Notes:
Originally written for the Febuwhump 2024 Challenge on Tumblr for the prompts:
- DAY 14: Blood-stained tiles
- DAY 15: “Who did this to you?”
Any member of Spectrum to Captain Scarlet, requested by Sineater on Archives of our Own.
Content Warning: I was specifically challenged to make this WORSE than Stillwaters and Lay Me Down To Sleep. I have been told that I succeeded. That is your warning.
Shoulder to shoulder with pistols raised, Blue and Ochre slipped down the broad, dimly lit hallway, nearly silent in their soft-soled boots. The two of them and Scarlet had been investigating a possible smuggling ring with ties to Bereznik, and had split up to search a large ‘private clinic’ in San Francisco that the group were using as their front for their operations.
“And that was our first mistake,” was Blue’s grim thought. “But someone reported seeing people being brought in here so we had to hurry.”
Now there was a different reason for their haste.
While he searched the ground floor and Ochre took the upstairs, Scarlet had been sweeping through the basement. He’d started to call them when he’d suddenly yelped and the call was interrupted by a solid-sounding ‘thwack’, immediately followed by the thud and clatter of a falling body and a dropped gun. Next had been the rustle and ‘hand on microphone’ noises of someone picking up the RadioCap, and at the same time, just faintly in the background, a groan from Scarlet, followed by another ‘thwack’ just before the call cut off.
Blue and Ochre had immediately found each other, called for backup and gone hunting.
“Please be okay, Paul, please be okay...” was Blue’s worried thought as they reached the end of the long passageway. He was very certain that that interrupted radio call was going to haunt his nightmares for a long time to come.
The hallway fed into what was apparently a waiting room, all dressed up with the usual easy-clean plastic chairs, a reception desk with phone and PC, fake plants and corporate grade abstract canvases. A door directly opposite the hallway had what looked like some sort of odd decorative glass circles around it, but that was the only obvious thing out of place.
Communicating with gestures, Blue took the left and Ochre the right as they swept through the room for any signs of Scarlet, then met back up again in the middle.
“Nothing,” Blue reported in a murmur. “But I found what they hit him with.” Blue nodded to a wooden baseball bat leaning against the corner of the reception desk. There were fresh bloodstains mingling with very old ones, and a smeared puddle of blood on the white tiled floor showed where Scarlet had lain. “But what are these?” Blue crossed to the door and peered at it. “They’re lights! Some sort of high-powered LED.”
“This must be how they surprised him.” Ochre gestured at the bank of lights. “Blinded him with the lights, then hit him over the head with the bat.”
“Agreed.” Blue nodded grimly. “What did you find?”
“There’s another door over there,” Ochre tipped his head to a dark corner of the waiting room. “Blue, this just levelled up from ‘bad’ to ‘horror movie’.” Ochre looked extremely unsettled as he waved for Blue to follow. “Come look.”
Trailing after Ochre, Blue just about felt his heart skip a beat when he saw it.
A set of four coat hooks were set into the wall beside the door. Scarlet’s RadioCap hung from one, and on a coat hanger below was his tunic, neat and tidy and practically identical to how they hung up their uniforms back on base. Stacked on a chair beside the door were Scarlet’s undershirt and trousers, both folded, with his watch, pistol and knives placed on top, and his tall boots were tucked under the chair. A plastic shopping bag beside the chair held the rest of his belongings.
“There has to be at least two of them,” Ochre reasoned. “It hasn’t been that long and undressing someone who’s unconscious is hard. Fawn and his team can get our uniforms off in seconds because they just cut everything with those special scissors, but his uniform is intact.”
“Yeah...” Blue gave the stack of clothing another look, then examined the edge of the door, crouching down to get a better look. “There’s no light showing under the door, but there’s fresh blood here,” he pointed to a couple of drops on the tiled floor, “and I can smell a whole lot more,” he said as he got up.
“Yeah, me too.” Ochre looked grim. “Quiet or loud?”
“Loud.” Blue set himself, bracing for whatever they might find in there. “I’ve got the door.”
“S.I.G.”
A quick test of the door handle showed it wasn’t locked. Blue counted down from three on his fingers, then threw the door open so Ochre could surge in with a roar of “Spectrum! Hands up!”
Quick and efficient, they swept through the dim room, finding nothing, and while they both saw and recognised the shape on the steel table, he didn’t move and they didn’t dare check on him until it was safe to do so.
This room was a perfect square, the floors and walls tiled just like in the outer room. There were banks of overhead surgical lights, all off, and it was lit by the powerful glow of a glass-fronted, double door industrial refrigerator, currently empty. A stainless steel workbench beside the fridge was almost covered with boxes of surgical tools, dressings, cleaning supplies and body bags, and a cupboard held different organ transporters. A door on the far side was the scrub room, with another door feeding to elsewhere. Ochre locked that door for the moment - he couldn’t see anyone and they had another priority right now.
“Watch your step,” Ochre warned as Blue holstered his pistol and approached the steel table in the centre of the room. He kept his gun out: he’d watch Adam’s back while Adam went to see if there was anything they could do to help Paul.
“S.I.G.”
Adam did his best to step over and around the thick ropes of congealing blood that surrounded the floor around the table: the classic sprays from arterial bleeding. His heart sank when he saw Paul’s state: sprawled on the table, there was a sheet of blood drying on his neck, chest, belly, hands and arms. His eyes were half open, staring sightlessly at the door to the scrub room, and he had one hand limply clasped to his throat, a scalpel handle poking out from between his fingers. The other hand was resting on his chest.
When the initial shock had worn off, Adam gathered himself for a closer look and swallowed hard against the acrid taste of bile.
“Ochre... They... they must have been opening him up,” he pointed to the smooth slice just under the right side of the ribcage before it turned into a rough slash across Paul’s lower abdomen, one so deep that the loops of his intestines were poking through. “He...” Blue had to swallow hard again “... He must have woken up, fought them, then they stabbed him in the neck and fled.” He indicated the blood drying on Paul’s hands. “He tried to hold the wound but...”
“Damn.” The curse was vehement and heartfelt and all that Ochre was allowing himself to express right now. “Who the hell did this?”
“I don’t know. Yet. But we’re going to find out.” Blue replied, steel in his voice, then turned back to their friend.
Picking up the nearer of Paul’s hands and ignoring the blood, Adam gave it a little reassuring squeeze, just in case Paul could sense him in that weird place between dead and alive. “We’ll get you outta here soon, okay?” he promised. “We’ll get you safe and back to Cloudbase as soon as we can.”
Then the fingers in his curled slightly and there was a flicker of movement as the half open eyes turned towards him. “A’m...” The voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper of a rasp, not even a shadow of his normal baritone.
“You’re... you’re still alive...” Sick with horror - and the retching in the background showed he wasn’t alone in that - Adam choked back the rising gorge, but he did not let Paul’s hand go.
0o0o0
Three weeks later...
Vasily paced the length of the foetid motel. He hadn’t dared to take off his shoes, he was sure he could feel the fleas climbing his jeans and burrowing through his socks in their search for fresh blood, and the idea of sleeping in the beds turned his stomach. “And if the beds are bad...” He looked in the direction of the bathroom, “... The shower and toilet are somehow worse.”
He shuddered at the idea of using the facilities and turned to the reason of their change in fortunes. “This is your fault, Peter!” he snapped, rubbing his hands together like he was scrubbing up for surgery. “I said we should run, that the clinic was clearly compromised, that we were lucky we were in position to ambush him and we should just go, but no... no, no, no, you had to make one last throw of the dice. ‘Steal his uniform, we can sell that’, you said, then ‘we can take his liver and maybe even a kidney, that’ll fund a new clinic, I can have them out inside ten minutes’, you said.” Vasily broke off to swear roundly in Russian and Polish, then threw in some Uzbek just for good measure. “Look at where your gamble has gotten us! From a mansion in California to a stinking roach motel in the back end of Ohio!”
“Well, you and your brother agreed!” Peter looked up at him. Compared to Vasily’s lean build and patrician face, Peter was square-faced, square-jawed and square-bodied, the very definition of ‘blocky’. “I saw an opportunity to recoup our losses and you both agreed!” He got up from the wooden chair and ignored the alarming creak and wobble as he shifted his weight. “I suggested and you and Markus agreed! How was I supposed to know he’d get up again? I hit him right on the occiput then again over the temporal, he shouldn’t have gotten up after that!”
Vasily sneered at him, then looked around irritably. “Where is Markus anyway? My blood sugar is getting low. It’s just pizza, he should have been back by now.”
“‘My blood sugar is getting low’,” Peter parroted back at him, putting in a nasal tone that turned it into an especially obnoxious whine. He dropped it for his next sentence. “He’ll be back when he’s back.”
Knock Knock
“Ah, perfect timing, there he is now.” Peter turned to get the door, knowing that Markus would have his hands full and with him sharing his twin’s aversion to dirt and germs, he’d be reluctant to touch the door handle in the first place. “Coming!”
He was almost at the door when it flew open and four men in coloured uniforms surged into the room, all shouting with guns in hand. Frozen in terror, Peter found himself thrown to the filthy industrial carpet with his arms pinned behind his back and a knee digging into his spine. A split second later Vasily joined him there, white faced and brown eyes wide. “How?!” he broke off into a coughing fit when he inhaled a tangled clump of hair, but even as he coughed it out and spat out a lump of phlegm for good measure, he just could not believe it. They had been so careful! And the only witness was dead! How on earth could Spectrum have found them?!
Cuffs went onto his wrists and were cinched almost tight enough to pinch, then someone barked out “Flip ‘em over,” in a harsh New York clip.
Hands grabbed his arms and Peter found himself on his back, pain lancing up his wrists as the steel cuffs bit into his skin. A grunt and yelp beside him was Vasily being turned over too.
“Scarlet, come do the ID,” a tall blond in blue said, calling out through the open door.
Peter could feel the blood draining from his face when the doorway was darkened by a blue-eyed, black-haired man in a red uniform. It wasn’t possible! He’d put the scalpel through the man’s neck himself! How had he survived?!
The man strode in and Peter tried to shrink in on himself as best as he could. Something about the man made him feel very, very small, like a mouse before a snake. The man crouched next to him and stared at him with unblinking eyes, then slowly turned his head and gave Vasily the same look over.
“It’s them.” His voice as bleak as an Artic storm, the man rose from his crouch and strode out of the room, followed by the blond man.
“Right, get the feds so we can hand ‘em over.” A man in a light brown uniform ordered, then looked at him and Vasily with a grim expression. “If they’re lucky the feds will get here before Scarlet decides they’re not that valuable and we don’t need them alive after all.”
“Before we decide that,” a third man in grey corrected him.
“Yeah, you’re right, before we decide they’re not that valuable and we don’t need them alive after all,” the man agreed, then looked to his comrades. “Get ‘em up.”