Arcane Exfil-Chapter 49: David MacPherson
Elina started with the basic demographics.
It was a standard request that demanded a standard answer – a mechanical tone should’ve been expected, but Mack’s take on it felt lifeless. “David MacPherson.” The name came out clear enough, but there was nothing behind it; even ChatGPT had more personality.
Elina didn’t let it faze her. After wrapping up all the basics, she moved on to a recap of the day’s events.
Mack, naturally, stuck to his robotic detachment. Whatever they’d told Warren and the others back at the OTAC debrief, he regurgitated here. That alone was worrying enough for Cole, but it didn’t stop there.
“Is there anything presently weighing upon you that ought to be spoken of – before we proceed?”
There was no avoiding it. Mack stared at the wall for maybe a good three seconds before responding. “Besides adding another name to the list?” he spat. “Sorry. I, uh… yeah.”
Elina maintained a patient smile and nodded for Mack to proceed.
Mack sighed, “What do you want me to say? I killed a kid. I can convince myself I was forced to, but it doesn’t change what happened. I… I don’t know. It’s unforgivable.”
“What of this ‘list,’ then?” Elina kept her voice gentle but didn’t let that detail slip by.
The evaluator-turned-evaluated held his jaw like he was chewing on broken glass. The wall behind Elina apparently held fascinating secrets, based on how hard he stared at it.
“A list of previous incidents,” Mack admitted. “We can address those if relevant.”
“Might the past be echoing here, in how you’ve received the events of today?”
“No shit.” The phrase cracked out like a whip before Mack reeled it back. He rubbed his temple, that same spot he’d been worrying at all evening. “Sorry. Yes. There’s… significant historical context.”
Elina made it obvious that this was a challenge – not in her facial expressions, which she managed well, but in her hesitation. She wrote details, but lingered on them, face buried in her notebook while she undoubtedly wracked her brain figuring out where to go from here.
“That may warrant deeper inquiry, yes. I wish to know: to what end do they affect you? Let us turn first to the present – the PCL-5 questions.”
Mack’s shoulders dropped a fraction, some of the combativeness leaking out. “All right. Run your assessment.”
Elina recited the question. “On a scale of zero to four, how much have you been bothered by repeated, disturbing memories of today's events?”
“Three.” The answer came immediately.
Elina continued, “Feeling very upset when something reminds you of the experience?”
“Four.”
They worked through the checklist. Threes and fours dominated where the others had scored zeros and ones. Avoidance symptoms, negative mood alterations, hyperarousal – Mack ed them all like he was reading from someone else’s file.
Ethan shifted slightly when Mack mentioned intrusive thoughts. He leaned forward like he was about to make a comment, but refrained; this was still Elina’s session until she concluded it.
“Physical symptoms?” Elina asked.
Mack diagnosed himself. “Tension headache. Nausea. Elevated pulse, mild tremor. Classic acute stress. You can copy that down. You know it’s nothing that won’t pass with time or sleep; nothing fatal.” He forced a smile. “If it really gets bad, you can always prescribe some swamp-ass potion to make me feel better.”
Elina made notes, but her clinical facade had already started to falter. Watching Mack document his own breakdown was wrong on every level, regardless of how well he tried to mask it with humor.
Cole couldn’t guess how either of them felt: Mack, knowing all the tricks of the trade; or Elina, knowing that she was evaluating the very man who taught her everything she knew about modern clinical psychology.
She cut right to it. “You know full well where this leads.”
“Gerrick.” Mack’s voice went even flatter, if that was possible. “Fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. Dock worker. Consumed demon-tainted food, underwent possession. I terminated the threat; saved my commanding officer. One shot.”
The clinical language was a shield, but the cracks were obvious. Mack’s right hand had developed a tremor, barely visible. His breath had gone shallow, too. He knew the symptoms, and probably tried getting them under control, but simply couldn’t – not with a blockage this built-up.
“And how do you regard what was done?”
“Necessary. Justified. The best – no, the only possible action.” The words came out with a bit too much emphasis, like he didn’t fully believe what he’d just claimed. Then, quieter, he added, “Getting good at it, apparently.”
Elina’s quill paused. “Getting good at what?”
Cole waited for the deflection. Mack was good at those – he’d redirect to theory, circle back like some career politician, maybe even cite some study. For him, it was
anything
but personal disclosure. Then his expression changed – a resigned lean forward that said ‘fuck it, might as well.’
“This wasn’t my first.”
Elina waited, showing more restraint than most evaluators Cole had seen. There was a time where she might’ve naively asked a dumb question, like “first kill?”, but she knew them well enough to rule that out. Definitively.
The watery glistening in her eyes suggested that she figured out exactly what Mack meant by that. It was about kids, specifically.
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“First was Al-Jadira,” Mack began. His tone took a turn for the worse, abandoning the lifeless robocaller vibe for pure misery – like an engine running on fumes, still functioning but burning through the last reserves. “You don’t know the place, but whatever. We had to take out this terrorist ringleader, kinda like a cultist boss. So we snuck into his home, started going door-to-door. Intel didn’t say shit about anyone else in the compound; but there he was, some little kid, probably about to start middle school. Fucking kid had an AK in his bedroom. Had it pointed at a bunch of toy soldiers. Then he pointed it at me.”
He paused, wincing. “Had a Captain America shirt on. The fucking irony.”
Elina tilted her head slightly – she didn’t understand the reference exactly, but the context was enough. She knew they were Americans, and the kid was wearing something that represented them. She put two and two together, forcing out a response, “It sounds as though the moment asked more of you than most could bear.”
“Yeah, that’s putting it fucking lightly. But I got commended for it instead. It was clean, technically. But I could’ve held my fire.”
Elina steered him away before things could get too ugly. “If this was the first, then the account begins with great weight. Still, you spoke of a list – I would not disrupt its course, if it lends you steadiness.”
Mack took a breath, trying to gather himself like a cliff diver psyching up for the plunge. “Second one was harder. Six years ago. Not killed. It was my baby boy. We just… we couldn’t save him. Killed indirectly, if you wanna put it that way.”
Elina seemed like she had something to say about the phrasing there, but Mack continued before she could even open her mouth to speak.
“It was supposed to be a quiet week with my wife, Seline. Just a little vacation. We went to La Bresse, you know, that stretch of France with the lake and the mountains. I figured we’d earned some peace. We found this cottage at the edge of town, cute little place. No crowds, no noise, but no hospital, either. Closest real facility was over an hour away. I knew that. But Seline had always wanted to visit her mother’s hometown, and I just thought… I thought that the hospital thing wouldn’t matter.”
“Her water broke in the middle of the night, no warning at all. She was twenty weeks pregnant at the time, so this was way too fucking early for that.” Mack rubbed his eyes, turning away from everyone. “
Previable PPROM
– that’s what the doctors called it. Premature rupture of membranes. Nothing you can fix out there with gauze and prayer.”
His voice wavered a bit. “I called the French emergency line right away. They patched me through to a regional dispatcher, and guess what? The nearest EMS unit was forty-five to fifty minutes out, and that was just to
get to us
, not even including the time it took to get to a damn hospital. Winding roads, night time, rural grid. They told me they were doing what they could, and I think they really did. But it wasn’t enough.”
He looked down at his hands, slowly curling and uncurling them. “So I called Ramstein, told them everything: OB emergency, twenty weeks, no ground access. They sent up a helo from the 86th, no questions asked. Medevac got to us in thirty minutes. The guys onboard tried stabilizing. We were maybe ten minutes from Landstuhl when our baby’s heart rate started to crash. We landed with a full OB team waiting. NICU. Everyone ready to go. They wheeled Seline straight in anyway, but he was already gone.”
Jesus. Cole had known about the miscarriage but not these details.
The tears were indiscriminate by this point. Even if all the acronyms flew over Elina’s head, the emotional context rendered the tragedy obvious.
Both Ethan and Miles looked ready to jump in. Ethan’s hand moved toward his chest, reaching for the cross Cole knew he wore under his shirt. He leaned forward again, this time offering a handkerchief.
Mack accepted it with trembling fingers, and said nothing more.
“The third?” Elina prompted.
Mack took a few slow breaths to compose himself, wiping his face with the cloth. “Third was right before we got pulled here. That last day in Al-Jadira.” Mack’s hand drifted to his side, an unconscious gesture toward old wounds. “We’d just finished a mission, and were en route to our extraction point. We pushed through this protest on foot – massive, blocking all the roads. And we were stuck in the middle of it. JNI rolled up in technicals, started firing into the crowd with those mounted Dushkas."
His voice went mechanical again. “Saw this kid in the middle of it – maybe seven, eight years old. Everyone panicked, trampling each other, and he’s just standing there, frozen. Grabbed him, pulled him against me, tried to shield him when they opened up. 12.7 mil went through me and into him anyway. Held pressure while he bled out. Couldn’t do anything else. We left him, gathered for a last stand against the JNI, then I passed out and woke up in the castle.”
Cole saw the moment it clicked for Elina – the wound she’d healed, the blood loss that nearly killed him, the coma she’d basically induced to save his life. All of it suddenly had context. She’d saved the man who’d failed to save the child, brought him back when he’d probably been ready to let go.
Mack left them barely any time to process the information. “Then there’s today. Four dead kids across two worlds. That’s a pattern. That’s…” He stopped and took a breath. “I’m the common fucking denominator, man.”
Cole recognized what was happening. Mack, in his guilt, was building a case against himself, prosecutor and defendant in the same trial. Each death served as another piece of evidence in an argument that had only one conclusion.
“No outcome could have been clean – not then, not with what little was known,” Elina tried, falling back on techniques Mack himself had taught her. “You acted within the bounds these moments afforded you.”
“Don’t – please don’t do that. God, I’ve said that so many times to others. Dozens of times. It doesn’t work when it’s me.”
Elina lost her patient smile for the first time in this entire session. How could she possibly respond to that? Mack hadn’t taught her how to deal with someone like himself, and Elina was probably short-circuiting, trying to figure out how not to make things worse when all her training just went out the window.
Cole decided to step in: not as an evaluator, but as a friend. “Mack, you’re connecting dots that don’t connect.”
“Really, now?” Mack’s laugh had no humor in it. “Fucking seriously? Every time I’m supposed to protect kids, they die. Every time, they fucking die. Either by my hand or my failure. What’s the threshold? Five? Ten? How many more before we all realize the truth: that I’m the fucking problem?”
Ethan leaned forward again. He must’ve been wrestling with words heavy enough to matter. But weight required consideration, and so Ethan hesitated. That beat of delay – so human, so necessary – cost him the opening.
Mack stood up before the words could form. “Don’t.” It was just one word, but it was enough to stop a sermon cold. “Just… don’t. I know what you’re going to say. Grace, forgiveness, how God uses broken vessels. Save it for someone who hasn’t used up their allotment.”
He turned to Elina and managed something that might have been a smile if it actually reached to his eyes. “Evaluation’s done. You’re gonna recommend intensive monitoring, so I’ll do y’all a favor and leave my door open.” He unholstered his weapon and offered it to Cole. “Here, I’ll even leave this with you.”
Cole took Mack’s revolver.
The man left at that, already heading for his room upstairs.
Miles started to rise from his seat. “Should we–”
“No.” Cole shook his head. “Let him go.”
“But he’s –”
“He’s processing. Pushing right now will make it worse.” Cole had seen this before. When operators hit their breaking point, crowding them only accelerated the spiral. Space was survival. “He needs time to sort through it without us trying to fix him. Just like he said – nothing time and sleep can’t fix.”
“How much time?” Elina asked quietly. She looked shaken, probably running through everything she’d said, wondering if and where she’d fucked up – if and where she’d made it worse.
Mack would go to his room, probably sit at his desk with his journal. Write until his hand cramped or the thoughts stopped screaming, whichever came first. Maybe he’d sleep. Maybe he’d stare at the ceiling cataloguing every failure. Either way, there was nothing they could do for him now – not yet.
Cole settled back. “As much as it takes.”
Chapter 49: David MacPherson
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