Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

I black out again, and then wake up with someone else’s hands searching my pockets. As soon as I move, the person shouts: ‘Argh! What the fuck?’

I try to sit up, but I’m still too weak.

‘Sorry, man. Thought you were dead,’ the voice says. ‘My bad.’

By the time I’ve turned my head to look at him, the looter is already hurrying away.

The next time I wake, it’s because of flashing lights. An ambulance is parked next to the crashed van. Two paramedics climb out, their faces drawn. It’s been a long night.

My throat is too dry to call out. It doesn’t matter. They come straight over to me. Maybe the looter called them, told them I was alive. A good Samaritan thief. Stranger things have happened.

One of the paramedics shines a light in my eyes. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ I croak.

‘What’s your name?’

I give the question some thought. I’m aware it’s Timothy Blake, but right now I don’t remember who is allowed to know that. It feels like I’ve been Lux for a long time.

She’s already given up on a response and is talking to her partner. ‘Concussion, and signs of infection just here.’ She touches my stump.

‘I don’t think a nurse dressed that wound,’ the other paramedic says.

‘No. I’m also seeing first-degree burns on his hand and around his mouth.’

The second paramedic shakes his head at my stupidity. ‘Tried to eat something that was on fire, did you?’ he asks me.

‘Fred,’ I say.

‘Okay. Let’s get you out of here, Fred.’

They roll me onto a gurney and then raise it up. I feel sorry for them. The rest of us hit each other, shoot each other, blow each other up, feed one another into meat grinders. Then we expect paramedics and nurses and doctors to repair us so we can do it all again.

As they slide me into the ambulance like it’s a pizza oven, I raise my head for a last look at Kyle. I’ll never find him again. I don’t even know his last name. But the female paramedic pushes my forehead back down and says, ‘Easy there.’ Her hand is cool. She snaps a plastic mask down over my face. Oxygen flows into my mouth, around a foreign object. Something hard. A little piece of bone, but not a tooth. I swallow it.

The hospital is overflowing. It’s all the same people from the riot, but they’re not fighting anymore. Maybe they’re too tired and sore. Maybe they’ve had their fill of violence. Or maybe, in their identical hospital gowns and bandages, they can’t tell who they hate.

There’s no point lying anymore, but with so many patients, the doctor doesn’t have much time to quiz me. Who am I? Timothy Blake. What happened? Car crash. And your arm? Went into a meat grinder. What about the burns? I don’t remember. She doesn’t look surprised by any of this and asks no follow-up questions.

She unwinds the bandages and examines my stump while a nurse smears some antiseptic on my burns. A bag of someone else’s blood arrives. It enters my body, this time through a vein rather than my mouth. The nurse gives me a juice box and some tepid pumpkin soup.

I watch TV. There’s footage of the riot. Protestors screaming, punching, getting kicked. Apparently two hundred people were wounded and six are dead. I guess those six include Fred, Cedric and Kyle. It could have been a whole lot worse.

A commentator is badmouthing the protesters, calling them animals, saying the National Guard should have been summoned to control them. She says witnesses have described one protestor eating a corpse. The other talking heads look sceptical.

The director of the Houston FBI field office gives a press conference. She explains the riot was triggered by a torrent of fake news, distributed by terrorists. She says her cyber unit got on to it early thanks to intelligence sent by an undercover FBI agent within the terrorist cell. It takes me a while to realise who she means. I guess my package made it to Dr Norman after all, less than thirty-six hours after I mailed it. I’ll never badmouth the USPS again.

Apparently one FBI team was dispatched to arrest the terrorists, while a second team set up roadblocks nearby so they couldn’t escape. But locals noticed the police presence, and soon rumours were spreading online that the barricades were for the protection of Emmanuel Goldstein. Instead of congregating at the courthouse as Fred intended, the protesters were drawn to the roadblocks, right in the middle of the Guards’ escape route.

The director implies that this was a long-term operation rather than dumb luck. She doesn’t admit how bad it could have been.

The same doctor comes back, looking even more haggard. Working a double shift, I guess. She gives me a script for OxyContin and an antibiotic, and discharges me. I go downstairs to the pharmacy. The man behind the counter offers to send a bill to my residence instead of charging me on the spot. I give him a fake address and walk out.

It’s too far to walk home, and I don’t have any money. But the hospital is surrounded by drug addicts. I can tell them apart from the worried relatives by their hollow stares, the way they rub their thin arms through their coats. Some of them look a lot like Cedric. I wonder if he could have made OxyContin from his poppies.

I walk up to the most wealthy-looking addict, a woman in a knitted sweater and beanie. I sell her my painkillers and spend the cash on a bus fare home.

I can’t tell if my house has been robbed. The lock on the door is broken, but maybe it was always like