im trying to get out of an art block, first by drawing lucy. first is her early on in Execution in fatigues. but also thinking about how she studying to become a nurse, so im imagining her a few years a later into her nursing student years
Day 2
the ao3 version will have art! by @soledadcatalina
Lucy Wells returns to work in a sleep-drunk daze, slipping from the cramped staff lounge and blinking into the half lit fluorescence of the dusty ceiling lights. She hadn’t slept well for her piddling nap break, turning restlessly on the plastic sofa as garbled codes called out on the speakers and the lights of the crumbling parking tower outside shone orange through the torn, broken window curtains. No time for coffee - her preceptor has been on her ass so much that Lucy had given herself a five minute alarm reprieve just to stare at the water stains on the ceiling, a moment of peace from her veritable peaked-in-highschool passive aggressiveness if she didn’t return from her break early - so she slaps a caffeine patch on her wrist before wrapping the hospital flannel around her shivering shoulders, trudging through her circadian low.
The nursing station is tucked into a forever-unfinished alcove frozen in mid-renovation, smelling of antiseptic and wood dust. Half-lit by old computers, their flickering blue light casts the other nurses’ faces into sickly green shadows, the hollows under their eyes and the gaping maws of stained teeth in yawning mouths ghoulishly warped. They lounge about - Lucy will take the mind-numbing boredom of an orthopaedic night shift over back-to-back cesareans or the blare of intensive care alarms any day - four nurses, ranging in age and skill from new graduates to veterans in their middle age, huddling around an over-confident murse with the words ORTHO BRO patterned on his pilling scrub cap.
“Lucy,” the guy schmoozes from the centre of attention, extending the second syllable of her name in an annoying tease she could, maybe, consider less tolerable than a catcall if she were more awake to be angry. Her attention is quickly grabbed by the cracked phone in his hand, the tinny distortion of yells and gunfire playing out loud on its speaker. The nurses around him stare, nauseous and enraptured, at the images playing on the screen. “You freaking see this shit?”
“What are you looking at?” Her preceptor isn’t here - of course, she thinks with a huff, she can be late coming back from break - so she lets herself join the huddle. Ortho Bro has his finger on the scrollbar of a video, and it takes Lucy a second to discern the motion on screen through the grainy dark-vision hues. The gradients of ectoplasmic night-vision green begin to cohere into an identifiable shape in her mind, taking the form of a boy just a year or so younger than her walking vigorously in the night, his brisk pace made uncanny by the slowed and sped rewinding and replaying of the video. It’s dizzying enough that she doesn’t notice the prison jumpsuit and army-issue kit, at first - she’s too distracted by the bright pops of light she realizes, with a lurch, are bullets sparking - until she watches the poor kid trip and fall.
“Wait, you’re actually watching the Walk?” she asks, though no one turns to her to give her an answer, eyes locked on the verdant kaleidoscope shining up from the screen. An AI-voiceover commentates on the obvious events of the video, robotic and obnoxious, but the original audio remains underneath.
“Oof.” The gaggle of them wince as one as they watch the boy on the screen topple harshly onto his shoulder. One of them chuckles darkly, for one brief moment, watching his collar bone shatter as it folds unnaturally into his chest. Even dulled down under the video processing, Lucy can hear the crunch of muscle and snap of ligament, the breathless rush of air that forces its way from the boy’s mouth, the unmistakable gasp of surprise making way to blooming pain. Ortho Bro zooms in on it - the resolution isn’t great, but she can see the way the hard ball of the greater tuberosity rolls sickly smooth under the skin, and it makes something rise in Lucy’s gorge. The other nurses around her tsk as they lean in to examine, all of them urging to rewind, to slow down, revelling in their morbid curiosity of analyzing the gruesome minutiae of the scene.
“Look, look, Lucy,” one of them - Alice, the charge nurse, points at the boy’s shoulder as he falls, falls slow through the air as if it were thick with molasses, the quarter speed showing the moment of impact, the grisly dislocation, the subsequent reverberation through the body. “Pop quiz - tell me what’s happening.”
“Uh, shoulder dislocation,” Lucy grimaces. Her body feels heavy with twin weights, that of the group’s petty scrutiny paired with a squick similar to having a shitty preceptor make comments about a patient’s condition over their head, like they didn’t exist. Like they didn’t matter outside of what illness they needed to cure. “With clavicle fracture.”
“Probably a humeral fracture as well. Looks like a real doozy, too. What kind of dislocation?” Alice asks nonchalantly as Ortho Bro rewinds again. Lucy didn’t really know much about the Walk, hadn’t wanted to care. She had been turned off by the media frenzy and the subsequent anxiety abounding as the public cannibalized itself on the discourse - the security risk, the violence on television, the morality in cheering for a criminal as if they were a role model, think of the children! - but it had been her mother’s insistence, her disgust at the display that made her promise she wouldn’t watch of her own volition, tell herself she was only examining this footage as some sick form of education.
“How could they think of doing this,” her mother had sobbed to her, her wrinkled face twisted, forged into a mask of hatred by her grief, though it wasn’t over the eventual death toll. “After your father died at the hands of these animals, and now they want to set them free for nothing?!”
“Um, anterior,” Lucy answers, though she is noncommittal. She knows she should be watching the injury unfold, but her eyes are fixed on the boy’s face - the wide, terrified eyes as he fell, the flash of his teeth in a clenched jaw as he cried out for help, reaching up for another kid that hoists him up so he can suffer in pain for another few miles instead of falling off the brink of death he had just been perched on. The sinews of his neck stand wire taut under his skin as he leans on his friend. The fear, the terror in his innocent - innocent? He’s a convict, Lucy! - young face.
“Fuckin’ nasty,” Ortho Bro laughs, delighted by the carnage. “Number 25 is fucked, no way is he going to make it to the last five.” He smiles up at Lucy with perfect white teeth. “Brandon owes me so much money!”
“I have to prep for handover,” she says, an excuse for her to leave. She doesn’t comment further on it, though her stomach feels like curdled milk as she glares at them one last time over her shoulder, the lot of them too entertained to acknowledge her departure. She doesn’t make her way to her assignments, though, instead pulling out her phone, a quick browser search of the Walk route confirming her suspicions, matching to her recognition of the blurry landscape.
One last glance at the staff room, looking both ways to find the corridor empty. With her preceptor nowhere to be seen, she checks the depths of her scrub pockets before slipping into the clean utility room.
Mile 59
They see the dawn.
The first of the sun’s rays peek out above the horizon, its long slender fingers finding their handhold before hoisting the rest of its gaseous body languidly into the air. It meets Alex in a state of delirious stupefaction, nothing but muscle memory and his own inertia keeping the steady rhythm of his footfalls from stuttering to a halt. He’s never been this tired in his life - unlike when he spent his first day in custody being endlessly questioned, screamed at by pug-faced detectives and suited men as he spiralled into panic and despair; not the nights he snuck from his window to gallivant in petty theft and graffiti with Toby; not even close to his fitful tossing and turnings on the county jail cot, a luxury he would’ve kissed the ground for now. He aches down to his marrow, shivering against the tacky, foul film of his own sweat.
For once, his body feels as ugly as his soul, and he is grateful in his hateful masochism to receive the emotional release through physical pain. His heels shot through with the burn of hot pokers, the swelling in his ankles, the migraine behind his eyes - not just punishment, not just atonement. He wants to be lost to the distraction of it, sink into it until it drowns out the guilt and shame and cowardice until he is bathed in nothing but the warm soup of agony.
Still, the morning greets him kindly, warming and gentle on his gooseflesh skin. The shadows of night begin to slowly fade, taking with it the liminality fogging his cognition - reality comes rebounding back, made razor sharp on the second wind of overtiredness. He glances at his speedometer as the last seconds of his penalties tick down, a tinny, cheerful chirp sounding as the metal box buzzes on his wrist.
“Morning, sunshine,” Donovan drawls at his left. His eyes are half-lidded, his face drawn, but the soft curve of his lips makes his face shine bright. Alex breathes a laugh, the sound of his voice like a shot of caffeine. “That’s all your warnings gone, yeah?”
“Yesiree,” Alex chimes, and he is giddy enough about the fact that he even does a little skip. He thinks he hears Gary call him a pansy under his breath, but eh, what does he care - the guy is smacking his face to keep himself awake, has been muttering at nothing the last five miles. If anyone’s judgment held a grain of salt, it wouldn’t be that of Gary Owens. “My slate is wiped clean. Ready to start this day fresh.”
“Good on you, Alex,” Donovan says with a grin. The two gravitate towards each other until they’re shoulder-to-shoulder. “That’s the kind of attitude that’s gonna make you the last one walking.”
“I don’t know about that,” Alex muses. “Hell, I barely made it through last night, I’m really starting to think I’m not gonna be able to do this” He blinks up into the dawn, the sky beyond the treetops bleeding out its rich navy blues of twilight, the gloom of a cloudy overcast bleaching the landscape into muted greens and miserable greys. Still, there’s enough light now to see without the armored floodlights casting everything into severe angles of unreal incandescence - enough for him to assess the damage.
Their motley crew is a picture of depression, the group of remaining Walkers thin. Where bands of kids had previously clustered together, animated with chatter and sparring both playful and harmful alike, large gaps now stretch between the remains of their meager cliques. No group has more than three people at this point, everyone sequestered alone or in pairs, and the distance between them only stretches them thinner into pockets of bleary, hopeless isolation. They cower quietly under the watchful, glinting eyes of the Suits, their own half-lidded or bloodshot eyes fixed on the ground beneath their sore feet. Clothes are stained, tattered. The smell of body odor and piss and shit wafts its offensive perfume on the breeze.
With his warnings walked off, Alex gives himself the opportunity to fully turn and look at Zee and Simon. They are alive, breathing, walking still, but that’s where the reassurance ends. Zee’s relatively undamaged, but his face is pinched with the strain of Simon pressed against his side. The other boy, in turn, is mangled and pale, sweat dripping like water off his forehead and his hair, blood blooming in small, poppy-petal patches in the fabric over his dangling arm and chest. The affected limb remains covered by his jumpsuit, but Alex can see the unnatural angle of it, the way its swollen dead weight slouches in its sleeve. Alex had heard him crying last night, as Zee tried and failed to tie the cuff of Simon’s sleeve against his body for stability and only worsened the injury in the process.
“Hey, don’t talk like that,” Donovan says, bumping his shoulder. “That’s the kind of thinking that’s gonna get you killed.”
“Everything’s gonna get me killed, according to you.”
“I’m just saying,” Donovan continues, not unkindly. “That’s the despair talking. It’s easy to fall into it, when you’ve been given our lot in life. When you’re too focused on the end - and, y’know, for a lot of these blokes there is none, they’ve had their lives signed away to rot - and it’s so far away, it’s easy to give up.” He nods to himself, proud of his own half-assed wisdom, but Alex can’t help but feel his assuaged. “Especially when everything is out to kill you, you lose sight of where you are. To remember you’re alive for now. You just gotta focus on getting by, day by day, moment by moment.”
“How far did that get you?” Alex asks. “Back when you were in prison.”
“Far enough to get me here.”
“And how much farther do you think it will get you?”
“I’m not really focused on that,” Donovan says, and Alex wants to scold him - an equivalent return for the verbal ass-whoopings Alex had gotten from him on their first day together - but Donovan’s weary sigh keeps him from cajoling him. “I know I’m not gonna win -”
“Don’t say that-”
“It’s fine man, I’m not focused on winning. I know I’m gonna die - either with a shiv in my back in a cinderblock shithole, weeks, months, years down the line, or with a bullet in my brain in the next few days. Zee’s right, y’know. Might as well do it while feeling the sun on my face, under the open air.
“I’m just trying to live. Trying to enjoy this moment, while it lasts,” he sighs. His eyes flash with a comfortable sadness. “Or else I’ll forget how important it is.”
Alex scoffs. “And this shitty, gloomy ass morning is important, because -?”
“That’s for you to figure out, man.”
Figure out what’s important, Alex wonders. How can a moment like this matter, with all the despair weighing on them now - where is the importance in that? The trudging feet; the panting of Zee and Simon behind them, the collective suffering; the few minutes of laughter that had been shared, between them. Hope when the last thing all but one of them will know is a violent, inhumane death. What’s important, now?
“Warning: number 47, first warning.” The call rings out as Alex falls back, Donovan still walking but his eyes widening in a confused, fervent panic as his mind runs through the worst conclusions.
“Alex, what are you doing -” he calls back, a plea disguised as a warning - he’s interrupted when he watches Alex pry Simon out of Zee’s grasp, slinging his good arm over his shoulders.
“All for one, yeah?” Alex mutters to Zee with a half-smile, who groans and stretches his limbs gratefully. “You doing okay, Simon?”
“Peachy,” Simon grunts, but the tension in his brow loosens, just so, as he falls into Alex. Alex, in turn, takes his weight graciously, offering Donovan a sweet, tired smile as the two fall into step.
Donovan huffs sheepishly. He turns away with his head down. He does not return the smile.
