ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Shelf Life

Vignette - Shelf Life
like going home
Dramatis Personae Parley & Dutiful Security
In Absentia	2013-04-09 '
Location Oscorp Facility
The door beeped with the swipe of a card and a lock clicked open, shedding an extra sliver of light across the dark laboratory floor. The room boxed in the smell of Windex and Pinesol and that odd feeling of cold compression inspired by cement walls, hovering like a weight against the hairs of the arms and inside the inner ear canal. The security guard paused there in the open doorway, backlit by the hallway and poised as a Pinscher. Stone still. Tickling at just the edge of his mind, he was almost certain he’d seen movement. Or heard it. Sensed it. Deeper inside, bent toes crouched frozen against ground, the hard flooring pressed up against folded knees. Fingertips tracing the grout between the tiles rhythmically, restlessly, Parley crouched lower, stomach nearly to the ground with his spine sagged in the middle between flexed shoulders and raised tailbone. A long period of waiting swam in the watery darkness, shot through by a yellow horizontal glow that poured through the glass window of the viewing room at the far end of the room. But the lights were off in this half. The building was closed down for the night, silent save a soft ‘vrrrrrm’ of a computer terminal and the breathy whush of the air conditioning. The jumpy beam of a flashlight bounced against the wall over his head, ricocheted to the ceiling, dropped to the floor. Breaking the stillness came a series of footsteps. Parley watched the gloss-black wedges of the guard’s boots cross the room from under the table. His head pressed to the ground, the tiles smelling like stone and soap and chalk against his temple, cold and hard and by god, he’s been facedown before, not to this ground but it may as well have been, they all felt the same. It all still felt the same. He had not miss this environment. (or do i?) It brought back the familiar. This place where they’d all tried, in their own way, to escape. Some broke, and then died, some broke and conformed, some broke and went mad. And then some of them didn’t break at all. And they still died, or conformed, or went mad. Damn. His back was trembling. Suspended like a bead, with the guard’s sharply disciplined mind washing through him like a taut thread he’d strung himself from, he almost didn’t notice. Other things on his mind, swarming like bacteria. He pulled back his hand, and the flashlight beam skated over the floor where it had been. He counted to five before folding up his knee, pressed his toes a few inches forward, and then flexed his thigh muscles so sharply they quivered like a horse’s haunch shaking loose a fly, spider-crawling his fingers over the ground to slither around the side of the table. Orbiting furniture to keep it between himself and the other man. In his hurry to drop from sight, he’d shoved the thumbdrive in his mouth, and it tasted like plastic and metal and it kept threatening to press against his gag reflex and click on his teeth. Its shape was distinct and strange and boxy compressed to his tongue This is going to be really funny, he found himself thinking, a touch hysterically, fur pinprickling under his clothes,if I swallowed it right now. He was near enough that he could hear the guard breathing, whistling air through nostril hairs somewhere above, jingling keys in his pocket. The sound of fabric pulling taut across the man’s back when he turns his head to scan every corner. The guard was being thorough. He was paid to be. There was a gun at his hip. And a baton. One hand ever within reach of them. So many ways to kill you. Suddenly, intensely, Parley found himself glad the boy wasn’t here. Parker. His busy mind and his rapid conclusions, and there was so much here to conclude from. A drainage grate ran the length of the room like a railroad track, turrets stuck out from the walls where equipment and cameras could be loaded onto their swiveling necks. But there was no equipment out right now and they jutted empty like black bone fragments. To his right, looming in a great dark shape bolted to the ground through a number of hydraulic pedals, a seat, like a dentist’s chair, but with restrains hanging off its arms, its shoulders, its headrest. Someone had been forced to sit there. There were pictures he’d been flipping through, before the guard came in, looking at them blankly, turning each of them over one by one. But it was empty now. This was taking forever. (just wait.) He heard the rumple of paper, the guard flipping up the corner of a wall calendar, scratching at his stubbly jaw while he contemplated the weekend, and Parley was looking at the door, sitting open, ajar. Contemplating something else. The hallway beyond was well-lit and clean and a million miles away. He felt absurdly like he could fall asleep here on the cool ground and he wallowed in it. Nestling into the absurd. That was the key, wasn’t it. Don’t bolt. Don’t thrash. Don’t scream. It's like going home. Just wait it out, silent and unchanging. So many insidious tricks you pull on yourself, to extend your self life for another day. Holland was right. This was no place for children. Just the damned. Just the truth. But only the useless truth. The truth that science didn’t always put order to chaos so much as unravel it like a spool to measure its length, leaving it tangled in a heap and then thrown it away. The truth was in the video footage of a young mutant girl strapped to a chair like a crash test dummy, shaking her head back and forth blankly while her urine ran off the plastic cushion onto the floor. The truth was in spreadsheets with empty boxes left open for comments, pinned to bulk-bought clipboards, waiting to be filed into neat blue folders, each containing information on people whose names had been replaced by anonymous test numbers to remove some of the humanity from the photographs of chest fronts sliced down the middle and pinned open like a pair of wet red wardrobe doors. The truth was that the universal engine didn’t fire on questions, it just offered meaningless open answers, and there was no such thing as sufficient evidence. There was no winning. There was just sustained equilibrium, to keep it all from tipping over into a newer and more terrible status quo. And pushing back the shelf life for another day. The security guard leaned over to look around the side of the desk, and there was nothing there. A soft click and a flash of light caught the corner of the guard’s eye, and he turned his head to see the door slowly listing open on its hinges like a dilating pupil. He lifted his hand to press against his earpiece. “Control. I think we have an intruder.”