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The room smelt crusty and full of dust, something that you’d expect of a hospice ward. A half-eaten, half-expired pudding cup and abandoned plastic bottle of juice sat untouched on a tray just out of reach. A couple nurses came by to check in, keep things as painless as possible.
At his own request, a radio played a mix of songs to keep him at peace. As long as it wasn’t loud enough to bother the other patients, the doctors didn’t mind too much that the man bobbed his head to the beat of The Jackson Five and early David Bowie. It was his time and his place now, and it would only be that way for as long as the life in him kept around.
It was an inevitable thing; he knew he’d be seeing death’s face soon. Part of him wondered if it’d look anything like when he still worked at Mann Co and felt the startling embrace of bullets gunning him down. Would it be like the searing end of the flamethrower he’d gotten to know so many times or would it be quick like that backstab he managed to dodge from time to time.
All that pain was very distant and different from the pain he felt now at the end of his life. This pain wasn’t sudden or shocking to him like his days at Mann Co. This was old age and the failure of internal organs, being eaten alive by cancer and sickness. It was slow and unexciting and in more than enough ways, it pissed him off.
Back then he was the Scout, known for his incredible speed and cocky attitude, he could defy gravity and jump higher than anyone ever could. Now his bones creaked and ached and his skin felt loose on his body. He smelled a bit like something that would have been growing in the back of their German medic’s infirmary fridges. It was a side effect of the age and disease he guessed.
He missed the mercenary work every day he was alive. After the Gravel Wars had ended and the events with Team Fortress Classic and Grey Mann resolved, Scout found his life incredibly boring.
At first it was novelty. He finally could sit down, find a gal, and have a steady family. He wanted it so badly whenever he’d run into Miss Pauling on base. He was somehow infatuated with the idea of it and maybe in reality he was a bit too quick to bite the bullet and stop working in the industry.
Where his fellow teammates had refused to completely settle and stay in one place, Scout had hurried home and shoved what money he could at his mother for her sake and went out with the first girl in Boston who would lend him the benefit of the doubt.
Six months later he was married and carrying off a bride already a month pregnant into a hastily bought home. Within another six months, he’d be back in debt and working at a high school as a baseball coach and dead eyed gym teacher hoping he’d get it big.
Things didn’t much improve from there. Sometimes he’d get calls from the mercenaries but the most he’d see of them would be the occasional visit from the Engineer and a call saying that Soldier needed to be bailed out again for his eccentric activities.
Sometimes Scout wondered if he was too quick to say goodbye to them. Admittedly he kind of hated them when he first met them. But they were his family for a good couple of years and many of them had affected how he’d grown up. What kind of man he became was so heavily influenced by the mercenaries who helped him toughen up, so he probably should have paid them more credit right?
But here he was, dying about ten years earlier than he should’ve with disease in his lungs and liver. Smoking and drinking were what the doctors had said. Both habits he would rather say were caused by a hate for menial work rather than a nostalgic obsession with his elder teammates.
Lying in that hospital bed and staring up at the yellowed ceiling and the stained but clean tile floors every day was killing him even more than the self-induced parasitic cells inside of him. The smell of the room should have reminded him of the latex texture of the Doc’s gloves and the unhygienic presence of birds cooing and fluttering about in the light fixtures. The old Scout felt offended that he wasn’t reminded of that German doc’s operating theater. Instead, all he could do was spot the differences.
Hospice…such a foreign concept to him. Medic had never believed in such a thing, always being ready to operate and experiment until the ailment was gone or the patient died in his arms. More than once, Scout remembered being afraid of going to the doctor for a broken bone or sprained leg. After he got to know the man, things were better and he was less inclined to beg Demo to put him through respawn.
Everything always had a fix when he was working for RED. If the good Doctor couldn’t fix it and Engie’s dispensers couldn’t throw enough healing juices into it to remedy the issue, respawn was always there. Respawn was their safety net.
The old Scout could romanticize the respawn system all day. The respawn system allowed him to fight to the death for the adrenaline rush every day. He got to feel like he was living every day to his end, it made him feel like he was doing something with his life. There was some sort of gratification with dying for RED, even if he wasn’t really dying.
He liked to think that if he did die there, in some freak accident where Medic nor the respawn could save him, he would’ve accepted death in the end. He would have been around his team, in the place he belonged.
Thinking about dying there hurt more than anything. Some part of him, the younger Scout in his twenties, was thrashing about in this old frail body and screaming for freedom. He could feel his very being shake with the concept, wishing and wishing he was able to go back in time. He wished he could take his younger self and beat his face in. He wanted to tell his younger self he should’ve never left. He should have stayed a mercenary, maybe worked with Sniper somewhere.
Now they were gone, long since dead and lying in their graves probably. He doubted many of them even had graves to visit. He couldn’t get any resolution to the nightmare he’d been living for the rest of his life. It was just decades of staring into the faces of high school children that reminded him of who he once was. Decades of being in debt and being unable to work in the field he was so good at.
He knew he wasn’t really the “Scout” anymore but in his mind, he kept wishing someone would call him that. It was more than fifty years ago…why was it all he could think about? What ever happened to the dream of becoming a professional baseball player or even something as dumb as an actor in the movies. The closest he ever got was a spot on a heartburn medication commercial where he looked like just another flabby high school baseball coach promoting it because he’d eaten too many stadium hot dogs.
Part of him wished he’d suffered dementia or Alzheimer’s so he’d be able to forget the misery of the past half a century. But that wasn’t the case and it all came back to this moment in time where he was lying on his back in a hospital bed he knew he shouldn’t be making his family pay for.
Distantly he could hear the familiar voice of his daughter as she walked toward his bed from down the hall. His wife, Joyce, wasn’t with her. He’d made Joyce go home a day before, almost tired of her tears even though he knew it was ignorant of him. He was dying, a cruel part of him wanted to die. He couldn’t escape this fate he was set on. He wasn’t operable and he wouldn’t deem himself worth it anyway.
His daughter Lisa had a better idea of his attitude than Joyce did. She was a lot more intelligent than he ever was and she was perceptive as ever. Lisa knew deep down he had other dreams; she’d always known that since she was a child. He favored his daughter a lot in the family.
He and Joyce had two other children as well, Robert and Christina. Robert had been a lot like him and in his youth ran off with some big dream in mind. He’d come back sometimes for holidays with a new girl at his elbow and was always involved in questionable activities. Rob visited once after he found out about the cancer, then he went back to whatever he was doing. Joyce worried it was drugs.
Christina shared a lot of qualities with her grandmother on Scout’s side, and not necessarily the best ones. He never judged his mother for how she lived her life but he knew Christina could’ve taken better care of herself. She had six kids by the time she was thirty-five and all of them needed parental attention she wasn’t really able to give them.
He wished he could have been a better father to his children. He pretended he could be proud of Lisa, but Lisa was a freak miracle. He had no hand in raising her to be as functional as she was. His wife Joyce was more likely the source of Lisa’s good qualities. As for Robert and Christina, he took full responsibility and he regretted everything. Another reason he would rather just keel over and die now when none of them were there to look at him like he was still their disappointing father.
Why couldn’t they just bury him now? Suffocate him under the weight of the earth and lay these old bones to rest.
He by no means wanted to accept death, he felt like life owed him a better hand but he knew it wouldn’t come this late. There was no reprieve for him now other than the end of his life.
Lisa stood at the end of his bed sooner than he thought, the nurses hadn’t stopped her from coming. She looked a lot like him, minus the curly hair she’d inherited from her mother. She had the same prominent teeth he did and the attitude towards the world that he had, especially in his youth. She didn’t have tears in her eyes when she looked at him, not like Joyce did.
“You ready pa?” She asked as she stood still at the end of his bed.
He squinted at her behind his inch-thick glasses. He didn’t need to ask her what she meant. He could barely speak from his aching teeth and gums. Instead, he craned his neck upward and looked at her over the rims of his glasses and nodded.
Lisa pulled a small smile and walked to the side of his bed. He inhaled through the oxygen tubes feeding into his lungs and let out a brief cough. She sat down at his bedside and took hold of his hand gently. “Docs say you’ll be gone soon. Mom’s afraid to be around you but I know better,” she said quietly with the softest smile that said she knew everything in the humble way that a mother might.
Pleased with herself, she reached back into her pocket, fishing around for something.
He watched as his youngest daughter pulled out a very familiar pair of aged dog-tags. His heart fluttered a little at the sight. “Lisa…,” he muttered in the gravelly voice he’d been reduced to.
His daughter nodded her head, leaning over and helping place the dog tags around his neck. “You talk about these crazy things in your sleep. It took me a long while, but I dug up what I could find of your old things from before you met mom. I hope you find what you’ve been missing, pa,” she wished upon him.
Disbelief was strong but the gesture still tickled his heart. He knew he was long past the years, and this was just a small token as he passed on into the next world. Tears built up in the corner of his eyes nonetheless and his aged hand reached up toward the dog tags as they rested over his ill and barely beating heart.
This was all that was left. He’d never see them again. He didn’t much believe in God anymore, not after witnessing the mysteries of science in his youth. He especially didn’t believe in a god after the fifty boring years he’d lived through after. But a small part of him prayed that maybe he was wrong.
Staring up at the lights of the ceiling, blackness started to fade in as distantly he heard the beeping from the machines around him. The nurses’ footsteps echoed as they jogged towards his end of the hall but it was hospice. This was the end.
There was no bringing him back now. He was free from the nightmare of his own life. He no longer held his breath in wait for the release from his own bodily prison.
-o-↭-o-
Light passed through him like a twisted blackhole and he felt his stomach do flips. The old musty scent of wet wood and sawdust filled his nose so deeply it stung and his eyes ripped open to the cracked linoleum tiles of a small enclosed room. Disoriented from the sudden energy thrown into him, he quickly lost his balance and fell to his knees just milliseconds before he was vomiting. Nothing in his empty stomach other than bile and bodily fluids, the feeling bit into his throat. He gagged, hands grasping tightly at the ground and his entire being shaking.
It felt like hours before he could find some sort of stability and balance. He was aching, screaming, and horrified. He gripped the floor tiles so tightly his fingernails bled and it took him all too long to figure out where he was.
Respawn.
It was Respawn at Sawmill. For some reason it was Respawn at Sawmill and that was where he was sent into heaven, hell, or maybe even purgatory. This felt like purgatory.
“Oh god why-,” he practically sobbed as he brought his hands to his face. A small part of him recognized the texture of athletic tape wrapped around his fingers and he had to look at them to realize what was happening. There was no perpetual arthritis in them, just the same hands that held scatterguns and baseball bats as he beat the same 9 men’s faces in.
“Why?” He cried, feeling shock starting to creep into him. “What is this?” He practically begged for the answer as he looked down at himself. The same red t-shirt with the rolled-up sleeves was plastered to his skin from the cold sweat he had gathered in the few moments he had been there.
He was no longer seventy-something years old and dying in a hospice ward. He was twenty-something years old and having a mental breakdown in a respawn room. He was alone, in an aged respawn room looking at the floor he’d already defaced with his own puke.
He could not figure out if he was dead or alive still. Was this a real respawn phenomenon, or was it just some fever dream he was suffering from in the final moments of his life? Was this an actual sign of the afterlife or the start of his own personalized hell?
“FUCK!” He shrieked, banging his fist down on the cracked tiles. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!” He yelled as though he was ranting to some invisible force that was there with him, holding him there with no explanation.
A clank rung out against the entrance of the room and he snapped his gaze upwards, eyes like those of a deer in headlights. Laser focus pointed him towards the source of the sound in the room.
“Shut up, kid. You’re in here making a racket like ya haven’t been through respawn before,” the familiar southern drawl of Engineer spoke out through the room. The Engineer looked like he hadn’t aged a day at all. He was wearing the same overalls as usual and had banged a wrench against the doorframe.
Eyes widening more than possible, Scout stared at the Engineer as if he were a ghost. In all reality, he was. There was no way that anyone could have been in this hell with him so the fact that Engie was even there meant things were different than he initially thought. Then there was the fact that Engie hadn’t seemed to age at all.
So, was this time travel of some sort? Was he just going to keep reliving his life over and over?
A quick glance around the room revealed to him that Sawmill was absolutely decrepit. The years had definitely passed and the place was lucky not to have caved in from the termite and water damage over the decades.
“You’re not dead,” Engie said, looking at him seriously. There was a slight hint of pity in his eyes as he looked down at the revived body of his old friend. “This is real, Scout,” he added with sincerity.
At the same time, Scout couldn’t help but let the tears he’d been trying to hold back go. “What do you mean? There’s no way,” his voice cracked as he begged for answers. “There’s no way! You’re supposed to be dead! I’m supposed to be dead!”
Engie stepped forward into the room, lowering the wrench he was holding and looping it into his workman’s overalls as he approached his old friend. As Engie got closer, Scout could feel a nostalgic tug washing over him. He had feared that he forgot what they looked like in the fifty years but Engie looked like an angel to him in his moment of need. The face of someone who in his youth had normally meant less to him than he would later realize, Engineer was a splash of clarity.
“Scout, we’re all supposed to be dead. But we’re alive. We just are, you gotta come to terms with it as quickly as you can,” he tried explaining quietly as he bent down and reached a gloved hand out to the runner.
The light glinted off of Engie’s goggles and Scout squinted against the brightness as he reached out. Part of him was truly afraid to actually make contact with the elder man. Would touching him mean he’d disappear and Scout would really be in purgatory? Was this all false hope?
His palm was hovering just a few inches above the ground and his fingertips were still bleeding from clawing at the broken linoleum flooring. Scout internally battled with his refusal to offer up his hand. All the while, Engie watched him carefully as though he was unsure if Scout would break out into another fit. If the man hadn’t been wearing his trademark goggles, Scout was sure they’d be making eye contact.
All the years Scout had been alone were reflected in his eyes and Engie could see what time had done to the poor boy. He understood exactly why the kid had stopped moving towards the Engineer, unwilling to submit. He was so guarded and afraid. This was much worse of a reaction than any of them would have predicted. Scout had always been the quickest to recover from anything but it looked like his adult years had scarred him.
Reaching slowly for Scout’s hand, Engie just barely made contact before the kid flinched so strongly that it was like he’d been struck by lightning. He pulled away like a wounded cat, drawing in on himself as if the mere feeling of Engineer’s hand touching his set his skin on fire. Scout’s face was full of a stream of emotions as he tried to process the magnitude of what this all meant.
Engineer was real. Respawn was real. Scout was alive and this really was Sawmill. Scout really was put back into a younger version of himself, reconstructed to be the twenty-something year old body he had when he signed up to join RED. Against all science, Scout had defied the laws of nature and completely avoided death.
He had no idea what to do. He had spent the past couple years of his life battling cancer and grappling with dying. He had been certain and prepared that he would have had to face whatever was on the other side of death. He spent so many days and nights terrified and here he was alive again in a molding respawn room breathing in the same air he had decades before.
“Why is this happening? Why are we alive?” Scout cried, tears running down his face. There were so many emotions coursing through him that he barely noticed them flowing from his tear ducts.
Engineer shrugged a little but smiled, albeit a weak smile. It didn’t bring Scout the comfort he would have wanted, but Engineer did it nevertheless.
“The doc said we probably would keep respawning until all the machines stopped working,” he replied softly.
Scout froze for a second as a new realization shattered through his bones, looking up with desperation again.
“The doc? Medic is alive?” His voice was quiet and his tears paused for just a moment as Scout felt a confusing amount of happiness against all the odds of his turmoil.
Escaping death was no easy thing to process, especially when you spent the better part of a decade waiting for the moment to come that would end your miserable existence you wholly regretted. But against all of those feelings, Scout had always hoped that the insane doctor had found a way to cheat death. If anyone could, it would’ve been Medic.
“We all are, Scout. You were the last person to respawn.”
.
..
…
Scout heard those words and it was like every atom in his being were being torn apart and put back together all at once. The tears began again, harder than ever before and sobs very suddenly shook him to the point that he felt like he was going to physically burst.
He was incoherent at that point, curling in over himself as everything hit him all at once, a tsunami of emotions collapsing into one painful wail. The sound was unsettling to say the least, and somewhere in the depths of Scout’s mind, he felt bad that the Engineer had to hear it.
He was the last mercenary to cross over the gap and return to Mann Co.
He could have been back sooner, but he held onto his miserable life for so long. Internally he damned his previous doctors for keeping him alive so long, but at the same time he damned the respawn system. He had gone through so much pain and all for nothing.
A wiser man would probably say he learned from the experience, but a wiser man wouldn’t have lived through it. No one else, other than the eight other mercenaries he had been teamed with, would ever understand the feelings that were coalescing into him in those very moments.
He was angry and he was devastated all at once and he had no idea how long he laid there for, shaking through his entire body until the energy in him seeped away into the cold hard tiles around him. His body didn’t feel like his anymore, not after years of being confined to an aging, decrepit prison. It was as though he had phantom limb syndrome but for the cancer that had been growing inside of him.
At some point Scout began to feel himself again, aware of the sounds he had been making and the way he had been shaking. The tears hurt his eyes at that point. He felt all dried out, but drowning at the same time.
The lighting of the room had clearly changed in the time he had been there, orange tones reflected into the room from the windows to the outside. The sun was setting. Surely the sky was painted with clouds and a stunning sunset of oranges and pinks, but Scout could only just begin to accept the reality of the world outside the room.
Engie was still there, quiet and patient. At some point he had sat down in a nearby chair that looked equally as run down as the rest of the room. Scout didn’t remember him taking the seat.
Scout was surprised that he was there with him still after so long. Hours must have passed but the man had stayed silent, letting Scout’s internal spiral continue out of control until he was simply too tired to keep with it. Maybe that was for the best, considering how things had gone and were still going, if Scout had the energy to continue it.
The Engineer appeared a little bored even, waiting for something specific while he was watching the Scout. The man must have found it after Scout had begun to eyeball him and his presence in the room once more because he shifted in his chair. The chair squeaked across the tile floor and creaked with the change in weight distribution. The sound of it was deafening in what had now been a fairly long bout of silence. Scout had stopped audibly crying or making sound long ago.
“You good now, son?” The Texan asked, voice a little gruff from disuse over the past few hours.
Scout snorted.
“No,” he replied with a similarly gruff voice. At least his sarcasm was still intact.
Engineer nodded his head but placed his hands on his knees to shift forward and stand up entirely. He cleared his throat, patting his knees once before he committed to standing.
“Well, come on then. You’ve made enough of a mess in here and you could use some food at least,” Engie said as though he had been waiting for ages. Something about the sentiment echoed deeper than just the period of time Scout had been steadily losing his grip on reality – or rather regaining it maybe. It felt as though the Engineer had been waiting much longer for the Scout than he was even aware of.
He tried not to get caught up in it as Engie reached out and took his hand, pulling him up from the floor. He almost tripped, but the tight grip of the gunslinger held him in a stand. Scout almost would have forgotten about the Texan’s prosthetic hand, but enough memories of having his teeth knocked out from Engie punching him clean in the face came to the forefront of his slowly unclouding mind.
“Thank you,” Scout instinctively replied as he leaned into Engie to catch himself.
The man gave a grunt of affirmation and another half-smile before he patted Scout on the shoulder and began leading him towards the exit of the respawn room. As they approached, Scout could better see the light of the sunset bleeding in through the windows.
As the skies became visible to him through dirtied windows, Scout felt the first true breath of life coming back into him since he’d travelled through the great beyond to wind up at Sawmill. This was the first time he had seen the sun with his own eyes in what was genuinely weeks. His hospice bed had been his home, unmoving, for what must have been at least a month prior to his “passing”. Unfortunately, the window nearest to his bed only faced another portion of the building, showing only discolored concrete.
It felt like the first sunset he had ever seen and he was mesmerized. Fiery oranges and airy yellows covered the setting horizon and reflected upon the blues and pinks and purples of the clouds. The clouds radiated from the setting sun like a halo, a painting of warmth and life that formed naturally right before his eyes. The night was encroaching, but that was okay.
It would all be okay.
Taking a deep breath, Scout followed his companion as they exited the rickety old building. It creaked and it moaned, some wooden planks of the stairs missing as they descended from respawn and walked towards the base. Weeds had overtaken most of the facility, he found.
Once they exited the building, tall grasses of different types brushed against their legs. It was a sea of greens and yellows, still reflecting the very end of the sunset’s orangish hues. It would have been almost too much had there not been a miniscule path. It was nothing more than a small break in the grass, something similar to that of a deer path. Internally, Scout wondered how often the Engineer returned to the respawn building.
Did he come back to check that it was still working? Did he come back to check for Scout?
Then it occurred to him.
“How did you know I had respawned?” He asked before the question could fully formulate in his mind.
Engineer barely made any sign of having heard him. He just kept walking, head facing squarely forward towards the winding path ahead of them.
Without turning, he replied. “Spy called me to say you passed.”
…
Spy.
Something about that answer was both shocking and yet not at all. The Frenchman always had a weird relationship with Scout, and he felt for years that something had been left unsaid between the two of them. It was always as though Spy had some other sort of secret, or some information that he was lording over Scout’s head. At least, that was how he saw it. It could have been nothing.
Scout never liked the guy much, especially not during their years of employment. They worked poorly together and damn near always fought with each other during their free time. That said, Scout did look up to him in a way. The man was suave and debonair and could always catch the interest of the ladies.
He remembered seeing him once after Mann Co. let them free of their contracts. On Scout’s wedding day, he was certain he saw the Frenchman standing outside the chapel. Scout had sent invites to all of the mercenaries except Spy. For some reason or another, he decided the man wasn’t worth it. But Spy showed up anyways, the only mercenary who did, and he didn’t even come inside. Scout and Spy never spoke a word that day.
Of course, it was Spy who called. Of course, it was.
Forcibly changing his focus, Scout continued his questions.
“You said I was the last?” He asked, knowing full well that was what the man had said. That wasn’t what he was asking about. He wanted to know about the others.
The Engineer was quiet for a moment, reaching his hand out into the tall grasses and running his fingers through it pensively. He paused in his steps, taking a deep breath of his own and looking back over his shoulder once.
Scout couldn’t place the look on his face when he turned. The man was always a weird one to get a read on and the goggles never helped.
Nodding his head finally, the Texan turned his gaze back forward. They were almost to the entrance of the base now.
“Pyro was the first,” he started to say as they closed the distance towards the door to the base. “They’ve respawned dozens of times now, but they were pretty shaken up at first.”
Scout couldn’t begin to understand what that meant. Pyro always seemed to be so positive and happy go lucky. He couldn’t imagine an alternative where they weren’t upbeat and burning things to a crisp. The concept of Pyro handling respawn poorly was so much of a foreign concept.
Engie didn’t let him keep wondering as he powered through his answers.
“Heavy and Medic had moved to Austria together. Medic got sick and died first in the middle of a harsh winter – absolutely tore up Heavy. But Medic eventually got to a phone and called him.”
Scout quirked an eyebrow momentarily at the mention of both Heavy and Medic together but all too quickly started to put himself in Heavy’s shoes. The two men had always been so close together at Mann Co., regardless of orientations and what not. Heavy always reacted intensely when Medic was harmed on the battlefield, and that was when they knew they would come back within 15 seconds or so. To picture the man losing Medic for “real”. It was unsettling, no matter what their relationship was.
“Soldier never left the bases, so it’s hard to say. Sniper came through after that, really helped put Pyro back together. I tried to help as best I could when I got here. They’re, better now,” Engie almost sighed in relief with the last sentence. Scout could tell it meant a lot to him.
“Demo?” He tried to distract, hoping the answers wouldn’t depress the Engineer further.
Engie cleared his throat. “Demo died of old age, showed up here and decided to treat his liver better the second time around. He quit drinking,” he said with half a chuckle.
Scout was impressed by that. “Spy?”
“Spy died of lung cancer a few years back,” Engineer paused for a second, giving Scout just enough time to think about it. “…He still smokes,” he added.
Scout snorted the second he heard it. Of course. Spy would never give up smoking, even if it killed him. That was the man’s trademark.
Engie seemed to enjoy the laugh from Scout as he idled up to the base door. He spared a glance up towards the moon in the now darkened sky. Dusk had fallen upon them and although the faintest glow of the sun was still radiating from the mid horizon; the skies were mostly darkened now.
They fell quiet again, sharing a moment to observe the stars as they very slowly began to appear above. Crickets and creatures of the night echoed from the grasses around them as they stood at the door. Engineer’s hand lingered on the doorknob as it seemed he was searching for the right words to say.
“…we’re small in this universe, Scout. This isn’t a miracle, or an accident. It’s just something that happened and for a while, it will continue to happen. Remember that,” Engie finally spoke.
The last vestiges of the sun mixed with the growing light of the moon, glinting off his goggles until Scout could see directly through the lenses into the man’s eyes.
Swallowing nothing, Scout tilted his head just enough to indicate a nod.
Engie didn’t say anything more than that, seemingly satisfied with just those words. He opened the door inwards into the base and flipped on the light in one fell swoop. Scout followed him inside, lingering for a moment in the open doorway. It had been decades, but he still knew his way around the base at Sawmill.
Ahead of him, Engie walked down the hallway to what was path to the common area. That was where the kitchen resided and based on what Engie had said before, it was where he was headed.
But to the left, along the wall, was the one thing that halted Scout from continuing onwards.
He wondered if it even worked. Based on the Texan’s answer before, telephone lines still ran to the base. He had received a call from the Spy somehow, but maybe it was through a handheld phone or other means. The Engineer could probably invent something more effective anyway.
Ignoring his doubts and following every intuition, Scout’s legs took him to the phone line until he stood directly before it. It was a little dusty from underuse. He had to guess that maybe this wasn’t the phone that the Engineer had been using for his personal calls. Then again, who does a person call when they’re “undead”.
Well, maybe that was an easy question to answer.
Fixing his gaze on the device to the point that his eyes almost went out of focus, Scout held his breath. There was only one answer to who a person called when they were supposed to be dead.
Family.
Scout had a family back in Boston that were no doubt all receiving phone calls right about then, if they hadn’t already, about his passing. To his family, he was a corpse in need of a farewell service and a casket. To his family, he was dead.
Was that okay? Was it okay that they thought he was dead, never to return?
First instinct told him no. Absolutely not. He wasn’t dead and they needed to know. There was no reason to mourn him, he was still clinging to this mortal coil. In fact, he was younger than ever and gripping stronger than he ever could from his hospital bed just hours before.
But then again, what would happen if he did tell them? Would he have to explain respawn? Would he have to explain all those tears of work at Mann Co. that he was sworn to secrecy over? How could he? No normal person could ever understand it.
Or maybe, maybe there was one person.
Scout’s hands found his dog tags, thinking of the last person to touch them before him.
Lisa.
Of all people, she would be the person Scout could trust with it all. But even still, would it hurt her? At the end of the day, Scout knew the rest of his family would probably benefit more from him being gone. His wife could barely stand seeing him in hospice and she could probably use the life insurance payout. His other children were barely a part of his life anymore and that probably was for the better. Scout was still convinced he was an incredibly bad influence and a less than desirable parent.
But Lisa? She deserved to know…right?
Scout picked up the phone and held it to his ear. A dial tone echoed back. The phone was still live.
As he raised his other hand to the number pad to dial, he could feel his fingers shaking.
The first few numbers floated across his mind.
6…1…7…
He closed his eyes, exhaling the breath he had been holding.
“We’re small in this universe,” he repeated very quietly to himself. “Remember that.”
Opening his eyes again, he knew what to do.