by Maya Riley
Right. Left. Left. Right. Left. I tried to keep a mental tally of the turns we made so I could easily get back if I were to take care of the doctor out here.
“Stop. Go in through the door on your left.”
My hand wrapped around the brass knob and turned it, opening the door to reveal another room inside. This room had walls lined with both floor and overhead cabinets. Tables, not unlike the ones found in hospitals or a dentist office, were spread around the room. Tall trays on wheels piled with surgical tools stood beside each one. Papers were strewn everywhere in organized chaos.
Movement in a far corner caught my eye and I glanced over to see another glass cage. How many of these did this place have? I stepped forward to get a better look, and the body in the bed moved at my presence. It got to its feet, moved slowly as it dragged it’s decaying body forward. Strands of blonde hair floated to the floor with every step, and petite glasses rested on the small nose, an accessory no rotter would ever need.
“What do you want with me in here? Surely it doesn’t have anything to do with… that.” I pointed at the rotter within the glass, with its jaws now opening and closing up against the wall as though it didn’t realize there was a barrier there. Its front tooth cracked against the glass and fell to the floor, blood and pus dripping down after it. I scrunched up my face in disgust, but I couldn’t seem to look away. It was like a train wreck, only more grotesquely mesmerizing.
“Oh, my dear 662. It has everything to do with that.” Dr. Crane’s voice rolled over me and I turned to see him observing me with pride. It made my stomach churn as though it wanted to expel vomit again, but there was still nothing inside of it. I wanted to ask him for some water, but didn’t think I could trust anything he gave me.
“Are you going to throw me in there?” Fear began to race through my body at the thought. I knew this guy was off his rocker, but that would still be insane. A level of crazy I hoped he hadn’t reached yet.
“You can sit down for now.” He pulled out a chair from seemingly nowhere, and set it in front of the glass wall so I’d be sitting face-to-face with the rotter, with only a thin sheet of glass between us. I took a tentative step toward it before sitting down and facing the rotter.
“I’m sure you have a lot of questions about what this place is and what it is we’ve been doing here.”
Well yeah, I’ve been asking questions and getting nowhere. Give me some damn answers already. “Yes.”
“This building,” he gestured all around before leaving my line of sight, “and the building you were in before this, is one of many. The overall company is called the Black Moon Corporation. Ring any bells?”
I shook my head no and he carried on with his evil genius monologue. I could feel him pacing back and forth behind me.
“Tell me, 662. Do you believe in magic?”
The question caught me so off guard that I almost fell out of my chair. Out of everything else that had happened today, with stumbling into this place, all the cages, the dead caged humans and the rotters, and seeing my baby picture in a folder buried in a file drawer… a question about my beliefs in magic was certainly not on the list of things I expected to hear come out of his mouth.
“I mean… like… what kind? Witches and cauldrons? Magic of the moment between two people? Spells and necromancy? Greek mythology?”
He stopped his pacing somewhere behind me and to my left, letting out a small chuckle. “Necromancy is such an interesting topic, especially in this day and age. That’s a little advanced for right now, but maybe we can touch on it another day.”
I didn’t want to think about how long he planned to keep me here. From what I’d gathered so far, I didn’t think he planned to ever let me go.
“Magic. Not the kind with wands and cauldrons, but more like mastery of the elements. Commanding water, air, fire, earth, and the like.”
I froze. Lincoln had developed fire power. Was it linked to this Black Moon Corporation? Hopefully, this crazy man didn’t notice my sudden, rigid posture. I pushed the thoughts away and focused on this moment.
“We here at BMC believed that magic existed, hidden within the DNA of living things. In our early days, we started out with plants. Those tests didn’t last long and yielded no positive results, so we moved on to insects and small animals. As our thirst for knowledge and success grew, so did our subjects. It wasn’t until a scientist decided to run the tests on himself that we moved our research in that direction.
“We found something small, leading us to believe that magic was hidden within human DNA, waiting to be set free. As you saw in some of the files you snooped through, we’ve been experimenting on people. Trying to find the right combination to unlock the magic.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking: crazed scientist. That’s only partially true. He was on to something though. His tests didn’t accomplish what we were trying to, but the results were enough to make us search for others to experiment on. We started with the homeless, people nobody would notice if they went missing. We grabbed runaways, ones in healthier states than the decimated and disease-ridden homeless.
“We didn’t stop there though. Our quest for knowledge continued to grow. We discovered that the younger the test subjects, the better we could sway the results. That wasn’t where we stopped either, and I supposed you can guess what came next.”
“Me,” I supplied.
“Almost. Procuring young kids only got us so far, we needed to run the tests on more. We took in scientists from stem cell research. We began harvesting embryos, and then creating embryos. We created fetuses. Going that route, we were able to perfect our tests on life before it even began. We went back to the very beginning.
“Every time we started to get somewhere, we’d hit a dead end. Test subjects turned savage. Some died. Some turned into an empty shell. And then you came along. Creation Number 662. You showed promising results in everything, you were the most favorable, the light in the dark tunnel of research that we’d been in for decades. We were getting so close to unlocking the magic from your DNA. Once we were able to do that, we could harness its power. You were our key.” His face turned into a scowl at some memory.
“Then you were taken from us. An assistant that we’d trusted, who we had thought wanted the same things as the collective, bypassed every security checkpoint and disappeared into the night, with you in tow. It was devastating to the progress we’d made. We were hindered a great deal and had to start over, especially since he destroyed the cryo tanks and your vials of blood in the departure.”
He stood still in my peripheral, his anger from the memories running off of him in waves. Clearly he was upset by the setback this place received with my disappearance. I became suddenly grateful for the assistant who took me out of here. Despite the orphanage and Mama G’s house, I had a feeling that growing up in this place may have been worse. That was a realization I’d never expected to have.
“So,” I started, trying to piece things together, “what happened with the outbreak?”
His scowl deepened. “You’re looking at it. This rotter in front of you is what started this whole mess. You see, this is Dr. Hannity. She had the highest of confidence in herself. She thought she would be the one to create the next key, and didn’t like to waste her precious time on menial duties with the existing subjects she didn’t believe would yield any results.”
He turned his scowl to the creature beyond the glass. “She was to check up on one of our subjects. That was always a two-person job—one doctor and one assistant. I was the assistant. I’d gotten held up with a previous task and was running only three minutes late. She was to meet me outside his cell before we were to enter. She decided to take matters into her own hands and walked in unassisted. This particular subject had a… surprising reaction to the drugs he’d previously been administered. He became the first rotter.”
My mind tried to wrap around the excessive amount of information.
“She wasn’t fast enough. He got he
r and busted through the glass wall, running around and infecting everyone he could before he freed himself into the outside world. From there, the Void Virus was born and it spread like wildfire. Rapidly infecting the human population. As far as we knew, everyone was becoming these new creatures. Rotters, as you call them.”
I watched the rotter more closely as this new information proceeded to float around in my head. She was the second rotter. The reason for all of this. The reason the world had spiraled into chaos, and life as we knew it ceased to exist.
My head was so overfilled with information that I couldn’t find my own thoughts.
“Luckily we had a safe space if something were to go wrong and we needed to go into hiding. So, now those of us who survived have been hiding out in this building, scrambling through what research we could save in attempts to find a cure. Without you, though, we weren’t making any progress. It was one dead-end after another.
“It’s only been a few months, but with the massive setback we faced after losing you and getting nowhere after seventeen years, then the outbreak and starting basically from scratch with only a handful of staff, we were quickly losing hope. But now that you’re here, we can fix this mess and do what this organization had originally set out to do. We can get back on track now that we have the key ingredient back in our grasp.”
Something in his voice warned me to be on edge. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but I knew something wasn’t right. Not that anything about this whole situation was right in any way at all, but he had a touch of mad scientist about him, and not at all in a good way.
“Now that I’ve spilled everything out to you, I would like for you to go lay down on one of the tables and we can get to work.”
The fuck? Is he going to start experimenting on me right this second?
“What, I don’t get a welcome bag first?” Smooth, Blyss. Insult the crazy scientist doctor man who most likely wants to harvest your organs. He didn’t look at all amused with my terrible sense of humor.
“Table. Now.” He held up the small black button, threatening the worst headache on the planet if I didn’t comply. Reluctantly, I stood up from the seat and dragged my feet over to the farthest bed, trying to buy some time but unable to think of anything useful along the way.
I hopped up on the bed and sat there, waiting. Dr. Crazy put his free hand on my shoulder and pushed me down so that I was lying on the bed. As soon as my back landed on the hard surface, a buzzing noise erupted and steel bands shot out and around me so that my arms, chest, and legs were pinned down, with no way to escape. Fuck, I was screwed.
Blyss
The vials of my blood rattled and clinked together as Dr. Crazy carried them away. I couldn’t be sure how much time had passed since I’d walked into this room, but it was time to stop asking questions and start forming a plan.
With his back turned and him focusing on something else, my eyes darted wildly around, looking for any point of weakness. I spotted one of the tall, rolling trays piled with surgical tools. If I was some kind of… elementalist, I should have some sort of power. If I could control the air, then I should be able to warp it to make the tray roll over to me, and I could use one of the tools to break free and escape.
So I focused, harder than I ever had before. Harder than football players’ cocks during cheerleading tryouts.
Nothing. Damn, okay so maybe I couldn’t do anything with air. If my only ability was healing, then I was sorely at a disadvantage.
“So tell me, 662. Have you ever noticed anything odd about you?”
I froze at the question. Looking over, I could see that his back was still turned and there was no sign that he’d noticed what I was trying to do. “What do you mean?” I threw a dose of innocence and confusion into my voice, hoping that would be enough to trick him.
He seemed to be smarter than I gave him credit for though, so I had to remain cautious.
“Anything odd, different. Something that made you think you were different from all the other children.”
“Nope, nothing that I can think of.”
“I sense that to be untrue.”
“Well, aside from growing up in a group home and foster care, and all the bullshit that life brings with that, yeah I’d say I was pretty normal.” I always had a hard time keeping my sass in check and I really hoped it wouldn’t get me killed before I could even get off this damn table.
“A subject with attitude, I like that. You’re going to be fun to keep around here. It’s been fairly quiet since the outbreak.” He waited patiently for a drop of blood to fall from the pipette in one hand to the little glass slide on the counter, carrying on a conversation with me without losing focus.
I paused. “You mean, quiet with only a handful or so of you, right? You’d said that some of you had escaped into this building.”
No answer.
“Um, Doc, where is everyone else?”
“Everyone else?” he parroted.
“The other doctors and scientists, whoever they were that had run and hid here.”
“They’re around.”
For some reason, I didn’t buy it.
“Maybe you’ll meet them soon enough.”
He seemed to be avoiding something. For some reason, this was the one thing I couldn’t get a straight answer on. I decided to change tactics. “You said that the overall company here is the Black something or other—”
“Black Moon Corporation.”
“Right. So since that’s the overall company, are there, uh, smaller ones around? Other buildings like this filled with labs and experiments and such. Are there more out there?”
“My dear,” he turned his head to the side so I could see a partial grin, “BMC is everywhere. All over the country. The continent. Every continent.”
For a moment I forgot how to breathe. That couldn’t be good. This thing was larger than I’d expected. “How many are there? Where at, exactly? Is there a list somewhere? A map?”
“You needn’t concern yourself with those trivial things. This one is the one that matters here.”
Okay, so I wasn’t going to get any more answers regarding that. Time to change tactics again. “So, uh, Doc. Now that you have my blood, what’s next?”
“My child, 662, don’t rush. This has been decades, even centuries, in the making. We want to make sure this is done right,” he answered from his spot at the counter, looking into some kind of a large microscope thing, as he focused on the little slide that had my drop of blood on it.
“And what exactly is that? What is it that needs to be done right?” I tried to squirm, becoming more uncomfortable with every passing second.
“Why, the revolution, of course. You’re going to bring mankind out of hiding. Restore the natural order. Get things back to how they were, so that we can proceed with Plan A.”
“Which is?” I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with all the vague answers I was receiving.
“Unlock the magic.”
“Is this all a plan to take over the world? Are you trying to become some kind of evil warlock or something?”
A grin, which was visible from his spot at the counter, pulled at the side of his face. “An evil warlock. Now that’s something I haven’t heard before. You’re funny.”
Sad. The one time in my life that someone actually tells me I’m funny just had to be some crazed scientist trying to take over the world. I mean, yeah, the world was already fucked right now anyways, but he was going to take it to a whole new level.
“You see, it’s not only unlocking the magic from DNA. No, it’s so much more than that. Especially since you weren’t born in a normal way. We manipulated everything about you. Your physical attributes, your voice, we even added in a belly button. You’re our most marvelous piece of work. We created you, we gave you life. And in doing so, we created what’s inside of you. I own you.” He turned his head slightly to the side, enough to see me in his peripheral. “You were rather close earlier with your question on
mythology. You see—”
“So, what, mythology is real? Magic is real, I get it, that’s all you’ve been going on about. You’re trying to play God here and you’re frustrated that it’s not going anywhere,” I concluded, tired of this shit and wanting something to happen already. I hated being stuck to this table, so vulnerable. “You’re creating people and trying to control them and the future. None of it is going to work the way you want it to.”
This guy had seriously lost his marbles and I was going to help him find them by shoving them down his throat as soon as I could get free.
“Ah, yes.” He clasped his hands together in triumph. With a grand smile on his face, he looked around, before spotting me in the same place he left me.
He walked over and hit a button, and the buzzing noise told me that the steel bands were about to start moving. Why I had to be restrained to that extent only to have a little blood drawn baffled me, but I was grateful for the release.
I rubbed my wrist with my other hand, trying to relieve the ache there from the bands being on so tight. Before I could even think, he wrapped a firm hand around my arm and pulled me back down to the floor. I barely had any time to regain my balance and prevent myself from face-planting on the floor before he was dragging me out the door.
“We have much to accomplish, it’s best not to waste time dawdling.”
“Who the fuck says words like ‘dawdling?’” Oh shit, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.
A slap to my face had me reeling back. “Don’t speak out of turn.” My cheek stung as he continued to pull me down the hall. His mind was surely deteriorating and I was in trouble.
We emerged back into the large warehouse-sized room and I could see my friends were all still in place. Jonah jumped off his cot and began signing furiously, asking if I was okay. I gave a hesitant nod, unable to sign back any useful words with the iron grip this guy had on my arm.