Steve’s shorts: Retiree Number 114 at Pine Hills Manor…
Retiree Number 114 at Pine Hills Manor
Virginia, 2030
Copyright 2008, 2013, Steven M. Moore
Brenda moved along the dim corridor and stopped at room 114. After checking off the visit on her list, she peeked into the room at her patient.
Rafael, the old retiree, sat in his rocker, muttering to himself. As usual, he was smiling and staring out the window between thick, wrought iron bars at the bleak Virginia countryside.
She thought he might like winter because he used to ski, but she couldn’t be sure. Most retirees didn’t remember much with all the drugs they took. He often drew pictures of skiers, though, especially of children on skis.
“Ready to start your day, Rafael?” She always tried to be cheery with her patients.
He gave her a dour look. She knew he was a warm and caring person—he just hated to be rushed.
“What’re they having for breakfast?”
“Oatmeal, OJ and coffee, what else? Do you want me to come back?”
“No. I don’t want to disturb either my routine or yours. Besides, my daughter is coming to visit today. I’d better spruce up.”
She nodded. She had known Rafael Reyes for four years. It was what he said nearly every morning. The drugs had that effect. All her patients were docile.
She helped him dress. He was in better shape than the average retiree in the nursing home. Lean body, flat abs, not confined to a wheel chair—at seventy-seven Rafael Reyes could pass for early sixties. Without drugs, he would have been a handful. With drugs, it was like dressing a sleepy baby. Under their influence, he would often start muttering in Spanish. She wondered if those were his secrets.
* * *
Brenda Morgan was Rafael’s only true friend at the nursing home. He hadn’t established any lasting friendships with other retirees. Most of them were pleasant enough.
Men outnumbered women. Both sexes separated into groups as if they were cliques of little schoolchildren. Some men and women hooked up, visiting one another at odd hours during the night. The orderlies were happy to provide the necessary pills to make all their parts work. They preferred happy retirees—drugged, but happy.
Some women would try flirting with him or men would try to involve him in a poker game. Without being rude, he made them understand he only wanted to be alone. Most of the time he couldn’t even remember why. Other times he would remember Gabriela, his ex-wife, or Patricia, his daughter, and know why. Still other times he would remember his work of a lifetime and know they should avoid him as if he had a contagion brought back from Mars.
Rafael had always been a loner. About the time new pills were due, he would sometimes have flashbacks to his previous life and knew it had been lonely. Some of that had been work related, but mainly it was his personality. Gabriela became a part of that life somewhere along the line and briefly swept away some loneliness, but that hadn’t lasted long. He had driven her away and his daughter with her. He wondered where his daughter was and why she didn’t visit him.
As an engineering graduate from Carnegie-Mellon, he possessed skills and credentials that brought him into what Eisenhower, with remarkable prescience for a leader, had called the military-industrial complex. Its golden era after 9/11 had sent him from SCIF to SCIF, working on a number of black programs, endearing him to the Pentagon, and ruining his marriage.
In less confused moments, he would often find it amusing to remember his travels when he ran into people with whom he had worked closely for a time. They would not even acknowledge they knew him. He saw some of those same people here at the nursing home and wondered about that. He did not find the latter amusing, though; the prevalent emotion was a foreboding he couldn’t shake.
Brenda had encouraged him to work out. Often, at the end of a workout, and especially when new pills were due, he had his most lucid moments. It was at those times he knew he must escape.
* * *
“Retiree 114 seems to be having more moments of lucidity.”
Dr. Harold Barnes studied the chart the orderly handed him. They randomly tested all retirees. Rafael Reyes’ peaks in lucidity correlated well with dips in the drug levels in his blood.
“Good catch. I’ll increase dosage a little.”
“Yeah, not too much, doc. We wouldn’t want to kill him.”
The orderly winked at Barnes who reacted to the man’s insensitive banter with a glare. He had little use for these people. They were not nurses in any sense of the word. Most were lowlifes and cutthroats taken off the street and given basic training.
After he signed a new drug order and the orderly departed, Barnes looked at the pile of folders underneath Rafael’s and sighed. He hated the job for many reasons, but its paperwork was one of them.
He had 187 patients to look after. “Retirees,” the National Intelligence Director had called them, but the government said their retirement implied a risk to national security—the knowledge inside their heads was too sensitive. A new program had been established to make sure that knowledge didn’t fall into wrong hands.
Barnes never worried about the justification for such a program. For him it was just a good job in bad economic times. There weren’t many medical jobs they would give a doctor who had lost his license to practice. And he didn’t have to think too much about being a real doctor, either, because most patients were healthy. The unhealthy ones were often helped along a little toward a quiet death. They could only take care of a maximum of 200 patients, so the number had to be controlled.
* * *
Nighttime brought bad dreams. Rafael would often wake up with a start. Each dream was a guilt trip. In them, he could see maimed bodies and sometimes wonder why. Other times he knew: he had designed weapons. Weapons to end a war that shouldn’t have started. Weapons now necessary because the rest of the world no longer liked the U.S. Maybe the people, but not its policies.
One night he left his room. Cameras and motion detectors in the room and in the hall alerted security to where he was and what he was doing. They found him muttering curses in Spanish and took him down. They beat him, injected him with more drugs, and put him back in bed.
Brenda wondered about the bruises the next day because she asked him about them. He couldn’t remember. He seemed to be in a daze. She had to wonder if he was getting Alzheimer’s.
* * *
Rafael’s desire to escape finally overcame his fear of confiding in someone. He decided to approach Brenda, his friend. She wasn’t the only one giving him his pills, so Rafael waited until it was her turn.
He grabbed her arm.
“Which one makes me stupid?”
“Don’t ask me that,” she said. “I can lose my job.”
“You’re the only one I trust. I need to escape.”
He waited a few beats as she considered the request.
“It’s two—white and blue,” she said. “Don’t leave them in the cup. Pretend to take them but spit them down the toilet.”
“They have a camera in there too.”
Rafael was an observant patient. She obviously hadn’t known about the cameras in the bathrooms.
“Where?”
“Light fixture. Covers a full 360 degrees. Tiny little devils. Motion sensors too. We used to have them in some of our SCIFs.”
“You’re going to make trouble for me.”
“Don’t worry. I can pretend to do number two and flush them down. I need to stay alert to escape.”
“You’re too old. You can’t run.”
“But I can walk fast. I’ve been on the treadmill, rowing machine—“
“OK, OK. Don’t do anything yet. I’ll see if I can help you.”
* * *
That night Brenda finished brushing her teeth, stared at her image in the mirror, and made up her mind. She didn’t like the frown on her face or the lines of worry. For a long time, what they did at the nursing home seemed wrong to her.
She possessed a top-secret clearance, vetted by the FBI. As a registered nurse, she could easily find work, but the job at Pine Hills Manor paid thirty percent more, had full medical benefits, and was a half-mile drive from her townhouse. Unlike the orderlies, she was a full-fledged member of the medical staff. Dr. Barnes trusted her.
Years ago, her life had nearly unraveled when her husband didn’t return from the Middle East. It was Lebanon and yet another war; the draft had taken him to that land of endless firefights and street fighting. After many years, she didn’t care anymore. Then she met Rafael.
The old Latino’s personality reminded her of her father’s—gruff, but a nice teddy bear all the same.
She knew how to help Rafael escape from the nursing home. She had also decided she would go with him.
* * *
“I can’t climb in there!”
After six days of planning and Rafael skipping pills, he now balked at climbing into the laundry cart. His whisper sounded like a shout. Brenda put a finger to her lips.
“Of course you can,” she said. She tipped the cart over. “Crawl in here and draw up your knees. I’ll put your clean sheets over you before I put in dirty laundry.” She knew Rafael to be obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness. “Don’t worry.”
She was dressed in a gray and white-striped orderly’s uniform, not her nurse’s uniform. Another black woman’s picture was on the badge—not a good match, but good enough. She was confident security would be lax. No one had ever broken out of the retirement home because all retirees were drugged. Security guards often commented on how boring a life they led.
Rafael, dressed only in boxers, crawled into the cart. He scrunched down, drawing himself into a fetal position. He was limber for an old man.
After she covered him and made sure he still could breathe between the sheets and other linens, she wheeled him from his room in the cart and took off along the corridor. She figured she had at least a half hour before guards caught on to the fact she had covered all cameras and motion sensors in his room with duct tape.
At the loading dock door, she touched the stolen badge to the reader and was outside into the cold night. A dense cloud cover hinted of more snow to come. Inkiness suited her fine.
There was a tense moment when she thought the laundry truck had already arrived and left. But it was only three minutes late. The driver, a young black, thought he recognized her.
“Hi-ya, Maggie.” He jumped down from the cab and onto the loading dock with an agility that surprised her. “No bodies tonight, huh? Old place is getting full. When they going to euthanize another old fart?”
She shrugged. As the driver did his duty and bent over the cart to rummage around in it, she hit him with a pipe wrench she had brought from her townhouse. It was the first violent act she had ever committed.
Unfortunately, the blow only stunned the driver. He rose slowly, clearing his head.
“What the hell? Hey, you ain’t Maggie. Gimme that wrench!”
She struck at him again but he caught the blow on his right arm. He started yelling for help. He was cut short by a rolled-up sheet around his neck. Rafael twisted it from behind. The driver gasped for breath, reaching behind to grab Rafael or loosen the sheet. He went down on his knees. That’s when Brenda hit him again.
She looked at the dent in his head, the matted hair and blood, and almost fainted.
“Good job,” Rafael said, taking the wrench from her trembling hands.
He shivered a little as cold air bit into his skin. She hoped he wouldn’t develop pneumonia. There weren’t many antibiotics left to treat the most resistant strains.
He rolled the guard over, stripped him, and put on his clothes. They weren’t a bad fit and stopped his shivering. She helped him put on socks and shoes. He then heaved the guard into the cart, throwing the wrench in after him. He piled the linens back in and loaded the cart on the truck.
“You still OK with riding in back? I need to look like the driver, at least at a distance.” He pulled the driver’s cap down low over his forehead.
Brenda nodded and entered the rear of the van.
She thought he must be giddy with their success. Still, she held her breath when the engine didn’t start right away, but it caught, so off they went. She heard the guard at the front gate, sounding bored and half asleep, give them the OK to pass.
“Here we go!” he said, yelling back to Brenda after a bit. “Thanks to you, I’m a free man.”
* * *
Six months later, the DC area was already steamy. Walking on the street one saw the seasonal American contradiction of bureaucratic types in formal dark suits and dark ties sweltering in the heat. It was midweek. The little bar in Alexandria was a haven for only the lucky souls having time to come in for a cold beer before battling the traffic on the highways.
“ID please.”
The Washington Post reporter handed over his ID, now a DHS requirement. Every citizen must have a photo ID with an embedded chip specifying blood type, retinal pattern, and DNA signature, along with other personal data like education, address, current place of work, and type of job.
Brenda scanned it into a stolen reader and studied the output on screen for a moment. When she was satisfied, she made a call with a cell phone that featured a built-in scrambler.
Moments later, Rafael scrunched into the booth beside her. He looked at the young black man and smiled, but she knew he was wary. But he offered his hand across the table. The reporter shook it.
“Good evening, sir,” said Rafael. “Do I have a story to tell you!”
***
Comments are always welcome!
The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. The above short story, found in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, a collection of speculative short fiction stories, forms part of the plot of this futuristic thriller. The novel is a spin-off of the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” and, along with the novella The Phantom Harvester (a free PDF download—see the list on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), serves as a bridge between that series and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.”
DHS agent Ashley Scott, who is involved in several books in the detective series, is worried about retirement. She witnesses a murder on Frank Sinatra Way in Hoboken, NJ. The victim is a nurse in a retirement home for government employees, many of them possessing Top Secret information. But the murder is only a part of a larger conspiracy! This ebook is on sale now at Smashwords at 50% off.
In libris libertas!
