Medical Gothic (A Weasel Excerpt).

Through the windows of the van I could see the hospital on the hill, all lit up like an alien ship.
Shooting up out of the centre was a steep roofed red-brick beast ' mid-period Medical Gothic we called it - but spread out around it was the hospital I knew: rectangular grey boxes with square wire-mesh windows, all just one story high so there were no stairs to fall down. Or get pushed.
I was ushered in quick. Things had changed since my last stay; it was all halls of warm corpses and shuffling shells, put to bed under thin plaid blankets. All the howling and thumping stuttering swear words had been closed down.
My turn was coming. They told me - we were all lined up for the same; I only had to look around to see the progression. One moment they'd be twittering and jittery, telling tales and gesticulating, the next they were still and quiet, hollow-eyed shells.
I saw little of our keepers; the dead don't need watching. A face would occasionally appear at the reinforced glass, and it would smile out or study me for a moment as if I was a quirky but poorly drawn picture. But there was no-one to ask, no-one to appeal to, none to explain or comfort or to just be there. There was just us and we were fragmented.
This was a new policy, adopted in the face of large numbers of incoming.
Containment.
Just where the grey tiled floor met the plain grey wall crouched a figure, back against the wall and legs pulled up close. His head was thrown back and spit hung out of his gaping mouth. His wide-open blank staring eyes looked up and saw nothing.
I recognised his ears first, and stepped closer and I knew: it was Flea, smashed to bits. The cursing, biting, fighting and stealing, nasty little Flea, dead in his skin. All his traits that made him so spiky, the poisonous ways that marked him out and made us wary and clear of his spit, they made him Flea and they were all gone, with nothing in their place.
Just a Flea-shaped hole in the world.
And soon to be a hole shaped like me.
"Can you hear me Flea? He didn't speak but he closed his eyes, opened them again, too slow to call it a blink.
"Are you alright? It was a trite thing to say but it was all I could think of. He closed his eyes again and kept them shut this time, and nodded his head although his body rocked with it, locked into the movement.
"Hello, he said, no bite or sarcasm, nothing but an empty noise.
He turned his head with difficulty ' he had to move his chest and shoulders as well ' opened his eyes and looked into mine. I looked hard, I couldn't be sure if deep in there I could see a small screaming spark of Flea in the void. It was too much to bear, I put a hand on his shoulder ' "I'll see you soon ' and I stood back up and walked down the corridor.

All the rest, they were packing them off to god knows where, but they were packing more in as well, and I got a new one in the bed next to mine, Long-fingered Larry the Murderer, or so he boasted. Fair enough about the fingers, long reedy digits like milkshake straws with a wavy tentacle life of their own. But his story was, and I quote: "I strangle the useless by government order. Hee! I come out at night, work hard, I do, pushing my fingers into soft places, squeezing and pulling. Hee! Hee! I doubted he could murder a curry.
But he swore blind he got his orders from messages placed among the stars. Now that did sound like a bit of me. Perhaps I was broken. Perhaps I was where I should be, then.
Now Larry got to be a real pain in the arse with his screeching and poking and making himself busy; he threatened gruesome murders upon any and all comers, and promised he would wear his shrinks' blood with pride. But at least he was alive.

And after a time, a matter of weeks or days, the doors were left open; they had nothing to fear.
I wandered, with my blanket. It was hard to tell if I crossed the same ground, every corridor repeated itself, on and round and into themselves, an infinite cycle of lifeless concrete, plastic sterilised smell, sick light and tiles. Round and round in the long boxes.
But somewhere and by someone, my time was being marked and the condition of my containment would inevitably change, from the physical to the chemical. It would soon be time for me to shuffle off into my new half-life, become a Sunny-shaped hole in the world.