night shift
EVIDENCE: EXHIBIT 338
TYPE: VIDEO
LENGTH: 6M 52S
FRAME RATE: 16 FPS
SIZE: 54.7 GB
DATE: UNKNOWN. INJURY REPORTS AND VICTIM TESTIMONY PLACE TIME STAMP IN LATE JUNE.
LOCATION: NEAR MT. WASHINGTON, NORTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE.
NOTES: SHOWS VICTIM A & VICTIM C. LAST KNOWN FOOTAGE OF VICTIM C.
A crackling sound. A few clicks, and video flickers on.
For a few seconds, a blur of white and blue. The camera focuses once, and there’s a shake of motion. The video sharpens, and the mix of color morphs into a white lab coat and a man in loose blue scrubs. The man is fiddling with the camera, pointing up to his face. “Peter, I think it’s working! Peter!”
Behind him, there’s a dark-haired figure laying sideways on the center table, laying under some paper-white medical sheet and crinkling it over himself. His back is to the camera—it looks as though he is sleeping, his chest moving slowly beneath the blanket.
The man in front of the camera clears his throat. “How much time is there left? Crap, crap—okay, um. My name is Leonard Skivorski, I am forty-four years old, and I’ve been missing for approximately…thirty-eight days. I’m not sure where we are, but if someone finds this… I don’t know where we are exactly, but there was some forest, but I’m not sure… They knocked me out. Peter doesn’t remember much from the car ride either…” The man blinks then at the floor, and then shakes his head. “Peter! Come on, hon, we don’t have a whole lot of time.”
A low murmur from the boy on the table.
“Peter.”
Finally the boy sits up on the table, shifting painstakingly slow, the fabric beneath him rustling. There’s a handprint of a bruise on his wrist, dark brown and old, and a row of bandages disappear up his other arm, all the way into his sleeve. One of his eyes is swollen shut, purpled and yellowed, and there’s a sharp line at his cheek closed up by strips of white medical tape. The boy is sitting up now, and he has the medical sheet pulled around his shoulders. He’s dressed in black jumpsuit with the buttons undone to the waist, the open collar revealing a patchwork of fresh scarring on his chest. His head is bowed low—his eyes on his lap.
The scars are recent. A pink-brownish color, lined up in a scatter of different-sized slashes.
The man says the boy’s name a third time, and this time the boy looks up. His brown eyes find the camera, narrow slightly, and look back down. His cheek tightens on one side, and he says nothing.
The man says something that sparks a response, the boy muttering quietly enough that the camera does not catch the sound.
There’s a short conversation between the two of them, and then there’s some rustling as the man picks up the camera—walking across the floor, shaking the video with every step—and then tilts the camera up. The lens takes a moment to focus, and when it does, it sharpens on the boy’s face. There’s some dark bruising on one side of his face, shadows under his eyes. His hair trails down his face, shielding some of his gaunt cheek. Some of it sticks to his neck in oily clumps.
The boy rakes at his hair a couple times with his fingers, combing it away from his face and back with his fingers, then smooths his hand down the back of his hair, giving a slightly embarrassed look to the camera. Trying to fix the front of his black jumpsuit, the boy struggles with the buttons for a couple moments before giving up and pulling the sheet around his shoulders to better cover his chest.
“My name is Peter Parker,” the boy says. “I’ve been missing for…” His voice crackles, dry from overuse. “A while.” He swallows, and then for a moment he lifts his head and gazes past the camera. “I’m seventeen years old. I’m a junior—was a junior, um. At Midtown High. There was a car crash, I don’t…” He frowns. “Um.”
The boy stares down a beat too long at his hand. There, his pinky finger is well-bandaged and shorter than the rest, the finger itself half its size.
“Peter,” the doctor prods on.
The boy closes his hand, hiding the injury from the camera, and his expression shifts into a scowl. “Whatever. I’ll be dead soon at the rate we’re going—”
“Peter,” says the doctor, incurably soft.
The boy shoots a very teenage glare at him. “—so this is probably the last you’ll see of me. So. Hey, May. You’re probably dead, so. Whatever. Hey, Uncle Ben—see you soon.” Then something crosses his face—anger—and his hand shoves the camera off of the table.
A shattering sound, and a low staticky hiss plays now in the background, like air coming out a balloon. The color of the video has changed now—the room now tinted gray, a black line striping down one side of the screen.
Some movement. and the camera is picked up again, this time tipped slightly downward so that the lens focuses on the boy’s legs. One pant leg is rolled up to the thigh, the other hanging near his ankle. That left knee is an ugly mess of blood and bone, white gauze wrapped around it, a blue ice pack pressed against it, taped to it. What is visible of his leg is lined in scars just like the left side of his face.
“Peter,” protests the man’s voice behind the camera.
“Nobody’s gonna see it,” snaps the boy. “This is stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. If there’s a chance—“
“There’s not,” he snaps again. “Turn it off.”
“Peter, if we’re gonna make it out of here, we have to try—“
“I’ve tried,” the boy says, and he’s glaring up at the man with one dark eye—the other still swollen shut. “There’s only one way I’m getting out of this place, doc.”
“Don’t say that,” the man says.
“Why not?” the boy scoffs, grit in his tone. “It’s true. I’m gonna die in here.”
“You’re not gonna—”
“Yes, I am ,” the boy spits. “You know I am. One day he’s gonna swing that hammer too hard and Mr. Lang will be scrubbing my brain off of that stupid chair.”
“Don’t say that,” he says again. “Peter—“
“I know it,” he continues, in a vicious tone, “Cassie knows it. Her dad knows it, Charlie says it all the time—I’m dead meat.”
“Just because Charlie says it,” says the man, and the boy cringes at the name the man mentions, “doesn’t make it true. If we plan this out right, we could—”
“No.”
“Peter, just listen to me—”
“Forget it.”
“Peter—“
“Stop!” the boy says, and now he is staring up at the man one-eyed, his face lopsided from the bruising. “I’m not doing it!”
The man falls quiet.
The camera is still focused on the boy’s legs: one thin with disuse and mangled by injury, the other whole.
“They don’t do shit to you, man, you know what they’ll do to me?” He’s shaking now a little, drawing the medical sheet tightly around himself with his thin arms. “You don’t get it, doc, you don’t know what it’s like up there.”
This gives the man pauses—a beat of silence behind the camera. “Peter, if we don’t—“
“I don’t care! ” the boy shouts, and then he glances with an abject look of horror past the man and the camera to the opposite side of the room—to the door—and his voice drops to an upset whisper. “They—they put me—they, they made me—”
“Okay,” says the man gently. “I know, Peter, I'm sorry. I know…”
The boy is still trembling, his arms tight around himself. That bruise on his face looks darker—as the camera focuses on the boy’s face, the details come into light—a sharp curve, like the tip of a shoe cracked into his cheekbone.
The boy lowers his head—tips his chin down into his chest, and he closes his mouth tightly—his hand grips in the medical sheet, crumpling it in his fist.
In the silence, the camera’s audio picks up on the sounds of the room: the boy’s halted breaths; the hum of the water pipes; somewhere far, a man laughing loudly.
“Just turn it off,” the boy says again, and this time the doctor doesn’t say anything at all. “Please.”
The man moves the camera without a word, turning it around until the screen is filled with the man’s white coat. Behind him in the corner of the screen, the boy lays down again, the medical sheet drawn up to his shoulders, curled up on his side, his back to the camera.
The man picks up the camera and he is now blinking very quickly—his eyes look weary and pink. He looks up for a second, blinking faster, and takes a breath that only makes it halfway into his chest before he’s breathing it out in a huff of tears, squeezing his eyes shut—his bearded face barely moving, his mouth pressed so tightly his lips can’t be seen.
There are spots of old blood on the front of his white lab coat—some dark red, some brown, some yellow, like he attempted to wash it and failed.
The doctor opens his eyes and stares down at the camera with his bloodshot eyes, fiddling with it again, biting on his lip as he presses a couple buttons, his hands shifting around it. He holds it still for a second in his hands—as though considering keeping it on.
“We don’t have long,” the man says directly into the camera, and then he sucks in a breath. “He. He doesn’t have long.”
Far away, men talking and laughing—the muffled sound of footsteps growing closer.
The man takes another breath—a deep one, and this time it doesn’t tremble. He looks again at the boy—his body shrouded in paper-white sheeting, his hair sticking to the back of his neck, his knee bandaged bloody.
Then his hands shift around to each side of the camera.
A couple clicking sounds, then a crackling sound, and the video starts to blur. The man looks up to where the boy lays—his eyes crinkle a little at the edges, his face softening, a tight swallow. His mouth opens a crack, like he’s about to say something else.
The video shuts off.