The Man on the Inside
                              By Jason Rodencal
 

     Officer Beggs sat alone in his little hospital room as he mindlessly flipped through channels on the portable one of the doctors had been kind enough to lend him.  Since the very moment he was brought to Hammot County, he’d been locked away in a biohazard isolation ward and treated as if he carried the plague by the hordes of doctors that swarmed about every hour on the hour.  None of his friends or family had come by to see him in the day he’d been there and the feelings of loneliness was beginning to deeply affect him.

     Sitting there, Beggs was really beginning to wonder if they were even allowed in his room or actually ever notified about his “condition.”  No one would give him a straight answer for any of his questions and his commander hadn’t come as he promised for follow up questioning on what had really happened at the Deffone factory.  Beggs threw aside the remote in disgust as he began to simmer in anger over what was happening to his life.  He pulled up his legs as close to his body as his oversized middle would allow and tried to clear his mind of everything that had happened to him.  Beggs wished he could have closed his eyes, but having no eyelids to speak of made that task a bit difficult.  The crunching noises his body made with every slight movement didn’t help him to forget either.  Beggs wanted to cry, but the amber colored plastic of his eyes would never again allow such a comfort.

     A commotion by the door caught Beggs’ attention as he slightly lifted his head to see what was going on.  The best he could make out was that several people were arguing with the guard at the airlock to his room.  A third voice suddenly entered the picture and the arguing abruptly ended.  Beggs wondered about what was going on outside, but didn’t feel like trying to struggle his way over to the door and find out.

     As he sat there, the door swung open and entered his wife and parents calling for him.

“Linda!  Mom, dad!” Beggs said in total surprise at their entry.

“Thomas!”  His mother said with her eyes wide open in shock, before fainting into the arms of her husband.

Beggs’ wife, Linda, could only manage a gasp as she put her hand over her mouth.

“Mom!” Beggs cried out when he saw her faint away.

He wanted to rush to her side, but his bulk took the efforts of several people to heft him onto his feet with any speed.  Beggs was still just learning even how to walk again with his new body and it was hard for him to even get up from a seated position.

“Tom… is that you?” Beggs’ wife asked as she slowly approached the bed.

“I’m afraid so…  I’ve missed you,” he replied with open arms.

Linda wasn’t sure about going near him and hesitated.

“Come on, I won’t bite…  Hell, I don’t even have teeth.”

Linda slowly came up to Beggs and gave him the hug he was searching for.  He wrapped his arms around her and gently squeezed with a loud “crunch.”  Linda let out a surprised “OH!” at the noise and let go of him with a worried look, like she had just hurt him.

“Don’t worry, that was only whatever’s inside of me.  Nothing to worry about.”

     By that time, a couple of doctors had finally come in to help Beggs’ mother to a chair and were trying to revive her.  Beggs reached over and grabbed onto the lab coat of the closest doctor and roughly pulled him next to the bed.

“Now that I have your attention and everybody’s here, I want some answers, doctor!”

The doctor straightened out his glasses with a startled look, as he wasn’t expecting to be manhandled (or would that be plushhandled?)

“Tell me something, anything…”

“I, um, we….  We really can’t figure anything out on you Officer Beggs.  You’re breaking every rule of conventional science.”

“Well, it wasn’t science that made me this way!  Don’t you have anything?”

“Only a few basic facts.  Um, your body is completely composed of a polyester-like material and the stuffing are pellets of some type of plastic no one’s ever seen before.  The only way you can move is because a core of those pellets seem to form a primitive solid skeletal structure that also acts as its own tissue and muscle system to let you bend and flex.  Other than that, you have no internal organs or any normal signs of life.  The only clue even remotely pointing to the fact that you’re alive is that we could detect brain patterns and signals that match to what a normal human mind would produce.  For crying out loud, we can’t even figure out how you are talking without vocal cords and thinking without a brain.”

Beggs was silent for a moment before asking, “What about Officer Teleto?”

The doctor was hesitant to answer and Beggs began to get extremely aggravated with the red tape he was constantly running into.

“Tell me, damnit!  I’m getting really tired of this ducking my questions!”

The doctor was taken aback by the force of Beggs’ voice and quickly looked through some papers.

“He’s…. to put it frankly, he’s what we would call a vegetable.  No response to stimuli, no movement of any kind.  There were detectable thought patters when he was brought in, but even those have been steadily fading every hour.  It will be only a matter of time before Officer Teleto can be officially called brain dead.  We’ve received the order to have him sent out with the rest of the Deffone toys found.  I’m sorry.”

“By who’s orders?!?”

“I’m not under liberty to say.”

Beggs wished the anger he was feeling right that moment could have been seen by the doctor as he left the room.  The tension grew to an unbearable level and Beggs wanted so badly to hurt something or someone.  Then suddenly, he was blindsided by a grip around his upper body.

     “What happened to my baby?!?” Beggs’ mother sobbed out as she gripped onto him.

“Um, the short version would be:  I ran into a crazy witch that like turning people into toys and she was going to make me a “special” project before her plans got the hook.”

“Can’t she turn you back??”

“Um, she’s dead… I hope.  And somehow, I don’t think there are many people that know black magic about. ”

His mother let out another wail before continuing to cry into his shoulder (which was beginning to soak up her tears and get soggy.)

     Sometime later, Beggs’ commander came into the room and had to chase everyone out as several more cops came in with recording equipment.  The commander apologized to the family as he explained that it was official business that needed complete privacy.

After the men had finished setting up, the commander sat down next to the bed, “Sorry I had to boot everyone out like that, Beggs, but what’s said in here the next couple of hours has to stay only in the department for now.”

“Couldn’t it have waited until I had some time with my family?”

“Sorry, but the mayor’s office want’s this case closed ASAP and buried even faster.  They’re already blaming the factory collapse on the storm.  Now,” the commander turned on a tape recorder, “Tell me *everything* from the top, starting with the initial call for backup.”

     It had been a year since the Deffone incident, and nothing had gone as smoothly as Beggs wish it could have.  Even after his lodging an official protest, Teleto was still taken away with the rest of the toys to be destroyed.  The department kept hiding behind the fact that Teleto was clinically declared dead and not having any family to inform the hospital of what to do with his body, the department was left in charge of what to do with him.  Linda filed for divorce not long after he was released from the hospital.  Beggs couldn’t blame her though, she needed a chance to have a normal life and have the child she always had wanted.  He couldn’t provider her with any of that and it hurt deep inside him.  The police department wasn’t sure of what to do with him and kept bouncing him from department to department.  It was by accident that he finally ended up as a permanent member on one of the teams that act as bodyguards to visiting dignitaries.  During a gun training exercise with new recruits, a rifle accidentally discharged in the range right into the crowd.  The bullet, by some stroke of fate, struck right smack into the chest of Beggs.  He didn’t feel a thing and because he technically isn’t alive, the bullet had no adverse affect on him except for a hole that need sewing up.

     Beggs had created quite a reputation for himself as a bodyguard especially after he had took a sniper’s bullet for a visiting ambassador from Europe and now several ask for him by name if they have business in the city.  Beggs was happy that he found a new meaning in life, but he was still deeply bothered by the ghosts of the past.  There would be some night that he would drive by the old site where the Deffone factory stood and think about Linda, Teleto, and all the other toys that were once housed there.