Free Tribe by R.D. Zimmerman

minutes later, she handed Zeb a good-size file, mumbling, “It's all in here.”
    Not sure how much he really wanted to know, Zeb hesitantly accepted the papers. Then it was his turn to disappear, and he went into his bedroom, where he stayed up most of the night. The following morning he and a friend skipped school and went in search of some dope, only the guy they bought the joints from wasn't some down-and-out dealer but an undercover cop. When the police made it clear that Zeb and his pal were going to be made an example of, Zeb declared them all fucking idiots. His mother. His teachers. The cops. And just as soon as he was released to his mother—his “fake” mother, he called her—he ran away in search of his real parents.
    He pushed the wide dust mop up one side of the long corridor, then down the other. Up one side, down the other. Now that he was a father himself, now that he had fled The Congregation just like his own mother had, he saw how complicated it really was, this parenting stuff. He understood, too, just how far a parent would go, what you'd do for your own kid.
    After the first two or three passes the floor was perfectly clean, yet still he continued, hoping no one would notice. When he reached the far end he paused and stood there, his broad, lean figure clothed in the blue janitorial uniform, his short dark hair covered by a hair cap. He glanced to his left, saw a nurse coming toward him, which in turn spurred him down the hall one more time. Within a few steps he passed a nurses' station, which was surprisingly empty—short of staff, were they?—and then a door that was marked with the initials M.S. What lay in the room beyond was the primary reason he'd taken the job at Edina Hospital here in one of Minneapolis's suburbs. Now if only he could get in.
    As he passed yet again down the corridor he wondered when he'd be missed, when one of his bosses would wonder where he was. At best he had another fifteen minutes. Earlier he'd tried with no luck to locate a key. He knew they'd be closely guarded, but he hoped he might get his hands on one. After all, they'd given him a couple of passkeys already, and certainly that room needed to be cleaned at some point. But by whom? Perhaps he'd have to work here for a month or two before they trusted him. On the other hand, he didn't have that much time. The drugs he'd already stolen had been purely by chance, a few things he'd noticed on a passing cart and then swiped, but the drugs behind that locked door, well, they were the good ones, as expensive as hell.
    “Nice and quiet in here tonight, isn't it?” said a pleasant voice.
    Zeb looked up, saw a nurse with short red hair and a round face moving quickly toward him, and replied, “Yeah, it's kind of dead.”
    “Say now, you can't use a four-letter word like that in a hospital.” She laughed, her teeth flashing brightly. “You must be new here. I haven't seen you before.”
    “I just started this week.”
    “Welcome aboard. My name's Brenda.”
    “I'm Zeb.”
    “Well, Zeb, there's gotta be a couple of miles of corridor in this joint, so I'm sure they're keeping you busy.”
    “Yeah.”
    Trying to look just that, he kept moving on, but stopped suddenly when he saw her taking out her keys. Shit, he thought. This was his chance. She was unlocking that room. How the hell was he going to do this?
    Suddenly the words were spilling too eagerly out of his mouth, as he said, “Hey, I'm supposed to clean in there. “In…in that room.”
    She stopped at the door, eyed him. “Do you have a key? All the meds are in here, you know. No one gets in here without authorization and a key.”
    Zeb lifted out the two keys he'd been given. “I thought one of these was supposed to work.”
    “No offense,” said Brenda, “but I doubt it. If you're new I don't think they'd just give you a key for this room.”
    “Oh, well…well, maybe I got the rooms mixed up.”
    “Yeah, probably,” she said, unlocking the door