Chapter Text
“And I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire flashing up, so that a brightness was round about it; and out of the midst thereof as the colour of electrum, out of the midst of the fire.” -Ezekiel 1:4
Maxine’s phone goes off sometime between two and three in the morning, and she is instantly relieved to see it is not someone from work but Sam Yao.
More specifically, it is Sam Yao sending her a new picture of a crop circle, with the message “pretty impressive, right????” attached. Maxine chuckles, shakes her head, and stays awake long enough to write “So why are you convinced this one is real?” and chuckles again as her phone indicates Sam is typing something.
“did u listen to that podcast i told you about?”
“Which one?”
“jet fuel!!!!!!!!”
“Is this the WoW one or...?”
“the conspiracy one”
“Oh brother”
She’s trying to do the time zone math to figure out where Sam has found the time to send her excited crop circle texts. He must be between university classes, she guesses, and falls asleep thinking not for the first time that this must be what having a kid brother is like.
She wakes an hour later to her phone actually ringing, and this time it is work. It’s not even five in the morning, and she dreads breaking the hermetic seal of her Silver Springs apartment to go wherever she’s supposed to this time, because even this early summer in D.C. is unforgivingly humid.
She hits the answer button, and before she has a chance to say anything, her boss, Diana, starts in: “Missing person showed up near Union Station. We need you to take a look.”
“Missing person?” Maxine repeats as she pulls on her socks, “And you need me because.....?”
Diana sighs softly. Years of experience and successfully resolved cases have taught her Maxine works best on a long leash. She not the usual pick for ordinary cases, but this is not an ordinary case. “It’s more complicated than that,” she says, tone clipped. “We need you over here.” Maxine hears Diana talk to someone in the background. “Please, now.”
The metro is closed so she has to drive into the city. The front plaza of the station is sectioned off by the collection of government and emergency vehicles parked there. The police car is still silently flashing its lights, and the ambulance’s rear doors are spread open. She sees Diana talking with one of the EMTs as she tries to park her car in an unobtrusive way. By the time she’s done, Diana is halfway to her car.
“It’s...bizarre,” she says as she walks Maxine over to the ambulance, “This kid was supposed to be in town for the weekend, disappears for two days, and then he turns up here. No memory of anything.”
“So, you think, what? Drugs? Failed kidnapping?”
“Most kidnappers don’t start out by chopping off half their abductee’s limb.”
“What?”
“Look,” Diana says as she passes Maxine the EMT’s paperwork.
As she scans the chart Maxine realizes she has not had enough coffee to deal with any of this. Name: Woods, Eugene Benjamin. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. The EMT leads her into the back of the ambulance. Height: appx. 6’ 4”. Weight: appx. 170 lbs. He’s lying on a stretcher, covered in blankets, probably sedated, given the IV he’s hooked up to and the fact that he’s sound asleep. His home is listed as somewhere in Canada, and as Diana begins to turn to talk to other people, she shouts, “If Interpol or the Mounties or whoever else tries to turn up, send them away!”
Diana smiles wryly, closes the ambulance doors, and Maxine returns her attention to the sleeping Eugene Woods.
“Did he say anything?” she asks the EMT.
“Not really. Still delirious from shock, probably. Didn’t understand what was going on. Got his information from the cards he had from his wallet” he says, then checks the IV. “We’re lucky we got here before he lost too much blood.”
“What happened?”
“Someone.....amputated half his leg.”
“Someone amputated half his leg and left him to bleed out in public?”
“It looks that way from what we can tell.”
“May I?” she asks, and gestures at the bottom corner of the blanket.
He nods, and Maxine pulls back the blankets to reveal one foot, still wearing a sock and a sneaker, and one stump below the knee wrapped in bandages.
“Do a tox screen. Do a thorough tox screen.”
The EMT nods, and she resumes looking through the paperwork, though there’s not much more left to glean. The ride silently until they reach the hospital, where more staff comes to unload Eugene and wheel him in for intake procedures and preliminary examination. Maxine is considering calling Veronica, her lab assistant, to figure out what they should focus on testing for, but part of her is immediately against it. Prodigy international exchange medical student or not, she is only sixteen, and she needs to sleep.
She does check her phone to find a distraught message from Sam.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO JACK’S BOYFRIEND????????????????”
She knows Sam is really upset when he opts out of emojis and doubles down on punctuation.
“What?”
“there’s a rumour he was kidnapped!!! in washington!!!! that is by u right”
“Who is Jack?”
“u would know if you listened to my podcast recs”
“Pretend I didn’t. This one time.”
“he’s one of the hosts of jet fuel and the internet is saying his bf got kidnapped”
“Who is his boyfriend?”
“eugene woods”
Maxine wonders morbidly if this will be the longest day of her life.