The Woodlands

by Lauren Nicolle Taylor

  I was taken aback, my body stiffening from the short attack. Over the last few weeks, I had snapped at her many times, mocked her even. But she had always been this impenetrable source of hope, a light shining from inside her. She never stooped to my level, no matter how much I pushed her. I felt terrible for upsetting her, but for me, I didn’t feel anything other than the need to escape this nightmare. I was about to open my mouth and say something else rude when she screamed—a scream that tore through me, rumbling and echoing throughout the room and into the hall. Something was not right. Panic penetrated me, and something else, guilt. I prayed it was not my taunting that had brought her here.

  “Rosa, something’s wrong, something’s wrong,” she said in short, expelled bursts like hiccups. “Ahhhh!” She was holding her stomach and retching. She was in so much pain I could almost feel it myself. Beads of sweat crowned her forehead, her hands searching for something to hold onto. Her face was contorted into a grimace that didn’t sit well on her usually serene face. I was about to jump up when I saw the doors swing open.

  The white coats were swarming around her. Completely ignoring my presence. Clara turned towards me, her eyes wide with fear and adrenalin.

  Harsh Voice appeared, looking displeased but not panicked, and said, “This is not right, she’s only thirty-six weeks. It won’t do, we haven’t prepared her yet. Take her to theatre five. I’ll meet you there.” She adeptly unhooked Clara from her various machines and ripped a sheet of paper from the frantic, scribbling machine they’d wrapped around her stomach. As she studied it, the other people wheeled her out of the room. Clara screamed again. “Do something about the noise,” Harsh Voice called after them. Mid-scream there was silence. She stormed after them.

  I felt pure terror. For my friend and for myself. The pain she was in seemed unnatural. She looked sick. Was she sick or was this normal? What were they going to do with her? What did they mean when they said she wasn’t ‘prepared’ yet? I held the edge of the sheets tightly in my balled-up fists, as if I could pull them over my head and shut the horror out. Clara, I prayed, please, please, please, be ok.

  I felt a hand touch my own. I snapped my head around wildly. I hadn’t noticed that Apella had stayed behind. She stepped back a little and said, “It’s ok, Rosa. They won’t hurt her, she’s too important.” This was the first time Apella had spoken to me and I knew she was taking a big risk talking to me now.

  “What will they do?” I asked, the pitch of my voice escalating, feeling desperate and unhinged with every passing second that I didn’t know where Clara was.

  “I don’t know.” Apella looked at her feet. She looked to be close to my mother’s age. Her neat, blonde hair swung at her shoulders as she stared down at the ground, avoiding my gaze. She seemed to be bracing herself for a tirade. But I wasn’t angry. She wasn’t the culprit. Like me, like Clara, she was probably here against her will, recruited after the Classes and brought to this place. She had already risked too much for us.

  A man popped his head in the doorway. Apella quickly withdrew her hand. If he saw it, he overlooked it.

  “Semmez is asking for you.”

  “Ok. I’m coming.” Apella left the room, her timid footsteps barely seeming to touch the floor as she padded quietly away.

  So that was Harsh Voice’s name. I think I preferred Harsh Voice to Semmez.

  For two days I waited. Apella never came to check on me and I didn’t hear what had happened to Clara. I hoped Apella hadn’t been reported or discovered. Clara must have gone into labor that morning. Had she delivered the baby? What would they do with her after it was out? I started to think about the possibilities and shut myself down. These people were capable of horrible deeds. Clara could be, no. I wasn’t even going to think it.

  I felt the fog rising but it was a fog of my own making, a cloud of fear and hopelessness, blanketing my brain. The problem was there was too much time to think. I kept staring over at her side of the room. I was like one of her dolls, a perfect facade on the outside, wooden and dead on the inside. I wondered how Clara was feeling, if she was even alive. If they had taken the baby away from her, what grief she must be feeling right now. Her spirit seemed so tied to that thing. It nourished her in this hell of a place. Without it, I wondered what would be left of the girl I had come to love.

  At night, I felt the leech writhing inside me. I came to think of it as a monster. I dreamed it was tearing its way out of me. Claws scratching at my skin, pulling me apart as I screamed in pain. I woke up in the middle of the night with someone’s hand over my mouth, a hand that smelled vaguely of earth and smashed herbs. “Shhh!” the dark figure whispered. “You can’t be dreaming in here. The others don’t dream.” I nodded my head and he removed his hand. “Who are you?” I whispered into the dark, but he was already gone.

  The next morning, they wheeled her in. She was alive, drugged up to her eyeballs, but definitely alive and still very, very pregnant.

  I waited eagerly for the people in white to leave so I could ask her what had happened and it seemed like forever. They were fussing over every detail, making sure everything was in order. They brought me my dinner but brought her nothing. It was then that I noticed the new tube coming out of her arm. One woman disconnected the tube and syringed a yellow-tinted liquid into it. I watched it track up the tube and into my friend. She looked so tiny, so weak lying on that bed, her head propped up with a boulder sitting on top of her, her eyes closed. Maybe that’s what they did, drugged her to stop the labor. I had heard that was possible. We didn’t have those kinds of facilities in Pau. Anyone who had the misfortune of going into labor early was generally in big trouble. The baby usually died.

  Once everyone had left the room, I tried to wake her, to no effect. She was heavily drugged, and would only open her eyes for a second before falling back asleep. Her dark lids fluttering and closing like they were a leaden weight, too heavy to lift. I decided to let her rest and try and talk to her tonight, at lights out.

  The day went by uneventfully. Although, again, the white coats looked more stressed than they had been before. They looked tired. Tired and unhappy.

  When I got back from exercise, Clara was sitting up but there were people all around her again. I was led back to my bed and given dinner. Inside I was bursting to jump up and talk to Clara. I wanted to shake her awake and pepper her with questions. But I had to wait, eat my dinner slowly, and wait for the last check before bed. Looking calm and dopey on the outside but buzzing on the inside. I did what was required, and thought it was safe, until someone came in again and injected more liquid into Clara’s tube. I was very worried this was more mind-altering drugs, like the gas. Clara seemed so dopey, her head lolling from side to side listlessly. She barely looked in my direction.

  Lights out.

  Clara’s voice was crackly as she spoke, “I know what you’re going to ask me but I didn’t see very much.” I couldn’t see her face very well but it sounded like it was an effort to speak.

  I wasn’t going to ask her that, well, not at first anyway. I held my tongue from saying anything defensive and asked, “How are you feeling?”

  She laughed. “Oh, wonderful,” she said with unfamiliar sarcasm. “At least the baby is safe.”

  Luckily, she couldn’t see me rolling my eyes in the dark. “Yeah, there’s that I guess. I’m glad you’re safe, Clara.” I gulped and said the words that would give me away, “I was really worried about you. What happened?”

  “I don’t really know,” she whispered. “All I remember was that horrible pain and then being rushed out of here. They took me up, Rosa. There were real windows, a real sky, not just pictures of the real thing. I don’t think we are that far underground. We got in an elevator and the numbers read B6 to Ground. They covered my mouth to stop me from screaming and then jabbed me when I got to the top. When I woke up, the pain was gone and the baby was fine.”

  I absorbed this new information. Critical information. If we were only
six levels underground maybe there was a way to get out. If there were elevators maybe there were stairs, maybe… my mind was running away with the idea of escape.

  “What else? Anything else you can tell me?” I said urgently. I think she sensed my desperate tone when she replied.

  “Calm down. There was something else.”

  “What?” I was barely keeping my nerves contained. I felt like I was jumping out of my skin.

  “There were other girls up there. Most were pretty dopey. But there were two that were out of control, screaming and carrying on. One of them yelled ‘how could you do this to me?’ The other one was just crying hysterically. She was so scared. I wanted to run to her and hold her. Rosa, I think they were the girls that moved into my old room. Someone said that these were the crazy ones from room 112. That was my room.”

  I felt a shiver of dread run through me. I wasn’t sure I could even ask her the next question.

  “What happened to them?” I could hear Clara sniffing. She was crying, a choked, crackly sound.

  “I heard two of the people in white talking while they were cleaning my room. Something about a waste.” She hesitated and took a breath before imitating the conversation she had heard, “What a perfect waste of time and money, a waste of two perfectly viable fetuses and two good breeders.”

  I could hear her wiping her face with her arm as she uttered, “I think they killed them. No, I’m sure they’re dead.” For the first time, she sounded as hopeless as I felt.

  I felt the need to protect her, to preserve that shining light. “Maybe they didn’t, Clara. Maybe they just moved them to another place. Gave them another purpose.”

  “Maybe,” she said breathlessly, but I don’t think she really believed me. I didn’t believe it myself. If life in Pau Brasil had taught me anything, it was that the Superiors were not merciful.

  “You need to sleep. Shut your eyes and we’ll work it out in the morning,” I said, trying, unsuccessfully, to sound soothing. Trying really hard not to sound petrified. Because I was. If the girls were from Clara’s room, it wouldn’t be long before the white coats worked out what we’d done. And once they did, acting dopey wasn’t going to save us. I was sure they would be coming for us soon.

  I woke up coughing, tears filling my stinging, itchy eyes. Clara was coughing too. The lights were still off, but as I watched, strips of light started illuminating the floor like miniature airstrips. It felt like my lungs were on fire. It wasn’t like smoke from a fire. It was odorless but leaving a bitter taste in my mouth when I exhaled. I couldn’t see where it was coming from and it was filling the room fast. I thought—this is it. They have finally worked out that we are aware. They were going to gas us to death. I fumbled around, trying to disconnect the leads to my machines and monitors they had reattached to me after Clara’s episode. I quickly gave up and just rolled to the floor, feeling the machines towing along behind me. A convoy of sounds—metal crashing against metal, emergency beeps and blips.

  I could breathe a little better, down on the cold, linoleum floor. I called to Clara, my voice raspy and hoarse, “Clara get down on the floor.” I could vaguely see the shadow of her awkward form climbing carefully out of bed as the photo wall flickered images I’d never seen before, a window with grey wool curtains, a desk with a photo frame on it, stacks of Woodland textbooks dog-eared lying in the corner. An old wooden chair projected over Clara’s back as she used the wall to support herself as she got down on the floor. I cursed her careful movement and wished she would move faster.

  We started crawling towards the door, an oppressive cloud of smoke hovering just over our heads. The machines started disconnecting and setting off alarms. Ignoring them, I stood up and went for the door handle. I lost my balance and slipped in some kind of liquid. What was it? It was slimy and thick. “Clara, are you ok?” It felt like blood. I shuddered involuntarily. “Are you…bleeding?”

  “No‚” she responded quickly. “I think it was my bag of fluids.” Relieved, I reached for the handle. I was about to open the door when it slammed into me from the outside and knocked me to the floor. Someone strong picked me up under my arms, dragged me out the door, and then went back for Clara.

  What I saw in the poorly lit hall was absolute chaos.

  It was a war zone: girls coughing and screaming. Disoriented and frightened. The white coats were trying to get them into a line, but they kept wandering off, banging into walls, into each other. Each of them lost in their own foggy panic. Clara and I were pushed towards a wall that had a long bar running along its length. We held onto it and followed the strips of light. It stayed dark as we walked in line, collecting more confused, coughing girls as we went. Whatever this smoke was it had infiltrated the entire place. Some of the staff were wearing masks, but I could still hear them coughing. They pushed us through doors and upstairs, through another door, up some more stairs until I started to lose count.

  Finally the darkness lifted; I could see Clara in front of me. I put my hand on her shoulder, determined not to lose her in the crowd. Now that I could see better, it was apparent the gas was a curious, dark purple. I held my breath for a minute but buckled quickly, watching the gas move into my mouth as I breathed in and seeing it, as it came out, like it was almost solid. Clara’s breath was the same. Other girls were mesmerized by the same phenomenon, but when they breathed out the smoke was tinted pink.

  We walked passed a window. A real window. Clara was right. We weren’t that far underground. Sunlight was streaming through it like an invitation. We were on the surface. One of the people in white went to the window and tried to open it. He heaved and strained, his face showing his panic and exertion, but it didn’t move. “It’s no good, it’s sealed‚” he said to the one that had a hold of my arm. “We’ll have to take them outside.”

  I felt the grip on my arm tighten as I was strongly guided to two large, locked, security doors. One of them typed in a key code and spoke into a microphone while the other one pushed his fingertip into a jelly-like substance. There was a sharp beep and then a voice said, “Prints incomplete”.

  “You’re too sweaty,” one of them said in frustration, girls squashing him up against the wall. “Wipe your hand and try again.” I could see the purple cloud thickening around us. Bubbling and pushing into the corners. Some of the girls were on the floor, survival instincts telling them they could breathe better down there. The coughing was deafeningly loud. The room kept filling with girls as more and more of them came up from below. Just when you thought no more would fit, more would come, and you were forced to compress yourself further.

  “Verification complete,” the computer voice said and the doors swung open. The men repeated the process again, at the second set of doors, swapping who used their fingerprints and who used their voice as verification. The second set of doors swung open but the first set of doors we had walked through was trying to close, banging against hapless girls. Continuously knocking them over, as they were carried through on a wave of bodies. I saw one of the white coats take off his shoes and shove them under one of the doors, jamming it, so the girls could get through. It creaked and groaned as it tried to pull back to closing.

  I stumbled into the outside world, turning around to see purple smoke billowing out the doors and into the sky. Fighting its way into the air, like a hundred purple worms, intertwining, squirming, and pushing out in different directions. Girls were spilling out, some crawling, some being dragged, some kicked along by impatient white coats. There were hundreds of them, they just kept coming and coming.

  I looked down at my feet, registering the squelchy, wet feeling between my bare toes. I inhaled deeply, enjoying my first taste of the sweet, fresh air. Delicious. Scanning the area, I could see we were in the Wilderness. From where I was standing, all that pointed to the immense dwelling below was a grassy mound with doors in it and a few windows puncturing the sides of the hill. The clearing we were pouring out into was only as big as my old school courtyar
d and soon, it was completely packed with coughing, panicking girls.

  Heels of hands pushed us backwards, as far away from the doors as we could get, so we were right up against the rough, puzzle piece bark of towering trees. I was eased down onto a moss-covered log. The smells of damp, decomposing wood made my heart do little flips. Clara was right next to me and was guided to the ground as well but by pale, willowy arms. It was Apella. “Stay there,” she said, fanning her hands and then she disappeared into a sea of girls. We sat and watched, as all the girls were planted on the ground, some not very gently, by the extremely stressed people in white.

  For a moment, it was quiet. I heard birds off in the distance, a flutter, a foreign scampering sound of some unknown, forest-dwelling creature. We sat there for about an hour, pushing our toes into the mud, looking at the endless sky, the odd cough breaking the stillness. As I watched, little puffs of pink smoke were being exhaled by the girls. They floated up, carried by the breeze, dissipating into the atmosphere.

  Then it started, very slowly. At first.

  It began with restlessness—girls moving, shaking their heads, and touching their stomachs. Then we heard a girl shout out, then another, and then soon there was an immense chorus of wailing girls. I realized then that the purple smoke was some kind of quick working antidote to the fog. Some of them were screaming, “What have you done to me?” Some were crying, some were calling out for help. One thing was clear—these girls had woken up. The drugs were wearing off. The people in white were exchanging glances, nervously. What they had said before was true. There was only one of them to ten girls. One man was bracing himself, his fists clenched, his chest puffed out, as if ready for a charging stampede. I saw one, with a face as white as her coat, drop her gear and run for the trees. Action was necessary but they all stalled. Then the decision was made for them, as girls started to stand and run. Some pushed through, parting the bodies like they were swimming through a fleshy sea. Some just ran right over the top of the others. Most of them were trying pull themselves out of the fog still, and they were the first ones that received the needle to the arm.