Chương 144: CDM 3, Chapter 20: Employee Healthcare

Intern Ali turned his head toward me, his eyes droopy from painkillers. Back in the dungeon, the healers had said he would keep both legs, but seeing two sets of toes sticking up beneath the hospital blankets was still a relief. I didn't think they would lie to me, but my mind needed to see for itself. There was no saving his left arm, though. I wasn't sure they ever even found it, but that probably didn't matter. We had sat in that dark room for hours, waiting to be rescued.

Reattaching a limb in general was a long shot, and that was if circumstances were ideal. After that long? Ali still being alive was a miracle. His life and all four limbs were too much to ask for.

"Enforcer Gray, hey," he said, speaking just above a whisper.

"I'm really fucking high right now. I'm sorry if I say something unprofessional." I laughed.

"I won't tell anyone."

"My crawling career is over. What do you think about inspections? How do I type on those dumb tablets with just one hand? I've been trying to picture it, but I think I'm screwed. Lost an arm and an internship in the same day." I pulled a chair next to the bed.

"I'll hold the tablet for you."

"Like we write the tickets together?"

"Yeah." He grinned.

"We'll be like super tablet heroes, fighting crime."

"Sure. I'm glad you're awake and able to speak. I was worried about you."

"I'm sorry I let you down, Enforcer Gray," he said, the levity draining from his face in an instant.

"I actually came to thank you for not letting me down. You were tough as hell back there and kept fighting when most people would have quit. That helped me keep going."

"Really?"

"Really, so thank you." Ali sniffled and wiped his eyes.

"Your mom is on her way," I said.

"Want me to sit with you until she gets here?"

"Will you stay even if I fall asleep?"

"Yeah. Resting as much as you can is a good idea."

"Usually it's bad to sleep in front of your boss," Ali joked.

"But okay. If you insist." He didn't need more than a minute to go back to sleep. As it turned out, neither did I. A gentle shake of my shoulder brought me back to the waking world, and I needed several seconds to realize I had even fallen asleep. The nurse standing over me looked down with sad eyes. She stepped aside so a short, round woman in glasses and a shower cap could see me.

"Thank you for saving my baby boy," she managed, fighting back her tears. As soon as I stood, she half-tackled me with a hug. She whispered, "Thank you. Thank you."

"Jomo is a good kid," I replied.

"You raised him right."

"Seems clearer to me your parents raised you right. No one does what you did by accident."

"You're giving me too much credit, but thank you."

"Have you talked to him?" she asked.

"Only a little bit. He's on a lot of meds, and he's pretty tired." Ali's mom gripped his remaining hand with both of hers and pulled it to her face.

"I'm so glad you're alive, baby," she whispered to him.

"You can't go scaring me like this again." That hadn't been enough to wake him. She stared down at his figure wrapped in hospital blankets and tried not to look at the stump on his left shoulder. I stood to give them their privacy, but Ali's mom stopped me.

"Stay a bit longer?" she asked. Her eyes were filled with fear.

"Of course. I'm going to find some tea. Can I get you a cup? Maybe something from the vending machines?"

"Tea would be wonderful." Several minutes later, I returned to Ali's room and handed his mother a styrofoam cup with a teabag string draped over the edge. She forced a small smile to thank me.

"They told me not everyone made it," she said after a sip. I shook my head.

"One passed on scene, and two are still in critical condition." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"So Jomo was one of the lucky ones." I didn't know how to respond to that.

"He talks about you a lot," Jomo's mother added a few moments later.

"He was really excited to have you mentoring him." Ali considered me a mentor? We hadn't really worked together all that much, but then again, I couldn't deny attaching myself to Enforcer McDouglas in a similar way when I started at the CDM. She inhaled sharply, shook a little bit, and wiped her eyes.

"I can't help thinking what I'd be doing right now if you weren't there today." That was another comment I didn't know how to reply to. All of my canned niceties for a situation like this were all things like, "the Lord works in mysterious ways" or "Jesus was watching him." What could I actually tell a mother who almost lost their child that would be remotely comforting? The best thing I could think to do was sit quietly and say nothing at all.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," a nurse in the doorway said softly.

"Enforcer Gray, can you step outside for a moment?" Ali's mother nodded that it was fine. I gave her a hug and followed the nurse out. Enforcer McDouglas stood outside the room wearing black fatigues. His hair was wet like he had just come out of the shower. He jerked his thumb to ask me to follow him down the hall. Several doors later, we stepped into an unused office. McDouglas let me in, shut the door, and then sat on top of the desk.

"Good work back there," he said, his tone a bit somber.

"I mostly just sat still and let her talk."

"I mean in the dungeon. That should have been a wipe. On paper, you run that scenario a hundred times, the outcome is always a total loss of life." And again, I didn't know what I was supposed to say, but I had come to think of McDouglas as completely unflappable. The enforcer sitting in front of me at that moment was visibly disturbed, his eyes quick to lose focus and drift off into a memory.

"What are you not telling me?" he asked.

"How are you always the one who ends up in this kind of gate? We're only up to 11 anomalies in the United States, and you've been in two of them."

"Anomalies?"

"That's what they're calling gates with radically different difficulties from what they register as on the outside. We're beyond the point of it being coincidence, Gray. And Osheski says you 'felt' it before you went in? How? What is happening here?"

"I'm not hiding anything. I just had a bad vibe, and sending a text made me feel better about it." McDouglas rubbed his face.

"I didn't mean to suggest you're hiding something. I know you aren't. If this is a taste of where Stage 2 is going to go, we're all in a lot of trouble, and no one has any idea what to do about it." He seemed to still be thinking, so I waited to speak.

"That dungeon was a little larger than what we'd expect for a D gate, but the mobs inside were more like an A. Shadow hunters in a D gate? Jesus Christ."

"Is that what you call the jumpscares?" I asked. He shook his head.

"They're similar to jumpscares but smaller. That D gate was only the seventh time they've been recorded, and all the other instances were A or S gates. Jumpscares have only been seen four times." My chest tightened. No, LootLootLouis was the first person to see them in that S gate, and then no other reports about them had been made since. I either missed three very big crawl stories, or McDouglas referenced records that weren't public.

"We've asked you every question anyone can think of about your life, background, or health. We've run every test and scan we have. We've dug into your family history and went out and gathered a bunch of samples from where you grew up. Soil. Water. Air. Found absolutely nothing." I was aware of the questions, but I was unaware of the rest.

That shouldn't have surprised me, given where I worked and how often I had been in the hospital, but someone using my blood samples without informing me felt deeply violating, almost as if they did the tests on me personally without my knowing.

"Three local kids crashed the gate before a RAID drone got there," McDouglas continued.

"There was barely anything left of them. We found six total shadow hunters in there, and then the boss was… We don't even have a fucking name for it yet, Gray. That's how messed up this is."

"I'm sorry." He shook his head.

"I'm trying to say you're in. I wanted to put it off for at least a few years so you could get more crawls under your belt, but if this shit follows you for some reason, I'd be an asshole to not help you now. We've had too many of these conversations where I spend most of it telling you how dead you should be." My heart jumped.

"You need to understand how serious this is before you decide. This is the kind of classified where you don't get a trial or a court-martial for breaking it. Two out of five candidates don't live through the first year, and every op has a chance to be the hardest thing you've ever done in your life. All of that messes with your head in ways you can't imagine, and any hope of living a 'normal' life is out the window. This is not the time to be an eager intern. This is a serious, life-changing decision." I nodded.

McDouglas held my gaze for a long pause, as if giving me one final assessment. When he looked away, he said, "On average, there are 11 to 15 more S-ranked gates in this country per year than are reported. You already know that the CDM satellite system doesn't automatically announce the appearance of an S gate. If one of those gates happens to appear in an area secluded enough where witnesses aren't likely to have seen it, that S gate doesn't get pushed to the CDM portal at all. We run it, harvest it, and close it.

"If there is an exceptional wild monster that needs put down, like, say, a ghost salamander in the Allegheny mountains, we kill it. If a high-level crawler goes off the deep end and needs brought in or put down, we do it. If we have reason to investigate something in the wilds, sometimes traveling for days with no support or contact, we do it." He paused, seeming to think.

"Your job is to be a killer," he said, bringing his eyes back to mine.

"You're a weapon that gets pointed in a direction and told 'go.' You will see and do incredible things. Your work could save thousands of lives. No one will ever know. With the exception of a handful of people, everyone in the world will think you're a middle-management CDM grunt who did alright in their career but was still decidedly average and unremarkable. If you die in the field, your family will be given some benign story about a car accident or heart failure.

"Do you still want in?"

"Yes, sir," I said without hesitation.

"Alright. You're 9 levels shy of what we want for a minimum. Your interest in the Rapid Dungeon Surge Response project gives us cover for leveling the shit out of you. At 15, you'll start the classroom training. If you don't flunk out of that and make it to 20, you'll start to join real ops with the rest of us. We want you to keep the YouTube channel going through all of this. Having one of our own embedded in that corner of the crawling world has a lot of value, so that's even more work you have to do.

And there's one more thing." I listened.

"That hero shit you pulled with Brennan Kielar a few months back? Cornering him in a bar to get in his head? You don't get leeway to go off script like that ever again. Not ever. If you're good with all of that…" McDouglas hopped off the desk and offered his hand. I stood and shook it.