Page 2 of Red Rooster

The doctor didn’t protest.

Rooster didn’t expect him to.

He limped back through the mazelike hallways, following the laminated signs that steered patients back to the waiting room.

If he’d cared about aesthetics, he would have said it was a beautiful building, in the way that a medical facility can be eye-catching. The walls had been painted a warm taupe, the terrazzo floors looking more like those of an upscale hotel lobby. Rather than harsh overhead tubes, glowing wall sconces provided the light. The air held a subtle floral smell. The effect was miles from the glaringly-bright, bleach-scented hospitals he’d cycled through after he was blown up.

Not just a place of healing, but a well-funded one. A place not intended for the likes of him, with his unwashed hair and grungy jacket.

In the waiting room, a new group of hopefuls occupied the chairs. All of them still with buzzed hair and immaculate dress. Several guys had spouses. An athletically-built woman in head-to-toe Nike sat upright, right arm cradled in her lap in a way Rooster knew too well – it was the same way he held his own bad arm in public, holding it close, guarding it.

She glanced up as he walked past, eyes flashing dark and guarded.Stay away from me, her expression said.

That was fine; he figured his own face said something similar.

He was in the air lock when the alarm sounded.

As it did every time something like this happened, his brain split in two. A clean, metaphorical cleaving that left him of two minds.

Part of him – the half that had been pierced and pitted by shrapnel, burned and beat up, fractured and pinned back together again – wanted to curl and cower. But the other part of him, the dutiful Marine, the well-trained military killer, picked up the limp, frightened half of his psyche and kicked into action.

He turned back to the lobby, was in the process of tugging open the door when a uniformed security guard loomed on the other side of the glass, waving him away.

Rooster opened the door anyway, and the alarm was louder then. Not an air raid siren, not the fire alarm wailing he remembered from drills at school, but something softer and politer. An unobtrusive sort of siren, meant to catch your attention, but not to send you into a panic.

The guard, face set in a scowl, held up a flat palm. “You can’t come back in here, sir. Please make your way out of the building.”

Behind him, two other guards were herding the waiting patients up out of their chairs and toward the door. The door that Rooster was blocking.

“Sir,” the guard said, firmly.

“What’s going on?” Rooster asked. He felt a hard tug in his gut, that sense of responsibility he couldn’t shake off or drink away. There was no such thing as an ex-Marine, and all his training and instinct was kicking in now. Something was wrong, therefore he needed to act.

But the guard was having none of it. “Sir,” he said, edging forward, openly hostile now. “You need to leave.Now.”

The other potentials were closing in, peering at him curiously…and suspiciously. They were all vets, they would assume a man blocking the door was up to no good.

The alarm continued to ring, on and on. Something wrong, something amiss. A fire? A gas leak?

Not his business, really.

Rooster nodded and turned away.

The hopefuls followed him out onto the sidewalk, murmuring questions to one another, wondering aloud what might be happening. Evening was fast approaching, bringing a cold breeze with it, fat gray clouds piling up on the horizon.

Rooster zipped his jacket with stiff fingers, shoved his hands – one smooth, one ruined – into his pockets and walked to the bus station.

~*~

He’d just brought his third glass of bourbon to his lips when he heard the front door open and then shut above him. He was in that good space, where the buzz was fresh, floating but not flying, deliciously warm, his pain fuzzed at the edges so he felt almost human. His muscles, the ones that hadn’t been shredded and harvested to try to repair his broken body, had relaxed, and he was melting slowly down into his secondhand sofa.

Drinking helped with the anxiety, too. When he was buzzed, he stopped listening for footfalls, waiting for disaster. When he was buzzed, he didn’t worry about the rest of his life, the disaster it was becoming. Sure, he’d wake up sweating and nauseas at two a.m., heart pounding out of his chest, blood in his mouth because he’d bitten his tongue in the midst of a nightmare.

But for now, he drank.

Overhead, high heels rapped across the hardwood floors. From the foyer to the kitchen, followed by the hurried thumps of a child’s sneakers. Two voices – one young and high, one grown and patient – conversed. Slap of the fridge door. Scrape of a chair’s legs.

He was sitting forward to pour his fourth drink when the door at the top of the basement steps opened and the high heels clicked down into his lair.