The Preying Doctor

look over his shoulder as he speaks. The lawn is perfectly manicured, there’s even a small pink plastic flamingo in one of the corners of the yard. It looks like the door should open to a house with two point five children inside and the smell of cookies.
And yet, he hears the sound of locks slipping open on the other side of the door. The process takes longer than appearances would have made it seem, giving the distinct impression that the inside of the house is far more fortified than it looks on the outside. When the blue painted door finally swings opens it reveals a large, tattoo-covered man with a buzz cut and yellow house slippers looking at him very seriously. Though Nathan can smell cookies. What a mixed message that sends him.
“You’re small.”
Compared to the large man standing in front of him he can’t deny that to be true. Behind him Nathan can see another two men watching what appears to be ice skating on the large television with an assortment of snacks piled high on the coffee table in front of them. They must have been the loud voices that he heard moments ago, and Nathan lifts a hand and waves. Each one of these men could bench press him easily; there is zero doubt in his mind about that. At least, should this turn ugly for some reason, Nathan will have the obvious advantage of speed on his side.
If this were a longer mission, Nathan would have taken the time to really gain their trust. To get to know them as people, and he would have already have been given a detailed profile about each one of them, their triggers and the best pressure points to play on to manipulate them to get exactly what he wanted out of them. In this instance, since the body count is so high and he is on such a short deadline, Nathan just needs to use them as a halfway house on this business venture. He doesn’t have to take the time to become one of them, he’s just relying on the background that the company has laid out for him and hoping they did their own minimal research into who they were inviting into their home and that they have decided amongst themselves that he might be trustworthy, at least insofar as this.
“And you’re blunt,” Nathan responds, lifting a cynical eyebrow, feeling like he’s being mentally sized up, but the large man steps aside and allows him passage anyway. Once the door closes behind him it’s a different thing entirely. The large man slaps a hand against the flat pane of his back in greeting before sliding a thickly muscled arm around Nathan’s shoulder and starts to guide him toward the living area.
“That I am! Good to have another here, we call this the clubhouse. I’m William and that there on the couch in the sweats is Denzel; the goofy looking one that’s Logan. We’re usually the only ones that live here, though sometimes we have a couple drifters passing through. Are you going to need somewhere to stay, Locke?”
Nathan, Franke Locke, shakes his head, slipping the rest of the way into his alternate persona. “No, I got a room down at the Lucky Stop in town for the night, though your place does smell infinitely better, I must say.”
The two on the couch exchange glances before dissolving into laughter and nodding. “Well, we don’t smell like roach shit, so yeah, I would imagine that we smell a good deal better.”
“Is that cookies that I smell?”
“Good nose, my small new friend, it’s actually chocolate pancakes. Got them chock full of protein powder and all of the good stuff that might make you grow into adult height if you’re hungry,” William teases him from the side.
“No thanks, I don’t really want to look like a swollen tick today,” Nathan teases right back and William laughs. Instantly, it’s hard for Nathan not to like these men. They are so much warmer than their profession would otherwise imply about somebody who looks like them. The two men seated on the couch snort and turn back to watching the competitive ice skating that’s happening on the television in front of them, speaking loudly about the way that the form of the girl on the screen should be corrected and what they would do if they were her. Nathan is almost tempted to make a joke about what they would look like in tights, but he doesn’t feel he knows them nearly enough to make such a comment.
For a moment, just a passing moment, he wonders if at any point in his life before the company he had friends. Was that why he was snatched up by the company? Assuming of course that it wasn’t by his own design, that this wasn’t something that he walked into readily, was it because he needed a purpose? Had he wanted to do something ordinary as a child? Did he have a friend group back home in Muncie, Indiana that missed him and wanted him to come home? Did he have somebody there who mourned his departure? Nathan knows there is little point in thinking like this because the past cannot be changed and nothing will stop the future from coming. He just knows, he can tell by looking at them, that if any of the men in this room went missing, they would move heaven and earth to try to find their missing party. It’s not often that Nathan witnesses closeness like this. It’s a comfort that just spreads around the three of them. Nathan almost wishes that he could stay, do things here the long way around today.
“So don’t take this personally or anything, my new friend,” William starts, pulling his hand from around Nathan’s shoulders and going back to packing up what looks like prepped breakfasts for the three men.