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Fuck, I needed some caffeine. I guessed that my headache wasn't a missing a cigarette headache, or a headache caused by that damn cycler implant that just kept me awake longer to deal with bullshit.
I shuffled my bones over to the coffee machine. The blockade meant that we couldn't get the good shit, so we were down to the off-brand stuff. I guessed I would have to manage with it. It was a paperwork day that day, so I didn't mess around with any chatting to Ianna or Marcus. Sophia never stopped to chat, she was always doing actual work. Made the rest of us look bad, but it was my clinic so it hardly mattered. She could show us all up for the entire month of Octum for all I cared.
My office door practically screamed as I pushed it open. I should probably have gotten that fixed before it alerted the entire Confederacy that we were still kicking and waiting for them to come kick us. My office chair was new enough, but it squeaked a little as I sank into it and put the coffee mug – the black handle with UNT on it that day, since NO was too polite– on the table. I'd bought the office chair from some girl on level 5, and it had only a little bit of wear on the elbows.
Sophia had done quite a few of them, but she refused to touch Cletus’s file, being four pages of about sixty STDs. Prude. He was only patient zero for six of them.
My cigarettes were practically begging to be smoked, so I reached for the packet in my pocket and lit up. That sweet hit of nicotine never got old.
Of course it was interrupted by a knocking on the thin door.
“Come in,” I called. The door screeched open and there was Sophia, silk waistcoat and all. I motioned for her to sit down, and she did. Stiffly.
“Spill it, Lurco. I've not had a coffee yet.”
“I apologise. I can return later –”
“Nah. You're here now.”
“Of course. Well. There's the matter of Cletus and his escapades.”
I chuckled and tapped some ash into the tray. Hoo boy. Wonder what he did. This was going to be good.
“And? He's some level 9 gutter trash. Of course he's gonna be rough around the edges.”
Sophia wrinkled her nose. “I'm aware. I was actually more concerned by the fact he's currently on daytime television.”
Okay. That was out of left field. “The fuck? You sure this isn't pre-recorded?'“
“Certain. Kara Jeremiah episodes are always live.”
We both left my office, me with both my coffee and my cigarettes, and got to Ward 7, where all of my staff were gathered around a TV watching Cletus debate his fidelity to a partner.
“I'm tellin’ you, Kara, I didn't go sleepin’ with Stacey,” he said. In the corner of the TV set, there was the word ‘LIVE’. The question on everyone's mind was: how the fuck did he get out? We were under a blockade and the only exit was a service tunnel where civilians couldn't get to. But there he was.
“What Eldritch being is he?” Sophia wondered aloud. I hummed and took a drag of my cigarette, then took it out of my mouth and sipped my coffee at last. The right temperature, thankfully.
“Dunno, Soph.”
Cletus was being dragged out of the studio after a fierce argument on TV, and Marcus was laughing at him. The audience was booing at the results of the STD test: eighty seven. Fuck, my estimates were twenty too low. I didn't even know that many had existed.
“What I want to know is this: how does he function with eighty seven STDs?” Sophia wondered, as she looked at the cigarette in my mouth but said nothing. She'd given up on trying to get me not to smoke on the ward weeks ago.
“Probably the same way he managed to teleport out of the Hub,” I shrugged. “Pack it up, people.”
The crowd filtered out, and then we actually got on with our damn jobs.