Cursed Apprentice (Earth Survives Book 2)

by R. R. Roberts

  The bus appeared down the street, its headlights illuminating the driving rain in two bright columns. It was a fine sight as it lumbered steadily toward him. All he had to do was lift his legs up those three steps and he could make it to Dom’s shelter. Three steps and he was home free.

  The bus pulled up with a wheezing sigh of stinking diesel exhaust, the doors opening with a creaky thunk. With a stuttering chug-chug of the old diesel engine and the patter of rain against the pavement the only sound, Payton and the driver stared at one another, the driver taken aback by his appearance, obviously, but not enough to reject him. All in a day’s work for the driver.

  Payton’s gaze dropped to the steps and he considered loosening his hold on the post.

  “Come on buddy, it’s now or never. Make up your mind.”

  Payton let go of the post, lunged for the bus, and fell onto the steps.

  “Oh, he’s drunk!” a woman’s voice squeaked in alarmed protest from inside the bus. “And it’s getting cold in here, driver.”

  Payton pulled himself up onto the platform, his legs still dangling outside the bus. Gawd.

  With a long-suffering sigh, the bus driver got out of his seat, placed the sole of his boot on Payton’s shoulder. Payton screamed in agony as the driver shoved him off the stairs with a grunt. Too weak to resist, Payton collapsed back out onto the pavement. “Better sleep it off buddy. Can’t take no drunks on the bus. Transit policy. Sorry.”

  He didn’t sound sorry; he sounded annoyed.

  Payton rolled onto his side and blanked out, his last thought… Meat wagon.

  When he came to once again, he was “moving along”, only this time he was inside a warm moving vehicle, strapped to a gurney with a burly medic gazing down at him speculatively. His shoulder was on fire, as was his face. Every breath he took was a knife in his side.

  “Rough night.” The medic’s tone wasn’t unkind.

  Payton struggled to speak around his swollen face. “Jumped…robbed.”

  “Looks like they got you good. Lucky for you, the bus driver called you in.”

  This was a surprise. The guy who’d booted him from the bus had called in help? Huh.

  “Transit policy.”

  Closing his eyes, Payton was slow to respond, his voice cracked. “Nice guy.”

  “You’re going to Vancouver Pacific Hospital. They’ll fix you up and probably release you tonight. Got some place to go?”

  Payton opened his eyes and slid them over to the medic. Seriously?

  “Yeah—I thought so.” The medic’s expression brightened considerably. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. “Here. Get yourself over to this place. They’ll take you in, help you recover. No charge.”

  No charge? Where the hell had this place been hiding?

  Payton took the card with his good hand. Okay, semi-good hand. It shook as he peered blearily at the tiny print. Harmony House. Why hadn’t he heard of this place before? He croaked, “Where is it?”

  “Right across from Van Pacific.”

  “Handy.”

  The medic grinned. “That’s the idea.”

  This guy was decent. His concern was a surprise Payton was unprepared for and he was alarmed at feeling himself soften, then tear up, the final humiliation. Mistake. Accepting kindness from strangers was the enemy of the disenfranchised. It robbed them of their resolve, of their strength, and they couldn’t give that up. If they did, they were lost.

  Keeping his tone gruff, Payton said, “I’ll think about it.”

  The ambulance came to a halt and the back doors opened, a blast of cold night air rushing inside. Payton’s gurney was expelled and whisked smoothly through the hospital emergency doors and into a curtained room, where he was transferred onto a hospital bed.

  The medic nodded. “Good luck, bud.” Then he was gone.

  A pretty, honey-blonde nurse came in, followed by a young doctor with kind blue eyes and gentle hands. Payton was quickly assessed, his wet clothes removed, his screaming right shoulder immobilized. They cleaned him up, his face, head, left thigh, and left arm frozen and stitched. When he woke with a start, they told him he had a broken collar bone and broken ribs. Had he dozed off while they’d X-rayed him? How was that possible? Then he was given pain meds and slowly, deliciously, it was all good. Dressed in a borrowed set of clean blue scrubs, he drifted then, lost in a random recollection of today’s events, seen now in his mind’s eye at a calm and clinical distance.

  No one asked him for ID, for his insurance plan, for his home address. Was this because they knew he was homeless; knew not to ask? He was at once glad for their sensitivity and embarrassed they knew this about him just from his appearance.

  Then, surprisingly, they brought him warm blankets, tucked them securely around his weary body and told him he’d be sleeping in the hospital tonight. No back out into the rain at midnight for Payton. Grateful beyond his ability to speak, he closed his eyes and fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  When he awoke, it was because a male orderly was wheeling a hot breakfast into his cubicle. Hot tea, hot oatmeal, eggs and fragrant sausage, toast, jam, orange juice. A banquet! Wouldn’t Dom and Weazer get a kick out of this? Damned straight they would.

  Payton was warm and comfortable, his body relaxed for the first time since he’d fallen from the Bore. Distant early morning noises of hospital activity drifted in behind the orderly along with the smell of antiseptic, the muted bong of signal bells that meant something to the people who worked here and nothing to him.

  Payton struggled to sit up. The orderly waved him to stop and cranked up the bed so Payton was in a sitting position, then the orderly swung the tray over the bed for Payton to easily access. “Darla ordered this for you. Said you’d be hungry.”

  “Darla?”

  The orderly winked and disappeared back out of the curtains. Payton stared after him, but when the orderly didn’t reappear, realized that was it. Time to eat. The food smelled like ambrosia. Orange juice. Real orange juice. He’d heard about it, but had never indulged, all his money earmarked for establishing himself here in WEN 2036 and getting off the streets. He raised the glass with his good hand and sipped the cold, tangy liquid slowly, rolling it around inside his cut-up mouth. It stung where his teeth had lacerated the inside of his cheeks, where the missing molar had once been, and it felt cool and soothing at the same time. It was delicious. There should be poems written about chilled orange juice, he decided.

  The rest of the meal, all soft and easy to chew, as long as he went slowly so not to pull on his facial stitches, went down nicely. Once done, he pushed the tray away and closed his eyes, falling back to sleep despite the activity he guessed was happening beyond his curtain. This was the safest he’d felt in months.

  He was woken once again and this time the orderly came bearing lunch—the breakfast tray had been removed when he’d slept.

  Payton asked, “Darla?”

  The orderly nodded. “Darla.”

  Payton was loving himself some Darla.

  Lunch started with cream of mushroom soup. He’d had mushrooms back on Cloud Rez and had liked them, but this was much, much better. Next up was some sort of pasta dish filled with a soft white cheese and spinach and covered with a tangy tomato sauce with more cheese. Soft cooked vegetables came with it. The salad was too hard to chew, so he skipped it. The dessert was a caramel pudding over sliced bananas with whipped cream. Hot coffee and cream ended the meal. They knew how to feed someone with an injured face.

  This meal he ate quickly, feeling more like himself now, taking care to avoid the side of his mouth with the missing molar.

  There was some sort of disturbance outside his cubicle that caught his attention. A doctor was demanding to know what the hell was going on here.

  “…not your own private procurement center, Matt,” one man stage-whispered angrily.

  Next came a snatch of, “—Hospital Board might be interested in your…” argued back.

/>   These guys were not happy. These guys maybe didn’t like each other much?

  He wanted to call out, “Try a few weeks of street life, why don’t you? You’ll find your petty problems will disappear.” If they only knew how good they had it.

  Still, he escaped into restful sleep once again and didn’t wake until someone shook him. He opened his eyes with a start and was surprised to see the pretty nurse from last night with an older, white-haired man by her side.

  “Hi,” she greeted, with a wide smile. “I hear you slept the whole day away.”

  Feeling shy, he nodded. “You’re Darla?” She was so pretty, and she didn’t avert her eyes from him like most women here in WEN 2036 did.

  “Yes. And this is Mark Peterson from Harmony House. We’ve brought you some clothes we think will fit and we’re taking you there now. It’s just across the street. You’ll have a room to yourself for your recovery.”

  This was the place the paramedic had told him about. Since there would be no tree climbing in his foreseeable future, nor defending himself at the shelter, Harmony House was a Godsend. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. He asked, “We’re going now?”

  “Yes. And Mark is here to help you get dressed. We’ve borrowed a wheelchair from the hospital and will go out a back way to get you across the street. It’ll be the easiest route for you.”

  “Thanks. For everything.” Payton was abruptly aware he hadn’t been to the facilities in hours. “I-ah… I’ll need to get to a washroom first.”

  Mark Peterson stepped forward now, his face wreathed with a friendly man-to-man understanding. “And here’s where Darla removes herself and I take over.”

  Darla ducked outside the curtains. Mark took care of the rest.

  Without fanfare, in fact without signing a single document, Payton was released from the hospital. This was a surprise, since they seemed to want everything documented on paper in this era. Wouldn’t hospital services need to be accounted for? Maybe keeping track of beat-up homeless people was an exercise in futility and the hospital had simply given it up? This was excellent news for Payton.

  It turned out his little curtained off area wasn’t with all the others as he’d imagined, but off by itself at the end of a little used hallway. This way he could be wheeled out the side door without a fuss and spirited across the busy street and into Harmony House, which, it turned out was a remarkably unimpressive plain, unmarked gray building. No wonder he’d never heard of this place.

  Once inside Harmony House he was taken immediately to a private room, and settled into a normal bed, where, after a cup of sweet tea, he fell again into untroubled sleep. Someone up there finally liked him.

  The first week he was at Harmony House, Payton was simply grateful to take his next breath. He had the broken collar bone, and the five broken ribs, mostly on the right side, both injuries massive sources of pain with every move he made. Because he’d been on the streets for so long, his reserves were empty. He needed the nursing they offered to properly heal from the mugging, and once he was allowed at last to see his stitched-up face, he needed another day to recover from the shock of his new appearance. He had two black eyes and a broken nose he hadn’t even been aware of. His features were lumpy and bumpy, and unrecognizable, along with a long line of black stitches that seamed the side of his face back together, stretching from his jaw to his forehead. This hadn’t just been a mugging. He’d been carved up with a blade. Disfigured. Carved on the left side, pummeled on the right. If not for the bus driver’s call, he would be dead.

  All the while, they gave him daily injections to help him heal. That was all right. He wanted to heal as much as the next guy. And after the shock of his appearance wore off, he could see the wisdom of their advice—the scars would whiten, flatten and might even mostly disappear, over time.

  Wait ‘til Dom and Weazer saw him. They’d barely recognize him.

  At the end of the second week, they carefully removed his stitches; all of them—face, arm, thigh. He was healing nicely, and he was breathing easier, though deep breathing was still out of the question. The swelling in his face had settled, his eyes were now a colorful array of greens and yellows, his nose looked almost normal. The long scar was a deep purple and angry looking and would take some getting used to. He could have walked out then, but they invited him to stay, and since tree climbing required strength and two healthy collarbones he didn’t have, and the so-far not possible deep breathing was still a major issue, he took them up on it. He was in no shape to fight for every meal, for every dollar; he’d be a fool to walk out now. He rested, listened to music, read books, ate good meals, and slept and slept.

  By the end of the third week, he was getting antsy and wanted to roam, stretch, to move his atrophying muscles, but his nurse discouraged him, saying it was too soon. He couldn’t help the sensation that the staff at Harmony House seemed disappointed he was recovering so well. Did they want him to be an invalid? Is that what made them feel fulfilled, bringing someone back? There was a name for that, wasn’t there? Once the deed was done, so was the challenge?

  It was weird, but this morning, when a nurse arrived with his daily injection, Mark was with her. There were no more friendly, man-to-man understanding smiles on Mark Peterson’s face now. And come to think about it, there had lately been no visits from the pretty Darla.

  What was going on here at Harmony House? Were they funded by the bed and they needed the bodies to fill them? He maybe should let them in on a little secret—there were many more where he came from who could use some care and feeding.

  Payton had lots of time on his hands now, time to pick over every detail of what was happening to him since he was mugged for his can money. Why had the hospital kept him in the curtained room and why no discharge papers? Did they even know he’d been there? Now that he thought about it, no one had come to check on him—ever. Was there an underground funnel of patients happening under their very noses? If so, why the subterfuge?

  The word “procurement”, remembered from the whispered argument he’d overheard outside his cubical at the hospital popped into his head at the start of week four. Procuring what?

  Or the more disturbing—whom?

  And had he misheard the name Matt? Was it perhaps Mark who had been arguing? He had been drugged up and they had been whispering. It could happen.

  Once this idea landed in Payton’s head, his easy sleeping was over, though he still slept the sleep of the dead every night. As an experiment, he faked drinking his nightly tea by nipping into his bathroom and dumping it down the sink while the nurse was out of his room getting him a requested second pillow. When she returned, he was back in his bed and had smiled sleepily at her, handing back the empty cup and pretending to nod off. She turned out the lights and left the room.

  He remained wide awake.

  The only conclusion could be they were drugging him every night. To what end?

  He waited for a few hours, then, dressed only in a gown, robe and slippers, slipped out into the low-lit hallway, this the first time he’d left his private room. There were several doors along the hallway. He tested them. Most were locked.

  These doors, however, had windows.

  He ghosted from window to window, gazing into each room. These were other patient’s rooms and judging from what he was seeing, these patients were very sick, very, very sick, with IV’s and machines, some with attendants wearing what he’d call… hell, they were hazmat suits.

  What kind of medicine were they practicing here at Harmony House?

  He glanced down at the portal in his arm, recalling his daily shot, and Mark’s disappointment he was still thriving, while these poor losers obviously were not.

  Were they expecting him to become sick? Were they giving him something that should have made him sick and he was immune somehow? He remembered Patterawadee’s cocktail of inoculations just before he’d come through the Time Bore. Could he be immune and the others not?

  Mentally he walked th
rough the events of the last few weeks once again. The paramedic telling him the bus driver had “put in a call to get him help”, then asking him if he had anywhere to go. Then straight into the single, isolated and curtained room, no interaction with anyone beyond Darla and that one doctor. Was that guy even a Vancouver Pacific Hospital doctor? Darla’s orders being followed to the letter. Him falling asleep after every delicious, personally delivered hospital meal; Darla and Mark showing up, providing him with clothes, “whisking” him away through the back door, and no discharge paper. Now, his daily shots and Mark’s obvious disappointment Payton wasn’t looking like these guys in these rooms.

  They were experimenting on people who had no people. People no one would come asking after.

  They were doing something evil. And judging by the impatience he was beginning to see in Mark’s face, Payton’s usefulness at Harmony House was fast coming to a close.

  5

  FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES

  FIRST ON HIS LIST: steal a phone. This worked out well, as the phone he stole was from one of the purses behind the front desk and was a pay-as-you-go phone—irony at work—and was not passcode protected. Who was that lax?

  It took pictures. Sweet. Time to collect evidence. Right after he called Dom at the shelter.

  He ducked back into his own room, then into the bathroom, locking the door behind him then punched in the number he knew by heart and had never had the opportunity to call.

  A hushed voice answered. Obviously, everyone was sleeping.

  Payton cupped his hand around the phone and whispered, “Can I speak to Dom Derrick?”

  “You do know it’s two in the morning?” The woman’s murmured response was long-suffering, but not unkind.