The Haven Hotel

The Second Hardest Part

"Hello." I say from across the pantry and take my radio off the counter. 

"Is this the field officer?" The base officer asks.

"Yes." My face warms up in an involuntary smile and my stomach flutters with relief. I begin to feel the hope that Themba felt yesterday; when I was too numb to think that maybe we wouldn't have to fight through the whole city. 

"Name?" I pause, before asking the officer to repeat herself. "What is your name?"

"Fortissa Monday." 

There's a distant sound of her slamming the keys of an old computer. "Do you know that you're on a special charge?" My heart falls into my stomach because I was expecting her tone to be vastly different. Instead of offering to help she's reminding me of my job.

"I've been shot." I figure that my being injured should draw some sympathy. It turns out that I'm wrong.

"Where?" It sounds like she's taking stock.

"My shoulder. I can't move my arm." The tingles I felt earlier in the fingers of my left hand are completely gone now; now I feel pain in my shoulder and nothing below.

"Can you walk?"

"Are you implying that I'll have to keep going with this charge on my own?" As I ask that I know that it's more than an implication.

"Can you walk?"

"Do you know why this is a special charge?" I hear the indignation in my voice but I'm not really sure why those particular words are coming out of my mouth. The words are arbitrary; all I want is to get my feelings across. My anger is obvious, a defensive mechanism against her coldness, but there's something under that which I can't explicitly show; despair.

"The reasons are irrelevant, you need to..."

"For fuck's sake! This is not a joke!" I close the pantry door to block the noise from carrying over to my companions, leaving myself in total darkness. "We are being hunted right now. Two rooms away from me there's a child who can move shit with her mind. The guy she's travelling with is a fucking scientist, I have no clue how he's managed to survive this long but I know I was not trained for this shit! I know that I can't use my left arm right now and I know that whoever's hunting us is gonna kill us if we don't get reinforcements. I know that we are going to fucking die if you keep playing this authority game. I know that you base officers are all a bunch of fucking stupid bureaucratic cunts, but can you at least understand my situation?"

I'm gripping the radio so hard my fist is shaking. There's no reply, and for a moment I think it's because she's hung up on me, then her voice returns: "Are you done?" Her tone has gone from being cold to being positively hostile.

I lift the radio high over my head, about to smash it on the floor, then I catch myself; nothing will be gained from cutting off my sole source of communication with the only people who can help me and my charge. Somehow it takes more effort to simply place the radio back on the counter than it would have to hurl it at the ground.

"Officer Monday, that was not a rhetorical question. Are you done being a child?"

I bite my lip hard and take a deep breath. It takes every fiber of my being to keep my composure. "Yes." The whisper barely reaches my own ears yet she manages to hear it.

"Good. Now, can you walk?"

"Yes." My voice is slightly louder now. "I don't know how long I'll be able..."

"Here's the thing, Officer Monday, you have a job to do."

"I can't do my job if I'm dead."

"Shut up." She doesn't raise her voice but the sound of her leaning forward in a plastic chair somewhere in the Haven carries through the radio, and from that and from her choice of words I can hear that she's livid with anger. "You said you were done talking, now I'm talking. You wait your turn."