Andulasia

-1-

“Sir!,” a panicked voice calls through my door. It’s followed by three  knocks.

It’s 10PM, a half hour past lights out for the corporals. I’d just come into my room, removed my tie and jacket and laid on my bed to catch up on the news streams when I heard it; five gunshots from an RLA issue glock.

At that point the only thing I could do was wait and hope they didn’t need me for this.

“Sir!,” comes again through the door.

I open the door to see a flushed Coporal Woulter Belgrade. He’d enlisted in the RLA during the first wave of recruitment when he couldn’t pay back his college loans and the RLA agreed to pay them for him. Belgrade was smart and a hard worker, he set all of the physical training records even though it was an open secret he drank excessively at night.

“Who the fuck fired ?,” l  demand.

“Sir,” Belgrade begins, buying himself half a second to decide if he wants to tell me the truth. “Sir, Corp. Hunter, Sir. He hit an inmate.”

He's misleading me and I don't like it.

“Hit or killed ?”

“Sir-”

I don’t need an answer. They wouldn’t come knocking at my door if it was a misfire or petty fight. I step out of my quarters and he backs away quickly. I do a quick sweep and spot most of the squadron encircling the vehicle lot.

I head towards the crowd and catch sight of an RLA Jeep Protect destroyed beyond recognition.

These fucking idiots.

As I approach they  quickly come to attention, most of them shaking, a few wobbling drunkenly. Behind the formation is an inmate on the ground, surrounded in a halo of blood.

I break the line and kneel besides the body. The young man’s usually fiery eyes are lifeless and picking up his  head by the blood matted brown hair I can see the bullet went clear through his skull.

My stomach churns and my vision falters, I close my eyes and guide my way out of it. 

I can’t falter in front of my men.

I’m relieved they’d decided to atleast kill the  prisoner who caused me nothing but logistical headaches and administrative issues.

Still, another dead inmate is the last thing Fort Harmony needs.  After the Greene boy  had been killed by another inmate in his sleep we’d received a number of citations, and threats from the Colonel’s office about the importance of keeping prisoners from killing each other.

They don’t like fuck ups, Ken General Hinkley had said.

 If  the Colonel found out a corporal killed a civilian prisoner I would surely be court martialed and sentenced. This was my second chance and my worthless subordinates were fucking that up for me.  I need to get these men in line.

“Hunter,” I call.

“Sir ?,” Corp. Hunter responds, stepping forward.

 He  is ghostly. Hunter  was young and intelligent,  a drafted teacher. He’d been given deskwork developing training curriculum for the RLA until he was sent here to fill out my  roster. He’d probably never discharged his weapon, but it was no excuse. He didn’t have to shoot the boy in the head.

“Who the fuck told you to shoot an inmate ?,” l demand and then I can’t stop I'm so pissed. “What the fuck gives you the right ? Because he disrespected you ? You fucking want to see me gone ? You want me to be fucking executed ? Or do you want to go to be doing the labor? Which one ?”

“Sir, neither, Sir--”

“Shut the fuck up. I don’t ever want to hear you speak again. Ever.” I i turn to the still at attention corporals. “Who witnessed what happened ?”

Two corporals step up; Belgrade and Lansing. On their breath I can smell the cheap brandy they store in expired castor oil bottles in the kitchen and think I know nothing about.

“Sir, the witnesses were I and Lansing…and the inmate’s brother,” Belgrade begins cautiously.

I scan the faces in front of me, but Alex  Haley isn’t among them.

“And where is he ?,” I ask.

“Sir, we escorted him to the interrogation room, sir. We don’t know exactly what he saw or...thought he saw,” Lansing reports catching my eye.

This gives me some relief. After the Greene death,  I’d created a policy that we were to  isolate any witnesses to a prisoner altercation. That way I could come up with the best official story without any rumors getting started and making their way up the chain.

I didn’t have a single doubt that  Hunter had shot Harlow Haley. But Harlow Haley was unstable and a ticking timebomb and Hunter was a decent man. Reporting a homicide would put the kind of attention I don’t need at Fort Harmony just yet.

“Officially, this was suicide, do you understand?” I tell them. “Harlow Haley tried to escape. He destroyed an RLA vehicle, stole a weapon and he killed himself when he got caught. Tell the inmates nothing. Let them make up their own stories.”

Hunter and Belgrade both nod slowly.

This is for show anyway, I will have to have them and all of the men in front of me transferred out some place better so they won’t try and discredit my official story.

“Belgrade, take care of Harlow Haley's body. Lansing, Alex Haley is likely in shock, go make sure he understands this was  suicide. The rest of you wake up the rest of the squadron, change clothes and run laps around this base until the sun comes up. Relay any immediate frustrations to Corporal Hunter in whatever form you deem necessary.”

The men move quickly to obey, they are all terrified of my wrath right now and I get a feeling of immense pleasure as they all move unquestioningly my orders.

After months confined to a hospital bed, I learned just how much I liked being in control. It made me feel good.  Though it seemed that now that I had the power, I was fighting everyday to keep it.

 

***

 

“Don’t you want to go get some sleep ?... What is it ?... Are you fucking stupid, now ?,” Lansing demands from the boy. “Just tell me about the suicide. Tell me how  your piece of shit brother took Hunter’s gun and shot himself. That’s all you have to say to leave…Answer me !”

Alex Haley appears disturbingly unemotional though the interrogation.

Haley sits on the other side of the interrogation table from Lansing, his brows are furrowed and there is  a vacant look in his eyes. 

I felt partially guilty for Haley being in the situation,  for even still being at Fort Harmony. But I’d done the best I’d could, I’d offered him an out on day one.

I tap on the two way glass and Lansing quickly stands to come out and meet me.

“Sir,” Lansing says shakily.

“How long has he been like that ?”

“The whole time, Sir. Seven fuc—Seven hours and no response.” Lansing replies. “I don’t think he gets what is going on—“

 “He’s in shock,” I explain.  “I’ll put an end this.”

Lansing steps aside and I go into the interrogation room. I probably should have ended the interrogation hours ago, but I’d been otherwise occupied.

An inmate (particularly one I despised) dying didn’t mean I wasn’t getting my eight hours of  sleep and a long shower. Since it was becoming clear I needed to instill some discipline into my squadron I knew today would be a long day. And I wanted to look my best.

Opening the door to the interrogation room, I walk over to Haley’s chair and kneel so I’m closer to his eye level. Haley stiffens slightly at my presence, but he doesn’t make eye contact.

I’d taken a special interest in interrogation techniques while studying military law. I knew all the basics and how to get a victim to believe what you needed them to believe.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” I tell him and he ignores my order.

I resist the urge to force the boy’s face up to look at me.

“Would you like a break ? Maybe some tea or coffee?,” I ask to his  downcast face. “Maybe some rest ?”

Haley’s eyes  flicker to me and I try to look reassuring. He’d been awake for nearly 24 hours

“Come with me,” I say standing and he follows. 

On the way out I signal for Lansing to follow.

“There’s an affidavit on my desk I need you, Hunter and Bellgrade to sign. Now,” I say into Lansing’s ear.

“Yes, sir,” he says and walks off quickly.

I turn to Haley, who is hunched over behind me,  his eyes still vacant.

 I should be taking him to my office too so we can properly finish this, but start walking towards my quarters. I’ve convinced myself it’s better this way; my office is probably bugged, my quarters are closer, doing it in my office makes this kind of proposal  too official.

But deep down I know the real reasons; doing this in my private bedroom put me in a greater position of power over him. Not to mention  the troubling thoughts I’d been harboring towards the blonde Haley.

The only Haley now, I suppose.

I  turn to make sure he is still following me and I notices he keeps his arms around his waist as we walk, like he’s going to be sick.

I unlock my room door with my Syndicate and hold it open  for him.

“Please tell me if you are going to be sick,” I say as soon as the door is  closed. “I have a private bathroom.”

Although it’s a joke to call that coat closet sized room a bathroom, it barely fits a shower and a toilet.

Haley’s eyes move briskly around the room. There isn’t much to it; it always reminded me of my college dorm in scope. The nearest sprawl to Fort Harmony was 800 miles west and the nearest military base was 200  miles away, so I was forced to live in camp.

Superior officer quarters were made to fit a twin bed and  but I’d had a full bed  squeezed into the room. At 6’6’’’ I wouldn't  even consider a twin bed.

That addition aside, everything else about the room  was standard, the furniture a cheap plastic.

I haven’t had my morning coffee and even though it’s shitty coffee I start the water heater. I take my eyes off him for one second to grab the coffee and hear the small ting of a tiny piece  of metal make contact with the  fake wood  polyurethane floors.

My  eyes search the spotless flooring for the source of the sound and focus on a  crumpled bronze bullet at Haley’s feet.  It’s a  bullet from a standard RLA issued glock.

Before I can figure out where the hell it came from the spot on the floor is covered in thick red blood, spilling from Haley’s abdomen.

 “What the fuck…”

I  pull one of my  weekend shirt from the dresser and push it into Haley’s wound. It should hurt like the devil, but he doesn’t scream. I hold on to his arm to keep him from falling and I can already feel the blood loss and his body growing cold and distant.

***

She looks different.

l never thought Nurse Audrey tried, after all she spent most of her time cooped up in the infirmary. But, maybe she did.

This time of morning, 3 hours before her actual shift begins, she looks ragged. Her skin looks dry, her dark brown hair is dull and tied in a messy ponytail and her lips look like they are missing.

With expert hands I knows too well, she lays  Haley back on my bed and without a moment’s hesitation injects the blood coagulant into his wound.

The bleeding stops.

He’d passed out from blood loss a long time ago and she’d given him medicine to keep him that way. After injecting him with an extra painkiller,  she opens her bag and taking out an enzyme creams, rubs it over the wound on his abdomen before turning to me.

“Are you all right, sir?,” she ask me urgently

“Of course, why wouldn’t I be ?,”

She gestures to the blood. There is blood everywhere.

It had started as a rather large puddle on the floor near Haley and my frantic steps mixed with Audrey’s has smeared blood all over the floors, it had gushed on my bedframe and sprinkled the walls.  The sink was stained pink from my earlier attempts to wash it off my own hands.

This much blood should of set me off,  but it hadn’t bothered me.

“I’m fine,” I tell her.

I’d liked Audrina Maddox from the first day I had been admitted to the City of Hope for my gunshot wounds during Operation Risen Sun,  She didn’t believe in having the fake bedside manner and knew when to keep secrets.  She’d found out about the orderly who’d given me a handjob, but never said anything.

She had a complicated relationship to the RLA. Her husband had been killed in the initial attack on the border and while she wanted to see justice for him she didn’t want anyone else’s husband to get blown up either.

When given my choice of medical personnel for the camp, I appointed her; she came cheap and didn’t have a stick up her ass about rules.

Nurse Audrey was the only one at the camp who fully knew about my past, about Operation Risen Sun and what happened there. I’d come away with a mild case of PTSD, which I tried to keep quiet.

 “Did you shoot him, sir ?,” she asks looking at the crumpled bullet on the dresser.

“No,” I respond, appalled by the accusation. ”I think he was hit by a stray bullet. It’s a long story. Thank you, for your assistance.”

“I’m wondering if I should even go back to bed,” she says, changing into clean gloves. “Do you  plan to wake me up again ?”

“Again ?”

I’d told the Corporals not to wake her to help with the storage of Harlow Haley’s body. I received a regrettable report from Corporal Belgrade that they put the body in the kitchen refrigerator for the time being.

“Prisoner Mayfield Daniels had another asthma attack,” she explains.  “Not to mention 3 of your corporals collapsed on the track and are on hydration IVs.”

“Do you think I’m working them too hard ?,” I ask her pointedly.

I’m supposed to defer to her about any medical concerns or behavior hazardous to a man’s health. But she’s just a civilian and I’ve made it clear I’m the one who makes the rules in this camp.

“Nothing they won’t survive, sir.” 

 “I think things will quiet down now. I’d like for Haley to stay here,” I decide. “Will that work ?”

She raises her eyebrows.

“I need him isolated from the others.” I say quickly. “And I kind of owe him one.”

Nurse Audrey opens her bag and removes a sterile plastic sheet to lay over the bed along with more bandages, gauze and a hospital gown.

“Alex should wake up by the end of the day,” she explains. “Take the bloody uniform to the hazardous materials drop. Make sure the bandages get changed or it will get infected and let me know if he needs any pain medication...you know what a bitch gunshots can be, sir.”

I nod  and after she checks Haley’s vitals she heads back to the infirmary, where she sleeps upstairs in a studio, without a second look.

-2-

My attention shifts to the unconscious, bloodied inmate on my bed and something I can’t  place courses through my veins.

Desire.

I’d been running from it, but the truth was I desired him in a way I couldn’t explain. Alex Haley was not my type,  he was beautiful but I’d never been superficial and always fell for intellectual superiors.

This feeling wasn’t desire I decided. It is something closer to  lust.

I quietly undresses the unconscious boy, tossing the bloodied uniform into the hazmat bag. His small frame is more muscular than I imagined. Seeing him naked  doesn’t give me an ounce of perverse excitement I expect  It feels very wrong.

I reach for the hospital gown Audrey left and as I unfold it I pause.

I’d been reading Haley’s file in an attempt to fully understand what the hell is going through his head. I knew he’d been born with  hermaphroditic mutation.

Curiosity gets the better of me and I peer closer, not touching; his genitals appeared relatively normal save for a neat, long surgical scar underneath his scrotum that disappears between his legs.

My gaze lands scarring on his calf, looking closer I recognize  a crude L, E and most of an X had been half-heartedly carved there. I follow the length of his leg to a small circular burn mark on his inner thigh, the flesh around it pink and healed.  My eyes move upward.

Past several faint scars.

Over yellowing bruises and animal  bite marks.

To another burn mark on his shoulder.

“What the fuck happened to you ?,” l wonder aloud and quickly cover his body.

 

-----------------------

Isla Starling-Haley rushes to pick up her Grandmother’s line, needing a break from the crying and religious diatribe.

“Hello,” she says over the  sound of Skylar crying  in the background, aggressively ignoring Gram’s attempts at comfort.

“Hello Ma’am, my name is Sgt. Kenneth Maxwell and I’m looking for a relative of Harlow Haley,” a cool voice says over the line.

“What now ?,”she breathes into the phone as the door slams behind her. She turns to see her mother walk in, angry and high.

1,200 miles east of  Isla, Sgt. Kenneth Maxwell projects his script and reads dutifully

“I’m sorry to inform you, Mr. Harlow Haley passed away at 9:39 PM in a suicide. As he was in RLA custody we have allotted $1,000 to release his body to you and prepare his burial. Which address would you like us to send it ?”

There is silence. He scrolls further down the script.

“Ma’am I’m truly sorry for your loss, but I need an answer--”

“Sorry,” she says, a smile pricking at her cheek. “Wait, where is Alex ? Is he alright ?”

“He’s fine.” Maxwell lies, knowing that particular Haley is unconscious in his bed. “Now, about  Harlow--”

“What about him ?,” she half laughs.

“I need to know where to have his body--”

“Don’t send him here.” 

“Well, we can do a nearby  funeral home--”

“No, don’t send him here at all.” she says firmly. “I don’t know if you knew my brother but Harlow didn’t give  a fuck about us when we were alive and we’re not giving a fuck about him when he’s dead. Can you just send the money that you’d spend to ship him to his daughter’s family?”

Her statement struck Maxwell as cruel, but he wasn’t going to argue with her.  He didn’t care where the money went, he just had a body in the kitchen fridge he needed to get rid of and a money order to send.

“I suppose I could do that. But I can’t keep a body here, so why don’t you tell me what I should do with that ?,” he asks bitterly.

“I honestly don’t care,” she responds flippantly. “What do you do with the trash ?”

This statement silences Maxwell, he wasn’t prepared for such harshness.

“Look, I know he was my brother and maybe he was good once, but he was cruel. He was a monster. Harlow suffocated us all, now maybe we  can finally breathe a little.”

“Yes, well…I did notice some…scars on your other brother.”

“What ? Which ones ? The burn marks ?,” she says lightly and her voice cracks. “Do you want to see my matching ones…god, that was the worse phase Harlow went through. Now if that’s all....”

“Thank you for your time,” Maxwell says.

He cuts the line and reconnects to his favorite nurse, Audrina Maddox, who’d just settled back into bed  fully dressed hoping  for one more hour of sleep.

“Yes, sir ?,” she answers dutifully.

 “Audrey, there’s something in the kitchen fridge I need you to have fired up for me.”

-----------------

:I

CPShawna: So, SHV

SHV: Yes ?

CPShawna: Audrina is a nurse....

SHV: Yeah. She is Pascal's from Vice's wife. Audrina gets a super tiny cameo in Vice and I could not stop thinking about her.

CPShawna: Yeah, but she's a nurse...

SHV: Yeah...

CPSHAWNA: And Pascal is a drug dealer....

SHV: Yeah ???

CPSHAWNA: Drug dealer. Nurse. A Nurse doing good and her no good drug dealing husband.

SHV: Oh, hmmm. Totally unintentional.

============

You: Hey Shawna, wasn't Maxwell 6'5'' in Sundays ? Why is he 6'6'' here ?

SH: Maxwell is very competitive when it comes to being a tormented soldier with a ripped body in a forbidden relationship so he had to be an inch taller than Seraphina.