Punish the System - 4

“Babes, listen. Listen! I know I said I’d come straight home, and when I said it, I meant it, I did. From the deepest bit of my soul. But the lads’ve had a shocker of a week. Gav’s just crawled off the night shift smelling like diesel, Dean’s nan’s back in hospital with that thing they still haven’t named, and Keith, well, Keith’s divorce lawyer says he needs to build a ‘support network.’ Which is legalese for ‘either go to the pub or have a quiet breakdown in the car park of a B&Q.’ So really, technically, I’m performing a sort of… community outreach.”

A pause followed, one that stretched out a bit, like the silence just before someone pushed a big red button and all hell broke loose.

“No, I’m not choosing them over you, babes! Never. I’m choosing them… adjacent to you. Slightly behind. Like if there was a queue to the Main Event, right? They’re the bit where the lights come up and everyone shuffles out. You’re front-row orchestra. They’re upper balcony with a restricted view. Think of it like this, I am emotionally prioritising you from a location that just happens to sell Jägerbombs two-for-one and plays Fatboy Slim on loop.”

Another pause. This one was long enough that even the phone felt heavier in his hand.

“Yes, I remember what happened last time. But technically, that wasn’t my fault. Nobody told me it was her hen do. I thought it was just a lively book club. And she kissed me first, babe, I was just being polite. What was I supposed to do? Push her into the punch bowl? And anyway, if you think about it, it’s actually quite rude to slap someone mid-cheeseburger. I could’ve choked. Look, don’t ‘Ethan’ me, babes!”

A soft click echoed through the tiled silence. Not on the phone. In the room.

Behind him. 

Ethan paused in his monologue and slowly turned around. Rows of drawers, all neat, all sealed. Except…

“Hang on, babes,” he said, phone wedged between cheek and shoulder as he squinted. “I think one of the cold-storage drawers just…”

Then, with a groan like a reluctant confession, steel runners gave way and cold air hissed out in a long, white breath. Drawer Eighteen. The gunshot victim. He was sure, absolutely certain, he’d closed number eighteen.

Nobody had told the tray, though, which slid open entirely by itself. Not all the way. But certainly far enough to suggest someone inside might’ve wanted a peek.

Ethan crept forward, one foot squeaking faintly on the tiled floor. 

“Babes,” he whispered, voice cracking. “You still there? Something freaky is going down here!”

And from the drawer, the faintest sound, like a wet breath on glass.

“Babes, I’ll call you back,” he said, voice laced with panic.

The silence that followed felt loud, electric, and heavy. Then Drawer Eighteen rolled out the rest of the way on its own, like it had decided the reveal was long overdue. The body bag inside was standard-issue, grey and securely zipped up. Frost clung to its folds in stubborn clusters, but oddly, impossibly, condensation had misted in patches across its surface.

Ethan stared, his mind running through the gamut of possibilities.

It was a faulty rail, right? That had to be it. One of the runners had slipped. The new ones did that if you didn’t give them a proper, extra shove, yeah? That was what Dr. Ridge had told him during induction. 

You cannot trust the latches, he’d said. 

So it was probably nothing. Just a trick of pressure. Or temperature. Or whatever.

Ethan might’ve even believed it, too. He might’ve convinced himself that Drawer Eighteen forcing itself back into the light was a glitch. A stupid, explainable, mildly annoying mechanical fault.

That was, until the bag twitched.

And not a gentle slump or sag, either. This was a sudden tightening, like something inside had twisted around. The zip holding the bag closed trembled and then stretched outward, puffing as if dragged from within by breath.

A hot, wet, living breath.

And then the upper half of the bag sat up.

Ethan’s phone dropped from his hand, cracked against the floor, and skittered into the corner, all attempts to parlay for a hall pass strangely irrelevant.

*

“I mean, this is absolutely new to me, mate,” Joyful said. “I’ve known plenty of lads who were ‘dead men walking’ in this job, but I’ve never actually met anyone who qualified as ‘alive man zipped up.’ That’s some niche comedy, that is.”

Connor, pale and plugged into more machines than a synth band, was struggling to find his situation quite as amusing as his friend. 

“Glad I could broaden your cultural horizons, Joyful. At your age, I imagine novelty’s hard to come by. Bet my resurrection has been quite the vicarious thrill.”

The older man huffed out a laugh, but didn’t argue. His eyes lingered on the lines in Connor’s face, ones that hadn’t been there before and had nothing to do with what had happened. Near-death experiences left more behind than just wounds on the body. And was what had happened here even something as easy to define as ‘near-death?’

“You scared the bejeezus out of everyone down there,” Joyful said, settling his significant bulk back in the visitor chair. “That was a real giggle. The mortuary assistant, poor sod, quit on the spot. He didn’t even stop to collect his vape. Mind you, the chaos you’ve caused here is nothing compared to the circus that’s broken out back at base.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, absolutely. You see, the Dane had already signed off on your paperwork. Fast-tracked it, too. The smart money is that he was angling to get you a medal or a flag-draped plaque or some other tasteful nonsense. Following that up with a ‘sorry, my mistake. Turns out my agent was just lying down a bit stiller than most.’ ‘Fraid to tell you that your locker’s already been cleared out, your email’s been wiped, and, brace yourself, someone nicked your chair.”

“Please tell me it wasn’t Mikey.”

“Oh, it was absolutely Mikey.”

“Come on! He weighs like three hundred kilograms!”

“Yeah, well, now he owes you one slightly pancaked ergonomic miracle. Still, I’m not sure you need to worry about reclaiming your office furniture just yet. Maybe you should just focus on not dying again first.”

Connor let out a deep sigh and shook his head.

“Sure. I’ll stick that at the top of my not-to-do list. Right between ‘haunt the break room’ and ‘wake up in cold storage and wrestle my way out’.”

“Good. I’ve already got enough ghosts following me around.”

A machine in the corner kept up its determined electronic chatter, buzzing and beeping like a neurotic cricket as it monitored Connor’s vitals. Green traces slid across the screen tracking oxygen, pulse, and ECG. Despite everything, each one was stubbornly normal. Sure, his heart rate sat in the high fifties, which everyone insisted was “borderline bradycardic,” but considering he’d flatlined not twelve hours ago, it was practically a celebratory party.

One arm bore the ever-tightening squeeze of a blood pressure cuff, while the other played host to an arterial line. A small telemetry box was strapped near his hip, with its cords webbing across his chest in an arrangement that made him look like he’d lost a fight with an enthusiastic electrician. A ventilator stood silent at the bedside, plugged in and ready for use the moment Connor looked like he might return to his dead state.

Above Connor’s head, an IV pole carried four bags: lactate, an antibiotic drip, something milky-white that probably wasn’t for fun, and a dopamine infusion which was slowly ticking down. A central line ran from his clavicle into a catheter, taped neatly in place next to the first of his bullet holes, and the bandage above his right cheekbone was newly changed.

The nurses, who were struggling to pick a lane between military efficiency and covert mother-henning, had nicknamed him ‘Cute Lazarus.’ He’d overheard that, just after his third bed bath and before someone sneaked in a banana smoothie against protocol.

Nurse Frankie, short, fierce, and rocking a streak of neon pink in her otherwise strict bun, had nearly tackled the junior doctor when he suggested moving Connor to a regular ward. 

“He codes again, you better believe I’m not doing CPR in a corridor,” she’d said.

Nurse Babs, the night shift queen with a laugh like a foghorn and a collection of lurid novelty socks, had taken to humming ‘Staying Alive’ whenever she passed his bed. She claimed it was good luck.

Between them, they monitored him like he was glassware in an earthquake, half out of clinical caution, half out of something stranger. After all, it wasn’t every day the morgue returned something to the ward.

Consultants kept appearing for a looksee. ICU. Trauma. Neuro. Even one from Cardiology who claimed to be “just passing through” but somehow had Connor’s chart in hand. They each performed the same curious ritual. They’d step through the curtain, glance at him with something between religious awe and scientific dread, skim the ever-thickening wodge of notes clipped to the end of the bed, then mutter to each other in hushed, acronym-studded shorthand.

None of them stayed long, thankfully.

A few tried to ask questions. 

“Do you remember anything unusual?”

“Were you exposed to any experimental medications?”

“Did you perhaps have a… moment of spiritual clarity?”

Connor had replied, variously, “No,” “Not unless baked beans count,” and, “Only that the afterlife is very cold and smells like disinfectant.”

Most of the Consultants settled for mumbling a brief apology for having signed his death certificate, then backed out quickly as if afraid he might make them do paperwork again. One neurologist dropped his pen and left it there. Another asked for a selfie and was forcibly removed by Nurse Frankie.

By mid-morning of the second day after he’d risen from the dead, the curtain had been pulled back so many times it had developed a permanent skew, and Connor was beginning to feel like a living exhibit. Cute Lazarus, the Miracle in Bed Four. Watch him blink. Marvel as he drinks tepid squash. Recoil as he tells you, cheerfully, “I remember being zipped up. Your handwriting is terrible, by the way.”

No one found that last bit funny.

And through it all, through the hushed consultants and blinking machines and nurses scribbling hourly fluid balances, Izzy’s voice had remained an unshakable fixture. As if someone had sello-taped a glittery, over-caffeinated space radio to the inside of his skull and set it to "enthusiastic broadcast forever."

“Oooh! Are those central lines? My, what big catheters your civilization has! Is that… is that actual tubing? With fluid inside? How wonderfully vintage!”

Connor closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. 

“Please. Just one minute. One minute of quiet. Please.”

Joyful, misreading the tension, gave Connor a reassuring foot tap and stood up. 

“Righto. I’ll give you a sec, mate. Holler if you need anything.” 

He shuffled out, letting the curtain whisper shut behind him.

“That little woman in the blue uniform is measuring your urine output with a jug,” Izzy went on, utterly unfazed. “A jug, Mr Connor! Most civilisations track neurofluid with infralight resonance, but your people, oh, bless, they’re weighing wee like it’s alchemy! Do you think she’ll taste it? Just a dab on the tongue, a contemplative nod. ‘Hmm, notes of trauma and low potassium’?”

Connor pressed his knuckles against his temples and groaned. 

“Kill me. Kill me now.”

“But I did the opposite! And you’re very welcome! Honestly, I’m surprised no one’s written me a thank-you banner yet. Perhaps the nurses could embroider one between hourly checks of your delightfully inefficient drainage system. It’s all just so… quaint. Like a museum you’re somehow still using.”

Connor reached over, grabbed the hospital-issued plastic cup of squash, and threw it half-heartedly at the empty chair. 

He missed.

“Temper, temper! I suppose this is what gratitude looks like in organisms with spleens.”

After many long hours of being poked, scanned, scowled at, and made the subject of at least three whispered corridor arguments and one loudly dropped clipboard, Connor was extremely relieved to hear that, despite having been declared legally, medically, and administratively deceased, the best minds of Heartland Hospital now weren’t entirely sure there was anything wrong with him at all.

Sure, the initial prognosis in A&E had been dire: bullet to the face, second to the chest, both delivered with finality, followed by a notable lack of heartbeat, breathing, or other such helpful biological indicators. 

That had led, understandably, to him being zipped into a body bag with the brisk reverence typically reserved for leftover lasagne and wheeled off to cold storage.

But with the benefit of hindsight, and a surprising amount of peer-reviewed head-scratching, the consultants now agreed that his wounds had, in medical terms, “underperformed.” 

As if the bullets, presented with a perfectly good opportunity to ruin his entire day, had instead hesitated, fumbled the assignment, and clocked off early for lunch. The trauma surgeon had even gone so far as to call the damage “cosmetically unfortunate but structurally boring.”

Neurology had ruled out brain death, despite the head shot. Cardiology had found his heart not only functional but annoyingly robust. The ICU team had started referring to him as “the timewasting corpse.” And pathology had, very politely, asked for their certificate back.

So, after being examined with every scanning device short of an exorcist’s rosary, Connor was downgraded from corpse to minor miracle with manageable scarring.

The round that had gone in through his skull had exited cleanly behind his ear, somehow missing anything vital by margins of error so narrow they made the neurosurgeon blush. And the shot to his chest had likewise somehow contrived to miss Connor’s arteries, his lung, and his heart in an equally surprising turn of events.

In fact, for reasons no one seemed remotely comfortable discussing, not only had the injuries been utterly misdiagnosed as fatal, but as time went by, they appeared to be becoming, in record time, almost superficial. Like someone had pressed ‘mortal wound’ on the menu and then cancelled it out at the last second.

“I can actually heal them up completely if you would like, Mr Connor? We’re still well within the Initial Integration Phase, so I’ve got reasonably broad operational parameters. Tissue reconstitution is practically a warm-up stretch at this point. A bit of dermal smoothing, scar minimisation, maybe even a collagen lift around the jawline, just to balance your whole tragic-yet-dashing vibe.”

“No,” Connor said. “Absolutely not. Just… leave things as they are for now.”

He shifted in the bed, wincing as a lead tugged against his skin, and glanced through the ICU window. Outside, a cluster of doctors stood huddled around Joyful like gossiping meerkats in lab coats. Their heads kept swivelling toward his room, lips moving rapidly, eyes flicking to charts and screens and back again like they were trying to spot the twist in a bad mystery novel.

Closer to the door, were two black-clad armed guards. These weren’t regular hospital security, these were guys that would make metal detectors sweat. Connor didn’t need a formal briefing to know what they were. The Dane was clearly already leaning on the powers that be with a bit of quiet pressure. Favours owed. Influence cashed in on Connor’s behalf like chips at a table nobody admitted existed.

“Everyone’s baffled about all this enough as it is,” he said to Izzy. “Me suddenly having no bullet holes and a tauter jawline is going to raise questions I really don’t want to answer.”

“But wouldn’t that be the perfect cover?” Izzy chirped. “You could say the hospital got it wrong again. First they said you were dead, oops! Then you recovered, double oops! And then your face got prettier! Triple oops, but make it miraculous! From what I’ve read, humans love a good redemption arc. We could call it ‘The Resurrection Glow-Up.’”

“No.”

“But…”

“No enhancements, no lifts, no miracle moisturiser. I look like someone who came back from the dead. Let’s just let people focus on that part for now.”

Izzy sighed, a little too dramatically for a disembodied voice in his head. 

“My apologies, Mr Connor. I’m just anxious to get started and I’m frustrated for you that your integration journey has not, as of yet, been as glorious as I would have liked it to be.”

Connor slumped back against the pillow, closing his eyes for a bit of post-resurrection shut-eye and then paused.

“Hang on, what do you mean ‘anxious to get started’? According to you, you’ve saved my life and that was all you were going to be able to do. There being no online ‘Planetary Core’ and all that.”

“Ah, Mr Connor. Don’t worry about that for now. You get a little bit of sleep, and I’ll have a think about the best way forward to help you become amazing.”