Walking the male hallway on north unit same as a thousand nights previous and you know every stain and hole gouged in the walls. Every flickering bulb, every creaking door and moaning pipe. Know like a glove every inch of this hall and still the shadows have teeth. Eyes sweep left right up down and three sixty when possible. Zoom out and scan the whole unit. Every time you walk in and out of the nurse station and staff bunker you pass a bank of wide surveillance screens. Each with dozens of squares representing different camera angles of every corner of the unit. Pull up a snapshot of each screen and scan the squares, map the blind spots. Timestamp 02.33. Roughly seventeen minutes ago. Zane and Evander wrangle the area around nurse station where three female and two male patients mill around the box. Two of them sleepwalking. Tapping the glass stark and staring. Two of them standing in place arguing with their own reflection. One raging, voice hoarse and broken to jagged whispers. Three more patients sit in chairs talking into space. Two babble into phones with dead ring tones humming back at them. Six sleeping bodies on the floor around the nurse station. Arranged in assorted crash positions with and without blankets. Some waiting for a room assignment, some for assessment. Some are protesting, refusing their assigned beds for paraschiz reasons unknown. Darius and Juliet sit at the top of each hallway where they each monitor two high risk rooms. Down a narrow hallway separated by fire doors from the nurse station Dex surveys three seclusion cells from a tall swiveling stool with the butt of a cigar clamped in his teeth. Claudia walks the female hall. Molly and Arthur mix up potions behind med room windows. Everyone wears a radio. Cap interviews Bambi in one of the assessment rooms. She looks different. The meds have kicked in, perhaps. But she doesn’t appear groggy or sedated. Now wearing a black t-shirt and yellow pajama pants. Blue hospital socks. Hair in a tight ponytail. She sits upright and intensely calm. Her bearing is more captured soldier than lost college student. One hand traps the other on the gouged tabletop. Her muscles twitch but she sits very still. One hand drifts free to touch the rope burn marks at her neck. Bambi shakes her head and traps the hand again. She gives a brief rapid no nonsense response to stock question that I can’t read and Cap nods. Josephine is off camera somewhere, I can’t find her.
Zoom back out to the bottom end of male hall. The light has a gold tint and feels like you’ve jumped forward or back into night but otherwise real enough. Atticus stands just outside the doorway of 111, arms folded across his chest. He peers back at his room with eyes wary.
He sighs. Can’t sleep. Goddamn blackbird gonna peck my eyes out.
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