FIC: The Open Way's Too Dangerous 1/?
MASTERPOST
Waking up mid-air, that's how it feels. Bright spots in his eyes like he's been staring into the sun, clouds all around and panic like a sucking chest wound. No goddamn idea how he got there or when he'll hit the ground.
He blinks, flailing around a little bit, and that helps him figure out that, okay, he's on the ground, really fucking excellent to know. He's standing with his feet shoulder-width apart and one arm flung out for balance. The fingers of his other hand are twisted up in something.
The cloud part, though, that's real. The mist or steam or roving fog bank or whatever starts to drift apart, and he forces that panic back. Sucks the air in deep and blows it out slow, inhale exhale repeat, breathing is good.
Sit-rep, some vague part of him murmurs, thoughts muffled and sluggish like they're buried under the many nebulous layers of a years-long coma. It makes sense, anyway, so he tries to focus on the sights and pick out sounds that aren't the spastic beat of his own pulse.
He's in some kind of open-air marketplace that looks (and smells) like it was thrown together by vagrants: big, crumpled tin roof sitting atop flimsy supports with no walls, the whole place illuminated by trashcan fires and dim lightbulbs that hang from the ceiling in tangles of exposed wire. There are cluttered sales tables surrounded by clusters of unwashed, ragged people, all of them wide-eyed, open-mouthed and cringing away, as though they'd been haggling quite happily until he appeared out of thin air to interrupt them. Or-
The thing in his fist is the back of a suit jacket. The jacket is occupied by a shorter, really pissed-off guy. The guy, in turn, is locked up in a complicated embrace with a dark-haired woman dressed in all skin-hugging black, like maybe they'd been fighting or making out pretty aggressively just a second ago, and maybe he came up to punch the guy for messing with his girl before he got all disoriented, because she's smoking hot and he really thinks he deserves a hot girlfriend after all he's been through in the last six seconds, and so obviously these people aren't gawking because he's a wizard, but because the three of them are making a scene.
Whatever's going on, he's certain, at least, of this one thing: the past is gone. There's right now and what next but no clear sense of before.
The hot chick reacts first, shoving off of the other guy with a scowl that's trying too hard to cover for the total freak-out the whites of her eyes are giving away. “What the hell is your problem?”
“My problem? I don't even know who the fuck you are,” the guy in the suit says, twisting to free his jacket and smoothing out the wrinkles, squinty-eyed and suspicious and still really angry. Looks like it might be a default setting, actually, all these permanently unhappy lines carved into his face.
“You were attacking me.” The hot chick shifts her stance like she's gearing up for round two, but she keeps a safe distance. “Common courtesy says you should either talk first or go screw yourself.”
“You and pretty boy here were coming at me from two sides! I'm pretty sure that means I was the one under attack.”
“I don't know who was attacking who, or why, because I don't know either of you,” he (who is allegedly pretty) offers kind of breathlessly because, judging from the hostility pouring off both of them, this seems like it could go on a while, and he would very much appreciate a lifeline or something here. “I also don't know me, so if you two could stop bickering and help with that before I flip right the fuck out, that'd be awesome.”
They stop arguing long enough to look him up and down. Then they do the same to each other, taking in details, and he feels his stomach trying to do somersaults up his throat again because there's no recognition at all in their eyes.
“I don't know me, either,” the hot chick admits after a minute, voice a little strained.
The angry guy lets up on the glowering. “Same here,” he says, and glances around, as if just now noticing they've got an audience.
The people around them are shifting and murmuring, slowly getting back to business as usual now that the drama is over. More notably, some of them have started cleaning up smashed remnants of tables and merchandise. Others try to repair a wooden support that looks to have been snapped clean in half. No one seems bothered enough to complain about the mess, though, shuffling around with the resignation of people used to living on a fault line or in the paths of hurricanes.
He looks back at his fellow amnesiacs and notices the angry guy scanning the ground. It's littered with shards of glass and the remnants of shattered knick-knacks. There's also a crushed cell phone and a messenger bag at his feet. The angry guy starts patting at his pockets.
“Oh, hey, yeah,” he says, getting that the angry guy's looking for ID, but as soon as he starts to do the same, someone shouts, “Oi! Wanker!” and then there's another of those tumbling slip-slides in his head like reality hasn't quite finished rearranging itself and his brain is clamoring to keep up.
The three of them look up to see a group of cyborgs (motherfucking cyborgs, no lie; it's the only descriptor that makes sense for people with robotic limbs and huge chunks of metal punching through their skin) crowding in through one of the exits and pointing a whole lot of guns at them. Another quick scan of their surroundings reveals three more groups moving to block off the other escape routes.
“Who-“ the angry guy starts to say, but he doesn't get to finish because they start shooting, no explanation or care for who might get caught in the crossfire, and it's time to run.
There's no time to stop and discuss it between all the cursing and bullet-dodging and throwing of things. No time to say, Hey, so maybe since we're all really goddamn confused and the world is looking kind of crazy from here, we should stick together until we figure out what the shit is going on? All in favor say aye! No time and no need, really, because not only does it seem like common sense to keep track of those few but essential clues to this really whacked mystery, it's automatic-instant attachment born of a shared crisis.
It turns out they're all really fast, or the cyborgs are all really slow. Either way, they manage to slip through a crack in the blockade without catching any extra holes, racing six-and-a-half blocks before ducking into a dirty alleyway behind a pawn shop. It's packed with tarp-and-cardboard hovels and trash just everywhere, but luckily there doesn't seem to be anyone home. Or at least there's no one willing to come out of hiding to bother them.
Not one of them is out of breath, he notes, which means they must be in insanely excellent shape. Maybe they all go to the same gym.
“What the fuck were those?” the angry guy asks, back pressed tight against the brickwork as he pokes his head around the corner to make sure they're clear.
The hot chick opens her mouth to say something, snaps it shut and flinches when this wobbly humming sound approaches from somewhere up above. “Better question,” she hisses, looking up. “What is that?”
It's a flying saucer, is what it is. A miniature spaceship robot thing with its gleaming camera-lens eyes tilting back and forth, buzzing slowly through night to stalk the humans and feed on their innards. Or something. Whatever it is, it has his heart doing this unpleasant, lurching thing in his chest and he instantly doesn't like it or want it anywhere near him.
When it fails to notice them, drifting kind of clumsily over the rim of another building, they let out a collective sigh of relief.
“Okay, so we're in the slums,” he feels compelled to point out after being subjected to stunned silence for far too long. “And there are flying machines and machine people who want to kill us and, uh, possibly memory-stealing gas clouds. I think these are what you'd call clues.”
“Thank fuck we have you here to help us solve the mystery,” the angry guy mutters, lip curling up.
“I'm sorry, are you helping?” he snaps, not in the best mental place to deal with criticism and besides, it feels so natural-almost comforting-to run off at the mouth and press someone else's buttons. “I don't see you helping, so until you have something useful to offer, how about you bite me.”
The angry guy gives him a once-over that has him wishing he could take that last part back, a cold but somehow appreciative quirk to his mouth that says he might actually be considering it. The biting thing, not the part about being useful. Shit, and okay, so he's not exactly inflexible himself, because that look is disturbing and slightly serial-killer-ish, yes, but also maybe kinda hot, and that gets him wondering just what he looks like, anyway. If he's anywhere near as attractive as these two, it might take the edge off all this trauma. Just a little.
“No, wait,” the hot chick says, biting her very biteable-looking lip, and gestures at the messy alleyway. “He's got a point. We're in the slums, but I think,” her eyebrows crinkle, “I think everywhere is the slums?”
“What's that got to do with anything?” the angry guy asks, but he thinks he understands what she's getting at.
“Right, like. Like the whole city's a dump because … ” he trails off, thinking hard.
“Because,” the hot chick drawls, pushing for the blank fill itself in, and sighs. “Yeah, I've got nothing.”
The angry guy snaps his fingers. “The dump we're in is Seattle.”
“And it's 2021,” adds the hot chick, and then they're onto something, detailing all the little things they seem to actually remember, like basic geography and what the internet is and that Jaws 19 still holds the title for worst movie of all time. They just can't remember many present-day specifics. None of the other civilians really seemed surprised or all that bothered by the arrival of cyborgs, now that they're thinking about it, and those guys clearly knew one or all three of them well enough to hold a grudge (and maybe they all had some pretty colorful things to say to him, especially). The spaceship contraption wasn't exactly inconspicuous, either, and so far no one has screamed about alien invasions or anything.
“So we're missing a few common knowledge type details,” he concludes. “And pretty much all personal details. Which tells us … ” He looks at the hot chick again. “What does that tell us?”
The hot chick, who's carrying a small backpack, swings it off her shoulders and sets it down to rifle through it. “It tells us more than we knew before,” she says, and he and the angry guy take that as their cue to resume trying to identify themselves.
It's not entirely reassuring, the things he discovers. He's dressed dark, just like the hot chick, though not quite as skintight: black cargoes and a dark denim jacket over a t-shirt. He frowns at the wads of cash, baggies of pills and prescription bottles he keeps finding in his pockets. Frowns harder at the 9mm handgun in his jacket, a quick check telling him that it's fully loaded, and then gets his hopes up a little when he finds a wallet and a cell phone. There's more cash in the wallet, a somewhat excessive number of condoms, random bits of paper with phone numbers scrawled on them, a stick of gum, a couple paperclips, dental floss, matchbooks from an array of bars and motels, but no ID. The messenger bag he managed to grab in the midst of the chaos is filled with more pill bottles of all shapes and sizes.
Left with a widening pit in his belly, he waffles a minute before finally deciding to call 911. It doesn't make sense, he doesn't understand anything, and he has to work toward something constructive; or at least the illusion of it. 911 might still be a sensible thing in this nonsensical world, and gun-toting maniacs take priority; he figures he can ditch all this incriminating stuff before the law gets here.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Uh,” he says, and tries to explain that he doesn't know who he is or where he is and that robots are shooting at him, voice going thin and high with anxiety when he realizes that yes, these words are actually coming out of his mouth, and no, they don't sound any less crazy out loud, and damn it, maybe he should have rehearsed this beforehand.
A beat or two of silence, and then the operator explains in a bored monotone that this line is for emergencies only, not his personal entertainment when he's high as a kite, and if he calls again she'll send the cops after him.
“Yes! Good, cops!” he says, desperately trying to salvage the conversation. “Please send some of those!”
She hangs up.
He shrugs at the other two when they look at him expectantly. “I probably would've hung up on me , too,” he admits shakily, glancing over at the hot chick to see what she's come up with.
It's less reassuring.
Spread on the ground around her, so far, is a grappling hook, a whole lot of bungee cord, a set of lock picks and some kind of spring-action steel baton that looks like it could do some serious damage. And she's still got more in there.
“I'm an FBI agent,” the angry guy says, flipping through his wallet. “Ames White. Also, NSA and, uh, CIA,” he trails off, muttering mostly to himself, “Maybe I shouldn't've mentioned that last one.”
“I think I might be a ninja,” the hot chick says, slow.
“So which of you wins in a fight against cyborgs with spikes in their faces?” the possibly-a-criminal asks. “'Cause all my clues are coming up drug dealer, and somehow I don't think that's gonna help.” He nearly chokes on his own tongue when the whole FBI thing clicks, and he tries to backtrack. “Uh, I mean, I'm a totally licensed and legitimate pharmacist who keeps samples on him for emergencies. Obviously.”
The agent, Ames, does that angry squinting thing again. “Right, because my first priority right now is to arrest a fucking street pusher.”
“Good point.”
“Oh, hey, here's something. It's an employee ID from something called Jam Pony.” The hot chick twists her face up at the laminated cards she's found in her pants. Oh, to be those cards, he thinks, and shakes himself. Focus. “Max Guevera. And, um. A sector pass? Two sector passes,” she corrects.
“Sector of what? And why do you need a pass for it?” Ames asks.
Max shrugs and pulls a small packet of folded papers from another compartment of her bag, studying them. “Hell if I know. You're every law enforcement agent ever, so you tell me.”
Ames looks like whatever's going to come out of his mouth next will be something that requires a violent rebuttal, and Max kind of strikes him as the low-blow type, so he-he's going to call himself Joe until he finds out otherwise, because this is getting annoying and he never claimed to be creative ... he doesn't think. Anyway, Joe scrolls through his contact list and declares loudly, “You're in my phone,” before Ames can say something to get himself kicked in the jewels.
Max startles when Joe dials the number and one of her vest pockets starts beeping. She pulls out a pager. “I guess we know each other.”
“Looks like,” he says, disappointment biting at his gut. A pager isn't going to tell him what his name is, but maybe … “I need to find a payphone.”
“You've got a goddamn phone right there in your hand,” says Ames, sounding jealous, and Joe remembers the crushed cell phone at the marketplace.
“I'm aware,” Joe drawls, “but it doesn't have any identifying information on it, and I obviously don't remember my own password, so I'm gonna call it from a payphone and see what the voicemail greeting tells me. Doesn't seem like the greatest idea to just start dialing random contacts asking them who I am, y'know?”
“Guess you're not as dumb as you look.”
“Payphone's a good place to start.” Still distracted with her papers, Max carefully packs everything else back into her bag and stands up, handling it a little more gingerly than before as she shrugs it back on. Joe sincerely hopes there are no explosives in there. “But maybe we should also be thinking in terms of hospitals and police. I mean, I don't know much, but I know I don't wanna get shot, and I don't think memory loss is supposed to be a group experience. Add secret agent man to the mix,” she hikes a thumb at Ames, “and these … mad science blueprints or whatever,” her eyes go back to the packet, flipping to the next page, “and this seems like it might be way over our heads.”
“Blueprints?” Ames snatches said blueprints out of her hand, the rude ass. He whistles low. “Fuck me.”
“What is it?” asks Joe.
“Plans for some kind of … prototype? On DOD letterhead,” Ames emphasizes, brow furrowed and his eyes screwed tight in annoyance. “My guess is it's a weapon, except for how it looks so illogically put together my eyes hurt just trying pick it apart. Whoever wrote these notes should be stabbed in the goddamn face.”
“Department of Defense?” Joe peers over his shoulder. He catches a glimpse of photocopied, sloppy sketches of something vaguely spherical on the outside and mind-numbingly complicated on the inside, and handwritten notations that don't at all resemble letters of the alphabet. Max and Ames are both right. It's either some kind of code or the highly illegible scribblings of a lunatic. “Anyone else starting to think this is all a little too conspiracy theory?” he asks, mind whirling. “Maybe the cops are a bad idea.”
“Maybe,” says Ames. “But it's our best hope of getting in touch with whoever I answer to. They'll probably know what's going on.”
“Or you're Jason Bourne and they want to kill you,” Joe counters.
Ames starts to bare his teeth again, something caustic on the tip of his tongue, no doubt, but then he tilts his head, eyes flitting back to the DOD seal, over to Max and her Catwoman chic, back to Joe and his admittedly suspicious-as-fuck portable pharmacy. Factor in the cyborgs and their compromised recall, and- “Fair enough,” Ames concedes.
Before either of them can get very far in deciphering the blueprints, Max steals the packet back, completely unfazed by Ames's black look. She's gone a little pale. “We need to go. Now.”
Instantly alert, Joe hears it too: footsteps and hushed voices closing in on their position, fast. He spots a fire escape further down the alley. “Up, up and away?” he suggests, reluctantly scooping up his messenger bag in case it's important somehow, and they nod, following his lead.
Up on the rooftop, Ames says, “I have keys. So I probably have a car somewhere.”
“Good idea,” whispers Max, sarcasm drenching her every word as she follows Joe at a low half-crawl to keep from being sighted from the ground. “Let's waltz right back into robot gangland. I'm sure if you ask real nicely they'll cease fire long enough for us find our getaway car.”
“Why don't we go back to the hospital idea?” Joe says, eager to have a solid course of action. “Try for an obvious solution to our memory problem first. We might have better luck getting them to believe us in person, and if nothing else, it's a place to hide for a while. Hopefully a place with a lot of witnesses. We can figure out our next move from there.”
“They don't seem to care much about witnesses,” Max points out, and Joe shrugs.
“I'm open to better suggestions.”
No one offers any, and Ames grunts when they reach the other side of the roof, fiddling with his sidearm like he's checking to see that his hands remember how to work it. The clip slides back into place with a resounding snick. “Anyone else armed?”
Max twirls her baton experimentally, visibly surprised at her own adeptness in handling it. Joe hesitates a few seconds, then tugs the flap of his jacket open to reveal his own gun.
Satisfied, Ames waves a hand at Joe's phone and peers over the side of the building. “That thing got GPS? 'Cause if not, we're gonna need to find a map.”
Joe checks his phone and finds that it does, indeed, have GPS. He keys in a search for the nearest hospital.
His GPS map drops them a clue on the sector situation. The whole city is divided up and numbered, red dots glaring like angry little eyes to indicate checkpoints. Unfortunately, they don't get much on the reason for it, Joe's cell signal going into epileptic fits as they rise and fall between alleys and rooftops, limiting his internet access. It doesn't improve once they feel safe enough to stay at street-level, and it's a little maddening, to say the least, all these scraps of information with no context.
The closest hospital is fifteen miles and and two checkpoints away. Their lack of wheels makes this problematic. There's a free clinic a few blocks over, though, so they're heading there.
The night air is cool and brisk, moon like an old coin stuck up in the sky. The distant gunshots that have them jumping halfway out of their skin also go a long way toward explaining why there aren't many people out on the streets right now. The few they do run into give them sideways, distrustful looks. After a while, Joe starts to catch onto the fact that most of them are directed at Ames.
“Maybe you should think about ditching the jacket and tie,” he says, as they're passing a group of men loitering in front of an apartment complex who appear more likely to act on their disapproval than others.
Ames sneers, more at the world in general than at Joe, and that is apparently as far as that conversation's going.
“Okay, then.” Joe throws a subtle glance over his shoulder, swallowing hard and picking up his pace when he sees the men are no longer leaning against the wall. They're trickling out onto the street in a loose knot, looking very much like they have something violent to get off their chests. “Hey, I know, let's go faster,” Joe says, trying to make it sound like a cheerful suggestion for a fun game they could play.
Max and Ames stop and look back.
Ames's eyes go thin and cold. He pulls out his gun and pins them in its sight. “Do not fucking test me.”
The men throw their hands up-hey, man, we weren't doing nothin'-and go back to holding up the building.
Ames re-holsters his gun and stalks ahead to take the lead, leaving Max and Joe to hang back and stare at each other.
Against their better judgment, they trail after him. They walk the rest of the way with their eyes sharp and their mouths shut, sticking close to walls and cars and anything that can provide quick cover without much thought.
The clinic is a squat little postage stamp of a building covered in graffiti and rusting burglar bars. The inside isn't much better, and Joe is appalled that it could ever pass any kind of inspection because this? Is grossly unsanitary.
The whole place reeks of sweat and piss. Garbage is collected along the baseboards, walls water-damaged and pocked with rat-sized holes. The ceiling is missing huge rectangles where some of the lights should be, leaving the room a dim gray that Joe supposes is appropriate for a cesspool of despair. It's quiet in the waiting area, but the blood spattering the floors suggests it hasn't been that way all night, and he twitches kind of helplessly. He knows in his guts that there should be more order here, clutter frowned upon and any second now some unknowable higher-up is going to swoop down and ground him for it, held responsible simply for his sheer proximity to the mess.
A hard-faced but reasonably attractive receptionist eyeballs them from behind the chain-link cage around her desk as though she's prepared to pull out a shotgun at the first wrong move.
Joe takes a breath and lets it go. He forces himself to smile, palms out. “We come in peace?”
Her lips remain pursed but she pulls out a clipboard instead of a weapon. She slaps it on the counter. “Unless you're dying in the next five minutes, sit down and fill these out.” She narrows her eyes at Ames, who's watching her with open disdain, and adds a bit more steel to her tone when she says, “And don't get up until I call you.”
“Not even to go to the bathroom?” Max says, voice all falsely sweet.
Joe raises his eyebrows when the lady switches back to shotgun-mode. “What are you, five?” he hisses, poking Max in the back before he walks up to collect the clipboard. He requests two more in as polite a tone as he can manage, and gets summarily shot down when asking to use the phone.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do with these?” Ames demands when Joe hands out the paperwork.
Joe sighs and very carefully perches himself on the edge of a chair. “Try to make the nice lady happy and maybe you'll get a lollipop.”
Snarling a little, Ames throws the clipboard down and goes to challenge the receptionist. Max intercepts him, calmly and carefully reminding him that, until they have a better idea of what's going on, maybe he should keep his badges in his pants and maintain a low profile. Persuaded, but not at all pleased about it, he goes to stand at the window instead, keeping an eye out.
Ames has a point, though. There's not much they can fill out except the first name, last name and reason for visit sections, and in Joe's case not even the first two apply. It makes for a shitty way to pass the time. A little more boredom, a little more realization that they have no pens with which to fill out these stupid forms even if they wanted to, a little more buttering up of the receptionist, and he finds out that there's only one doctor on duty this late, and she's got her hands full with a pair of shooting victims. He tries explaining their predicament-sans the crazier-sounding parts-to garner the tiniest scrap of sympathy, but the receptionist is unmoved.
“You do any drugs recently?” she asks, tapping a pen against the desk. Her expression says she's heard it all and she doesn't entirely believe him, but she'll indulge him for about half a second to see where it goes, anyway. “Hit your head really hard?”
Joe huffs out a laugh, rubbing at his temples. “How would I know that? I mean, I don't feel stoned or anything, and, aside from the headache I'm starting to get from talking to you, my head doesn't hurt.”
She doesn't seem bothered by the insult. Just looks him up and down one more time, slow and careful, then shrugs in dismissal. “Your injury's not life-threatening,” she says in a tone indicative of a line well-used. “You'll have to wait until we finish dealing with the ones that are.”
“Great, thanks.” He feels the muscles in his face tighten up, scowling. “Don't suppose I could borrow a pen?”
That, at least, gets him somewhere. Finally. He takes his pen and goes to sit back down, filling out what he can and then flipping the admission forms over so he can doodle on the back. He is a terrible artist, come to find out, which he guesses he can sort of count as new information about himself.
Now that some of the urgency has passed, the discomfort of being strangers to themselves and to each other starts to sink in a little more. It feels very much like what it is: three random people off the street waiting at the doctor's office, coincidentally suffering the same affliction but with no other known traits in common. Idle conversation seems like an impossible hurdle. Tension becomes a huge, lung-crushing presence as they wait.
Max is staring at her papers again, vibrating impatience. Ames's hostility is about as subtle as rampaging rhinoceros. Joe's phone is still stubbornly giving him only one bar, and he wonders why the hell he settled for a company whose cell towers are such a goddamn joke.
He inspects his matchbooks, waiting for something about the business names or addresses to kick a hole through all these walls in his head. Subtly checks his bag again, a closer look revealing that everything in it seems mostly harmless-painkillers, antibiotics, caffeine pills, vitamin supplements-if the labels can be trusted at all. Stares at his hands for a while: long fingers and callused palms and an impressively strong grip but his knuckles clean and unscarred-like someone who knows hard work but not like someone who gets into messy brawls very often. Gives in and tries some of his phone's contacts.
It's tricky, trying not to give too much away when the people who do bother to pick up call him variants of stud or dude or jackass, asking when he's going to come over for another round of kinky sex, challenging him to a pool rematch, or demanding to know where he is so they can come break his legs for failing to pay a debt. None if it is altogether helpful and he's back to feeling like a criminal, wondering if sticking with Ames is a good idea, after all. Obvious lawman reasons aside, the guy just sorta rubs him the wrong way, all his superior air and increasingly aggressive tendencies. But, when it comes down to it, Joe is lost, and Ames is a small, really annoying but probably crucial piece of his shattered compass.
Joe sighs, head too empty and too active at the same time, and thinking, he quickly determines, gets real frustrating, real fast when a sizable chunk of his brain is spitting out a hundred 'error' and 'access denied' warnings and refuses to give him any password hints. And if part of his brain is like a heavily protected harddrive, then too much silence is like trying to unlock it by stuffing it full of live wires: all smoking, unmanageable chaos.
Silence is dangerous. Silence needs to be banished.
“A nose walks into a bar and asks for a drink,” Joe blurts out, knee bouncing up and down and his fingers anxiously fluttering against the arms of the beat-up plastic chair. “The bartender says, 'Sorry, I can't serve you. You're already off your face.'”
Ames turns and glares.
Max rolls her eyes at him. “Seriously?”
“No.” Joe licks his lips, and he doesn't miss the way both Max and Ames watch him do it. He smirks. “That is not based on a true story.”
“Dumbass,” Max mutters, but her mouth hooks up at one corner and the tension in the room has slowly begun to deflate.
“Wanna hear another one?”
“Whatever,” Max says.
“Shut the fuck up,” Ames says.
“Okay,” Joe says. “A man walks into a bar and orders three beers … “
“Maybe there was a robot apocalypse and machines have taken over the world,” Max offers with a shrug, slumping so far down in her seat she's practically laying on the floor.
“Oh,” Joe says, eagerly latching onto this latest theory in their new game of Guess The Really Lame Movie Plot We're Stuck In. “So, they wanna kill us, or cram us full of robot parts and turn us into their slaves like those cyborgs?” He lowers his voice and points at the receptionist. “Maybe that's what's up with her, too, except her disguise is better.”
Ames makes a loud, grunting noise like he might be choking on something, and finally deigns to turn around and acknowledge them again. “That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.”
Max has gone from participating out of sheer boredom to outright grinning. Looks like Joe's not the only one who gets a kick out of pushing people's buttons. There's just something so perversely satisfying about antagonizing Ames, in particular.
“Hey, if you've got any brilliant theories, we're all ears, buddy,” Max says.
“First of all, robots are robotic. Practical, emotionless, analytical-smart. Those guys? Were dumbshits,” Ames says, like he has so much experience interacting with robots to draw on. “Dumbshit freaks who break the law. I was probably there to bust them.” He doesn't sound as sure about that last part as he seems to want to.
“Great,” Joe says. “You go ahead and bust away, then. We'll wait here.” He gives him an encouraging thumbs-up.
To his surprise, Ames doesn't sneer or growl or squint at him. Not right away. He pins him with a long, considering and slightly pained look, as if getting ready to divulge state secrets. Joe stiffens, pulse skipping and his head whirling with uncertain suspicion.
Ames frowns and clears his throat. “Speaking of dumbshits,” he says. “You know you could've probably answered half your own questions by now if you'd pulled your heads out of your asses and used that cell phone for something other than word games.”
“The signal's still too weak for Googling,” Joe defends. “And that's not what you were going to say. You were-“ His mouth has gone dry. “You know something.”
He hears more than sees Max straightening up beside him, Joe's eyes locked on Ames for fear of missing another telltale clue. “What're you talking about?”
“He-he had a. A look.” Joe mentally thrashes around for an explanation that doesn't sound baseless and paranoid. It's harder than it sounds. “A knowing look. It was. Like he fucking knows something and he's not telling us. Do you know something?”
“No, I don't fucking know something. What would I know?”
“I don't know,” Joe snaps, annoyed with himself. Or maybe Ames. He can't tell. He just. He doesn't like the idea that he's way more out of the loop than he thought. As long as everyone's equally confused, he doesn't feel quite as alone, left to fend for himself in some alien wilderness. “If I knew then I wouldn't ask.”
Ames sighs, rolling his head around on his neck like he's thinking extra hard about his next move. “I have some ideas,” he admits, moving to sit in the row across from them. “I'm just trying to figure this shit out, same as you. Unlike you,” he emphasizes, “I don't go babbling about every last fucking thing that pops into my head without thinking it through first.”
“I don't babble,” Joe mutters.
Max snorts inelegantly, which he chooses to ignore. “Tell us anyway,” she says to Ames.
Ames doesn't much like being bossed around, if his glare is anything to go by. All the same, it doesn't stop him from sharing. “I've got three badges and a couple of credit cards in my wallet, but no personal affects. No driver's license or state ID with a home address, no business cards, no family photos tucked in the back, nothing.”
“So?” Max prompts when he pauses there, like they're supposed to let that sink in and be all dazzled by it. Joe doesn't get it, either. Didn't they go over this already?
“So,” Ames says, drawing it out. “I figure you two are about the same. No home address, nothing really personal-“
“Condoms are personal,” Joe interrupts, just because. He really does love it when Ames makes that face.
“Nothing personal,” Ames bites out, talking over him, “which backs up this idiot's not-so-idiotic theory,” he bares his teeth at Joe, nothing close to a smile, “that there's something seriously covert about all this. Whatever was going on with those … people,” he says it like he hates to sully the word in such a way but can't think of a better one, “it looked gang-related. Doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd send one guy in to handle on his own, does it?”
“Maybe an undercover guy,” Max tries, and it's Joe's turn to snort.
“He look undercover to you?”
“No, but-“
“But you do,” Ames says.
Joe frowns, not sure if he should be offended. “Me?”
“Obviously you're not freaky-looking enough to be one of them,” he explains, “but they did seem pretty pissed at you. More so than at us, anyway. Taking the drugs into account and assuming you're not just another lowlife scumbag, my first guess was CI or undercover agent. Maybe acting as a business associate or a middleman.”
“Awesome,” Joe says. “Either way, the jig's up and I've got a target on my back.”
“Why assume that, though?” Max asks, a gleam in her eyes when she looks over at Joe. “He looks pretty shady to me.”
And Joe responds to that with a halfhearted, “Fuck you,” more preoccupied with this hopeful hummingbird flutter in his chest because it seems like she might be flirting and he could really go for some of that right now.
“You wish.”
“He's connected to you,” Ames goes on, talking over them again and getting amusingly miffed about it. “At least enough that he's got a way to contact you. Whatever he's into with that gang seems like it could have something to do with whatever you're into. You've got all those specialized weapons, access to some pretty high-level clearance kinda shit if those blueprints are real, and sector passes to get you and a partner anywhere you need to go. So I was thinking, city messenger makes for a good cover, doesn't it? ”
“Was thinking,” Max points out, biting her lip again. Dear god, that is a gorgeous mouth, Joe thinks, and Ames isn't much better, staring openly until she catches on and glowers at both of them. “Upstairs brains, assholes.”
Joe holds his hands up in total innocence. Ames just smirks.
“But you're not thinking that anymore,” she says, getting back on track.
“Like I said, I'm still chewing it over. Not all of it fits. If we're working together why were we fighting? And neither of you really seem that well trained.”
“Maybe we weren't fighting. Maybe we were running away and one of us tripped and it was all an awkward tangle of craziness right before our memories went poof,” Joe proposes. “Also,” he says, unable to keep from bristling outwardly. “We were kinda fucking disoriented back there, so you don't know for sure that we're not well trained. We don't know that we're not well trained, that's pretty much the problem. And I didn't exactly see you going all kung-fu on anyone's asses, either. In fact, I seem to recall a lot of tripping and falling down on your end, agent.”
“What he means is,” Max cuts in when it looks like Ames is going to take exception and challenge him to a duel right then and there, “we can't take anything for granted and just start assuming, you know?”
“Right. I meant that. Speculation is stupid, anyway,” Joe adds, suddenly tired, because it's true enough. It was a nice way to pass the time for a while but it hasn't magically jogged anyone's memories, and a loud gurgle of his stomach has just informed him that he'd love nothing more than to stuff his face and then sleep for a million years. “This is taking too long. Go ask the mean lady where we can find a phone that someone'll actually let us use.”
Said mean lady's hearing is working just fine. She looks up, eyebrow arched like a dare.
Max elbows him. “Now who's five?”
“Your face,” he tells her confidently.
“That's very-“ Max's mouth shuts so fast her teeth click together, loud as a slap.
The clinic door has swung open. Dead leaves sweep in on a cool gust of wind, along with a pair of police officers.
Joe sits up straight, wondering if that 911 operator traced him and sent the cops after all. He still can't decide if it's a good idea or not, but all his earlier reasoning seems to have gone out the window in the face of the general safety men in uniform represent. It has him feeling very much like throwing himself at them and clinging. Ditch the all complications like his and Max's bags, pretend to be innocent and clueless, not all that hard to fake, and this could be everything they need, right here in one convenient place. They can get their heads checked, report the cyborgs for attempted murder and maybe get taken into protective custody, and all will be as right with the world as it can be while they wait for their memories to come back. (Joe doesn't dare entertain the possibility that they won't come back, not this early. His sanity is still too delicate for all that.)
It could be good thing. An awesome thing, even.
But.
Ames is making a face.
Joe follows Ames's line of sight and realizes that, alarmingly, the receptionist's demeanor has gone from mildly chilly to subzero. The second she catches them watching her, her eyes bulge a little and she gives the tiniest shake of her head.
Definitely not a good sign.
Joe does his best to blend in with the graffiti. Max and Ames follow suit.
One of the cops tips his chin at the receptionist, paying them no mind. “Margie,” he greets, voice smoker-rough and too forced to be friendly. He isn't smiling. “You called in a GSW?”
“In the back,” the receptionist, Margie, says quickly. “They might still be in surgery so try to behave yourself. There's coffee in the break room.”
Marlboro Cop gives her a sloppy salute and heads back, leaving his partner to hang out in the waiting area and shoot the shit with Margie, it seems.
His partner doesn't shoot the shit with Margie, though. His partner looks around, taking way too long to assess Max's legs and hips and chest before moving onto Joe and Ames.
“What've you got?” he asks, gaze settling back on Max. “STD?”
All her internal alarms may be screaming danger! danger! but Max apparently has a limit to the kind of crap she's willing to take to stay out of trouble. “You sonofa-“
“Joe Schmoe!” Margie shouts, and Joe nearly jumps ten feet in the air. She clears her throat, says a little more calmly, “The doctor will see you now. Go on back. Kyle, you leave those kids alone. You know better than to go poking your nose in people's medical business.”
Effectively distracted, Kyle goes to argue with Margie about how he's just doing his job, checking out suspicious behavior and keeping the streets clean.
Because people imitating lumps on a log are real menace, Joe thinks, standing slowly so as not to redraw the cop's attention.
Max's eyebrows are so high they look ready to crawl off the top of her head. “Joe Schmoe?” she mouths, incredulous.
“What the hell else was I supposed to put?” he hisses back, and doesn't dare look to see what expression Ames is wearing now.
“You don't think something like Smith might've been a little less conspicuous?”
“No,” he snarls, really not in the fucking mood to debate it.
Reluctantly, he heads for the back door and opens it with extreme caution, in case the other cop is standing there on the other side waiting for Joe to smack into him so he can slap him with assault charges or something. That seems like just the kind of unfair bullshit that would happen to him, the way his luck is going so far.
There's no cop there. There's no one there, actually.
“Hello?” he calls, craning his head around to try and see into the open doorways along the hall but too nervous to presume he can just go wandering by himself. It's much, much cleaner back here, at least, which helps ease some of his discomfort. Not a lot. But some.
A nurse comes around the corner at the far end of the hallway. “Hello, there! Sorry about that, we're, uh,” she waves her hands around and pulls a face, like that explains everything. “If you'll follow me?”
“Okay?” Joe doesn't feel like he has a choice really, because she's kind of herding him, bustling this way and that as if afraid he'll get lost any second now. She leads him into an examination room, asks him all the same questions he had to fill out on the form, most of which he still can't answer, makes him shed his jacket, takes his blood pressure and does a bunch of other little preliminary things before she leaves him sitting there with paper crinkling under his ass and a promise to let the doctor know he's waiting. She doesn't close the door, which he finds weird. He's not sure why he finds that weird, but that's par for the amnesiac course, isn't it.
Joe blows out a shaky breath and sits there. He sits there and really wishes he didn't have to sit there. His jacket is hanging on the back of the door, it's too cold in here and it smells …
It smells sterile and metallic and like this room is perfectly prepped to take him apart, neat as you please. However it pleases.
It doesn't take long for him to realize that his growing anxiety is not just from being left alone with his hollowed-out head and too much space for his thoughts, or being without Max and Ames for the first time since he can remember anything, or because of the shady-ass cops invading the place.
It's the place.
His mind is an unreliable traitor but his body is a whole other matter. It knows something. Something bad. Skin twitching hotly, pulse hammering, hands clammy and slick, all his spit drying up and the sharp tug of his stomach tying itself into knots. Acceptably clean or not, this entire setting unnerves him on a very deep, fundamental level.
He wants to go now.
Joe sucks in a deep breath. Pushes it out. He kicks his feet back and forth, white-knuckling the edge of the examination table. He feels in an abstract way that this is something he can pass or fail, only no one's going to tell him what the test is about beforehand, or when it really starts.
Is it time to go yet?
There's no way to know.
Fuck.
An eternity passes before the doctor comes in, by which point he's half out of his head with paranoia. When she smiles at him, he jumps again, much harder and higher than when Margie shouted his name out of the blue. He thinks he might've just pulled something.
Her eyes are soft and concerned. “You okay?” she asks, holding her hands open to show she's harmless.
“Fine,” he says, clipped. “Can we get this over with? I wanna get this over with.”
“Sure.” She pulls up a stool and sets a pen to her clipboard. “Why don't you start by telling me what the problem is?”
“You already made me tell you twice. There was a form and a nurse and-” He stops himself, takes another deep breath. Every instinct screams at him to run. That they're fucking with him. They have to be fucking with him. No one is this fucking redundant unless they're fucking with you. This is a bullshit mind game and he doesn't have to play if he doesn't want to. “I can't remember anything,” he manages, swallowing against the burn surging up the back of his throat. As long as she doesn't come at him with any needles or scalpels he can handle this. He can. “From before a few hours ago. And before you ask, my head doesn't hurt and my mind doesn't feel altered. Except for, y'know, the obvious.”
She scribbles on her clipboard and asks him some more questions. To her credit, she mostly tries to avoid the ones he's already answered, but he still can't give her much. “All right,” she says. “I'd like to take a quick look at your head before we do anything else. Are you okay with that?”
Joe nods, short and sharp, jaw aching with how hard he's clenching his teeth.
It isn't so bad, he realizes, once she's in the middle of it. Just her hands probing at his scalp, no instruments, while she asks him if this hurts or if that feels sore. He tells himself to quit acting like a skittish little kitten and suck it up. Jesus, if Ames was back here he would totally-well, he'd probably just glare a lot.
Joe wishes Ames would come back here. Or Max. Max and all her curves and her unwavering, bossy presence are definitely invited.
The doctor's gloved fingers freeze on the back of his neck. A couple seconds tick by, and then her thumb brushes across-
Oh.
Joe shivers. The sensation is pleasant but also fairly invasive. He can't decide if he wants to lean into it or punch her for the audacity.
The doctor clears her throat and pulls away. “I just need to, uh.” She darts around him and toward the door, wide-eyed. “I'll be right back, just gimme a second.” She spins away, spins back around and holds up a finger. “One second. Don't go anywhere.”
Joe's brain may be full of holes, but even he knows that is not a sign of happy, magical cures to come. He should probably go now.
A tilt of his head and he can just make out the voices a little ways down the hall. The doctor and Marlboro Cop are having a stuttered, breathless conversation.
Yes. Going. Absolutely time to do that.
Joe hops off the table and snatches up his jacket, shrugging it back on as he sticks his head into the hall to check lines of sight. He slips out, feeling much more in control the further he gets from that awful room, and he's practically sprinting by the time he skids back out into the waiting area.
And right into the other cop, who's in the middle of arresting Max.
Joe stops short, wildly confused.
Ames is looking more than a little helpless, which seems so unnatural it's like watching rain fall up. He's waving his FBI badge, scowling like his life depends on it, but his eyes are huge and savage. He's trying to pull rank, Joe sees now, claiming Max is in his custody, all get your goddamn hands off my prisoner before I take them off, but the cop barely seems to notice him, white-faced and fumbling with his handcuffs. Max demands to know what the charges are, then gets impatient and jerks away before the cop can lock the bracelets around both of her wrists, spinning around and smashing an elbow into his nose.
Blood spurts everywhere. The cop's hands fly to his busted face. Max drops before he can recover, sweeping his legs out from under him and planting him on his ass. Ames gets in on the action, then, bends over to grab the cop's hair and slams the back of his head down with determined brutality, knocking him out cold. Joe winces, hoping he imagined the wet crack and that Ames didn't actually just crush the back of the guy's skull like a pumpkin.
They both look up at Joe, eyes gaping.
That's all the warning he needs.
He ducks and twists away before Marlboro Cop can bring his riot baton down on Joe's head. One solid punch to the temple and the guy plummets like a sack of bricks.
Joe straightens, heart thumping crazily. His grin feels manic. “Remind me again about our training?” he says, and Ames just stands there for a second, stunned.
And then he smiles. Honest-to-god smiles, so big he might actually be straining an unused face muscle or two.
It's somewhat deranged-looking, but Joe is amazed nevertheless.
Sadly, he's only amazed for two seconds, because then the doctor comes rushing out and starts screaming at Margie to call 911 and animal control and the National Guard and anyone else with tasers or tranquilizers, and hauling ass is apparently going to be the theme of their night.
TBC ...
Waking up mid-air, that's how it feels. Bright spots in his eyes like he's been staring into the sun, clouds all around and panic like a sucking chest wound. No goddamn idea how he got there or when he'll hit the ground.
He blinks, flailing around a little bit, and that helps him figure out that, okay, he's on the ground, really fucking excellent to know. He's standing with his feet shoulder-width apart and one arm flung out for balance. The fingers of his other hand are twisted up in something.
The cloud part, though, that's real. The mist or steam or roving fog bank or whatever starts to drift apart, and he forces that panic back. Sucks the air in deep and blows it out slow, inhale exhale repeat, breathing is good.
Sit-rep, some vague part of him murmurs, thoughts muffled and sluggish like they're buried under the many nebulous layers of a years-long coma. It makes sense, anyway, so he tries to focus on the sights and pick out sounds that aren't the spastic beat of his own pulse.
He's in some kind of open-air marketplace that looks (and smells) like it was thrown together by vagrants: big, crumpled tin roof sitting atop flimsy supports with no walls, the whole place illuminated by trashcan fires and dim lightbulbs that hang from the ceiling in tangles of exposed wire. There are cluttered sales tables surrounded by clusters of unwashed, ragged people, all of them wide-eyed, open-mouthed and cringing away, as though they'd been haggling quite happily until he appeared out of thin air to interrupt them. Or-
The thing in his fist is the back of a suit jacket. The jacket is occupied by a shorter, really pissed-off guy. The guy, in turn, is locked up in a complicated embrace with a dark-haired woman dressed in all skin-hugging black, like maybe they'd been fighting or making out pretty aggressively just a second ago, and maybe he came up to punch the guy for messing with his girl before he got all disoriented, because she's smoking hot and he really thinks he deserves a hot girlfriend after all he's been through in the last six seconds, and so obviously these people aren't gawking because he's a wizard, but because the three of them are making a scene.
Whatever's going on, he's certain, at least, of this one thing: the past is gone. There's right now and what next but no clear sense of before.
The hot chick reacts first, shoving off of the other guy with a scowl that's trying too hard to cover for the total freak-out the whites of her eyes are giving away. “What the hell is your problem?”
“My problem? I don't even know who the fuck you are,” the guy in the suit says, twisting to free his jacket and smoothing out the wrinkles, squinty-eyed and suspicious and still really angry. Looks like it might be a default setting, actually, all these permanently unhappy lines carved into his face.
“You were attacking me.” The hot chick shifts her stance like she's gearing up for round two, but she keeps a safe distance. “Common courtesy says you should either talk first or go screw yourself.”
“You and pretty boy here were coming at me from two sides! I'm pretty sure that means I was the one under attack.”
“I don't know who was attacking who, or why, because I don't know either of you,” he (who is allegedly pretty) offers kind of breathlessly because, judging from the hostility pouring off both of them, this seems like it could go on a while, and he would very much appreciate a lifeline or something here. “I also don't know me, so if you two could stop bickering and help with that before I flip right the fuck out, that'd be awesome.”
They stop arguing long enough to look him up and down. Then they do the same to each other, taking in details, and he feels his stomach trying to do somersaults up his throat again because there's no recognition at all in their eyes.
“I don't know me, either,” the hot chick admits after a minute, voice a little strained.
The angry guy lets up on the glowering. “Same here,” he says, and glances around, as if just now noticing they've got an audience.
The people around them are shifting and murmuring, slowly getting back to business as usual now that the drama is over. More notably, some of them have started cleaning up smashed remnants of tables and merchandise. Others try to repair a wooden support that looks to have been snapped clean in half. No one seems bothered enough to complain about the mess, though, shuffling around with the resignation of people used to living on a fault line or in the paths of hurricanes.
He looks back at his fellow amnesiacs and notices the angry guy scanning the ground. It's littered with shards of glass and the remnants of shattered knick-knacks. There's also a crushed cell phone and a messenger bag at his feet. The angry guy starts patting at his pockets.
“Oh, hey, yeah,” he says, getting that the angry guy's looking for ID, but as soon as he starts to do the same, someone shouts, “Oi! Wanker!” and then there's another of those tumbling slip-slides in his head like reality hasn't quite finished rearranging itself and his brain is clamoring to keep up.
The three of them look up to see a group of cyborgs (motherfucking cyborgs, no lie; it's the only descriptor that makes sense for people with robotic limbs and huge chunks of metal punching through their skin) crowding in through one of the exits and pointing a whole lot of guns at them. Another quick scan of their surroundings reveals three more groups moving to block off the other escape routes.
“Who-“ the angry guy starts to say, but he doesn't get to finish because they start shooting, no explanation or care for who might get caught in the crossfire, and it's time to run.
There's no time to stop and discuss it between all the cursing and bullet-dodging and throwing of things. No time to say, Hey, so maybe since we're all really goddamn confused and the world is looking kind of crazy from here, we should stick together until we figure out what the shit is going on? All in favor say aye! No time and no need, really, because not only does it seem like common sense to keep track of those few but essential clues to this really whacked mystery, it's automatic-instant attachment born of a shared crisis.
It turns out they're all really fast, or the cyborgs are all really slow. Either way, they manage to slip through a crack in the blockade without catching any extra holes, racing six-and-a-half blocks before ducking into a dirty alleyway behind a pawn shop. It's packed with tarp-and-cardboard hovels and trash just everywhere, but luckily there doesn't seem to be anyone home. Or at least there's no one willing to come out of hiding to bother them.
Not one of them is out of breath, he notes, which means they must be in insanely excellent shape. Maybe they all go to the same gym.
“What the fuck were those?” the angry guy asks, back pressed tight against the brickwork as he pokes his head around the corner to make sure they're clear.
The hot chick opens her mouth to say something, snaps it shut and flinches when this wobbly humming sound approaches from somewhere up above. “Better question,” she hisses, looking up. “What is that?”
It's a flying saucer, is what it is. A miniature spaceship robot thing with its gleaming camera-lens eyes tilting back and forth, buzzing slowly through night to stalk the humans and feed on their innards. Or something. Whatever it is, it has his heart doing this unpleasant, lurching thing in his chest and he instantly doesn't like it or want it anywhere near him.
When it fails to notice them, drifting kind of clumsily over the rim of another building, they let out a collective sigh of relief.
“Okay, so we're in the slums,” he feels compelled to point out after being subjected to stunned silence for far too long. “And there are flying machines and machine people who want to kill us and, uh, possibly memory-stealing gas clouds. I think these are what you'd call clues.”
“Thank fuck we have you here to help us solve the mystery,” the angry guy mutters, lip curling up.
“I'm sorry, are you helping?” he snaps, not in the best mental place to deal with criticism and besides, it feels so natural-almost comforting-to run off at the mouth and press someone else's buttons. “I don't see you helping, so until you have something useful to offer, how about you bite me.”
The angry guy gives him a once-over that has him wishing he could take that last part back, a cold but somehow appreciative quirk to his mouth that says he might actually be considering it. The biting thing, not the part about being useful. Shit, and okay, so he's not exactly inflexible himself, because that look is disturbing and slightly serial-killer-ish, yes, but also maybe kinda hot, and that gets him wondering just what he looks like, anyway. If he's anywhere near as attractive as these two, it might take the edge off all this trauma. Just a little.
“No, wait,” the hot chick says, biting her very biteable-looking lip, and gestures at the messy alleyway. “He's got a point. We're in the slums, but I think,” her eyebrows crinkle, “I think everywhere is the slums?”
“What's that got to do with anything?” the angry guy asks, but he thinks he understands what she's getting at.
“Right, like. Like the whole city's a dump because … ” he trails off, thinking hard.
“Because,” the hot chick drawls, pushing for the blank fill itself in, and sighs. “Yeah, I've got nothing.”
The angry guy snaps his fingers. “The dump we're in is Seattle.”
“And it's 2021,” adds the hot chick, and then they're onto something, detailing all the little things they seem to actually remember, like basic geography and what the internet is and that Jaws 19 still holds the title for worst movie of all time. They just can't remember many present-day specifics. None of the other civilians really seemed surprised or all that bothered by the arrival of cyborgs, now that they're thinking about it, and those guys clearly knew one or all three of them well enough to hold a grudge (and maybe they all had some pretty colorful things to say to him, especially). The spaceship contraption wasn't exactly inconspicuous, either, and so far no one has screamed about alien invasions or anything.
“So we're missing a few common knowledge type details,” he concludes. “And pretty much all personal details. Which tells us … ” He looks at the hot chick again. “What does that tell us?”
The hot chick, who's carrying a small backpack, swings it off her shoulders and sets it down to rifle through it. “It tells us more than we knew before,” she says, and he and the angry guy take that as their cue to resume trying to identify themselves.
It's not entirely reassuring, the things he discovers. He's dressed dark, just like the hot chick, though not quite as skintight: black cargoes and a dark denim jacket over a t-shirt. He frowns at the wads of cash, baggies of pills and prescription bottles he keeps finding in his pockets. Frowns harder at the 9mm handgun in his jacket, a quick check telling him that it's fully loaded, and then gets his hopes up a little when he finds a wallet and a cell phone. There's more cash in the wallet, a somewhat excessive number of condoms, random bits of paper with phone numbers scrawled on them, a stick of gum, a couple paperclips, dental floss, matchbooks from an array of bars and motels, but no ID. The messenger bag he managed to grab in the midst of the chaos is filled with more pill bottles of all shapes and sizes.
Left with a widening pit in his belly, he waffles a minute before finally deciding to call 911. It doesn't make sense, he doesn't understand anything, and he has to work toward something constructive; or at least the illusion of it. 911 might still be a sensible thing in this nonsensical world, and gun-toting maniacs take priority; he figures he can ditch all this incriminating stuff before the law gets here.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Uh,” he says, and tries to explain that he doesn't know who he is or where he is and that robots are shooting at him, voice going thin and high with anxiety when he realizes that yes, these words are actually coming out of his mouth, and no, they don't sound any less crazy out loud, and damn it, maybe he should have rehearsed this beforehand.
A beat or two of silence, and then the operator explains in a bored monotone that this line is for emergencies only, not his personal entertainment when he's high as a kite, and if he calls again she'll send the cops after him.
“Yes! Good, cops!” he says, desperately trying to salvage the conversation. “Please send some of those!”
She hangs up.
He shrugs at the other two when they look at him expectantly. “I probably would've hung up on me , too,” he admits shakily, glancing over at the hot chick to see what she's come up with.
It's less reassuring.
Spread on the ground around her, so far, is a grappling hook, a whole lot of bungee cord, a set of lock picks and some kind of spring-action steel baton that looks like it could do some serious damage. And she's still got more in there.
“I'm an FBI agent,” the angry guy says, flipping through his wallet. “Ames White. Also, NSA and, uh, CIA,” he trails off, muttering mostly to himself, “Maybe I shouldn't've mentioned that last one.”
“I think I might be a ninja,” the hot chick says, slow.
“So which of you wins in a fight against cyborgs with spikes in their faces?” the possibly-a-criminal asks. “'Cause all my clues are coming up drug dealer, and somehow I don't think that's gonna help.” He nearly chokes on his own tongue when the whole FBI thing clicks, and he tries to backtrack. “Uh, I mean, I'm a totally licensed and legitimate pharmacist who keeps samples on him for emergencies. Obviously.”
The agent, Ames, does that angry squinting thing again. “Right, because my first priority right now is to arrest a fucking street pusher.”
“Good point.”
“Oh, hey, here's something. It's an employee ID from something called Jam Pony.” The hot chick twists her face up at the laminated cards she's found in her pants. Oh, to be those cards, he thinks, and shakes himself. Focus. “Max Guevera. And, um. A sector pass? Two sector passes,” she corrects.
“Sector of what? And why do you need a pass for it?” Ames asks.
Max shrugs and pulls a small packet of folded papers from another compartment of her bag, studying them. “Hell if I know. You're every law enforcement agent ever, so you tell me.”
Ames looks like whatever's going to come out of his mouth next will be something that requires a violent rebuttal, and Max kind of strikes him as the low-blow type, so he-he's going to call himself Joe until he finds out otherwise, because this is getting annoying and he never claimed to be creative ... he doesn't think. Anyway, Joe scrolls through his contact list and declares loudly, “You're in my phone,” before Ames can say something to get himself kicked in the jewels.
Max startles when Joe dials the number and one of her vest pockets starts beeping. She pulls out a pager. “I guess we know each other.”
“Looks like,” he says, disappointment biting at his gut. A pager isn't going to tell him what his name is, but maybe … “I need to find a payphone.”
“You've got a goddamn phone right there in your hand,” says Ames, sounding jealous, and Joe remembers the crushed cell phone at the marketplace.
“I'm aware,” Joe drawls, “but it doesn't have any identifying information on it, and I obviously don't remember my own password, so I'm gonna call it from a payphone and see what the voicemail greeting tells me. Doesn't seem like the greatest idea to just start dialing random contacts asking them who I am, y'know?”
“Guess you're not as dumb as you look.”
“Payphone's a good place to start.” Still distracted with her papers, Max carefully packs everything else back into her bag and stands up, handling it a little more gingerly than before as she shrugs it back on. Joe sincerely hopes there are no explosives in there. “But maybe we should also be thinking in terms of hospitals and police. I mean, I don't know much, but I know I don't wanna get shot, and I don't think memory loss is supposed to be a group experience. Add secret agent man to the mix,” she hikes a thumb at Ames, “and these … mad science blueprints or whatever,” her eyes go back to the packet, flipping to the next page, “and this seems like it might be way over our heads.”
“Blueprints?” Ames snatches said blueprints out of her hand, the rude ass. He whistles low. “Fuck me.”
“What is it?” asks Joe.
“Plans for some kind of … prototype? On DOD letterhead,” Ames emphasizes, brow furrowed and his eyes screwed tight in annoyance. “My guess is it's a weapon, except for how it looks so illogically put together my eyes hurt just trying pick it apart. Whoever wrote these notes should be stabbed in the goddamn face.”
“Department of Defense?” Joe peers over his shoulder. He catches a glimpse of photocopied, sloppy sketches of something vaguely spherical on the outside and mind-numbingly complicated on the inside, and handwritten notations that don't at all resemble letters of the alphabet. Max and Ames are both right. It's either some kind of code or the highly illegible scribblings of a lunatic. “Anyone else starting to think this is all a little too conspiracy theory?” he asks, mind whirling. “Maybe the cops are a bad idea.”
“Maybe,” says Ames. “But it's our best hope of getting in touch with whoever I answer to. They'll probably know what's going on.”
“Or you're Jason Bourne and they want to kill you,” Joe counters.
Ames starts to bare his teeth again, something caustic on the tip of his tongue, no doubt, but then he tilts his head, eyes flitting back to the DOD seal, over to Max and her Catwoman chic, back to Joe and his admittedly suspicious-as-fuck portable pharmacy. Factor in the cyborgs and their compromised recall, and- “Fair enough,” Ames concedes.
Before either of them can get very far in deciphering the blueprints, Max steals the packet back, completely unfazed by Ames's black look. She's gone a little pale. “We need to go. Now.”
Instantly alert, Joe hears it too: footsteps and hushed voices closing in on their position, fast. He spots a fire escape further down the alley. “Up, up and away?” he suggests, reluctantly scooping up his messenger bag in case it's important somehow, and they nod, following his lead.
Up on the rooftop, Ames says, “I have keys. So I probably have a car somewhere.”
“Good idea,” whispers Max, sarcasm drenching her every word as she follows Joe at a low half-crawl to keep from being sighted from the ground. “Let's waltz right back into robot gangland. I'm sure if you ask real nicely they'll cease fire long enough for us find our getaway car.”
“Why don't we go back to the hospital idea?” Joe says, eager to have a solid course of action. “Try for an obvious solution to our memory problem first. We might have better luck getting them to believe us in person, and if nothing else, it's a place to hide for a while. Hopefully a place with a lot of witnesses. We can figure out our next move from there.”
“They don't seem to care much about witnesses,” Max points out, and Joe shrugs.
“I'm open to better suggestions.”
No one offers any, and Ames grunts when they reach the other side of the roof, fiddling with his sidearm like he's checking to see that his hands remember how to work it. The clip slides back into place with a resounding snick. “Anyone else armed?”
Max twirls her baton experimentally, visibly surprised at her own adeptness in handling it. Joe hesitates a few seconds, then tugs the flap of his jacket open to reveal his own gun.
Satisfied, Ames waves a hand at Joe's phone and peers over the side of the building. “That thing got GPS? 'Cause if not, we're gonna need to find a map.”
Joe checks his phone and finds that it does, indeed, have GPS. He keys in a search for the nearest hospital.
His GPS map drops them a clue on the sector situation. The whole city is divided up and numbered, red dots glaring like angry little eyes to indicate checkpoints. Unfortunately, they don't get much on the reason for it, Joe's cell signal going into epileptic fits as they rise and fall between alleys and rooftops, limiting his internet access. It doesn't improve once they feel safe enough to stay at street-level, and it's a little maddening, to say the least, all these scraps of information with no context.
The closest hospital is fifteen miles and and two checkpoints away. Their lack of wheels makes this problematic. There's a free clinic a few blocks over, though, so they're heading there.
The night air is cool and brisk, moon like an old coin stuck up in the sky. The distant gunshots that have them jumping halfway out of their skin also go a long way toward explaining why there aren't many people out on the streets right now. The few they do run into give them sideways, distrustful looks. After a while, Joe starts to catch onto the fact that most of them are directed at Ames.
“Maybe you should think about ditching the jacket and tie,” he says, as they're passing a group of men loitering in front of an apartment complex who appear more likely to act on their disapproval than others.
Ames sneers, more at the world in general than at Joe, and that is apparently as far as that conversation's going.
“Okay, then.” Joe throws a subtle glance over his shoulder, swallowing hard and picking up his pace when he sees the men are no longer leaning against the wall. They're trickling out onto the street in a loose knot, looking very much like they have something violent to get off their chests. “Hey, I know, let's go faster,” Joe says, trying to make it sound like a cheerful suggestion for a fun game they could play.
Max and Ames stop and look back.
Ames's eyes go thin and cold. He pulls out his gun and pins them in its sight. “Do not fucking test me.”
The men throw their hands up-hey, man, we weren't doing nothin'-and go back to holding up the building.
Ames re-holsters his gun and stalks ahead to take the lead, leaving Max and Joe to hang back and stare at each other.
Against their better judgment, they trail after him. They walk the rest of the way with their eyes sharp and their mouths shut, sticking close to walls and cars and anything that can provide quick cover without much thought.
The clinic is a squat little postage stamp of a building covered in graffiti and rusting burglar bars. The inside isn't much better, and Joe is appalled that it could ever pass any kind of inspection because this? Is grossly unsanitary.
The whole place reeks of sweat and piss. Garbage is collected along the baseboards, walls water-damaged and pocked with rat-sized holes. The ceiling is missing huge rectangles where some of the lights should be, leaving the room a dim gray that Joe supposes is appropriate for a cesspool of despair. It's quiet in the waiting area, but the blood spattering the floors suggests it hasn't been that way all night, and he twitches kind of helplessly. He knows in his guts that there should be more order here, clutter frowned upon and any second now some unknowable higher-up is going to swoop down and ground him for it, held responsible simply for his sheer proximity to the mess.
A hard-faced but reasonably attractive receptionist eyeballs them from behind the chain-link cage around her desk as though she's prepared to pull out a shotgun at the first wrong move.
Joe takes a breath and lets it go. He forces himself to smile, palms out. “We come in peace?”
Her lips remain pursed but she pulls out a clipboard instead of a weapon. She slaps it on the counter. “Unless you're dying in the next five minutes, sit down and fill these out.” She narrows her eyes at Ames, who's watching her with open disdain, and adds a bit more steel to her tone when she says, “And don't get up until I call you.”
“Not even to go to the bathroom?” Max says, voice all falsely sweet.
Joe raises his eyebrows when the lady switches back to shotgun-mode. “What are you, five?” he hisses, poking Max in the back before he walks up to collect the clipboard. He requests two more in as polite a tone as he can manage, and gets summarily shot down when asking to use the phone.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do with these?” Ames demands when Joe hands out the paperwork.
Joe sighs and very carefully perches himself on the edge of a chair. “Try to make the nice lady happy and maybe you'll get a lollipop.”
Snarling a little, Ames throws the clipboard down and goes to challenge the receptionist. Max intercepts him, calmly and carefully reminding him that, until they have a better idea of what's going on, maybe he should keep his badges in his pants and maintain a low profile. Persuaded, but not at all pleased about it, he goes to stand at the window instead, keeping an eye out.
Ames has a point, though. There's not much they can fill out except the first name, last name and reason for visit sections, and in Joe's case not even the first two apply. It makes for a shitty way to pass the time. A little more boredom, a little more realization that they have no pens with which to fill out these stupid forms even if they wanted to, a little more buttering up of the receptionist, and he finds out that there's only one doctor on duty this late, and she's got her hands full with a pair of shooting victims. He tries explaining their predicament-sans the crazier-sounding parts-to garner the tiniest scrap of sympathy, but the receptionist is unmoved.
“You do any drugs recently?” she asks, tapping a pen against the desk. Her expression says she's heard it all and she doesn't entirely believe him, but she'll indulge him for about half a second to see where it goes, anyway. “Hit your head really hard?”
Joe huffs out a laugh, rubbing at his temples. “How would I know that? I mean, I don't feel stoned or anything, and, aside from the headache I'm starting to get from talking to you, my head doesn't hurt.”
She doesn't seem bothered by the insult. Just looks him up and down one more time, slow and careful, then shrugs in dismissal. “Your injury's not life-threatening,” she says in a tone indicative of a line well-used. “You'll have to wait until we finish dealing with the ones that are.”
“Great, thanks.” He feels the muscles in his face tighten up, scowling. “Don't suppose I could borrow a pen?”
That, at least, gets him somewhere. Finally. He takes his pen and goes to sit back down, filling out what he can and then flipping the admission forms over so he can doodle on the back. He is a terrible artist, come to find out, which he guesses he can sort of count as new information about himself.
Now that some of the urgency has passed, the discomfort of being strangers to themselves and to each other starts to sink in a little more. It feels very much like what it is: three random people off the street waiting at the doctor's office, coincidentally suffering the same affliction but with no other known traits in common. Idle conversation seems like an impossible hurdle. Tension becomes a huge, lung-crushing presence as they wait.
Max is staring at her papers again, vibrating impatience. Ames's hostility is about as subtle as rampaging rhinoceros. Joe's phone is still stubbornly giving him only one bar, and he wonders why the hell he settled for a company whose cell towers are such a goddamn joke.
He inspects his matchbooks, waiting for something about the business names or addresses to kick a hole through all these walls in his head. Subtly checks his bag again, a closer look revealing that everything in it seems mostly harmless-painkillers, antibiotics, caffeine pills, vitamin supplements-if the labels can be trusted at all. Stares at his hands for a while: long fingers and callused palms and an impressively strong grip but his knuckles clean and unscarred-like someone who knows hard work but not like someone who gets into messy brawls very often. Gives in and tries some of his phone's contacts.
It's tricky, trying not to give too much away when the people who do bother to pick up call him variants of stud or dude or jackass, asking when he's going to come over for another round of kinky sex, challenging him to a pool rematch, or demanding to know where he is so they can come break his legs for failing to pay a debt. None if it is altogether helpful and he's back to feeling like a criminal, wondering if sticking with Ames is a good idea, after all. Obvious lawman reasons aside, the guy just sorta rubs him the wrong way, all his superior air and increasingly aggressive tendencies. But, when it comes down to it, Joe is lost, and Ames is a small, really annoying but probably crucial piece of his shattered compass.
Joe sighs, head too empty and too active at the same time, and thinking, he quickly determines, gets real frustrating, real fast when a sizable chunk of his brain is spitting out a hundred 'error' and 'access denied' warnings and refuses to give him any password hints. And if part of his brain is like a heavily protected harddrive, then too much silence is like trying to unlock it by stuffing it full of live wires: all smoking, unmanageable chaos.
Silence is dangerous. Silence needs to be banished.
“A nose walks into a bar and asks for a drink,” Joe blurts out, knee bouncing up and down and his fingers anxiously fluttering against the arms of the beat-up plastic chair. “The bartender says, 'Sorry, I can't serve you. You're already off your face.'”
Ames turns and glares.
Max rolls her eyes at him. “Seriously?”
“No.” Joe licks his lips, and he doesn't miss the way both Max and Ames watch him do it. He smirks. “That is not based on a true story.”
“Dumbass,” Max mutters, but her mouth hooks up at one corner and the tension in the room has slowly begun to deflate.
“Wanna hear another one?”
“Whatever,” Max says.
“Shut the fuck up,” Ames says.
“Okay,” Joe says. “A man walks into a bar and orders three beers … “
“Maybe there was a robot apocalypse and machines have taken over the world,” Max offers with a shrug, slumping so far down in her seat she's practically laying on the floor.
“Oh,” Joe says, eagerly latching onto this latest theory in their new game of Guess The Really Lame Movie Plot We're Stuck In. “So, they wanna kill us, or cram us full of robot parts and turn us into their slaves like those cyborgs?” He lowers his voice and points at the receptionist. “Maybe that's what's up with her, too, except her disguise is better.”
Ames makes a loud, grunting noise like he might be choking on something, and finally deigns to turn around and acknowledge them again. “That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.”
Max has gone from participating out of sheer boredom to outright grinning. Looks like Joe's not the only one who gets a kick out of pushing people's buttons. There's just something so perversely satisfying about antagonizing Ames, in particular.
“Hey, if you've got any brilliant theories, we're all ears, buddy,” Max says.
“First of all, robots are robotic. Practical, emotionless, analytical-smart. Those guys? Were dumbshits,” Ames says, like he has so much experience interacting with robots to draw on. “Dumbshit freaks who break the law. I was probably there to bust them.” He doesn't sound as sure about that last part as he seems to want to.
“Great,” Joe says. “You go ahead and bust away, then. We'll wait here.” He gives him an encouraging thumbs-up.
To his surprise, Ames doesn't sneer or growl or squint at him. Not right away. He pins him with a long, considering and slightly pained look, as if getting ready to divulge state secrets. Joe stiffens, pulse skipping and his head whirling with uncertain suspicion.
Ames frowns and clears his throat. “Speaking of dumbshits,” he says. “You know you could've probably answered half your own questions by now if you'd pulled your heads out of your asses and used that cell phone for something other than word games.”
“The signal's still too weak for Googling,” Joe defends. “And that's not what you were going to say. You were-“ His mouth has gone dry. “You know something.”
He hears more than sees Max straightening up beside him, Joe's eyes locked on Ames for fear of missing another telltale clue. “What're you talking about?”
“He-he had a. A look.” Joe mentally thrashes around for an explanation that doesn't sound baseless and paranoid. It's harder than it sounds. “A knowing look. It was. Like he fucking knows something and he's not telling us. Do you know something?”
“No, I don't fucking know something. What would I know?”
“I don't know,” Joe snaps, annoyed with himself. Or maybe Ames. He can't tell. He just. He doesn't like the idea that he's way more out of the loop than he thought. As long as everyone's equally confused, he doesn't feel quite as alone, left to fend for himself in some alien wilderness. “If I knew then I wouldn't ask.”
Ames sighs, rolling his head around on his neck like he's thinking extra hard about his next move. “I have some ideas,” he admits, moving to sit in the row across from them. “I'm just trying to figure this shit out, same as you. Unlike you,” he emphasizes, “I don't go babbling about every last fucking thing that pops into my head without thinking it through first.”
“I don't babble,” Joe mutters.
Max snorts inelegantly, which he chooses to ignore. “Tell us anyway,” she says to Ames.
Ames doesn't much like being bossed around, if his glare is anything to go by. All the same, it doesn't stop him from sharing. “I've got three badges and a couple of credit cards in my wallet, but no personal affects. No driver's license or state ID with a home address, no business cards, no family photos tucked in the back, nothing.”
“So?” Max prompts when he pauses there, like they're supposed to let that sink in and be all dazzled by it. Joe doesn't get it, either. Didn't they go over this already?
“So,” Ames says, drawing it out. “I figure you two are about the same. No home address, nothing really personal-“
“Condoms are personal,” Joe interrupts, just because. He really does love it when Ames makes that face.
“Nothing personal,” Ames bites out, talking over him, “which backs up this idiot's not-so-idiotic theory,” he bares his teeth at Joe, nothing close to a smile, “that there's something seriously covert about all this. Whatever was going on with those … people,” he says it like he hates to sully the word in such a way but can't think of a better one, “it looked gang-related. Doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd send one guy in to handle on his own, does it?”
“Maybe an undercover guy,” Max tries, and it's Joe's turn to snort.
“He look undercover to you?”
“No, but-“
“But you do,” Ames says.
Joe frowns, not sure if he should be offended. “Me?”
“Obviously you're not freaky-looking enough to be one of them,” he explains, “but they did seem pretty pissed at you. More so than at us, anyway. Taking the drugs into account and assuming you're not just another lowlife scumbag, my first guess was CI or undercover agent. Maybe acting as a business associate or a middleman.”
“Awesome,” Joe says. “Either way, the jig's up and I've got a target on my back.”
“Why assume that, though?” Max asks, a gleam in her eyes when she looks over at Joe. “He looks pretty shady to me.”
And Joe responds to that with a halfhearted, “Fuck you,” more preoccupied with this hopeful hummingbird flutter in his chest because it seems like she might be flirting and he could really go for some of that right now.
“You wish.”
“He's connected to you,” Ames goes on, talking over them again and getting amusingly miffed about it. “At least enough that he's got a way to contact you. Whatever he's into with that gang seems like it could have something to do with whatever you're into. You've got all those specialized weapons, access to some pretty high-level clearance kinda shit if those blueprints are real, and sector passes to get you and a partner anywhere you need to go. So I was thinking, city messenger makes for a good cover, doesn't it? ”
“Was thinking,” Max points out, biting her lip again. Dear god, that is a gorgeous mouth, Joe thinks, and Ames isn't much better, staring openly until she catches on and glowers at both of them. “Upstairs brains, assholes.”
Joe holds his hands up in total innocence. Ames just smirks.
“But you're not thinking that anymore,” she says, getting back on track.
“Like I said, I'm still chewing it over. Not all of it fits. If we're working together why were we fighting? And neither of you really seem that well trained.”
“Maybe we weren't fighting. Maybe we were running away and one of us tripped and it was all an awkward tangle of craziness right before our memories went poof,” Joe proposes. “Also,” he says, unable to keep from bristling outwardly. “We were kinda fucking disoriented back there, so you don't know for sure that we're not well trained. We don't know that we're not well trained, that's pretty much the problem. And I didn't exactly see you going all kung-fu on anyone's asses, either. In fact, I seem to recall a lot of tripping and falling down on your end, agent.”
“What he means is,” Max cuts in when it looks like Ames is going to take exception and challenge him to a duel right then and there, “we can't take anything for granted and just start assuming, you know?”
“Right. I meant that. Speculation is stupid, anyway,” Joe adds, suddenly tired, because it's true enough. It was a nice way to pass the time for a while but it hasn't magically jogged anyone's memories, and a loud gurgle of his stomach has just informed him that he'd love nothing more than to stuff his face and then sleep for a million years. “This is taking too long. Go ask the mean lady where we can find a phone that someone'll actually let us use.”
Said mean lady's hearing is working just fine. She looks up, eyebrow arched like a dare.
Max elbows him. “Now who's five?”
“Your face,” he tells her confidently.
“That's very-“ Max's mouth shuts so fast her teeth click together, loud as a slap.
The clinic door has swung open. Dead leaves sweep in on a cool gust of wind, along with a pair of police officers.
Joe sits up straight, wondering if that 911 operator traced him and sent the cops after all. He still can't decide if it's a good idea or not, but all his earlier reasoning seems to have gone out the window in the face of the general safety men in uniform represent. It has him feeling very much like throwing himself at them and clinging. Ditch the all complications like his and Max's bags, pretend to be innocent and clueless, not all that hard to fake, and this could be everything they need, right here in one convenient place. They can get their heads checked, report the cyborgs for attempted murder and maybe get taken into protective custody, and all will be as right with the world as it can be while they wait for their memories to come back. (Joe doesn't dare entertain the possibility that they won't come back, not this early. His sanity is still too delicate for all that.)
It could be good thing. An awesome thing, even.
But.
Ames is making a face.
Joe follows Ames's line of sight and realizes that, alarmingly, the receptionist's demeanor has gone from mildly chilly to subzero. The second she catches them watching her, her eyes bulge a little and she gives the tiniest shake of her head.
Definitely not a good sign.
Joe does his best to blend in with the graffiti. Max and Ames follow suit.
One of the cops tips his chin at the receptionist, paying them no mind. “Margie,” he greets, voice smoker-rough and too forced to be friendly. He isn't smiling. “You called in a GSW?”
“In the back,” the receptionist, Margie, says quickly. “They might still be in surgery so try to behave yourself. There's coffee in the break room.”
Marlboro Cop gives her a sloppy salute and heads back, leaving his partner to hang out in the waiting area and shoot the shit with Margie, it seems.
His partner doesn't shoot the shit with Margie, though. His partner looks around, taking way too long to assess Max's legs and hips and chest before moving onto Joe and Ames.
“What've you got?” he asks, gaze settling back on Max. “STD?”
All her internal alarms may be screaming danger! danger! but Max apparently has a limit to the kind of crap she's willing to take to stay out of trouble. “You sonofa-“
“Joe Schmoe!” Margie shouts, and Joe nearly jumps ten feet in the air. She clears her throat, says a little more calmly, “The doctor will see you now. Go on back. Kyle, you leave those kids alone. You know better than to go poking your nose in people's medical business.”
Effectively distracted, Kyle goes to argue with Margie about how he's just doing his job, checking out suspicious behavior and keeping the streets clean.
Because people imitating lumps on a log are real menace, Joe thinks, standing slowly so as not to redraw the cop's attention.
Max's eyebrows are so high they look ready to crawl off the top of her head. “Joe Schmoe?” she mouths, incredulous.
“What the hell else was I supposed to put?” he hisses back, and doesn't dare look to see what expression Ames is wearing now.
“You don't think something like Smith might've been a little less conspicuous?”
“No,” he snarls, really not in the fucking mood to debate it.
Reluctantly, he heads for the back door and opens it with extreme caution, in case the other cop is standing there on the other side waiting for Joe to smack into him so he can slap him with assault charges or something. That seems like just the kind of unfair bullshit that would happen to him, the way his luck is going so far.
There's no cop there. There's no one there, actually.
“Hello?” he calls, craning his head around to try and see into the open doorways along the hall but too nervous to presume he can just go wandering by himself. It's much, much cleaner back here, at least, which helps ease some of his discomfort. Not a lot. But some.
A nurse comes around the corner at the far end of the hallway. “Hello, there! Sorry about that, we're, uh,” she waves her hands around and pulls a face, like that explains everything. “If you'll follow me?”
“Okay?” Joe doesn't feel like he has a choice really, because she's kind of herding him, bustling this way and that as if afraid he'll get lost any second now. She leads him into an examination room, asks him all the same questions he had to fill out on the form, most of which he still can't answer, makes him shed his jacket, takes his blood pressure and does a bunch of other little preliminary things before she leaves him sitting there with paper crinkling under his ass and a promise to let the doctor know he's waiting. She doesn't close the door, which he finds weird. He's not sure why he finds that weird, but that's par for the amnesiac course, isn't it.
Joe blows out a shaky breath and sits there. He sits there and really wishes he didn't have to sit there. His jacket is hanging on the back of the door, it's too cold in here and it smells …
It smells sterile and metallic and like this room is perfectly prepped to take him apart, neat as you please. However it pleases.
It doesn't take long for him to realize that his growing anxiety is not just from being left alone with his hollowed-out head and too much space for his thoughts, or being without Max and Ames for the first time since he can remember anything, or because of the shady-ass cops invading the place.
It's the place.
His mind is an unreliable traitor but his body is a whole other matter. It knows something. Something bad. Skin twitching hotly, pulse hammering, hands clammy and slick, all his spit drying up and the sharp tug of his stomach tying itself into knots. Acceptably clean or not, this entire setting unnerves him on a very deep, fundamental level.
He wants to go now.
Joe sucks in a deep breath. Pushes it out. He kicks his feet back and forth, white-knuckling the edge of the examination table. He feels in an abstract way that this is something he can pass or fail, only no one's going to tell him what the test is about beforehand, or when it really starts.
Is it time to go yet?
There's no way to know.
Fuck.
An eternity passes before the doctor comes in, by which point he's half out of his head with paranoia. When she smiles at him, he jumps again, much harder and higher than when Margie shouted his name out of the blue. He thinks he might've just pulled something.
Her eyes are soft and concerned. “You okay?” she asks, holding her hands open to show she's harmless.
“Fine,” he says, clipped. “Can we get this over with? I wanna get this over with.”
“Sure.” She pulls up a stool and sets a pen to her clipboard. “Why don't you start by telling me what the problem is?”
“You already made me tell you twice. There was a form and a nurse and-” He stops himself, takes another deep breath. Every instinct screams at him to run. That they're fucking with him. They have to be fucking with him. No one is this fucking redundant unless they're fucking with you. This is a bullshit mind game and he doesn't have to play if he doesn't want to. “I can't remember anything,” he manages, swallowing against the burn surging up the back of his throat. As long as she doesn't come at him with any needles or scalpels he can handle this. He can. “From before a few hours ago. And before you ask, my head doesn't hurt and my mind doesn't feel altered. Except for, y'know, the obvious.”
She scribbles on her clipboard and asks him some more questions. To her credit, she mostly tries to avoid the ones he's already answered, but he still can't give her much. “All right,” she says. “I'd like to take a quick look at your head before we do anything else. Are you okay with that?”
Joe nods, short and sharp, jaw aching with how hard he's clenching his teeth.
It isn't so bad, he realizes, once she's in the middle of it. Just her hands probing at his scalp, no instruments, while she asks him if this hurts or if that feels sore. He tells himself to quit acting like a skittish little kitten and suck it up. Jesus, if Ames was back here he would totally-well, he'd probably just glare a lot.
Joe wishes Ames would come back here. Or Max. Max and all her curves and her unwavering, bossy presence are definitely invited.
The doctor's gloved fingers freeze on the back of his neck. A couple seconds tick by, and then her thumb brushes across-
Oh.
Joe shivers. The sensation is pleasant but also fairly invasive. He can't decide if he wants to lean into it or punch her for the audacity.
The doctor clears her throat and pulls away. “I just need to, uh.” She darts around him and toward the door, wide-eyed. “I'll be right back, just gimme a second.” She spins away, spins back around and holds up a finger. “One second. Don't go anywhere.”
Joe's brain may be full of holes, but even he knows that is not a sign of happy, magical cures to come. He should probably go now.
A tilt of his head and he can just make out the voices a little ways down the hall. The doctor and Marlboro Cop are having a stuttered, breathless conversation.
Yes. Going. Absolutely time to do that.
Joe hops off the table and snatches up his jacket, shrugging it back on as he sticks his head into the hall to check lines of sight. He slips out, feeling much more in control the further he gets from that awful room, and he's practically sprinting by the time he skids back out into the waiting area.
And right into the other cop, who's in the middle of arresting Max.
Joe stops short, wildly confused.
Ames is looking more than a little helpless, which seems so unnatural it's like watching rain fall up. He's waving his FBI badge, scowling like his life depends on it, but his eyes are huge and savage. He's trying to pull rank, Joe sees now, claiming Max is in his custody, all get your goddamn hands off my prisoner before I take them off, but the cop barely seems to notice him, white-faced and fumbling with his handcuffs. Max demands to know what the charges are, then gets impatient and jerks away before the cop can lock the bracelets around both of her wrists, spinning around and smashing an elbow into his nose.
Blood spurts everywhere. The cop's hands fly to his busted face. Max drops before he can recover, sweeping his legs out from under him and planting him on his ass. Ames gets in on the action, then, bends over to grab the cop's hair and slams the back of his head down with determined brutality, knocking him out cold. Joe winces, hoping he imagined the wet crack and that Ames didn't actually just crush the back of the guy's skull like a pumpkin.
They both look up at Joe, eyes gaping.
That's all the warning he needs.
He ducks and twists away before Marlboro Cop can bring his riot baton down on Joe's head. One solid punch to the temple and the guy plummets like a sack of bricks.
Joe straightens, heart thumping crazily. His grin feels manic. “Remind me again about our training?” he says, and Ames just stands there for a second, stunned.
And then he smiles. Honest-to-god smiles, so big he might actually be straining an unused face muscle or two.
It's somewhat deranged-looking, but Joe is amazed nevertheless.
Sadly, he's only amazed for two seconds, because then the doctor comes rushing out and starts screaming at Margie to call 911 and animal control and the National Guard and anyone else with tasers or tranquilizers, and hauling ass is apparently going to be the theme of their night.
TBC ...