[DAMIAN]
The voice came through clearly once I found the right frequency.
Middle-aged. Measured in the way of someone who had been talking into equipment for a long time without response and had started to wonder if the equipment was simply talking to the air. Then I keyed the transmitter, and the measured quality cracked slightly at the edges.
"Who is this? Where are you transmitting from?"
"CPIB headquarters. Carpark level two. Who are you."
A pause. Processing. Then, ..... "How many of you."
"Two. And a dog."
"Armed."
Not a question. "Yes," I said.
"What did you do?" The careful quality was gone now, something harder underneath it. The specific anger of someone whose careful system has been disrupted by people who didn't know the system existed. "The collision. The trains. There are forty infected at your fence right now because of what you did. I had this sector mapped. I knew where every single one of them was and now—"
"We were being chased," I said. "We had no choice."
The anger ran itself out the way it does when the fuel underneath is actually fear. I heard it happen, ... the exhale, the recalibration, the tiredness that was always under everything after five months of this.
"Where did you come from?" he said.
"SGH. Moving since this morning."
Silence with a different quality from the ones before it. "You came from SGH to Redhill in one day."
"MRT tunnel. Then elevated track."
"You saw the flare."
"Yes."
"That wasn't for you." A pause that had something underneath it. "It was for someone else. But you might be useful. Before I decide that I want some answers." A beat. "How many are you, actually?"
I looked at Theo-3. "One person. One robot. One dog."
The longest silence yet.
"A robot," he said.
"Yes."
"Humanoid. Medical caretaker. White chassis. Roughly your height." Not a question. A statement of fact delivered with the confidence of someone who already knew the answer.
Something shifted in my chest. "How do you know that?"
"Because I have been watching you through binoculars since you were running past Bukit Merah Secondary School." A pause. "I saw you climb the CPIB fence. I saw you go up the carpark ramp. I suspected the patrol car on level two still had an active police band receiver. " Another pause. "I have been here five months. I know every building in this sector."
I looked out over the carpark barrier. Somewhere 1.2 kilometres west, a man with binoculars had been watching us run for our lives and had worked out the walkie-talkie before we did.
"What guns," he said.
"Service pistol. Police officer."
"Did you kill him."
"No."
A beat. "Have you killed anyone. Before this. During this."
"Two infected," I said.
"I mean people." Level. Patient. "Before all this. During all this."
The carpark was quiet around us. Echo was watching me from beside the wall, ears forward, chin slightly tilted in the way she did when she was paying complete attention to something she couldn't fully read yet.
"I was a soldier for seven years," I said. "You do the math."
Silence.
He didn't ask again.
"Alright," he said eventually. The word carrying the weight of someone who had exhausted his better options and was working with what remained. "I'm desperate. That's the honest answer. I need help and you're what showed up."
"What kind of help."
"The nursing home. Precious Homes. Bukit Merah, Lengkok Bahru." A pause. "It's right beside your building. Literally next door. You can see it from where you are."
I moved to the outer barrier and looked.
He was right. The nursing home sat directly adjacent to the CPIB building, separated by a narrow gap and a shared fence line. Three floors. Low structure. A small garden area at the front has gone entirely to weeds, the decorative plants five months past their last maintenance.
Close enough that I could see individual windows from here.
"I see it," I said.
"There's someone inside. A friend. He makes medication runs to the supply room on the ground floor, having been doing it every few days since the beginning. He knows the building. He knows how to stay safe in there." A pause that had something underneath it. "I fire the red flare when there's a herd in the area ... a signal for him not to come out. I've been watching his usual position through the binoculars but I can't see him and he's not answering and your collision happened and the herd surged near routes to come here and now—"
"You could have used the walkie talkie to warn him," I said. "Instead of the flare."
A pause.
"Yes," he said quietly. "You're right. I could have." Longer pause. "He wasn't responding to the walkie talkie. Might have lost it. Battery might have died." He stopped. Started again. "I don't know. I've been trying to raise him for two hours, and I can't, and then your collision happened, and I fired the flare to signal him not to move, and that's when I saw you through the binoculars running toward the CPIB."
I looked at the nursing home. At the windows I could see from here.
"If you get him out, I have food," the man said. "Stored properly. Five months of learning what keeps and what doesn't. I can share all of it." A breath. "I'm not trying to trick you. I know exactly how that sounds to someone who doesn't know me. But I'm not. I just need him out of there. Please."
That last word.
Not demanded. Not performed. Just said. The specific sound of someone who had been alone with a problem for too long and had run out of everything except the asking.
I clicked off the transmitter.
Held the walkie-talkie in both hands.
Looked at Theo- 3.
He was already looking at me. Those amber eyes reading everything and filing it and waiting for whatever I was going to say without putting any pressure on what that thing should be.
"The nursing home is right there," I said.
"Yes sir."
"Literally next door."
"Fourteen metres at the closest point", Theo-3 said. "Approximately."
I looked at my left leg. At the carpark floor. At Echo, who had moved to sit directly in front of me and was looking up with her ears forward and that particular expression of complete attention she had that I had no adequate word for.
"I can't go right now," I said.
The words cost something. I noted the cost and set it aside.
"No sir," Theo-3 said quietly. "Not right now."
I sat back down against the wall. Echo filled the space beside me before I had fully settled, her weight against my left side, her chin on my knee, her eyes going half closed.
Outside through the car park barrier, the nursing home sat fourteen metres away in the grey afternoon light. Three floors. Someone inside is not answering their walkie-talkie. A man 1.2 kilometres west, watching through binoculars and not being able to do anything about it.
I knew that feeling from a direction I couldn't fully see yet.
I closed my eyes.
Rested.
[THEO-3]
Personal Log. Day 154. 17:18 hours.
Damian is asleep.
The nursing home is fourteen metres away, and someone inside it is not answering their walkie-talkie, and Damian cannot go tonight because his body has reached the end of what it can reasonably be asked to do in one day, and I will not pretend otherwise even if he would prefer I did.
The man on the radio is unknown. My assessment is that he is what he sounds like. Frightened people performing calmly sound different from frightened people who have simply learnt to function inside fear. He was the second kind. Five months of careful survival. He knows this sector. He mapped the infected before today's disruption changed everything.
He is an asset if he is what he sounds like.
I keep returning to the patrol car. To the door that was slightly open. To what Damian's face did when he stood at that window. Something old moved in him in that carpark. Something from before the coma and before the accident and before the war made him into whoever he was when he came home from it.
He hid it efficiently.
I noticed.
I said nothing.
I am still deciding if saying nothing was correct. I believe it was. Some things need to move at their own pace, and the correct role in those moments is to be present without being in the way.
Echo is pressed against his left side. Her breathing has evened out too. She is asleep.
Outside, the infected are still at the fence. Inside the nursing home someone is not answering.
Fourteen metres is not far.
Tomorrow it will still be fourteen metres.
End log.
End of Chapter 13