Chapter Text
The first thing Price notices after stepping from the harsh heat of the unforgiving Texan weather into the cool sterile hospital, is the almost oppressive hush that the building seems to have. It doesn’t seem right to him, hospitals are supposed to be loud, bustling places with shouts, bells and whistles going off all hours of the day. Even for a relatively small one such as this so far out from most towns, it’s eerie to have such a quiet greet him.
It’s not just the almost silence that draws his notice, it’s how every single member of staff in the room suddenly snapped to attention the moment they saw his obviously military looking figure.
It sets him on edge.
He walks up to the reception desk and before he can even open his mouth, the woman at the desk says “You here for the John Doe?”. He falters, caught off guard by the direct and quite frankly brash way he was asked, but he isn’t a captain for nothing, he gains his composure quickly and confirms that it is what he’s here for.
The moment he says it the pause that took over the room the moment he walked in seems to snap, and suddenly people move in a hurry in all directions with a buzz of chatter that takes over the small reception area. He starts to think this hospital doesn’t get a lot of “interesting” patients, but to be fair, this isn’t a very common occurrence, even for bigger places than this.
Two days earlier Price received a call from an old friend of his in America, raving about some crazy story of a zombie hauling it’s way across the Mexico borders desert and dropping itself in front of a local ranger like a horror movie brought to life. Price had to practically corral the man into asking why the hell this was his problem before he was told that their “zombie” had a British accent (or what was discerned from his limited speech) and was most likely an escaped P.O.W from the local cartel.
Wonderful.
Of course he was the only person available to go meet the poor bastard and see if he could get any identification or even an idea about what happened to him. Why couldn’t he have finished his mission later. He's seen his fair share of survivors of capture and torture, one too many in fact. Most of them practically crazed animals by the time they’re able to escape captivity, malnutritioned walking husks of who they used to be.
It’s mentioned at some point during the phone call that this particular one, after a very long bout of questioning on Price’s end, was predicted to have been held for four whole months. Judging from what he knew about the local “businesses” surviving that was no small feat. Snapping out of his memory of his too long phone call, (he must have overdid it in the sun to zone out that much) follows two of the quickly moving nurses on duty who are obviously holding themselves back from asking him a million questions about their new guest.
Not that he has any answers.
Yet.
As they get closer to the door he’s almost dreading opening, the nurses seem to become more and more somber the closer they get. As if the cold feeling of dread Price feels in the bottom of his gut at having to go through with this is contagious, an airborne disease that seems to affect anyone they walk by. Morbid curiosity shines back at him in any of the eyes that he meets on the way there, hospital staff are always some of the craziest bunch.
He decides to look mostly at his own feet the rest of the way there.
Finally they reach the dreaded door, number twenty out of the twenty rooms that take up this small, cooler like box in the middle of a desert. Before he can even think about reaching for the door a doctor comes rushing towards him with a clipboard in hand, a grateful distraction for the task ahead.
What he doesn’t expect is to be handed said clipboard and told extremely sternly, that if he did not follow the guidelines written on this paper that he would be promptly kicked out for patient harassment. He starts to think that maybe this patient had a bigger impact on these people than he initially assumed.
The “guidelines” are really a bunch of hastily scribbled notes about the things that seem to set this particular patient off, mostly about questioning what happened, who is he, what’s his name. Just pretty much all of the things he needs to ask to get this damn thing over with. Price sighs and runs a quick hand through his slowly drying sweat-drenched hair and wishes he could have a smoke right around now.
However, there is no delaying the inevitable and he sets his hand on the metal doorknob and pushes on interior. “Onwards I suppose.” He thinks before bracing himself for whatever’s to come.