Loughlin didn’t even flinch. “I’m just tying up some loose ends.”
“Loose ends?” Bren said. “They’re not loose ends, they’re people. Your son-in-law is in there!”
Loughlin scowled. “He is not my son-in-law.”
“Your daughter would have to disagree.”
“I have it all under control,” Loughlin said, switching to his left glove, methodically removing it the same way he had the first.
Bren laughed and shook his head. “No, you don’t. You’ve gone too far this time and I am done keeping your secrets.”
“My secrets?” Loughlin said, raising an eyebrow. “This goes way beyond my dirty laundry. Now answer the question. What were Morgan and Charles doing here, Bren?”
“They know.”
Loughlin stopped midair, his glove still half on, and swallowed hard. “What do they know?”
“Everything.”
“You bastard,” Loughlin growled under his breath.
“It’s over. We need to come clean to the Council Elders.”
“That’s not an option,” Loughlin said, setting both gloves down on the desk in front of him.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Bren said. He began to tremble. “I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than live another day like this.”
“It never was supposed to go this far,” Loughlin said. He rose from his seat and walked around the desk towards Bren. “But there’s no turning back now. I have to finish what I started.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Bren asked.
Loughlin was at Bren’s side now, looming over him. “It means the asylum isn’t the only loose end that needs to be eliminated.”
Bren leaned away. “So that’s why you’re here.” The thought to beg for mercy flashed through his mind, but he already knew what the inevitable outcome would be. Deep down he had known it for a long time.
“I’m afraid so,” Loughlin replied, “and it brings me no joy. You have always been loyal to me, Bren. But I promise you, it’s for the greater good.”
“You stopped caring about the greater good a long time ago, Arthur.”
Bren lifted his glass and took one last long drink before standing up, ready to face his executioner. There was an understanding behind the fear in Bren’s eyes, and much like a lamb led to the slaughter, he did not fight back.
The world can’t suffer a blow like the plague, dust itself off, and then go about its business. Ninety-five percent of the world’s population died in the plague. Humanity lost centuries worth of knowledge, knowledge the Council is too prideful to even try and understand. And so we are doomed to repeat the Old World’s mistakes.
-Excerpt from Theodore’s journal
John woke suddenly, disoriented in the dark. It was impossible to know what time it was. Morning. Evening. The sleep John did get was poor and fever-induced, so he often woke just as exhausted as he had been before he fell asleep.
Something had woken him, though. A movement, a sound. He couldn’t remember which it was now. But even as he sat in the darkness, he heard it again—a thump from overhead as the trapdoor swung open, spilling light into the hole.
As his eyes strained to adjust to the unexpected flood of light, John could just make out the outline of a keeper peering down on him. The keeper grunted for him to get up and John obliged, his body still aching from days of abuse followed by days of immobility. John assumed it was days, at least. It could have been a month, for all he knew.
The keepers led John out of the room and into the hallway where he was met by a sea of red uniforms and what appeared to be every terminal patient in the asylum. The light spilling through the windows told John it was mid-evening as the sun had just barely started to set. Even in the reduced light, John had to shield his eyes. His head pounded with each dangerously unstable step, and each swallow felt as though knives were stuck in his throat.
Asylum patients crowded together, scuffling down the hall, keepers armed with pistols and batons surrounded the throng on all sides.
John pushed his way through the crowd, searching for a familiar face, someone to tell him what was going on. A few yards ahead, he spotted the gray, balding back of Buck’s head and elbowed his way towards him. As he approached, he could see Tim was there too.
“What’s happening?” John asked. Buck and Tim both whirled around, Tim smiling wide at the sight of John. Buck was smiling too, no doubt relieved to see John alive.
“We don’t know,” Buck said. “The keepers ordered the entire terminal ward to gather here, but they won’t tell us anything else. I overheard someone say something about a fire in the asylum.”
More and more patients were pulled from their rooms and sent into the hallway to join the crowd until there was barely any room to move, everyone awkwardly shuffling forward as the keepers ordered the group to keep moving.
There were many faces in the crowd John had never seen before. Many of the patients looked dazed and lost, as if this was their first time outside of their rooms in years. It probably was, John thought as he watched one man rub his raw, infected wrists where shackles had been just earlier that day.
There was something wrong, an uneasiness in the air.
As they reached a fork in the hall, the keepers shepherded patients down one side or the other, half the grouping going right, the other left. John and half of the terminal ward followed the keepers to a giant concrete bunker attached to the outer northwest wing of the asylum. The ceiling was lower inside the chamber, the top of John’s head barely an inch from scraping against it. There were no windows, just a series of thick metal doors lining one of the walls. Each door was open, but John was too far away to see inside.
The group divided once again as keepers directed the crowd into different rooms. As John approached, he was able to briefly glance inside before his view was blocked again. There was nothing beyond the metal doors, not so much as a chair or even a candle. Just a series of long, thin pipes running along the ceiling, connected to several spray-heads. A sprinkler system perhaps?
“What is happening, Buck?” John asked, speaking directly into Buck’s ear to be heard over the shuffle of bodies. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” he replied nervously. “We can’t be far from the crematorium, though.”
Despite the verbal prodding from the keepers, the crowd had slowed to almost a complete halt and their collective anxious murmurs echoed off the concrete walls at a deafening volume. A few keepers began pushing patients with their batons, ordering them to keep moving, but the throng remained frozen with uncertainty and fear.
“Gentlemen,” a loud voice boomed across the room. Head Keeper Carson stood at the front of the crowd now, his mere presence demanding absolute silence. “Some of you may have already heard, but a patient room in the terminal ward has caught fire. We are working hard to contain it, but the fire has already spread to several adjoining rooms. While we work to get the situation under control, I ask that you stay here and follow your keepers’ directions. These bunkers,” Carson said, pointing to the empty rooms, “are completely fireproof, so we need you all to get inside as quickly and calmly as you can, so we can keep all of you safe while we work to secure the rest of the asylum.”
“How long is that going to take?” someone shouted from the crowd.
“Hopefully not long,” Carson answered. “But as I said, you will be safe so long as you are in one of these rooms and you follow our instructions. All those at the front, if you please.” He directed those at the front of the crowd into the first room.
The room quickly filled to capacity, patients standing shoulder to shoulder. Once the keepers were sure they couldn’t fit any more men inside, they closed the heavy metal door and began directing the crowd into the next room, and then the next.
John counted five chambers in total, three of which were already full. Through a small glass window in the door, John could see the patients inside, anxiously looking around, wonde
ring what they were supposed to do next.
Despite Carson’s reassurance, something wasn’t right.
Buck, John, and Tim neared the front of the line, their group being ushered into the first of the two remaining chambers. The room was already over half full when John noticed strange marks on the walls. Thin white lines running along the blackened cement, always in pairs of four or five.
It was then that a small, strange sound caught John’s attention. He strained to hear the faraway noise over the scuffle of the throng around him. It was coming from the hallway of chambers to the right where the other half of the terminal patients had been taken.
What was that sound? Water? Footfall?
No.
It was the sound of screaming.
John turned to Buck, but Buck’s eyes were already wide and afraid. He heard it too.
The crowd began to panic, rushing the door of the open chamber, frantically pushing the other patients out of the way and onto the ground, trampling over them as they tried to get out. The patients already inside the three rooms pushed against the doors, an effort that soon turned into thunderous pounds along the doors and walls as they realized the keepers had locked them in.
An all-out riot broke out. A few keepers began forcing patients back inside the fourth chamber while two more pushed the metal door closed, catching several arms and legs in the door before finally slamming it shut, trapping the patients inside. The patients already outside began throwing punches at anyone who tried to stop them from leaving, knocking keepers to the ground before stampeding over them.
In the commotion, John saw a young keeper run to a valve on the far wall and frantically begin turning it.
“Stop him!” John shouted, pushing through the crowd towards the keeper.
But he was too late. A series of clangs rolled through the walls like approaching thunder, followed by the hiss of rushing air as the pipes all around them began to vibrate. The screaming inside the locked chambers intensified as men pounded on the door and clawed at the walls, desperately trying to get out. Thick, milky clouds descended from the ceiling. Their screams quickly turned to coughs and gags as hundreds of men simultaneously choked on the poisonous gas engulfing them.
John ran to one of the chamber doors and pushed against the lever with all his strength, but it was useless. The locking mechanism was engaged and would not budge. The men inside pawed at the door, crying out for John’s help. They quickly lost strength, some clutching their necks and chests, others vomiting and convulsing before collapsing to the ground.
White smoke slowly spilled out through the open door of the last chamber at the back of the bunker, bringing keepers, patients, anyone caught in the cloud to their knees as the gas began to fill the entire space.
John pushed against the locked lever again, throwing every ounce of strength behind it, screaming out as he felt the unmistakable tear of skin against thread, the stitches in his side ripping free as John twisted his body against the immovable metal door.
Buck grabbed John’s arm and yanked him away from the door, out of the concrete bunker, and down the hallway where all the surviving patients stampeded through the corridors of the asylum, searching for a way to escape. With Buck and Tim right beside him, John followed the crowd to the west wing of the asylum, towards the nearest exit. The way out was close, just a few hundred feet.
As they approached the first set of doors, armed keepers flooded into the hall, blocking the exit. They formed a barricade. One keeper drew his pistol and began to fire freely into the crowd. Men fell. John turned and ran down the adjoining hallway, Buck, Tim, and a dozen more patients close behind.
John sprinted towards the visitor’s center, the next closest exit he could think of, turning down hallway after hallway, the sound of gunshots and screams still echoing behind him as the doors to the visitor’s center came into view. They were close, they were all so close, but armed keepers marched in front of the doors, blocking their escape.
The patients all skidded to a halt, unsure of where to go. They were trapped. A line of keepers, led by Fisher and all armed with batons, loomed before them, ready to club any patient to death who tried to advance. A firing squad closed in from behind.
“Stand down,” Fisher yelled to the already petrified crowd, his ugly scar illuminated in the scarlet glow of the sun setting through the windows behind him. John wasn’t sure what the keepers expected them to do—throw up their hands and walk themselves back to the gas chambers? One man at the front of the crowd stepped forward but was immediately knocked down, the keeper’s baton cracking against the side of his skull.
“Stand down!”
Remember John, head down.
A few more men tried to push through but were immediately beaten to the ground.
“Stand down, now!”
Eyes down.
They were so close to the exit. It was right there, on the other side of the blockade.
“This is your final warning. Turn around now, or we will be forced to exercise extreme force!”
Don’t make a scene.
The words he’d lived by his entire life would be the death of him now. These men wanted him dead.
He wanted to live.
John screamed at the top of his lungs and charged the keepers, lowering his head and running at full speed. Similar cries erupted all around him as the crowd followed John’s lead and charged their captors.
“I have a plan,” Charles said. “We’re going to get John out of the asylum. Tonight.” He pushed through the front door of the Loughlin estate.
“How?” Morgan asked as she tried to keep up with her brother. The house was completely dark, the family no doubt at another party for the evening.
As soon as Bren had revealed the truth, that John’s records had been switched with Charles’, Charles had stormed out of the laboratory and made his way straight for the house, not even looking back to see if Morgan was behind him.
“I’m going to turn myself in,” Charles said, crossing the foyer and heading straight into their father’s study. He flipped the lights on and began rummaging through the desk drawers.
“You’re what?” Morgan asked in disbelief, taking off her coat and throwing it on a nearby armchair.
“I’m going to tell the Council I switched my results with John’s and I’m the one who’s actually unfit. Then they’ll have to let him go.”
“No,” Morgan said.
“What do you mean, no?” asked Charles, now moving on to the wardrobe, leaving a chaotic mess in his wake.
“I mean, you don’t have to do this, Charlie. We can find another way.”
“You heard Bren. We need to get John out of the asylum as soon as possible.”
“I’ll go to the Council,” Morgan said, frantically putting together the scattered pieces of a plan. “I’ll tell them John’s not unfit, that they made a mistake, and I’ll demand they retest him.”
“That will never work,” Charles said, pulling a bag from the wardrobe and stuffing it with several coats and a handful of books.
“Why not?” Morgan asked.
“Because when it comes to the Genetic Fitness Evaluation, the Council doesn’t allow do-overs. At least not without a good reason.”
“We have a good reason. I’ll tell them the truth. I’ll say Henry Bell faked his results and John was arrested by mistake. They’ll never have to know your part in any of this. John will be released, Henry will be arrested, and—”
“That won’t work either,” Charles interrupted, still not making eye contact with Morgan as he grabbed his bag and headed back towards the kitchen.
“Why not?” Morgan asked as she followed him.
“Because, once again, you have no proof.”
“What are you talking about? There’s an entire room full of proof sitting right in the records room at the lab. All the Council has to do is look through the records and—”
Charles stuffed a loaf of bread into the bag. “The Council can’t
know Henry Bell is unfit.”
“Why not?” Morgan said yet again as she followed Charles out of the kitchen and back into the study. “Charlie, will you stop for one second and just talk to me?”
Charles stopped at the doorway, his back to Morgan. “The minute the truth about Henry Bell comes out, Katherine will be in the exact same situation as you. They’ll make her terminate the pregnancy, and all of this really will have been for nothing.”
He was right.
“Fine, so we’ll figure something else out. Just give me a second to think.”
“Katherine’s going to be just fine without me. Just tell the Bells you know what they’ve been up to and they’ll back off.”
Charles turned around, looking his sister in the eyes for the first time since they left the lab. “It’s all right, Morgan,” he whispered.
“No, it’s not,” Morgan replied. She had been so caught up with how the news affected her life she hadn’t even stopped to consider how all of this must be affecting Charles. “You don’t have to do this. I can’t ask you to do this for me.”
“You never had to ask in the first place.”
“So Henry just gets to walk away from all of this while you’re sent to the asylum? This isn’t right, Charlie.”
“Look, Morgan—”
“I won’t let you do this!” she shouted. “I won’t choose between you and John.”
Charles set his bag down on the floor. “Do you remember when we were kids, I was probably six or so, and I was having a really hard time with reading? I was falling way behind the rest of the class, so Mom started tutoring me after school.”
Morgan nodded. “I remember, but what does that have to do with—”
“We would sit at the table and she would make me read book after book for what felt like hours and you would patiently sit across from us, coloring or painting or whatever. One day, I sat down for another one of our tutoring sessions, and once again, I couldn’t sound out a single bloody word. I had been stuck on one word for a while when you suddenly reached across the table, grabbed the book from my hands, and just started reading it out loud, word for word. You read the entire page perfectly. You were only four years old, and you could already read better than me. And you were only half paying attention when you learned how to do it.”
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