THE DEPARTMENT FOR MUTATED PERSONS
ROBERT R. FIKE
Copyright © 2019 by Robert R. Fike
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Robert R. Fike
1402 W Rosewood Ave
San Antonio, TX 78201
Printed in the United States of America.
First Edition
To my wife, Damaris, for humoring my chaotic brain as it bounced between characters, dialogue, and storylines. Thank you for being a fan and listening when it felt like everyone was silent. Thank you for the mother, wife, and woman you are.
To all the people who helped by reading and critiquing this work: THANK YOU. Thank you to Rhonda, Juliette, Jon, Sherri, and several members of Wattpad for investing their time and passion. Thank you to my parents, who let a kid spend long road trips with headphones in and a pen scrawling across a notebook.
This story is for anyone who has ever felt less than.
You are mighty.
one
It was another summer day in Arizona: arid, sun-soaked, eternal. Alan never owned a pair of sunglasses. Nineteen years spent squinting. Something in his heart said sunny days were behind him.
The block was government zoned; police enforcement at every corner and no civilians in sight except for Alan. Wide two-lane streets: empty. Not a scrap of garbage. Clean, deserted, and sterile.
Alan stood across the street from the white government building, and adjusted the bag slung over his slouched left shoulder. He brandished an emotionless, straight smile. His amber eyes stared up at the light-blotting structure, shadow reaching out toward him as if emboldened by the police presence.
Alan ran a hand through his short brown hair, then pulled his hand back to the sling of his pack to brace it from falling onto the pavement. Alan found a loose piece of sidewalk rock and scraped a long white line across the ground like rough chalk writing. He was fussing with this red hoodie when a voice snapped the air like a twig.
"Hey! Get over here."
Alan looked to his left and saw a large man in black military gear staring back intensely. Alan assumed he was staring. The man’s eyes were covered with sunglasses, and a taut, fabric mask was covering his mouth. The lack of visible facial features gave way to anxious assumptions for Alan; namely, the man’s stiff posture and a hand near his firearm. The man looked down at Alan’s long chalk mark and then back up at Alan.
"Do you have papers?" The man asked sharply, a condescending finger pointing at Alan. His voice was deep, strong, and impatient, so Alan didn’t feel like talking back like he normally would.
Alan reached backward and pulled his bag off his shoulders. He balanced it uneasily on his hip, then nervously pulled a crinkled red slip of paper from its zippered pouch. The man snatched the paper from Alan's hand with little regard for Alan’s personal space. The man’s head bent down to acknowledge he was reading Alan's credentials.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know I couldn't…,” Alan attempted to answer, his voice awkward and his words fumbling. He could feel the temperature on his skin rising and the hairs on his arms tingling. His joints suddenly ached and the hairs on his neck were trying to pry themselves free from his body.
With little more than a groaning response to Alan’s explanation, the man shoved a muscular arm outstretched with the paper. Alan took the paper back, a tattered mess of red, wrinkled paper. The man thrust his arm out, pointing a gloved index finger across the street at the white building, which stared down at them both with dispassionate dominance; its mere existence was meant to define their realities.
The operative reached down and picked up an errant scrap of paper from the sidewalk and shoved it into his body armor jacket before Alan could ask for it back. Alan looked down at his crinkled dossier paper, then back up at the man in black. The operative cleared his throat angrily.
"Move along, freak."
Alan's face tensed at the word. Freak? The word made his stomach turn. The tingling wasn’t going away. Was it permanent now? Had Alan’s brain broken under the man’s cold visage?
"Did you hear me? Move. Along."
Alan nodded nervously and set a foot onto the asphalt to show the officer he was en route. The man turned away and began walking back down the sidewalk toward another police officer, who had been keeping an eye on the situation from a small white car. Alan watched as the man who had accosted him shook his head at the other officer and waved his arm back in Alan’s direction. The other officer shook his head as well, pulled an arm up to the square walkie-talkie attached to his shoulder and muttered something into the microphone. He unclicked the comm button and gave Alan a passing glance through sunglasses; then he looked at the building across the way.
Alan took the hint and managed a few quick steps all the way across the street and up to the white government office building that stuck out against the rest of the city landscape.
The words were etched perfectly into the stone face: The United States Department for Mutated Persons, Precinct 305. Not a scrap of trash around the entrance. Nobody for miles, aside from law enforcement. Alan mused that this was a small reminder of the times they were living in. It was a distinct contrast from what his parents used to talk about, the stories they painted, and the people they once were. But that was then, and this was now.
Alan pushed his way through the revolving doorway of the 305 building and was met with a cold room with a high ceiling, granite floor tiles, and marble columns. At the end of the long room stood a granite lobby desk, a woman seated behind it, typing and answering the entryway phone. She did not look up when he entered, nor did she give any indication that she had even remotely recognized his presence in the empty room.
Alan cleared his throat. The woman looked up, her eyes both annoyed and bored. She glanced back down at her computer screen, without regard for Alan’s presence. Alan walked up to the desk and slipped his bag onto the floor.
“Please do not leave your things on the floor,” the woman said in a terse manner, letting out a sigh of discontent afterward. Alan reluctantly pulled the bag back up over his shoulder. “Papers.”
Alan held out his red slip of paper - a wrinkled, fading mess - and the woman took it without looking at him again.
“I wasn’t sure if I should call ahead, but obviously you’ve got a lot of people today,” Alan joked hesitantly, looking around at the empty room.
The woman didn’t look up. Instead, she ran a black pen across the red paper in a rote, measured movement she’d likely done thousands of times before. Name. Region. Job Code. Blah, blah, blah. She rolled her eyes, and raised the red paper back up into Alan’s face.
“Take this in, and Secretary Hollins will be with you shortly, Mr. Mitchell.”
Alan nodded silently; the woman never made eye contact again and thus did not acknowledge his nonverbal. She cleared her throat and spoke sternly, “Move along.”
The woman’s desk phone rang again - one ring - and she picked it up right away. Alan walked past her to the frosted door behind the desk and entered into the office of Secretary Roger Hollins. Hollins was standing behind a
giant oak desk, a tiny American flag nestled inside a coffee cup on top. Alan could swear he smelled the wood still. Everything was rust, bronze and brown, which made the flag - with its fading red, white and blue - stick out. Alan wondered what the flag meant to Hollins; he wondered what it meant to anyone anymore. The patriotic tones were fading on the flag, just like they had in Alan’s mind.
“Let’s see the paper, son,” Hollins said with his back to Alan and his hand out in anticipation. His voice was paternal and lethargic, an almost disarming quality if it weren’t for the circumstances of their meeting.
Alan handed over the red slip, and Hollins turned to greet the paper, but not Alan. Hollins, a tall blocky man with gray hair and a large, blunt nose, stared at Alan’s red paper through cheater eyeglasses.
Alan attempted to sit down in the rust-red, leather chair across from Hollins’s desk. Hollins sucked in a quick, loud breath, his eyes looking up at Alan briefly.
“That won’t be necessary,” Hollins said.
Alan stood back up awkwardly, his bag falling down into the seat beneath him. Hollins cleared his throat, his eyes staring intently at the red slip.
“Don’t scuff the leather, son,” Hollins reprimanded Alan like an annoyed father. It reminded Alan a little bit of his old cross-country coach, who always seemed annoyed by the athletes leaving their bags on the locker room benches.
Alan pulled the backpack up to his shoulder again, the skin feeling raw beneath his worn cotton hooded sweatshirt. Hollins groaned, his lips pursing and parting as he read the slip to himself. He noticed the cherry red, metallic stapler on his desk rattling softly on the wood surface, taking on an air of nervousness. Hollins looked up from the paper at the skinny boy, no older than nineteen years, staring awkwardly at the floor.
“Magnetism, huh? Don’t meet a lot of metal movers around here. Please try to keep your hands and mind to yourself, son. That’s government property.”
Alan looked up, and the stapler stopped vibrating. Hollins cleared his throat, a strange habit meant to transition to a new subject.
“Alright, then,” Hollins sighed and pressed the intercom button on his desk phone, “Miss Doland, please call transportation. We’ll be sending Mr. Mitchell to the 308.”
“Yes, sir.”
The phone hung up, and Hollins pulled his finger back. He took out a black pen from his coffee cup, shaking the flag out of the cup and onto his desk in the process. Alan stared down at the flag, the cheap cloth rolled over the stick like a snake strangling its prey. Hollins made a few marks on the paper, and then signed the bottom half.
“You will exit this building, give this paper to the driver outside, and find your quarters at the 308 station house. They will be expecting you in one hour, so don’t think you can lag behind on this. Dismissed.”
Hollins handed Alan the red paper, and then pointed to the door in a strange, detached mood. Alan walked out into the empty room, where Miss Doland - still the same apathetic girl - was still busily talking on the phone while simultaneously scanning a large phone book. A quick glance at the paper only confirmed that there were lists of numbers, presumably codes that Alan would never understand nor never care to. He looked down at his red paper:
Confirmed mutation. Designated for work. 308.
Hollins’s signature was scrawled in the bottom right corner, a sloppy cursive that Alan only guessed was his name. Alan wondered why people wrote their names in such a haphazard, rushed manner. He long mused it was from the busyness of everyday work, but Hollins wasn’t busy; just rushed. Now Alan gathered that it had little to do with Hollins’s view of his own time, but more to do with how little he valued Alan’s time or presence in his midst. Alan cleared his throat to get Miss Doland’s attention.
“Please wait outside,” Miss Doland said in a cold, threatening manner, her arm outstretched and pointing toward the exit.
Alan put his head down and walked outside, where a white transit van was now waiting for him. The streets were still empty aside from the van, and the law enforcement agents walking back and forth in precise formation. Alan opened the back passenger door and stepped into the pristine van.
“Alan Mitchell?” a screen lit up, a digital flutter in its voice. The computer prompt popped up on the panel that would’ve been the driver’s headrest. The van was empty, a self-driving model implemented by the government to transport the mutated. The prompt displayed Alan’s full name, a question mark, with a yes or no option below. Alan pressed his finger to the glass.
“Thank you. Setting destination: work precinct, designation 308. Please buckle your seatbelt.”
Alan lifted his hand and watched as the metal seat buckle floated up in the air around his lap. Using his powers in a non-government sanctioned fashion felt like one last act of defiance. The buckle rolled over itself, resisting Alan’s palm as he moved it back and forth in midair.
“Please fasten your seatbelt now.”
The voice was monotone, but to Alan it felt authoritative and angry. Alan snapped out of his trance and put the belt down with his hands. He shoved his bag off to the other seat and watched the windows around himself tint. People on the streets wouldn’t even know it was him. They wouldn’t know where he was going, what he was doing. He was redacted. Soon, his own parents would cease to remember the little boy who had broken the backyard slide by popping all of the screws out at once. That boy was gone anyway. Now, the man would be gone too. And nobody cared.
two
“Welcome to Work Precinct 308,” the robotic voice chimed from the self-driving car’s white dashboard. Alan opened his eyes after a restless sleep, his mind fumbling through a groggy stupor as his brain tried to right itself.
Alan couldn’t be certain how long the trip had taken or how long he had slept, but neither seemed to align with each other. The fogginess still floated in his brain. Sleep would do that. Nothing could be for certain.
The car stopped gently, and the windows slowly transitioned from opaque to transparent, revealing Alan’s new home for the foreseeable future. It was an old apartment complex, mostly concrete with soft edges, with blacked out windows and strong metal doors with bars and a large wall all the way around. The front office was designed like a hotel with an awning resting just over the car Alan was in. The entire sight was bathed in the slowly setting afternoon sun.
“Please exit the vehicle,” the voice buzzed. The ‘please’ did not feel as cordial to Alan as perhaps the programmer had envisioned (or maybe it was). It was a facade of decorum, a false sense of politeness that hid cold, detached systemized cattle herding. Alan almost moo’d out of amusement but thought better of it. After all, the machine might be recording his audio. Also, his throat felt a little hoarse from the terrible nap.
The door opened on its own. Alan grabbed his bag and stepped out into the dry, afternoon air. The front office of the complex was the only thing not surrounded by the concrete wall. From what Alan could tell, it was the only entrance and exit for the entire campus.
It was so unbearably hot that Alan took off his red hoodie and shoved it into his backpack. Something in his periphery caught his attention, and Alan looked up from his pack at the front lobby. The front desk’s windows were tinted, but Alan could make out a stocky figure coming toward the front door.
The door swung open, and the short, stocky man came out with a clipboard. He looked down at his brown clipboard, his bush mustache wagging back and forth. He ran a hand through his thinning hair, his eyes deeply entranced by his clipboard.
“Alan Mitchell?”
“That’s what they call me,” Alan joked. The man looked up from his clipboard with a look of busy annoyance. He made a check mark on the paper, and pointed at Alan’s bag.
“Bring your things,” the man said gruffly, and then stomped back to the front office lobby, shoving the heavy doors wide open to swing back violently on his way in.
The room was unadorned, save for a lone plant in the entryway corner. The white tiled flo
or was scuffed, and the grout was filled with dirt in aging cracks. A small desk was at the back wall, a stack of papers sloppily hanging off the edge facing Alan. The papers were a mixture of white forms and red slips jammed together unevenly.
“My name is Randall Finch. People around here just call me Finch. I don’t care what you call me, just follow the rules. Don’t leave the building without telling me, and you’ll be fine. Don’t invite people to the building, and you’ll be fine. Don’t tell people on the outside where you live, and you’ll be fine. Don’t bring liquor or drugs into the building, and you’ll be fine. Don’t leave your room after lights out, and you’ll be fine. Give me your red slip…
“... Or spend a night in the box?” Alan interjected, a tiny smirk on his face.
Finch rolled his eyes, and Alan replaced his smirk with a bunched lip awkwardly clinging to the right side of his mouth. Finch released a low, rumbling sigh and held out his right hand.
The Department for Mutated Persons (Book 1): The Department for Mutated Persons Page 1