegetable. She was sexually assaulted, over and over again, I learned, for sport. On the ward. Orderlies putting their cocks in her mouth. Turning her over and butt-fucking her over the side of the bed. Taking pictures. I visited her as a child, as a teen, as an adult. You, Dr. Lantigua, you ignored me over and over-”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Lantigua cut in, pressing forward, trying to cut him off. “Turn the cam-”

“-and though neither you nor your malignant staff recognized me, doctor-I suppose it has been several years now, and I took the time to gain some weight, you know, a little beard, color my hair-let me say it is so nice to finally be back… home.”

Janice was standing now, Wesley was sitting there, spreading both hands, palm up, in the air, like what the sweet fuck is this, and still, though the atmosphere in the room had changed, although the temperature felt like it had rocketed north, his implacable voice kept talking, still looking at Sully, as if drawing strength from him to continue.

“I was so concerned you would recognize me, Dr. Lantigua! But your incompetence is only matched by your lack of diligence, by the horrific torture chamber you call a hospital. I have been on these grounds three times in the past month, posing as an electrician. In this very building. It was so easy to walk in and out that it was tedious. Even Mr. Carter was able to walk into my room this morning. We had a nice chat.”

Janice whipped her glare over to him now.

“You did what ?”

Ezekiel, the lawyer, was looking from Harper to Sully and back again, Lantigua was still yelling at the man with the camera, “Off! Turn it OFF!” Sully alone was still looking at George, and so he was the only one who saw him make a small movement and reach, with his hands in their plastic cuffs, into the waistband of his pants.

Later, Sully would never be sure which came first, Lantigua’s short, sharp bark of surprise, or the thick heavy boom that shook the building like a strike from a mortar shell. The recorder on the table slid sideways, the overhead light swayed, and a single fleck of paint, loosened by the blast, came fluttering down from the ceiling, until it came to rest, like a bone-white snowflake, at the right edge of the brown table.

“Sweet-” Janice said.

Harper pulled a small black circular remote from the waistband and held it in his palm. “Do you know you can get anything brought inside this place, for almost nothing? That the staff can be paid to do almost anything? That the gas lines in this building are so very old?”

He pointed the remote at them, like it was a weapon. He smiled, almost beatifically now, his gaze still resting on Sully. “But what I have always needed, these years of planning, I only learned recently, to truly make my work known, was my very own… reporter .”

He pressed the button.

The explosion blew the chairs across the room and the people out of them. It rocked the concrete-block walls and collapsed the ceiling. Fire and smoke billowed in the abyss above, advanced in waves down toward them, then retreated before coming forward once again, with more force, hungrily sucking up the oxygen. The overhead light fixtures dropped, shattering, sparking, noise lost in the shock waves. Blackness fell, electric blue light shot through the air.

Sully was thrown back against the wall, then scrambled on all fours back in the direction of the table, but hit the crown of his head on the edge. He went down hard. He covered his head and scrunched his legs under him, trying to present a smaller target. He rolled over a body that was not moving. No idea where George was, his recorder gone; his notebook, history. But even then, over the smoke and reverberating air, over the sound of debris collapsing, over the screams from the front of the room, over the sound of chains moving and the metallic click of the door swinging open into the hall, he could hear Lantigua’s strangled cry: “Get him, goddammit!”

GLOOM AND MOANScame from outside the door. The sputtering of dying light fixtures. Flames. Figures staggering down the hallway.

Then the door swung back shut and everything went black. The totality of it swept over Sully, leaving him grasping to the left and right, trying to get his bearings. The collapsed overhead fixture flared again. His eyes began to adjust. The exposed hole in the ceiling was giving off a faint orange glow, flames licking in the distance.

Debris, from the air vents above the room, shards of jagged iron pipe. Behind him, the camera was overturned, on its side, the red “recording” light still on and the man beside it, on his back, his head gashed open above the forehead. He didn’t move and Sully crawled toward him until he could make out the deep cut in his neck, the real bleeder, shrapnel, some piece of flying metal taking him out. Then he stopped crawling that way. Ezekiel lay against the far wall, facedown. Jamal, he could see now, was lying on the floor in the rear of the room, not moving.