“No more,” he said in a quavering voice, watching his chapped lips move in the mirror’s reflection.
“Gods of the universe, I can take no more of this. How many more pounds of flesh can I give before nothing is left but barren white bone? Accursed speculum, why do you show me such a terrible sight?”
What stared back at him from the mirror was his transformed image, skull-like and hollow-eyed, topped off by the silver-gray hair he knew was his own, matted with dirt and sweat.
The hair remained healthy, but the rest of him appeared to have aged more than thirty years. He appeared to be a man of sixty-plus years.
At least thirty years, three decades of time, had been foisted upon his personage, and he remembered none of it.
Doc smashed his forehead into the reflection while starting to incoherently wail at a fever pitch. A wordless jumble of sounds bubbled out, interrupted only when he had to stop and suck another breath of air into his chest. He banged his head again and again, feeling the mirrored glass crack under the assault and cut his forehead. Blood began to run down his bushy silver eyebrows and the left side of his long nose.
Doc looked at the man in the mirror and cackled insanely, until his stomach began to violently cramp, driving him to a crouch. Feeling as though he were about to become violently, messily sick, Doc dropped his trousers and sat on the filthy toilet seat, thankful even in his current state of near-insanity that he hadn’t soiled himself.
The metal door to the small bath chamber swung open partway, blocked from fully opening by Doc’s bony knees. Doc remained hunched over the porcelain toilet, his pants around his ankles and his bare, bony knees sticking pointedly up. His stomach was gurgling, still expunging itself of the vile water he’d drank from a ditch many hours before.
The bearded sec man threw in a dingy towel many washings removed from its original color of orange, and spit out a series of orders to the captured man.
“Use the tub behind the plastic curtain. Water works. Hope you like cold. When you’re clean enough, you moldy old fruit, the baron wants to talk to you.”
“Baron?” Doc whispered. Such a form of address was medieval to his ears and reeked of the past, not the future land to which Welles had so arrogantly claimed he was sending him. In a quick second, Doc’s mind lost the patina of confusion he had feared to be permanent and began clicking on all eight cylinders again.
Doc wondered whether he could have been shunted back in time instead of pushed forward. The prospect was grimly appealing, until he considered the appearance and manufacture of the bathroom in which he was now sitting. While it didn’t look any more modern than the small bath he’d been allowed to use during his stays in Dulce and Chicago, it was certainly in much poorer condition.
Leaning out from his seat, Doc pulled back the dank, slimy shower curtain and looked at the condition of the bathtub. The interior was nearly black. A vapid green millipede as long as his forearm crawled back and forth, all one thousand of the ghastly insect’s legs trying vainly to find purchase on the walls of the enamel to crawl out to safety.
Although repulsed by the sight, Doc felt a certain kinship with the many-legged insect. He, too, was trapped, and scrambling for a way out, but the walls surrounding him were as smooth as pure spun glass, and in his present condition, just as insurmountable.
CHOOSING TO WASH his face and upper body in the sink, Doc had removed the layer of road dust he’d picked up on the trail and was actually feeling halfway human again. A bar of soap would have added to the ease of bathing, but none had been offered and he didn’t dare ask. The same gray-bearded man had come to fetch him, making many unfunny comments about the way Doc had “smelled up the shitter” to the amusement of the other fellow who served as his backup.
Together, the three had left the bath and entered a long hallway. Once upon a time, Doc noticed, the far side of the hall had been made of nothing but inviting panes of glass, offering a view of the world outside. Now, the glass appeared to have been mostly broken out, and huge slabs of plywood and scavenged metal nailed in place to contain the walkway. One piece of metal used was cut in the shape of a colossal red circle, and a white star rested in the center. The letter ‘ T” was in the middle of the star. The color red and the star itself made Doc wonder for a brief moment if he’d ended up inside the borders of Asia, or one of the Soviet states, but no Russian was spoken and the design of the hall furnishings ended this line of thought, as well as seeing the sign’s mate farther along, and this time the word “Texaco” could be easily read.