Chapter Text
He gets out.
It's bumpy, but the jeep clears the gate, and then he's careening down the tight winding road away from Mount Massive and all the horrible dead and living things within. He gets to the end and cuts left onto the two lane route that heads into town, thirty minutes away. A glance at the clock reveals it's early morning, 6am. No other cars on the road. He’s still shaking with the adrenaline, breathing hard.
He got out. That’s all that matters. For a little while.
He starts to crash about 5 minutes in, when he passes the little country gas station where he used to stop and buy bottled sweet tea and beer, the first week he started working for Murkoff, when they were actually letting him go home. The spot where Jeremy Blaire cut him (stabbed him, but he’s trying not to think about it, how long the knife was) is aching insistently, dark red blood still oozing onto his prison suit. His leg has started to swell, and he knows that the flesh around the puncture has started to go red and shiny and hot. Waylon knows basic first aid, not enough to fix himself, but enough to know that what he needs now is a hospital.
He slows the jeep and pulls off the road just as his head starts to spin, his head wobbling almost comically. With the engine off, it’s quiet, birds chirping in the high evergreens around the road. He cracks the window and breathes in that fresh green smell, letting his eyes fall shut, for a moment. It was one of his favorite things, he remembers. When they first moved to Leadville.
He’s struck by a wave of panic, starting in his head and rushing down his body to his gut, where it settles and squirms. His breathing stutters. Lisa. The boys. He struggles to remember the contents of the email printout he found inside, dropped and lost during one of his close scrapes with death. Murkoff told Lisa he was sick. But Lisa pushed back…
“Is she even alive?” he says into the quiet car, his voice cracked from misuse. From screaming.
He catches sight of himself in the rearview then. The last time he’d seen his own face was the morning he’d betrayed Murkoff, two weeks ago. They didn’t let the patients have mirrors in their cells, and he would have felt too sick from the drugs and the Engine to look if he’d had one. He’s startled by the man who looks back at him. No wonder the patients thought he was one of them.
His bleached hair has grown out at the roots in a dark stripe, and is thick and matted with blood and muck. His face is streaked with it, skin pale and tinged gray. His eyes are sunken and bloodshot, and there is bruising and dirty scraping down his forehead and cheek. There’s a blistering around it that reminds him of the scarring on the patients inside, and he smacks his hand onto the mirror, unable to see it anymore.
But not quite before he sees the reflection in his eyes that resembles the patients… no, the variants. That inhuman light that shines from the eyes of the men they put in the engine.
“Tapetum lucidum,” he mutters. A layer in the eye that reflects light… in animals with enhanced night vision. Not people. He remembers it from a nature documentary they’d played for the boys. People aren’t supposed to have eyes like that.
Waylon still sees it, the Engine, when he closes his eyes, when his vision blurs. Whatever terrible machine they built out of human flesh and suffering, he’s wired in. He’s one of them.
When he opens his eyes, he realizes he’s fainted. He slowly realizes he’s pissed himself. He sighs. The icing on the cake.
“Waylon Park,” he says, suddenly overwhelmed with the need to say it. He’s had so little time to really stop and think, inside, first the experiments, then making his way from place to place and near death to near death. He’s unused to contemplating, to planning.
“I have two sons. My wife’s name is Lisa. I’m a software engineer. I’m traumatized. I got out. I want to live.” He runs down a checklist of things that seem important. He pauses. “They’ll look for me. They did something to me. Something… lasting.”
Waylon assesses his body and tries to be rational over the panic that keeps surging inside him in waves. He needs a hospital. He won’t get to one on his own in his current state. He looks around the inside of the car.
“Water,” he says as he spots the half full bottle on the floor in the back seat. The last time he had water or food was…
He scoops it up and pops the cap. When it touches his lips he’s almost overwhelmed by the need to gulp it fast, but he forces himself to drink slowly. The water is stale, like it’d been left in the sun, but it wets his mouth and throat, and he feels like crying for the pure simple ecstasy of it.
He studies the interior of the car with a slightly clearer head. There are some snacks in the back and more half empty bottles of water. Fast food containers on the floor. He checks the glove compartment and above the sun visors. The registration has the name of the reporter he contacted on it.
The sick feeling squirms in his gut again. The man he emailed, he was there. He’s probably dead. If he wasn’t, Waylon took his car… He shakes himself. He can’t let himself feel guilty. Not yet.
He eats a granola bar and tries to remember how to think. There are raisins in it that explode with sweet flavor in his mouth. He doesn’t even like raisins. Having food in his stomach, meager as it was, eases an ache he wasn’t even aware of.
He tosses the wrapper with the rest of the trash on the floor, and puts both hands on the steering wheel. The wet fabric between his legs is getting cold and uncomfortable, clinging to his skin. He breathes in and out slowly. In the distance, he hears a helicopter, getting nearer.
He starts the car again and turns back toward the gas station. They have a pay phone.
He parks as close as he can and digs quarters out of the cupholder in the car, then limps over to the old phone on the side of the building. He’s not even sure if the sensation in his leg is pain anymore, he’s so used to it. The station is still closed, opening at 7 when there’s more traffic, the morning commute to Mount Massive. He watches the sky for the helicopter, plugs in a quarter and freezes for a moment when the number doesn’t just come to him like it always does, like it should. When he recalls it, his fingers are trembling as he punches it in.
“This number has been disconnected.”