Excerpt: My Last Wilderness

BACK TO THE PRESENT:
Sam shifted uncomfortably in his seat, with one leg crossed over the other and drumming the fingers of his right hand on his knee. While the weather outside seemed to be clearing a little bit, the sky was still very grey and it was chilly in the waiting room, where he still sat waiting with Sergeant.

They’d been sitting there in the waiting room for what… nigh on two hours now? He stretched the crossed leg a little, making a little circle with his ankle – cramp was starting up, and he hated that horrible tingly feeling that crept into his toes when the blood wasn’t circulating so well.

Sam glanced over at Sergeant, who was sitting directly across from him. The older man had said nothing, not since he had warned Sam against doing anything rash like leaving Gilmour Street Station without an escort and then ushered him into the waiting room so they could at least be partially insulated from the cold and the damp. Now that he thought about it, beyond breathing and glancing around the platform, he’d said or done absolutely nothing for the past two hours, beyond telling Sam that “the right people would explain the situation to him”, and that he would be informed of his duties for this research “soon enough”.

Well, tell a lie – Sergeant had reached inside his pocket to look at a communicator he had been carrying with him, though if it was because he was expecting a message for someone or he just wanted to check for the time, Sam was not informed on why. Sergeant did appear to be very calm, so Sam tried to take that as a good sign. He reasoned with himself that if Sergeant was actually a mad nut job, and he had ill intentions towards the psychologist, he would have tried or succeeded in bumping Sam off quite some time ago by now. There’d probably been enough opportunities.

Sergeant noticed his glance, and made eye contact, looking slightly amused.

“Are you feeling impatient, Doctor Morton? Or am I just too quiet to suit your tastes?” he inquired.

‘… Oh for… I hope that was just a joke or some slip of the tongue. Ewwww.’

Sam attempted to look nonchalant in the face of terrible innuendo, and threw up one hand in a gesture of “not really caring to be honest”.

“I’m not desperate for idle conversation or anything… I’m just thinking that this escort is taking their time, especially since Paisley isn’t an official clear area. The Royal Alexandra is still within… what do they call it, “kill zone range”, I believe?” Sam replied.

Sergeant’s eyebrows went up: “So you know about the Royal Alexandra Hospital? My, my, there are few who were educated in the New Midlands who could list kill zones in the northern territories…”

Sam felt rather smug at finally being able to get one up on his silent shadow.

“…But you were raised in the Millport facility until the Rebuild began, so I’m hardly surprised that you would be knowledgeable about certain matters and have access to information that a lot of others would not. After all, you’re Reg Morton’s son.”

And all of a sudden, Sam was feeling a lot less smug about his little show of knowledge. His jaw began to tighten at the mention of his father, as if that somehow made sense of his entire life and way of doing things. Of course, it was probably best that he didn’t have that conversation with Sergeant at this point.

“… Moreover, clearance out of the city can take time. Got to negotiate our way across the bridges and such, and we can’t do that at high tide. Our friends will be here before long, don’t worry yourself Doctor Morton.”

There was an unsurprising lapse into silence after that. It felt like it must have been half an hour or so later before the silence was broken. Sam was almost dozing off when he became aware of Sergeant standing up, and of harsh footsteps approaching, the sound of boots. He near slid off the seat and onto the floor on his bum as the waiting room door slid open automatically. Bloody hell, he’d needed to be sharper than this. He scrambled to grab his bag and re-arrange himself.

When Sam was sitting up again and a bit more in control of his faculties, he saw a team of soldiers spread across the platform, taking point, two standing guard at the waiting room door. He couldn’t tell if they were male or female, as they were all wearing environmental helmets and very heavy padding and protective gear, all dressed in black fatigues. They weren’t armed to the teeth, but he was pretty sure he saw some of them were carrying automatic weapons. He’d not seen armed soldiers since the first days of the Rebuild, and he was too young to remember what it had been like going into Seclusion. He could remember what his mum had told him about it, she told him what she’d seen when the chaos struck. He tried to put thoughts like those out of his mind.

He swallowed, and then stood reaching for his bag. Sergeant on the other hand, was still extremely calm, and had simply stood up. Sam wasn’t quite sure how he was so calm when surrounded by this; maybe he found it a comfort that their escort was finally here. This was, assuming that the military WERE their escort.

One soldier approached; he had a red band on his arm with a few gold stripes, probably meant that he was in charge. He had a nametag on the left hand side of his fatigue jacket, which said “LIEUTENANT COMMANDER S. MILLER.”

“You took a long enough time getting here, didn’t you Lieutenant? What happened out there to delay you?” Sergeant asked in a pleasant enough tone.

“Apologies Sergeant, we had a hold up at the security point. Apparently there was a mix up with the passes again,” a muffled voice replied – the soldier’s hands went up to take off his helmet.

“Those mix ups are getting to be a mite too frequent for my liking Lieutenant Commander Miller,” Sergeant said, a touch of irritation creeping into his voice. “Here I thought it was putting on your glad rags and your make-up.”

“For me too, but lucky for me I won’t have to put up with them for much longer,” the soldier laughed, a velvety laugh. “I’ll be glad to get this bloody thing off my head… I know we’re in proximity with an old kill zone, but this place hasn’t seen any kind of activity in a bloody decade. I feel over-dressed.”

Sam could have keeled over as the helmet came off. The soldier underneath was of average height and with slightly tanned skin, and close cropped dark hair in a cut that seemed standard for the armed forces. His eyes were a kind of warm dark brown, but Sam had already known that. Oh for fuck’s sake, why the hell did he always have the worst luck?

The soldier faltered for a second as he saw Sam, but his expression merely became solemn, and he recovered under the pretence of formality.

“I take this is our target then?”

“Yes, this is Doctor Samuel Morton. He’s been chosen for the mission; lucky for us, he was holidaying in Millport so it wasn’t much bother to track him down,” Sergeant explained – if he noticed a tension, he certainly wasn’t going to say anything to either man. “Doctor Morton, I do believe I should introduce you to Lieutenant Commander Steve Miller – he’ll be taking you back to Glasgow Central for your meeting. You’ll be briefed on your work when you arrive there.”

‘Don’t do anything stupid, Sam, for fuck’s sake… Don’t screw it all up now. And don’t fucking blush either!’

“I think the Lieutenant and I have met before. But I believe it was a few years ago now,” Sam remarked quietly, doing a rather poor job of looking and sounding neutral.

Steve just nodded his head and offered his hand, a very business like smile now on his face and Sam accepted it, though his expression didn’t change on iota.

“Now that you mention it, I’m fairly sure that we’ve bumped into one another once or twice around New Midlands. Possibly at the training facilities,” Steve added in.
“Yeah something like that…”

A sort of awkward silence settled for a few moments, while Steve turned back to address the Sergeant.

“Looks like the perimeter is secure Sir. We’ve got a vehicle waiting downstairs to take you up to Glasgow Central, so we’ll start moving you down to there now. But I was also told to tell you that the meeting’s been re-scheduled until tomorrow night. Apparently there was trouble with the original medics requested,” the Lieutenant Commander said.

Sergeant grimaced but nodded his head. There seemed to be a communication going on between the two men that Sam couldn’t quite fully grasp the meaning of. It made him uncomfortable anyway. And why the hell had Steve agreed to be assigned into picking him up? Fuck, didn’t those idiots read histories in a person’s personnel files anymore?

It seemed like Sam had zoned out there just a little too much.

“Are you still with us, Doctor Morton?” Sergeant inquired, now slightly smirking. Stupid Sergeant with his stupid smirk. “We’re going to move out now, so look lively. We’re late enough as things are.”

Sam grimaced back, and dragging his overnight bag along with him, he tried to march out of the waiting room.

How did he end up in situations like this again?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This was a few years back, this memory. Sam had only just graduated proper from the undergraduate course, and had started on his Masters project at First British University. He had never much cared for the city, but then he still felt like it was better than going back to the Northern Territories to continue his training. Plus, the party scene on Millport just wasn’t the same as the one at the university.

After four years of study, essays and projects, Sam had come to discover that he enjoyed the odd party and drink here and there. He never reached epic levels on drunkenness, not like some students, though he’d pushed the bar on a few occasions. He knew it wasn’t the best thing for his health or studies, but he had a hard time caring. He was convinced that the Rebuild was just going to succeed what was left of humanity into oblivion and extinction, and rather than watch everything go down the drain hole, he would have much rather enjoyed himself through the world imploding.

Not that the last few years had made him less cynical or anything, but Sam had a hard time caring about the consequences of his actions back then, for him or for any of the people around him. It was fairly ironic then, that the one person who had facilitated him towards giving a toss not just about others but also about himself, had ended up making themselves the victim of this newly nurtured conscience.

But where was he? Oh yeah, he’d been at one of the bars near the campus – one of the business models that had managed to survive in the days of the Rebuild funnily enough – and it was a place called the Roosting Cockatiel. It wasn’t a fancy place, as oft student places tended not to be and was furnished like a pub from the Nineteen Seventies. It had been a Wednesday night and that was Country and Western night – he remembered Wednesday getting dubbed Country and Western night because somehow the bar manager had managed to salvage an old jukebox from somewhere = probably highly illegal – and the only tunes that seemed not to be scratched to Kingdom Come were old Hank Williams the Third and Willie Nelson numbers. And so even though there was no visible market for it, Wednesday became Country and Western night and the younger undergraduate crowd seemed to avoid the Roosting Cockatiel on those nights.

So it was Country and Western night, and he’d been sitting at the bar? No, he’d been sitting at one of the booths, pouring over some coursework he’d had to get done, trying to write up notes for a project. There wasn’t many other people in the bar, maybe a couple in one corner and a panicking professor grading papers in another section. Sam’d had a drink, but he wasn’t completely wankered… well not yet; maybe if he’d hit the harder stuff first, but the night was still young and so was he.

And he’d been discussing Freud with the barman.

“You know who I feel bad for Fred? Mrs Freud; because that son of hers, he turned out to be a right wanker,” he’d said to Fred, the poor unsuspecting barman. Though when Sam looked back to the scene, Fred wasn’t that poor, given that the Cockatiel was one of the more popular pubs and he must have heard that rant before from the all of psych students who had ever passed through his door, so he couldn’t have been completely unsuspecting.

“That right Sammy?” Fred had replied – rude git hadn’t even looked up from his copy of the ‘Metropolitan’, or whatever bloody cheap tabloid he’d been reading. “Why would that be then?”

“Well, think about it yeah… Poor Mrs F, she raised Siggy and packed his lunchboxes, and you know how he repays her?”

“How does he repay her?”

“I’ll tell you how he repays her, Fred. He repays her by basically blaming the mother for being the root of all of men’s sexual issues and anxieties, that’s what he does,” Sam retorted, slamming down his bottle of beer with a little more force than was necessary,

Fred had shook his head and chuckled, something that Fred seemed to spend most of his life doing. As the mini-dishwasher pinged behind him, indicating the end of its wash cycle, Fred turned away and began to clear it out. Sam could remember it’s ping, because it played the bloody William Tell Overture every time.

“Don’t tell me you put that in your graduation thesis, Morton. Ain’t that a bit lowbrow for a university level essay?” Fred wondered aloud, drying off the glassware with the least ragged dishtowel that he could find.

Sam had nearly snorted up his beer at that point – it wasn’t exactly lovely stuff anyways. He strongly suspected that Fred brewed the stuff himself in a series of bathtubs in some secret dungeon – or at least the mental image of Fred cackling in a lab coat and rubbing his hands in glee had always amused him. He wiped the back of his hand under his nose to get rid of any errant beer suds that had collected there.

“You kidding me on? Crying out loud Fred, give me some bloody credit, cos that’s exactly the sort of thing I’d write if I wanted to get myself institutionalised! Just cos you read about something in a book or talk about it in some essay you hand in, it doesn’t mean you have to like it.”

“That right, Sammy boy? So would you actually like to do? Seeing as Freud isn’t to your liking then. Must be something that you’re capable of, ain’t there?”

The door jarred and then banged open and a gaggle of young men came wandering in. It wasn’t as if they were a set of clones, or anything like that, but there was a certain sameness about them. They were all in similar polo t-shirts and either jeans or smart tracksuit bottoms, and were jostling and winding one another up. They’d known one another. Sam turned his eyes back down to his paperwork – they obviously weren’t from the university, and certainly none of them were piquing his interest. He’d picked this night to go out… well not really to get peace and quiet as such, but to not think about his life back on campus, yes.

As they shuffled up to the bar and started to order drinks, ‘Stand By Your Man’ as sung by Tammy Wynnette cluttered into life on the old jukebox, giving them something of a shock. The jukebox, for some unknown reason, had had a compulsion to burst into life at the oddest of moments. Sam was aware of them looking at one another just at the very edge of his field of vision – perhaps they had been reconsidering their decision. He was too far aware from the bar to hear anything being said distinctly, there were too many voices.

The newcomers must have been stood chatting up at the bar for a couple of minutes before he’d slipped out of his reverie. Sam could remember sitting there for a little while, and considering what he’d actually wanted to do with his life back then. He’d had no interest in medicine or physical sciences as it were. He did like psychology, it interested him, and it challenged him. He also liked chocolate hob nobs and cups of tea, neither of which had very much to do with his studying other than the fact it got him through the day.

He had to have been sitting there and pondering for quite some time, because what he said next seemed to give the men at the bar as well as Fred something of a start.

“You know Fred, actually I’d rather have gone into sex therapy but apparently in our wonderful new Rebuild nobody has those kinds of problems anymore, so instead I’m up to my ears in trauma study cases. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know that this kind of work is essential right now, so it takes priority, but after a while it gets pretty bloody depressing, you know? I mean right, of course I knew that psychology would be about helping people with problems so it wasn’t going to be sunshine and roses and dancing kittens all the fucking time, but sex therapy was an area I really wanted deal with, know what I mean? I’ve just got a feeling that it’s something that’s going to get neglected now, if they ain’t training many people up for it.”

At that point, everything just seemed to get a little quieter. The men up at the bar didn’t completely quieten down, but their talk had moved from loud discussions and exclamations about laddish japes and escapades and that bird who’d worked the counter at wherever who well fancied Mike, to whispers of ‘What the bloody hell is he on about’ and ‘Fuck me, is that the fucking local perv’ and ‘Bloody Birmingham, it’s still full of fucking nutcases. Me mam said it was like this twenty fucking odd years ago.’ Fred too, seemed a bit floored for a couple of moments, but having probably experienced many different kinds of mad drunken rants – you know, because that was the province and duty of all barmen across the globe and universe – he gave a nervous bark of a laugh, and went back to pouring drinks.

Sam scowled at the young men, like only the partially drunk and partially self righteous could. He crawled back into what was left of his beer and then went back to scowling at his coursework and reports, and then things gradually became noisy again.

Time passed. Sam wasn’t entirely sure how long he had been sitting there, but it had been long enough that with the help of a chicken samosa he had managed to ward of the earlier affects of the beer and he was actually able to understand more than half the notes he had taken at yesterday’s lecture. Then there was a voice hovering over him, clearing his throat.

“Ahem… It looks like you’ve got a lot of paperwork to get through there, mate.”

Sam rolled his eyes at his paperwork, before looking up – he’d been about reply something along the lines of “Well duh” or “Your powers of observation do you credit”, something snappy and witty like that.

The voice belonged to a young man, Steve. He was tanned then, with dark eyes and hair, but the eyes had been less sure than when he had seen him at the train station, and the hair a bit longer and rather floppy. He’d had a slightly unsure and goofy smile on his face, it was rather… cute.

But Sam had never been quick to tell him things like that. He raised an eyebrow and had given him a curious look.

“Um, yeah, I do. I’ve got an essay due pretty soon, and I have to make sense of this stuff before then,” he replied, looking back down at the papers again.

He heard a thump, and glanced up again. The young man had plonked himself down on the opposite side of the booth and was smiling rather innocently at him. Sam hadn’t realised then.

“So you’re a psychologist then?” he asked.

“Yes,” Sam replied, starting to become irritated – his diction always improved vastly when he was irked or felt harassed. “To be specific, I’m a trainee psychologist; as soon as this course is done I’ll be fully qualified and I’ll be put on my official rotation. So as I’m sure you can understand, getting the actual qualification is very important for me.”

Steve had just nodded and made himself comfy, and he kept on smiling.

“That sounds kind of cool… I’m a trainee too! Well, I’m a military cadet, my training hasn’t started yet. That’s why me and my platoon are out the night, trying to get in the fun before the hell starts to reign,” he said, proffering a hand to shake. “Name’s Steve Miller, what about you?”

Sam had to look up again, feeling extremely perplexed. What the hell was with this boy? Damn, he was either incredibly persistent or incredibly dim, and neither were traits Sam found attractive in either sex, unless they were just after a quickie. And a quickie meant he only had to put with it for thirty minutes at most. Providing he was actually trying to come on to him. In any case, he had to confess that at the time, if Steve had thought that this was a valid chat up conversation, this night could only get more surreal.

Deciding to try and be mature about the situation, he accepted the hand and shook cordially.

“Sam Morton, and no ‘Sam’ isn’t on the birth certificate, but it’s just what everyone calls me, and no, not ‘Sammy’ as I’m neither a hobbit nor your pet cat. It’s nice to meet you, Steve Miller,” Sam said neutrally.

Steve’s smile became a rather infectious grin.

“Okay then, ‘Sam’, I’ll keep that in mind then,” he laughed – he’d been able to find humour in everything, hadn’t he? “So… what you studying then? Apart from the obvious psychology stuff I mean.”

Yet again, Sam looked up from his work, with a very perplexed look on his face. He leant across the table, looked Steve in the eye, and spoke quietly.

“PLEASE tell me that isn’t your idea of a come on.”

That derailed poor little Stevie quite thoroughly. Bright red crept across his cheeks and he began to stutter uncontrollably, retreating back into his seat.

If he’d been watching the whole scene on some gawd-awful sitcom on the telly at home, Sam would have been rolling around and snickering on his sofa at that point. Unfortunately, these sorts of things were not anywhere as near as funny when you personally where being subjected to them by a rather clueless cutie than as they were on the telly and were happening to someone else.

Sam sighed and tried to muster what little patience he was actually capable of, and Steve stared down to the bottom of his glass very pointedly as if something very fascinating was happening there.

“I… Uh… Erm… Look, I’m sorry if you’re busy, man. I’ll let you get on with it,” Steve blabbed, throwing up his hands in surrender.

For the first time that night, Sam gave a genuine smile. Well, it was more of a smirk, but it was better than him poking Steve in the eye with a sharp stick, which he had been seriously contemplating when the young cadet had first sauntered up.

“No offense kid, but you’ve got to work on your technique a bit. You get points for effort. I’ve got these notes to go through, and then I have to start scribing down an essay plan, and then I’ve got to finish the reading for my next lesson. I reckon that’s going to take me at least an hour,” Sam went on, a smug smirk still on his face.

Steve stood up and grabbed his drink. Embarrassment had shifted towards anger instead.

“Fucking hell man, I said I was sorry, there’s no need to be a tosser about it.”

“Apology accepted. Like I said, I need to get all of this stuff done or I’m in trouble. It’ll take me an hour to get it all done. So I’ll be free in an hour, and I’ll probably be less of a tosser by then. You can buy me a drink then if you’re still about, or whatever you want,” Sam continued, relaxing back into his seat. “Though if it’s the ‘whatever’ that you’re after, then I’d rather not hang about here for that.”

It had been a while since Sam had gotten any ‘whatever’… to be brutally honest, he wouldn’t have minded some ‘whatever’ in the gents toilets, but if he could pick somewhere more comfortable, well why not then?

And now anger was confusion. Steve just stared at Sam, rather pole axed by this form of logic. He was very attractive when he was pole axed by complex logic and innuendo.

“So… let me get this right, mate. You want me to buy you a drink, but in an hour?” he asked.

“Exactly that, you’re a bright guy. I can see we will have much discuss then,” Sam confirmed with a bright smile this time. “You’ve pulled Gorgeous. I’ll see you in an hour.”