October 19th, 1976
Rural Outskirts of Scranton, Pennsylvania
4:13 A.M.
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The fog was thick on the night, the kind that hugs the ground and swallows up the sound. A mist crawled low amongst the trees, along the perimeter of the woods, not far from the knocked chain-link fence of Hickory State Hospital, a mental hospital buried in the neglected borders of Northern Pennsylvania.
Thomas Bell slipped through the fence hole like a phantom. His boots were worn, and his feet were raw from the concrete, but he didn't mind. Not yet. The adrenlin is still in his system. That and something more. Something deeper. Something older.
He had been making plans for weeks, but to him, it wasn't planning. It's more of a matter of instinct. The kind that hums in a man's bones who has witnessed too much and remembers too little too well.
The initial portion had been the laundry room. It wasn't heavily monitored by the orderlies, and Bell knew more about the routines of the orderlies than they knew about their own. He scavanged item by item —olive-colored pants left in the charity bin, a canvas field jacket with some torn holes, size-too-large army boots from a deceased soldier's donation. He'd even discovered a patrol cap, tucked behind a water heater, edges frayed as if somebody worn it to the end of the world and back.
The final one was the shard of the mirror, broken from the rec room days earlier in an "incident." He'd stashed it behind a radiator, wrapped in gauze like an antique. He avoided looking at himself when he used it. He used it to remember what he'd become.
By the time he slipped outside into the woods, the east wings lights were still flashing from the fire alarm he had triggered as a diversion. A body in the hallway—an orderly who crept too close. Not dead. Not as far as he remembered. But Thomas couldn't be sure now. Not with the way the nights all blended together.
His breath came in slow, deliberate drags now as he ducked under a low branch. The air was damp. Chilly. But in a way that wracked his stomach. The forest around him brought him to places he fought to forget—places where trees were not trees, and men disappeared between them without a sound.
The voices started up as soon as he crossed the fence.
"...Left.. Eyes open."
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"Quiet... Quiet..."
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"Bell... stay low.."
They were no longer full commands anymore. Flashy. Echoey. Impressionative static trapped in his head.
He moved along to the beat of an repeat offender—low crawl, careful steps, pausing every few feet to listen. He had no idea if he was being followed. But that was irrelevant. What he required was to move far enough to possibly know where to start looking.
He found an abandoned barn a few miles from the road—a skeletal building leaning over in the fog, its tin roof creaking softly in the wind. The wood was rotten, the paint was stripped away. But it had all four walls and a place to hide.
Inside, there was rust and a midwell smell. He trudged through the broken crates and fallen hay bales to the back corner, where a window was partially covered by boards. From there, he could see the woods. The road beyond.
He sat down, folding up his legs slowly beneath him. Off the patrol cap came, and back on in a slow manner. A ritual. His hand trembled as he grapsed the mirror shard.
The face that looked back wasn't his entirely. It was changed. Or he may have changed. There were lines that hadn't been there before. The eyes were sunk deeper. Crazy. The edges of his lips curled trembling, attemtping to remember the procedure of how to feel.
He smeared mud across his face. First the cheekbones. Then the forehead. The bridge of his nose. War paint. Camouflage. A mask. Maybe all three.
"...Face. gone..."
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"..you're no one now..."
He blinked slowly, lowering the mirror.
Thomas Bell, a warrior, was lost. That part of his life had been snuffed out somewhere between Da Nang jungles and Hickory State's cold white hallways. What remained was a shape in a uniform. A shape walking around in a world that no longer accommodated him.
He wasn't following.
Not yet.
But the world had forgotten about him.