Dissociation

Theo's frostbitten failure leads him to a clinic where his only currency is humiliation.

Theo didn’t fall. He was lowered. The world lost its purchase. His knees buckled, and he was a sack of bones collapsing into a pile of discarded paperbacks. The smell was first—old books turning to mulch, the iodine, the unwashed body scent of a dozen desperate people. Then the sound: a low, steady whine that drilled into his skull. He stared at the scuffed toes of a pair of thick, black rubber boots. The boots did not move.

“Get up,” a voice rumbled from above, a sound like stones grinding together.

Theo tried. He pushed with his palms, but his hands were mittens of frozen gauze. The nerves screamed, a high-frequency agony that matched the room’s hum. He got his elbows under him, leveraging a sliver of upward momentum. His vision swam, gray spots popping in the periphery. He saw the man attached to the boots. He was a slab of a man, hulking, with a face like a block of granite that had weathered acid rain. A stained leather apron over a thick thermal shirt. A tarnished nametape read ‘Dewey’.

“Dewey,” Theo croaked. The word was a shard of glass in his throat. “Medical. Emergency.”

Dewey’s eyes, small and piggy in the thick face, flicked down to Theo’s hands, then to his white lips, the ice crusted in his eyebrows. “No payment, no entry. You know the rules.”

“It’s not—” Theo’s tongue felt thick and useless. He swallowed, tasting the coppery tang of his own frozen blood. “Frostbite. Can’t feel… can’t feel anything.”

Dewey shifted his weight, the rubber soles creaking on the wet tile. “Batteries? Antibiotics? A working pump?” He gestured vaguely with his thumb toward the dark aisles behind him. “We don’t run on prayers, junkie. You’re dripping on the books. Stains don’t come out.”

Theo’s mind, fogged with cold and delirium, tried to engage. The journalist’s reflex. Trade. Barter. Information. He was a conduit of information. That was his value. “BHI,” he managed, the syllables slurred. “Intel. On the… the east wall. Trenches. Mortar pit.”

Dewey’s expression didn’t change. Not a flicker. “East wall’s been exposed for a week. Mortar pit melted three days ago when the gas main blew. You’re slow, kid. Outdated intel is worthless. Worse than worthless. It’s a liability.”

Theo’s brain stalled. He had nothing. Owen’s door shut in his face. The pump was trash in the alley. His hands were useless clubs. He had crawled from the cold only to face a wall of flesh and rules.

“Please,” Theo whispered. The word was ash in his mouth. He felt a violent heave in his stomach. The sour, bilious smell of his own empty gut rose. He tried to hold it back, clenching a jaw that wouldn’t obey. It came up in a hot, yellow rush, splattering onto the floor and catching the edge of Dewey’s boot.

Dewey looked down. He looked at the wet, viscous stain on the pristine rubber. His piggy eyes narrowed slowly. A line of irritation furrowed his brow. He wasn’t horrified. He was annoyed. Like a stain on a clean counter.

“God damn it,” he grumbled. He looked back at Theo, who was now dry-heaving, tears streaming from his eyes, freezing on his cheeks. “Now that’s a contamination hazard.” Dewey sighed, a long, deep exhalation that fogged the cold air. He reached down and grabbed the back of Theo’s jacket. The fabric crunched with frost. He hauled Theo up as if he weighed nothing, a dead weight. “Mina’s gonna skin me.”

Dewey dragged Theo through the maze of paper spines. The hum grew louder. It wasn’t a single source; it seemed to come from the walls, the floor, vibrating in the metal bookends. They passed bodies on makeshift cots—people shivering under thin blankets, others unconscious, pale as wax. The smell of iodine was stronger here, mixed with something sweet and cloying: infection.

Dewey stopped before a towering shelf labeled ‘Medical Reference’. He shouldered a flap of heavy canvas and pushed into a smaller, more organized alcove. A woman in a stained, gray surgical robe was wiping a scalpel on a strip of cloth. She was thin, all sharp angles and taut sinew, her dark hair pulled back in a severe bun that pulled at her eyes. She didn’t look up.

“Dewey. I said no more intakes until the beds are clear. We’re out of sterile saline.”

“Didn’t have a choice, Doc,” Dewey rumbled, dropping Theo onto the cold floor. Theo landed on his hip, a jolt of pain that felt distant, detached. “He barfed on my boots. Contamination protocol.”

The woman—Mina Kovic—finally looked up. Her eyes were a flat, glassy gray, devoid of warmth. She scanned Theo from head to toe, not with medical curiosity, but with the weary assessment of a mechanic looking at a broken machine. She saw the frozen hands, the blue lips, the wild, glassy eyes.

“Frostbite. Advanced,” she stated. It wasn’t a question. “And delirium. He’s incoherent.”

“He offered BHI intel,” Dewey added, a hint of dry humor in his voice. “Outdated, of course.”

Mina’s lips thinned. She stood, wiping her hands on a rag that was already saturated. “Poverty tourism,” she muttered, the words sharp and clear in the humming silence. “You think you’re a witness, a chronicler, a hero. You’re a tourist in hell, and you’re losing your fingers as souvenirs.” She knelt beside him, her knee clicking. She didn’t touch him with gentleness. Her fingers were cold, her grip clinical as she took his wrist. She checked his pulse, her eyes on the wall clock. “Pulse is thready. Skin is cool. We’re not treating this here. It’s a resource sink.”

“I need…” Theo tried to form a sentence. He needed to prove he wasn’t just a drain. “I can help. I can document. The things you’re seeing. The resistance. People need to know.”

Mina’s laugh was short, without humor. A bark. “Know what? That we’re out of saline? That we have a teenage boy with a shrapnel wound that’s going septic because we have no real antibiotics? That we’re keeping a woman in a permanent vegetative state alive by shoving nutrient slurry down a tube? The world knows what it needs to know, and it’s that we’re the infected zone. You’re not documenting hope, journalist. You’re documenting decay. It’s a morbid hobby.”

She released his wrist and grabbed his left hand. Theo flinched. She held it firm, turning it over. The tips of his fingers were a waxy, pale yellow. Black lines of necrosis traced under the nail beds. She pressed the pad of her thumb hard into his palm. He felt nothing. No pressure, just the cold impression of her skin.

“No deep pain sensation,” she diagnosed. She stood and grabbed a bucket from a shelf. She filled it from a large, opaque water jug. The water was not steaming. It was barely less cold than the air. She dropped in a stiff-bristled brush, the kind used for scouring pots. “This is going to hurt.”

“You don’t have… morphine?” Theo’s voice was pathetic, pleading.

“We use it for shrapnel extraction and lost limbs. You have numb hands. Pain is the only diagnostic you can afford. If it hurts, the nerves are still alive. If it goes numb, we know it’s dead. We’ll know where to cut.” She knelt again, dragged him by the ankle until his hands were submerged in the bucket. The tepid, gritty water swirled around his frozen skin.

For a second, there was nothing. Then, the thawing began. It started as a deep, throbbing ache in the bones, a sensation of his hands being crushed in a hydraulic press. The thaw crawled up his fingers like molten lead. The feeling returned not as warmth, but as pure, unadulterated agony. Every nerve ending he thought was dead flared to life, screaming.

Theo’s back arched off the floor. A sound tore from his throat—a strangled, guttural roar. He thrashed, his eyes rolling back. Mina held his arms down with a surprising strength. The pain was blinding, visual, a field of white static behind his eyelids.

“That’s good,” Mina said, her voice devoid of sympathy, clinical. “That means there’s tissue to save. Don’t move. I need to scrub the dead skin off.”

She went to work with the brush. The bristles were stiff, like wire. She scrubbed the tops of his hands, the palms, the between the fingers. Each stroke was a fresh wave of torture. The water turned pink, then red. Theo screamed, a ragged, continuous sound that the room’s humming hum absorbed and threw back.

He didn’t know how long it lasted. Time dissolved into the pain. When she finally stopped, his hands were raw, bleeding in a dozen places, less frozen but infinitely more painful. He lay panting, his chest heaving, sweat freezing on his brow. The bucket of bloody, dirty water sat beside him, a testament to the cost of life.

Mina stood, wiping the brush on her robe. “Your boots,” she said.

Theo blinked, his vision blurry. “What?”

“I need collateral. The clinic runs on barter. Your boots. They’re good leather. Solid soles. We can trade them for iodine, or for a fuel tablet. Something better than a frostbitten journalist.” She held out her hand.

“The boots? I need… I have nothing else. I can’t walk without boots.”

“You’re not walking anywhere for now. You’re working. And you’re not walking in snow in those. You’d be back here in an hour with gangrene up to your knees. The boots are the cost of the scrub and the anti-freeze wash. Hand them over.”

His pride was a small, dead thing. He had none left. He fumbled with the laces. His fingers, raw and clumsy, could barely form the loops. Mina watched, impassive. Finally, he pried the boots off. They came away stiff with cold, the leather groaning. His socks were soaked through with blood and thawed sweat. He handed them to her. She took them without thanks and hung them on a hook behind her.

“You’re now barefoot in a freezing library,” she stated, as if confirming a weather report. “Don’t step on anything sharp. Your feet are numb too, I assume. You’ll feel it tomorrow. Come on.”

She grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet. His bare soles touched the cold, wet tile, and a fresh shock of cold shot up his legs. He stumbled, leaning on her. She was unyielding. She dragged him out of the triage alcove and into a larger section of the Stacks. Here, the bookshelves had been cleared of books, leaving tall, empty metal frames. Between them were makeshift beds.

Bed 4 was against the wall. It wasn’t a frame. It was a single, stained mattress resting atop a precarious pile of hardcover encyclopedias. The patient was a woman, maybe forty. She was lying on her back, her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Her mouth was slightly agape. From her throat came the source of the room’s hum: a constant, high-pitched, monotonous whine. It wasn’t a scream of pain. It was mechanical, brain-stem, a tone without emotion. It drilled into the skull.

“Neural overload,” Mina said, matter-of-factly. “BHI ‘cognitive recalibration’ procedure. It worked. She’s no longer a threat to the restoration order. Just a… biological function. She needs nutrients. I can’t do this one-handed. I need you to hold her head. Steady. Don’t let it move.”

Theo looked at the woman. Her hair was matted. A thin trickle of drool ran from the corner of her mouth down her cheek. He felt a cold dread that had nothing to do with his bare feet. “Hold her head?”

“It’s a simple task. Even you can manage it. If she thrashes, the tube goes in the wrong place. Either her lung or her brainstem. Neither is good. Now, hold.”

Mina uncapped a thin, flexible tube attached to a bulb syringe filled with a gray, paste-like substance. She knelt by the bed. Theo, leaning against a bookshelf for support, reached out. His bandaged hands felt thick and useless. He placed them on either side of the woman’s head. Her scalp was cool, her hair brittle. She continued to stare at the ceiling, the whine unchanging.

Mina gently tilted the woman’s head back. She positioned the tube at the woman’s nose. “Steady,” she commanded.

Theo tried. He tried to be a journalist. A witness. This was a moment. A human tragedy. He should be recording it, preserving it. His fingers twitched, a phantom muscle memory. He needed his recorder. His camera. His tools. They were in his bag. Where was his bag? He’d left it with Owen? Or in the alley? No, he had it. He had slung it over his shoulder before the crawl. It was a heavy leather satchel. It was still on his shoulder, slumped against the bookshelf.

He could get it. He just needed a second.

He moved his right hand away from the woman’s head, slowly, so as not to disturb her. He reached over his shoulder, fumbling for the bag’s strap. His fingers found the leather, slid down, found the buckle. He unbuckled it, the metal click loud in the space between him and the whine. He reached inside, past his notebook, past a spare battery pack, and found the small, cold rectangle of the digital recorder. His hands were clumsy, the gauze damp from the scrubbing. He pulled it out, his thumb depressing the power button. He didn’t check the level. He just needed to capture the sound. The sound of absolute nothingness.

The click of the device, the small electronic beep as it began to record, was a gunshot in the hushed, humming room.

Instantly, the whine from the woman’s throat stopped. Her jaw snapped shut. Her head, under Theo’s one-handed, clumsy hold, jerked violently to the side. Simultaneously, a figure from the next cot, whom Theo had assumed was sleeping, a teenage boy bundled under a coat, lunged forward.

Theo’s journalist brain, trained for threat, misread the movement entirely. He saw an attack. A lunge. A threat. It was pure, animal panic. He shoved his left hand back against the woman’s head to free his right, and he shoved the boy back, hard, with the palm of his bandaged hand.

“No!” the boy yelled, his voice cracking.

Theo was too slow. The woman’s violent head jerk tugged her neck. The tube Mina was guiding tipped. Instead of going down the esophagus, it skittered off track, jammed against her palate, and then, as Mina pushed the bulb, a geyser of thick, gray nutrient slurry erupted. It sprayed in a wide arc, hitting Mina’s surgical robe, Theo’s bare chest, and the boy’s face.

The boy screamed, a sound of pure anguish. “GET AWAY FROM HER!”

Mina didn’t react to the mess. She yanked the tube out of the woman’s mouth, the end dripping slurry. The woman began to whimper, a low, pathetic sound that replaced the hum. The boy, shaking slurry from his eyes, pointed a trembling finger at Theo. “You vulture! You’re trying to steal her soul! You with your recording machine! You’re just like them!”

Mina finally looked at Theo. Her face was spattered with gray paste. Her gray eyes were hard as chips of ice. She didn’t shout. She moved. She was fast. She reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out a small, heavy object—a pistol, but not a firearm. It was a Galvanic stunner, a common security tool. She gripped it by the barrel. Before Theo could process it, she swung. The butt of the weapon connected with the side of his head, just above the ear.

It wasn’t a crushing blow. It was a precise, shocking impact. Pain exploded behind his eyes, a sharp, white flash. His knees buckled. He didn’t lose consciousness, but the world tilted violently. He was on the floor, the cold tile pressing against his cheek. He tasted blood and the copper tang of his own skull.

“Shut up,” Mina’s voice was a whip-crack, directly above him. “Both of you. You are wasting resources. You are causing a scene. The boy is in shock, the patient is distressed, and you—” she nudged Theo’s shoulder with her boot—“you are a liability.”

She grabbed him under the arms again, hauling him up. His legs were jelly. He was dizzy, seeing double. The taste of blood was in his mouth. The boy was crying, cleaning the slurry off his face with a shaking hand, his eyes locked on Theo with pure hatred. Mina didn’t acknowledge him. She dragged Theo, stumbling and staggering, away from Bed 4, away from the Stacks, toward a door at the far end of the atrium.

The door was marked ‘Custodial’. She kicked it open and shoved him inside. He fell against a metal sink, his bare feet slipping on the wet floor. The room was small, windowless, lit by a single flickering emergency LED that cast long, jumping shadows. It was colder than the library, the air smelling of bleach and human waste. Gray, murky water sloshed in a large tub. Shelves were crammed with rags, brushes, bottles of harsh chemicals, and neatly stacked bedpans.

Mina slammed the door shut, plunging the room into a more intense green-tinged darkness from the LED’s flicker. She stood in front of it, blocking the exit, the pistol still in her hand. She wasn’t angry. She was done.

“You have a choice,” she said, her voice low and cold in the small space. “I can drag you to the back door and dump you in the alley. You can walk barefoot in the snow. You’ll be dead by morning. A clean outcome. You’re no longer a drain on my resources, and you won’t be tracking blood and filth through my clinic.”

Theo leaned against the sink, the metal cold against his back. He tried to stand straight, to salvage some shred of dignity. The side of his throbbed. The blood felt warm and sticky in his ear. He looked at his bare, raw, frostbitten feet on the filthy tile. He looked at his hands, the bandages soaked with blood and slurry, the gauze already seeping red from the fresh scrubbing.

“The choice,” Mina continued, “is the Sluice Room. You work. You clean. You scrub the linens, the bedpans, the floors. You work off the cost of that feeding tube you just wasted, and the scrub, and the disinfectant. You work until I tell you to stop. You will not speak. You will not record. You will not interfere with medical work. You are not a journalist. You are janitorial staff. You will clean up the messes you have made, and you will clean up the messes of others. Do you understand?”

He stared at her. The flickering light made her face a mask of shifting shadows. She was not offering mercy. She was offering a different kind of humiliation. A purpose, stripped of all glory. A punishment that served a function.

He thought of the snow. The silent, white, consuming snow. He thought of Owen’s door. He thought of the black plastic of the useless pump in the alley. He thought of the click of his recorder, the spray of slurry, the look in the boy’s eyes.

He wasn’t a witness. He was a stain. He was a vulture. He was a liability.

He nodded, a tiny, jerky movement. The words wouldn’t come.

Mina nodded back, once. She holstered the stunner. She pointed to a wooden crate in the corner. “That’s the bedpan. That’s the slurry bucket. The brush is by the tub. Start with the bedpan. Don’t drop it. The tile is cold. You won’t like the feel of what’s inside it.”

She turned and left, closing the door behind her. The latch clicked. He was alone in the small, freezing, stinking closet. The only sound was the faint, distant hum of the clinic and the slow, steady drip of water from a leaky pipe into the metal sink.

He looked at the crate. Inside was a single, white porcelain bedpan, stained with brown and yellow. The handle was cold. He picked it up. The weight was familiar, grotesque. He carried it to the large tub of gray water. He dipped his raw, bandaged hands into the icy sludge. He found the stiff-bristled brush. He lifted the bedpan and began to scrub.

His fingers, slick with water and soap, couldn’t grip the porcelain properly. The brush was heavy. His hands shook from the cold, from the pain, from the concussion. He scrubbed harder, his knuckles white under the gauze. He needed to hold the bedpan steady. He put his shoulder into it, bracing the bowl against the edge of the tub. He scrubbed in a frantic, useless rhythm.

And then, his grip failed. His hands, numb and useless mitts of gauze, slipped.

The bedpan tilted. It wasn’t a graceful fall. It was a slow, inevitable slide. He watched, detached, as it tipped over the edge of the tub. It hit the floor with a hollow, plastic-like crack that echoed in the tiny room. A wave of slurry—human waste, diluted water, and cleaning chemicals—splashed up, soaking the lower half of his bare legs, his feet, and splattering his abdomen and chest.

The smell hit him a second later. Hot, thick, ammoniac, the smell of death and decay.

He didn’t move. He stood there, legs dripping. He stared at the tipped-over bedpan, the mess on the floor, the soiled brush floating in the tub. The flickering LED light seemed to pulse with the rhythm of a failing heart. He felt nothing. No anger. No shame. No sadness. He just felt the cold seeping up his legs, the wet slurry drying sticky on his skin.

Slowly, his knees folded. He slid down the front of the metal tub until he was sitting on the wet, dirty floor. His bandaged hands lay limp in his lap. The water from the sloshed slurry pooled around him, warming slightly where his body heat met it, but then turning cold again.

He wasn’t the broken journalist. He wasn’t the seeker of truth. He wasn’t a witness to history. He was a janitor in the apocalypse. He was a cleaner of shit. His purpose was to scrub and to drop and to scrub again. He lowered his head until his forehead rested against the cold, damp tile. He closed his eyes.

The only sound was the drip of the pipe and the faint, distant hum of the dying, the wounded, and the forgotten. And the slick, slow sound of filth drying on his skin.