Chapter 54: 54 Dreamers Often Lie, Part Two

For the first few days after the barrier came down, the doctor had only needed Tsuyoshi in the hospital to help her force everyone into having a check up, and this only so she could add their data to her creepy files. Sometimes at night, after they'd finished seeing people for the day and she was done with disparaging his notes, she'd go off to convene with Colonel Huppert at her office. She didn't seem nearly so critical of the Colonel as she was of him.

At night, Zelko was a heavy, snoring weight by his side, constantly rolling onto Tsuyoshi's arm until it went prickly all the way down. If Tsuyoshi shoved him away like he was an annoying dog, he'd wake up and get angry, so Tsuyoshi had to carefully pry his arm out from underneath so he could roll over onto his side, facing away from Zelko's large form, and still not sleep. Trying not to think, What do you do all day? How are you wasting your time? Or, this is it, this is the rest of our lives, and none of us will ever get to leave.

On the morning after all the check ups were done, he stumbled out of bed in the direction of the hospital showers, and saw creepy Ibrahim waiting just inside the hospital doors. Tsuyoshi walked past and ignored him.

In the mirrors above the sinks, the spaces under Tsuyoshi's eyes were dark like bruises. Easier not to look.

When he got back to the hallway near the doors, he saw creepy Ibrahim talking with the doctor. All, "I convinced Yong Jie not to volunteer."

And the doctor replying, "So he is capable of seeing sense."

Tsuyoshi crossed his arms and waited until their cryptic conversation was done. Wasn't afraid of letting his face look as mean and impatient as possible while he waited.

When Ibrahim finally left, the doctor turned to him and said, "I will need you and Zelko to help me today when we begin dealing with the remaining wreckage in the centre of the camp. Antoine has secured the site and I have done my best to create safety equipment. I will not listen to any complaints."

"And, what, that Ibrahim guy is helping?" Tsuyoshi asked.

"Yes, and I have no interest in you whining about this."

"I can tell by looking at that guy that he's a killer. He came on the same ship as Neo, didn't he? How can we trust him?"

Dr Yeoh's gaze sharpened like a cutting edge. "He may well be a killer, Okada, but so are you."

Tsuyoshi tried to move back, away from the conversation, but where would he go? He'd made every choice that brought him to this shitty hospital, this terrible camp.

"For that matter," she continued, "so am I. But we all have to live here and work together or we will all die of easily preventable disease. So cut the crap. I do not have the patience for this."

He crossed his arms tighter. "Fine."

*

The larger crash site was loosely cordoned off. Tsuyoshi saw Colonel Huppert talking with the two military women from the other side that refused to let Dr Yeoh use anything other than their first names. He didn't understand any of the strings of words they put together, but the overall effect gave him the impression they knew enough about aircraft to have some clue what was broken in each.

Zelko grabbed him by the shoulder. "Cleaning up gloves and a scarf over your face is a sexy look."

"It's a sexy look the doc's going to make you put on in a minute unless you want to spend the day breathing in that beautiful corpse-y smell and putting bare hands on mysterious rot," Tsuyoshi said.

"Maybe I'll talk to the hot women over there and they'll find me something less disgusting to do."

Tsuyoshi breathed in rough air through his nose. "Want to be one of the corpses I'll handle today?"

"I'd like to stay alive for my man-handling."

From behind them, a flat voice: "I see you've become lazy in the last four months."

Tsuyoshi turned only far enough to see Milo, with his messy long hair and cold eyes. Did that guy just not cut his hair even once in the time since they'd landed there? Tsuyoshi didn't want to have to give the guy a hair cut, but he'd forced Jin to have one and Jin was unnaturally strong; in comparison, wrestling Milo into a chair to get his hair dealt with didn't seem like it would be as much of a trial.

But even Milo was less creepy than Ibrahim, who came up behind him with an unconvincing smile on his face.

"I'm sure he was merely joking, Milo. No need to start a fight over it," Ibrahim said.

"Whatever," Tsuyoshi said. "I'm going to start doing actual work."

The broken shells of the crafts filled Tsuyoshi with disgust. Most of the dead bodies Tsuyoshi saw were too charred to identify, not that he had any chance of knowing who they were anyway.

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"That one can wait for later," Dr Yeoh yelled.

Fine, he'd leave the large batches of overcooked hamburger until the doc was ready to make them all reach into that kind of horror. The body he could see through the filthy window of the craft she pointed him to looked like a person, at least. Whoever they were died eyes wide open. It couldn't have been pleasant. Something vaguely familiar about their collection of features made him want to stand back so that he didn't have to examine the corpse too closely.

"Oh, my, what a mess," Ibrahim said. He didn't have gloves but used a dish towel, folded around his hand, to steady his grip on the door.

"Yeah, well, they've been sitting in the no-go zone for four months. Of course they're gross," Tsuyoshi said.

"I left the other two arguing over who else survives of their initial party. It seems each is convinced that their 'big boss', so to speak, has to be hiding on the other's side," Ibrahim said.

Tsuyoshi looked at another dead body, its face forever caught in the grimace of death, and started to laugh. "That wouldn't sound crazy, because that happened with Darren, but Ivan is definitely dead because I'm looking right at him. Which is weird because he wasn't dead when we landed."

"Most unfortunate."

"For him, anyway. And I guess for us because we're stuck at this corpse handling party."

"I take it you didn't enjoy a good relationship with him," Ibrahim said.

"Sure. He didn't like me. But what do I care? A body is a body. I'm not exactly going to spit on his corpse."

"I assure you, that's more respect than some people show the dead."

Ibrahim had the kind of sombre look on his face that meant people probably asked him about his tragic backstory a lot. Tsuyoshi didn't even want to deal with his own tragic backstory in that moment.

"You still creep me out," Tsuyoshi said.

Ibrahim's laughter sounded lighter and softer than Tsuyoshi might have expected. He flapped a hand about like it was a small thing and said, "I do have that effect on a lot of people."

It was a long day.

*

Everything still seemed kind of bleak and joyless at breakfast, until Angharad shoved him over on a bench to make space for her. She leaned right into him, her knees across his lap and her enormous amounts of hair a warm sheet behind them. He slung an arm around her waist to keep her from losing balance.

"Why do you come in here at meals when you can't eat any of the food?" he asked.

"Because I'm, like, super committed to the social rituals that help us continue the bonds of friendship as human beings," she said.

"Bored and lonely, you mean. You know all the gossip. What is the deal with Ibrahim and Milo?"

"Okay, like, it's not that I know all the gossip? Because there is, like, tons of gossip that people are keeping from me and I don't know why. I'm super trustworthy. But Ibrahim said that he and Milo got friendly because they were the only Muslims on that side of camp, and I said, well, now you've met Sophie, so there's three people who can have religious togetherness in Zapville. Not that I know if they're the same variety, because there's different groups, right? But, whatever, everyone here is desperate for someone they have something in common with. But I got the impression there was more to it, and that they knew each other before they came here, and also Freya said some stuff about Ibrahim nagging Milo into friendship, which makes me think there's, like, secret details that might be kind of shocking or scandalous. I mean, that's all I know."

"That's a lot. Tell me some gossip about you instead."

"Okay, so like, Freya Moon kind of kissed me in, like, a joking way, and then later her friend Gael said that he'd heard about it and he thought it was so cool that hot chicks kiss here, and I told him he was gross and that women don't need his approval of their attractiveness or their sexual identity. But he was nice about apologising so I think we're going to be friends."

He pushed her hair out of the way so he could look at the way the laughter danced in her eyes. And maybe, if he held her face, some of her energy would rub off on him and he'd be able to face another day of looking at the dead.

"Have you kissed everyone here, my lovely girl?" he asked.

"No, not yet. Why, do you think I should collect the set?"

He kissed her cheek. "You've already collected me."

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