Investigating the Asylum

Angie’s arrival on the mainland went relatively unnoticed. She pulled Diane’s boat up to an old dock and climbed onto the dried carcass of the old world. Standing up on the earth for the first time in more than a decade, it felt uneasily still under her feet. It was a mile across the dirt to the old asylum. Putting all her equipment back into the duffel including her drysuit, just in case, Angie slung it over her shoulder and began the hike across the land. With her gun out, she wasn’t particularly worried about Goar on land. A lone, well armed traveller wasn’t attacked on land. Too many drifters in the waste, people whose survival depended on killing. Even if they knew they could kill every wanderer who passed, each one would kill at least one of theirs. Goar weren’t Greenies, they were far too selfish to risk that. Unhindered, Angie walked knife in one hand, grenade launcher in the other resting on her shoulder.

It took her just over fifteen minutes to walk the mile to the asylum’s front gate. Run by the local settlement as a theoretical hospital, it’s mostly used as a prison for everyone’s dirty secrets. Angie regretted shoving M here. If it had been up to her, M would have been lost at sea, long ago. Like Luis was. But her old mentor was weak, or scared, or wanted to use her later, and so instead they shoved her in a hole and tossed the key into the ocean. Walking up to the door, she let the launcher drop out of her hand, slung over her shoulder. It was still ready to fire, just a step separated and slightly less openly threatening. Angie rapped sharply on the door three times. “Who is it?” the person manning the door asked.

Cocking her head slightly and staring at the peephole with her featureless ballistic mask, Angie replied, “Nobody. Nobody of note.”

From behind her, before the door opened, she heard a familiar footstep. A step of overconfidence and betrayal. Without looking, without even thinking, she whipped her knife through the air at him. Then, knowing that wasn’t going to be enough to kill the bastard, she turned to face the self-proclaimed ‘God’.

Holding her knife in one of his gloved hands, Angie’s old mentor asked, “What are you doing here, empty one?”

“Of course it was you, false god,” Angie hissed at Jason, “I ruled you out because I forgot you’re an idiot. If you wanted to kill me, you should have had the balls to do it yourself.” She gripped her grenade launcher and aimed.

“I wouldn’t kill you, kid,” Jason said, throwing some weird box at her. “Much better to let people suffer. Seems you learned that lesson, finally.”

Angie drops to the ground sliding left to avoid whatever toy Jason was using. “What do you mean?”

“I believed it to be M, but you know how to make a mechanized forwarding terminal too, don’t you?” he said, throwing Angie’s knife back at her.

Angie caught the knife without any apparent effort. “A what? You know me, old man,” Angie scolded her mentor, “I’ve always found overreliance on technology to be your greatest weakness.”

Despite his strange mask, she knew he was thinking. “Fair enough, kid. If the actions were not yours, why are you here?”

“You don’t know?” Angie asked, mocking her old mentor, “I thought you knew everything. Isn’t that one of them perks of being a god?”

His strange face’s mechanical eyes stared into Angie’s featureless face, trying to reach into her soul. “Tell me,” he said with as much force as he could muster.

Behind her mask, Angie smirked. “Where’s the fun in that,” she mocked, then answered his question, “I’m here to do what we should’ve done years ago.”

“Why?” Jason asked, then began to piece things together, “Unless she moved against you somehow.”

Angie shrugged. “Tried to have me killed. Needs to learn the same lesson I taught you: I don’t die easy.”

“I assumed that,” Jason condescended, “How do you know it was her?”

Finally loosening her grip on her grenade launcher, Angie shrugged again. “Because you’re a shitty liar.”

Jason walked over and picked back up his box. “Someone targeted you, why assume it was one of us?”

“Because they targeted me. Unlike you, I’m good at not making enemies,” Angie answered, “And you’re the only two I know of who know I’m me. Oh, and, to be clear, I’m assuming you’re chatting with one of your pets. So if you so much as hint any details about me to whoever’s on the other end, I’ll find them and dot dot dot.”

Jason sighed. “I assume you don’t have anything more than suspicion, like me,” he said. Angie cocked her head curiously, so Jason elaborated, “Someone’s targeting the same people as M, using similar but improved tech.”

“I can do you one better,” Angie snarked, “M’s using the name Rite for some reason.”

Jason chuckled. “Maybe she found religion,” he joked.

“I’ll ask, probably before I kill her,” Angie replied, much less jokingly.

Jason shook his head. “You haven’t changed,” he scolded as he, too, approached the door to knock.

As Jason spoke with the door, Angie stood back up and brushed off her clothes. She had not expected a fight, not out in the wastes. Most people simply left her be at the sight of the grenade launcher. Unfortunately, her old mentor was insane and thought himself an immortal god. Meant he wasn’t easy to ward off by means of fear. Defeating and scaring him required playing to his humanity. His friends, his confidants, his tools, all things he was attached to. All connections that could be leveraged. That was why Angie was certain Jason would not leak her information to his pet. What is a god without worshipers, after all.

Angie walked up behind Jason as the person manning the door finally opened it. “Welcome, God and Nobody,” the doorman said with a bow, “Your patient is on the third floor in the psychiatrics wing.”

“I remember,” Angie hissed. Together, the pair of masked old frenemies walked in relative silence through the halls of the old facility. Around them were noises befitting a prison, a hospital, and hell itself. There was a reason they’d left her here so many years ago. It was all three of those in one.

As they approached the locked door, Jason turned to Angie. “Would you permit me a few moments alone to discuss what she’s doing, before you come in? If I recall correctly, she hates you.”

Angie grunted and glared, but didn’t say no. She had another questioning to deal with first. “Ten minutes,” she said, unlocking the deadbolt to the cell. She headed back into the asylum. On their way here, she’d seen a sign for security. Whether it was an old security room or a new one mattered little. It would have monitoring devices. Allow her to figure out how M had gotten in touch with Luis. She knew the right time frame for when the supposed dead drops occurred. Assuming they had recordings, she could find out how.

Walking in, she found the old security room was not empty. A masked Goar hunched over one of the screens, while his partner leaned against the wall. The leaning one noticed Angie almost immediately. “Who are you and why are you here?” he asked, suspiciously. He clearly knew the Goar who used this place frequently.

Angie, still slowly walking towards one of the security terminals, replied honestly. “I’m Nobody. I don’t plan on doing anything against you or yours, I have my own business. But, touch your gun and I’ll kill both of you before you can take a single breath.”

That caught the hunched over one’s attention. “Nobody, you say? My pops once worked with a nobody.”

Angie ignored him, pulling up the psychiatric wing’s security system.

The Goar continued to talk. “According to him, nobody was one of the scariest people he ever worked with. He always says that, if…”

Angie cut him off by flicking a knife into her hand and pressing it against his throat lightly. “You should get back to work and forget I exist. Before I get upset.” Her voice was completely even, her focus was entirely on the terminal before her, and yet the Goar understood the validity of the threat. To them, the knife must have seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the blink of an eye.

“Yes, ma’am” the Goar at the screens said, “Sorry.” Then he turned back to the cameras he was scouring.

Angie retracted the knife, mostly so she could use both hands. She searched the camera memory. It only lasted a month. That meant the original drop was out of range. But the cash drop and pickup wasn’t. Scrolling back a week, Angie searched all the cameras to find any hint of how M might have slipped out. But, as far as these seemed to indicate, she never left her room. The outside camera had a clear view of the windows, the interior view had a slightly obstructed view of her door. Either they weren’t giving her the drugs they were supposed to be and she’d gotten better at spotting cameras, or she hadn’t left. She wasn’t behind this whole shitshow.

“There he is,” shouted the focused Goar, “Fourth floor medical wing window on camera G7.”

“Let’s move,” his partner says as they take off together, though they both make sure to be out of the room before touching their guns. Angie can’t help but smile to herself, under her featureless face. She still had the stuff. If it wasn’t M herself, it was someone M had contact with. She needed the access log. They kept those under lock and key, to prevent anybody from doing exactly what Angie was planning on doing. Unfortunately for them, Angie was Nobody.

Getting into the office was the easy part. The hard part was the professional killer who staffed the office. They remained in the room any time they weren’t going to the bathroom. Angie had only given Jason ten minutes, and four of them had been spent at that terminal. She couldn’t afford to wait for nature to take its course. She needed to help nature’s hand. The killer was drinking coffee, to stay alert. Good for them. Angie could see it all from her position squeezed in the defunct ventilation system. Rather than rip it out, the new management had simply upgraded around it. Useful for infiltration, so long as one knew about its existence. Letting down a guide wire and waiting the four seconds for the killer to look away, Angie slid an embarrassing amount of laxative into the coffee then removed the wire. The process took about twenty more seconds, before the vicious killer had a vicious case of diarrhea rearing to go. The moment they left the room, Angie dropped in. Raking the desk drawer’s lock, she pulled out the log.

She and Jason had their own keys, but anyone else had to use the asylum’s pair to get in. Even her and Jason, if they had ever come alone, would have to use the asylum’s copy of the other’s key. Reading through the log, she saw Jason had done that, as the God of Newest York, twice. All too far in the past to be significant to these turns of events. Jason’s doctor in his new life, under Doc Luce, had visited once, after Jason had begun his new life. In all likelihood unrelated. Doctors tended to fight against relapses, or so Angie assumed. That left seven visitors. Three were Jason’s so-called friends, the people this new Rite was targeting. The others were marked staff. Moving to the other drawer, he looked for staff on the list who were absent just before both the hiring and the payment of Luis’s job. That would be whoever tried to kill me.

Of the four staff members who accessed M’s room, only one was absent for both timeframes. As cold fury overwhelmed her, Angie returned both journals to their respective drawers, and disappeared into the old vents. Making her way back to the cell, an aura of fury keeping everyone out of her way, only one thing occupied her mind. Who the hell was Quincy Wyman?