World 7A: The Runner
Ian clutched the little boy more tightly against his chest and attempted to shush him. He was surprised when it worked. It must have been the change of position that calmed the child down because Ian didn’t feel that the sound of his voice was very comforting at the moment. How could it be when he was freaking out? This was insane. He had gone insane. That was the only reasonable explanation for finding himself scurrying through the streets in the shadows like some sort of vermin attempting to not be seen as he made his way toward the outskirts of the city.
What did he think he was doing? This was crazy. He should go back. He should plead temporary insanity and . . . and what? That was the question. It was too late. They had to have noticed by now that the child had gone missing. They had to have noticed that he was nowhere to be found. It was likely far too late for this to end well for him, and the child hadn’t had a chance in the first place.
He didn’t know anything about children -- not really. Being medic trained didn’t equip you for dealing with the day to day aspects of child care. He had only gotten the kid to stop crying through some bizarre combination of the child’s exhaustion and his own dumb luck at figuring out that he liked to be held close and have his back patted. If he started wailing, someone would hear. If a security contingent caught them, they were both doomed. He just had to move as quickly as he could and hope that the kid stayed silent until he managed to get them far enough away that no one could hear the crying.
He had no idea if he could even manage that. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t even know how far the city stretched out before it finally came to an end. He had never been to the edges before. He hadn’t even been outside of the hospital since he had entered the medic training program at fifteen. The rooftop garden of the building might have technically been outside, but it hardly counted as actually going out. It wasn’t forbidden to leave the building. People in the training program went out all the time to visit their parents or friends. Some of the staff even went to homes where they had families when they weren’t on shift. They went to the parks or the museums during down time, but Ian had never joined them.
He had always been too focused. There had always been more work to do; there had always been something else to take up his time. There had been no one that he wanted to visit. There had been nothing that he wanted to do. The hospital had been his entire world, and he had been content to stay within its confines -- the classrooms, the dormitory, and the wards themselves had filled his time so easily, and he had never gone looking for anything else. His superiors had lavished praise on his dedication, and he had only allowed that to encourage him to be more focused. He had been a fool.
If he had ever bothered to take a break in those years that his world had revolved around the interior of the hospital building, then he might not be trying to rely on childhood memories to guide him through the darkened city streets that weren’t conjuring any sense of the familiar. He was lost, and he knew he was lost. He was, however, fairly certain that the city would end somewhere. It had to end somewhere.
That wouldn’t exactly end his problems. What did he know of outside the city? Rumors, whispers, and official statements of the dangers of being outside of designated living areas -- that’s what he knew. He didn’t know of anything practical. He didn’t know where to go if he managed to get outside in the first place. He most certainly didn’t know what he was going to do with a barely eighteen month old child that was bound to get hungry or wet himself or have another attack. He was out of his depth here, but he kept walking anyway.
There was the most miniscule of chances that he could leave the child sitting in an alley somewhere and make his way back to the hospital. He could pretend that he had wandered out for a walk, and they might let it slide. They weren’t likely to believe it as he had made such a habit of never leaving before, but they might decide that he was useful enough that one almost infraction could be allowed to pass if he never showed any sign of stepping out of line again. Maybe.
They might also shoot him first and bother with investigations later. He wasn’t sure whether the hospital cameras had captured any shots of him with the little boy, but it would take more random odds in his favor than he was willing to bet with for none of them to have done so. Besides, he couldn’t leave the boy. He just couldn’t. Now that he knew, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He couldn’t go back to the hospital and pretend that everything was okay. He couldn’t look the other way as it happened again. He couldn’t let the little one in his arms get left to the fate that awaited him.
Ian didn’t really believe that it was going to work. He was amazed that he had made it out of the hospital (let alone this far along the streets). He didn’t even know if he could find the limits of the city, and he didn’t know what he would find at them if he did. He just knew that he had to try. There were so many things that he knew now, and he didn’t want to go back to face them. He would make a run for it. He would bring the little boy with him because it made him feel better somehow. It was like he was making up for all the time that he hadn’t known and hadn’t bothered with knowing. He was nearly certain that he was going to get the both of them killed one way or another, but the compulsion to try to do something, anything wouldn’t leave him. He kept walking. He kept sneaking really, and he kept wondering what was going on that no one had caught up to him yet.
His mind was a jumble of images, words, and contradictions and the only clear thoughts that he could manage were to keep moving, keep holding the little one, and keep telling himself that he hadn’t known. He had to keep reminding himself of that or the self-disgust was going to paralyze him. Stopping to throw up in an alley or putting the child down so that he could sink to the ground and sob weren’t going to help anything.
How could he not have known? How could he not have questioned? All those times that they had told him how brilliant he was, all of those times that he had been patted on the back for his work ethic, and he had never questioned something as basic as what it was that he was really doing.
How many orders had he signed over the years? How many times had he moved on to the next patient without a second thought as to what those coding letters on the top of a file actually meant? He didn’t even know. There were so many orders, so many patients, and so many files. He had never questioned what happened next. What was wrong with him? Why hadn’t he ever asked? Why hadn’t it ever occurred to him that there was anything to ask?
So many things were up in the air now. There were so many things that he had taken for granted. There were so many things that he thought he knew that he was questioning now. He was never going to get any answers. There was nowhere for the answers to come from even if he wasn’t going on a suicide run in some misguided attempt to make himself feel like he wasn’t a monster.
He hadn’t thought about Rich in ages. He hadn’t had any reason to think about him. Why would he? He had only been a child of six or seven when it had happened. Their parents had always told them not to climb the trees in the park, but they had never listened. What boy that age would? They climbed the trees all the time and nothing bad had happened. They used to snicker to themselves over the silliness of mothers. He and Rich had been inseparable. They lived on the same floor of the apartment building, and they ran amuck as often as they could. Then, it had happened.
They had been climbing their tree of choice as they did on most days when their mothers would agree to let them walk themselves to the park unattended. They had been laughing together and sharing secrets, and then Rich had been underneath the tree screaming in pain with the broken branch beside him. He could remember the terror of that moment clearly now that he was thinking about it again, but the part of his brain that wasn’t living in the memory (the part that had his medic training at its disposal) could view it from a detached place and assess the meaning of the unnatural angle at which his best friend?
??s leg had been bent. He could make assumptions about the way that Rich’s arms had flailed, but his lower body had remained limp as the adults came to collect him.
He had no more memories of his friend. Rich had never come back to the apartment down the hall. A young couple with an obviously pregnant wife had moved in within a few days. His questions to his parents of where it was that his friend and his parents had gone had never been answered. His mother had never let him go to the park again.
Had Rich been too injured? Had the sliding scale that all medics were taught before all else combined the required treatment with his age and fallen into the TAG zone? Treatment Above Guidelines. Those three words that he had accepted so easily during his training haunted him now. What was it that he had thought that they had meant? The truth was that he had never bothered to think about it. He had assumed that those who received the designation were moved because the standard hospital didn’t have the capacity to deal with the issues they presented. Had he thought that there was some hidden area where there was better trained staff to deal with them? Had he thought that the children were going off to live in some special zone where there were caretakers prepared to work with all of their special needs? He had never bothered to wonder. He had simply followed the assessment protocols and gone about his business slapping those labels wherever the guidelines warranted them. How many people had he been responsible for killing?
The third baby he had ever delivered had had a club foot. He hadn’t thought twice about tagging him. How many? He couldn’t think. Only a few stuck out in his mind. He remembered the baby with the club foot because it had been the first time he had done such an assessment on a newborn. There was the little girl he had determined met the criteria for severely hearing impaired. He didn’t even remember her because of her. He remembered her because of what her parents had done in response. He understood them now. Oh, how he understood them.
He hadn’t at the time. He had thought that they had gone nuts. He had been fully supportive of the officers who had wrestled the child away from the father who had made a run for the door after the mother distracted them all with her hysterical shrieking. He had fully expected the final shot that ended the man. One didn’t attempt to attack law enforcement. Such a disregard for the order of things was not tolerated.
Well, Ian was the one who had gone crazy now. Here he was making the same run that desperate father had been trying to make all those years ago. He even owed what little of a plan that he had to the whispering that he had heard between the mother and father before everything had gone chaotic. He hadn’t understood the whispered consultation that he walked in on until after the man had made a run for it. The “we’ll have to go west to the river” hadn’t made any sense until then. If he made it out of the city (if he made it anywhere at all), that’s where he would have to go. He would have to try to find the river. He wasn’t even sure that he knew which way west was. He thought that was the way that the sun went down, but he might be mixing that up in his head. He wasn’t really counting on any of his thoughts being accurate. He was too muddled up. He had too many thoughts that were all too mixed together.
It randomly occurred to him to wonder what it was that had been wrong with his younger brother or sister. He had never thought of that before. He had been eight or so when his parents tried for a second child. His father had taken his mother to the hospital late in the evening one day, and they had returned the next afternoon without a baby. They never spoke of it. He never asked. He had already learned to not ask questions by then.
He couldn’t even tell you what it was that had been different about today. Maybe because the parents of the little boy whose weight he was shifting against his hip had acted so out of character from what he was used to seeing? Most parents of children who were tagged were a little sad but resigned. They took their two hours of allotted time for good-byes and walked away with a few tears. Very, very occasionally, there were those who acted in a manner like the parents of that long ago little girl whose father had tried to run.
Ian knew the proper way to deal with both. The first was not to deal at all. The second was to make sure that there was security present so that nothing got out of hand. The parents tonight fell into neither category. They had been angry. The mother had actually punched her fist into the wall. There had been yelling from both of them -- at each other. The words flying back and forth had been ones of blame -- whose genetics had caused the problem. There had been other words as well. There had been words about wasting two years of their lives on a child who was defective.
That was the word that had captured his attention. They were shouting about the child being defective. He had never thought of it that way before. He had always thought in terms of the coding initials that he used on the charts of all of his patients. He had never really bothered with their implications, but he suddenly couldn’t get away from the word. Every elderly person that could no longer complete the duties of their occupation, every child who had a permanent condition, every person of any age who he determined carried a disease that resided on the tag list was a person that he was labeling defective.
He was labeling them unwanted. He was labeling them as something less than everyone else. It had left a bitter taste in his mouth, but he had been determined to shrug it off and continue on his rounds. He had had only fifteen minutes left before his shift ended, and he had wanted to get to the stitches (he wanted more practice) in the next cubicle before he got sent for his mandatory rest period. He would have shrugged it off. He had no doubt that he would have shrugged it off and gone on with his ignorant little life if it hadn’t been for what had happened next.
A security officer had appeared to settle the commotion that the yelling was causing in the hallway, and the couple had immediately settled down before declining their allotted time and leaving. The security officer had wandered back to wherever it was that those people hid themselves when they weren’t needed, and the child had been left unattended on the table in the exam room. It seemed wrong somehow to leave the little boy sitting there by himself in a strange place. The call had already been made (it always was the instant that a tagged designation went into the system), but they wouldn’t arrive to collect the child until the end of what was supposed to be the parents’ chance to say good-bye.
Ian could have walked away. He could have moved down the hall and gotten the practice doing sutures that he had been hoping for, but he didn’t. The little boy was sniffling, but he was otherwise calm. The distress of his breathing that he had been exhibiting when he had first seen him had been treated before Ian had officially designated him as asthmatic (and therefore no longer eligible for further treatment). The little boy seemed unaffected by the yelling that his parents had engaged in, and he didn’t seem to have noticed that they had walked away and left him alone. Ian couldn’t just leave him unattended. He might fall off the table or wander off or . . . he didn’t know. Something just wouldn’t let him walk away. He glanced at the clock. He was off shift. It wouldn’t hurt anything for him to sit with the kid for a bit. He hated mandatory rest periods anyway.
That had been either the best decision he had ever made in his life or the stupidest thing that he had ever done. If he had just managed to slip in to work on stitches before he had clocked out, then he wouldn’t have been sitting there where he was technically not supposed to be. If he had just walked away and gone back to his dormitory like he was supposed to, then he wouldn’t have overheard anything that his supervisor and the ward receptionist were discussing in the hallway. Thinking of if only was pointless. He had heard. He had suddenly had it shoved in his face exactly what happened to anyone who was tagged. There was no better trained medical staff. There were no caretakers for children with special needs. There was only the elimination of those deemed defective.
How pathetic was it that he hadn’t known and no one had even lied to him?
He had been so focused. He had been such a model student. There was no need to lie to someone who never bothered to think. There was no need to lie to someone who would never bother to question what those in charge decided to do. His whole universe had come crashing down around his ears, and it wasn’t supposed to do that. He wasn’t supposed to care. He wasn’t supposed to question. He was supposed to accept. He was supposed to know but not acknowledge (as if things that were not discussed were things that didn’t happen). He had been taught not to question all his life, and he had never questioned the lack of questioning.
He was questioning now. He was questioning everything he had ever thought he understood. He was questioning everything he had ever been told. He was questioning whether he really had snapped under all the pressure of being the best at what he did and started hallucinating because everything around him certainly didn’t feel like anything in his life that was supposed to be real.
He stopped short as his eyes processed what he was seeing in front of him. The city just ended. He didn’t know what he had been expecting -- guards maybe. There wasn’t anything. There was street, sidewalks, and buildings, and then there was just the ground. The street just ended. The sidewalk just ended. The buildings just ended. He thought there was grass. It was a little hard to tell (the streetlights just ended as well). He took a step forward and waited for something. He paused and listened for sirens or yelling or demands that he stop. None of those came. He waited to feel something blocking his way forward. He waited to feel a shock or run into some sort of window. It didn’t happen. There didn’t seem to be anything stopping him from going forward. There was nothing stopping him from stepping further out into the grass.
He looked down at the now sleeping child who rested against his shoulder. He could leave the city. He could take the little boy and go. There was no security to stop him. He hadn’t really thought that he would make it. His feet weren’t moving. He was still standing there where anyone could see him just one step beyond the end of the concrete. He needed to move. He needed to keep walking. There was nothing stopping him except for him.
What was he going to do? Where were they going to get food? What would happen if security officers found them wandering out in the open where no one was supposed to be? Could he even find the river? Was there even a way to get across it? If there was, was if safe to go? He had heard the stories all his life. He knew what they said about those who lived beyond the river. All children heard the stories of the people on the other side who only left them alone because the river stopped them from coming any closer. Anyone could tell you how dangerous the traitors were. Anyone could tell you how they had slaughtered so many simply because they preferred destruction to learning to work for the good of the whole the way everyone else understood that you must.
Theirs was a world of starvation and poverty and disease and violence because they refused to let the authorities help them. It was a part of everyone’s basic education to learn what had happened to those who had rejected the help of the authorities who had tried so hard to save them from themselves. He could recite the stories like everyone else, and he had never questioned them. He had never questioned them -- just like he had never questioned tagging. Maybe it was time that he questioned everything including his history lessons.
Maybe there weren’t any people on the other side of the river. Maybe there wasn’t any river at all. He had certainly never seen it (but he had never seen most of the things inside of the city either). He was suddenly thinking that maybe he should only believe things that he had seen for himself. It would be safer, but safer wasn’t exactly the route he had been taking on this day. The little boy sniffled in his sleep against Ian’s shirt, and he looked back down at him.
The file had said that his name was Seth. He would have to start using it. He couldn’t keep referring to him as the little boy forever. They were living for longer than he had expected what with getting to the edge of the city and all. They might not last for long once outside of it, but the least he could do for the duration was acknowledge that the little one had a name. He was Seth, and he wasn’t defective.