When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  When we pass through the double doors my heart stops. The blood on the floor is gone. All the doors to the rooms for the “test subjects” are locked tight, their pain locked behind the soundproof doors once again.

  Two men who look barely out of college, one white with greasy black hair, wearing a T-shirt with various sexual positions on it, the other one with curly brown hair and features people call racially ambiguous, stand talking with an older white man in a blood-spattered business suit a few feet away.

  “Oh, there they are,” the man says, exasperation in his voice as he looks at me and Theo, completely ignoring our guns. “Perfect. Prime them, and then you can try the Feelbutrol on them. How does that sound? Feelbutrol. Mikel thought it sounded too much like an antidepressant, but he’s gone now and I like it. Has a sci-fi element but it’s still hip.”

  “Sounds good, Mr. Voorhies. You were always cooler than Mr. DeVries,” Curly Hair says.

  “Yeah, and Kim was a real bitch. Glad she’s gone,” Greasy Hair says, then looks at us, annoyed. “We’re giving it to this guy, too?”

  “Yes,” Voorhies says. “I hate to say it, but Mikel was a bit racist. I mean yes, yes, superior race, whatever. He also wasted a lot of money on his whims. I’m not going to let a good strong volunteer go to waste. Use them both.”

  He looks past us, snaps, and makes a wrap-it-up motion with one hand.

  There’s a sharp prick in my shoulder and everything goes black.

  Chapter 25

  Sydney

  IN MOVIES, WHEN PEOPLE GET STRAPPED DOWN TO HOSPITAL beds by the bad guys, they either develop superhuman strength or they manage to find some way to slip out. I’ve been strapped down against my will before. I know that no amount of wriggling, no amount of screaming, no amount of praying to God or Satan or one of their little friends will get you out.

  I’m not calm as I lie on the gurney next to Theo—my heart is pounding, my jaw is locked, and I feel like if I blink too hard I might set off a full-on panic attack. I look calm compared to Theo, who, in typical white dude manner, is not pleased about being denied autonomy.

  “Let us go!” he screams, writhing so that the bed he’s strapped to shakes and the metal buckles of the straps clang against the rails.

  The two young doctors, scientists, whatever, are in this room with us and bustle around us like they’re just at a regular office job. Like Julia and her coworker, they wear normal clothes and white jackets, and both of them are sipping tea from winter holiday Starbucks thermoses even though it’s summer.

  The curly-haired one is power walking back and forth around the room, opening small fridges and gathering glass bottles of chemicals. The white guy is sitting in a rolling office chair, and his hair hangs in his face as he looks over some papers and eats wings from a Crown Fried Chicken box.

  We’re about to get killed by some dude who probably hasn’t changed his underwear in the last five days and doesn’t care about getting strangers’ bodily fluids in his food.

  Great.

  “You know what would be cool?” Greasy Hair asks.

  “Letting us go,” Theo answers.

  “Me not having to do all the setup for once,” Curly Hair says irritably. “That’s what would be cool.”

  “Hey, I still have ten minutes in my dinner break because I got interrupted by all those suits stampeding down here. You get to go home after this and you got to go to the shareholder dinner and eat all the good food.”

  Curly Hair rolls his eyes. “It was boring as hell, I almost got killed at the dinner, and the food was worse than what we feed the test subjects.”

  “Let us go!” Theo shouts again, the tendons in his neck cording.

  They’re mostly ignoring him, but the curly-haired one’s gaze keeps flicking over. He seems disturbed, having to do this to a white guy, even though he looks more like the previous test subjects.

  Greasy Hair sucks his index finger and thumb, and then drops a chicken bone into his paper box. “I was gonna say it would be cool if there was a Whole Foods here already, so I could go to the buffet instead of eating this ghetto shit. There was one by my old job, and it was fucking—”

  “Let us go!” Theo yells, and Greasy Hair grabs a syringe, stretches a lanky arm over, and squirts a liquid into Theo’s face.

  “Shut. Up.” His voice is deadpan, like someone mildly annoyed by a cat scratching furniture that’s already been shredded by three cats before it.

  Theo sputters and blinks liquid that I hope is water out of his eyes, then glares at the guy. “Don’t you know that you’re killing people? That—”

  His words are cut off because Greasy Hair picks up the used latex gloves beside his food and shoves them deep into Theo’s mouth.

  I gag along with him.

  “Shut. Up. My rent just got jacked up. This job pays well. End of story,” Greasy Hair says, then leans back in his seat. He shakes his head. “And you two just killed a bunch of people? You’ve got a lot of nerve judging me. At least I don’t kill my own kind.”

  Curly Hair knocks over a beaker, swears, then heads to the medical-grade fridge humming in a corner.

  “What are you doing now, then?” I ask.

  “He’s not one of us.” He shrugs. “If he was, he wouldn’t be here, would he?”

  Funny how much race matters until it doesn’t.

  “Besides, there’s no guarantee he’ll die. In fact, he’s gonna feel really good for a little while. Unless I overdose him on this oxy since he ruined my dinner.”

  “Let’s do this already. He’s giving me a headache and I don’t want a migraine at the beach tomorrow,” Curly Hair says as he walks over to me. He places his little tray of meds on the table next to me and I see the familiar setup for a medicine port from when Mommy was in the hospital.

  He tightens the band around my arm, and I take a deep breath against the panic and the anger at the unfairness of this all.

  It strikes me that it’s pretty typical that I’d discover a goddamn conspiracy theory, infiltrate a secret research center, kill a bunch of bad guys, and still end up not saving the day.

  I snort a laugh and Curly Hair looks at me quizzically, which makes me laugh more.

  Shit, what a stupid fucking way to die. And if there is a hell, I certainly just earned my way in with all the blood now on my hands from this dummy mission.

  What a week.

  “What’s so funny?” Greasy Hair asks, throwing his wings box into a garbage can with a biohazard label on it and wiping his fingers on his jeans. He takes a sip from his thermos. “Are you already high or what?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Then shut the fu—ack!” I glance over at him and he drops his cup, his hands going to his throat. His mouth is stuck in an exaggerated O shape and his eyes bug out of his head as his face turns a violent shade of purple.

  Curly Hair’s brow creases in concern and he puts down the port he was about to insert into my arm so he can go check on his buddy. His hand slams into the tray clumsily.

  “What the hell?”

  Greasy Hair drops to the floor, convulsing—I can’t see him but can hear his desperate flailing and the squeak of his sneakers against the floor. Curly Hair staggers forward, and then the door opens slowly.

  Slowly.

  Shit, what now? I wish Curly Hair had managed to drug me before whatever fresh hell is about to go down takes place.

  Fitzroy Sweeney pokes his head in, his wrinkles rearranging themselves as he smiles at us.

  “There you are. Good, good.” He opens the door completely and I see that he’s holding a cricket bat in his other hand.

  I laugh again; either I’ve had a psychotic break or they’ve given me the drugs already without my realizing because there is no way any of this shit is really happening.

  Fitzroy twirls the bat easily in one hand as Curly Hair staggers toward him, then hefts it back and swings right at the researcher’s head; the sound of it smashing into his skull reverberates in the
room and then Curly Hair drops out of sight. Fitzroy shuffles over and lays the bat over my knees as he begins to undo the straps.

  Someone glides by outside the window and then Gracie steps into the room, dressed in her church clothes and with her gray bob perfectly laid.

  “What is going on?” I ask when Fitzroy’s strong grip helping me up makes it clear I’m not drugged or dead. This shit is, indeed, really happening.

  “What’s going on is you should have listened to Candace when she told you to come inside,” Gracie says tartly as she pulls the latex out of Theo’s mouth with an expression of disgust on her face. “Just like your mother, always so stubborn and not wanting to ask for help.”

  She sucks her teeth.

  She unstraps Theo’s hands and chest, and he pops up into a seated position, taking deep ragged breaths. His gaze flies to the two on the floor as he rubs at his wrists. “Do-fa-do.”

  “I knew I liked this young man,” Gracie says as she tugs his ankle straps free. “Do-fa-do means ‘tit-for-tat.’ Certainly seemed necessary here, wouldn’t you say?” She grunts as she gives the strap one last tug to free him. “These racists never think about things like the predisposition and mood of the people who prepare their food and beverages. Much like my dear departed husbands. When you expect others to serve you, especially others who you mistreat, you should really be more careful about what exactly it is that’s being served.”

  “How did you get in here?” I ask.

  “Same way you two did,” Fitzroy says, throwing his arm over my shoulder. I lean into him. “You know we watch out for each other around here. Do you really think you were the only ones who would notice something was amiss?”

  Him and Gracie laugh like Theo and I are still in diapers, and even though I’m grateful to them, my anger flares.

  “If you knew, then what the f—then what were you waiting for? People are dead. I had to . . . we had to . . .” My throat closes as emotion threatens to swamp me.

  Fitzroy takes my hand and squeezes it. “You’re right. We were trying to do things the old way, how we’ve handled it in the past. But the world moves faster now, and evil moves faster, too. We were too slow.”

  “I think we can all agree that poison moves quite fast, thank you,” Gracie says peevishly, then sighs. “Bad things happen in this world, every minute of every day. We try to stop them, when we can, how we can. We try to look out for one another. Like, when somebody recklessly buries something in a garden, we move it to a safe location.”

  I feel an actual pain in my body, like someone’s kicked me in my chest, but I just squeeze Fitzroy’s hand tighter.

  Gracie takes my other hand and helps me off the hospital bed. “That’s what we’ve always done and what we’ll continue to do in Gifford Place.”

  “You know Candace,” Fitzroy says, as if he’s about to launch into one of his old man stories. “Candace’s great-grandmother grew up in Weeksville. She was one of the survivors.”

  “Survivors?” Theo asks, attempting to stand.

  Fitzroy looks at him.

  “Cycles,” I say quietly. “Break and build.”

  “They can break, but they can’t erase,” Gracie says. “They can build, but they can’t bury us.”

  We’re all quiet after that.

  When they lead us back into the hallway, I see a line of neighbors helping to evacuate the people who’d been test subjects out through the tunnel.

  We get on the end of the line.

  Candace is waiting in the cellar of the bodega, holding Frito.

  “Sydney.”

  She looks at me disapprovingly and I suddenly feel like a child again. Tears well up in my eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I should have listened. I should have . . .”

  She drops Frito and pulls me into a hug. “Little miss bobblehead. Let’s find you a shower and some sleep.”

  “What about the medical center?” The weight of everything starts to crash down on me. The shooting, the bodies, the people in power. We’re alive, but I’ve watched Forensic Files. We’ve left a trail of evidence and will likely be in a VerenTech prison by sunup.

  “Oh, we takin’ care of that. Let’s go see.”

  When we walk up the steps, the scent of smoke hits my nose. Smoke and an oddly electrical smell, like a battery on your tongue.

  We gather yards back from the hospital as it’s consumed in orange flames, with a corona of blue at its center that brightens the sky behind it like a borealis.

  Paulette comes to stand next to me, reeking of gasoline.

  “Transformer,” she says, more lucid than I’ve seen her in months. “Causes blackouts. Causes fires. Makes the sky so pretty, too. They like the dark; this is so bright that no one in the city can ignore it. If there’re any of them left, and there are, that’s the last thing they want. We gave them an excuse, and a warning. They’ll clean up after themselves.”

  A hand comes to rest on my shoulder and I feel Theo’s solid weight behind me.

  I lean back into it, and we watch that shit burn down.

  Epilogue

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I WAKE UP IN AN UNFAMILIAR BED—the pullout in Candace’s guest room. Arms are around me, in a bear hug, but I’m not afraid.

  Theo.

  He smells like Ivory soap and smoke, but not the iron of blood anymore.

  The scent of coffee drifts in through the double doors that lead to the kitchen, then there’s a hiss and pop of oil and the smell of bacon follows.

  When I open my eyes, Miss Ruth is sitting on the arm of the couch, looking down at me and Theo.

  “You move fast,” she says, with brows raised and shoulders back in judgment.

  I sit up, my entire body sore and my head spinning. My throat hurts from the smoke of the fire we watched and from crying it raw.

  “Didn’t you say you never liked Marcus? Let me live, Miss Ruth.”

  She leans in closer to me. “Is it pink? Down there? I’ve never seen—”

  “Ruth, leave the children alone,” Gracie calls out. “Come help with breakfast.”

  When I glance down, Theo is staring up at me, his expression unreadable. Everything that has passed over the last few days barrels into me.

  “Good morning,” I croak.

  He crooks his finger at me, face still blank.

  I lean down close to him and he says, “In the future, if anyone asks, you can tell them it’s taupe.”

  I don’t know how it’s possible, but I start to laugh. The laughter shifts to tears so fast that I don’t even realize it, and Theo pulls me against him. Holds me together.

  The radio cuts on in the kitchen, which I guess is their way of giving us privacy. After a minute, I pull back, surprised to see that his eyes are red-rimmed and watery, too.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he says, and I kiss him once softly on the lips even though we both know there’s no guarantee of that.

  “Fresh asses!” Miss Ruth calls out, and we get up, freshen up, and join them.

  And back to the biggest story of the day, and maybe the year: The proposed site for the VerenTech campus has gone up in flames overnight, just weeks before construction was to start. It is believed that a transformer fire spread quickly, trapping several VerenTech employees in the inferno.

  Although the new site was opposed by community activists, no foul play is suspected. The project has been canceled as the company faces major restructuring challenges. Stocks plummeted—

  Fitzroy cuts off the radio as we pull two seats to the table. Jamel and Ashley Jones are here, too, looking haggard but able to move on their own. They had apparently been taken shortly before Theo and I had found them.

  They nod at us, and we nod back.

  Candace and Gracie bring platters to the table, not letting anyone help them, and we all dig in.

  Jamel clears his throat. “Um. So y’all know I do community activist work. And I’m in some groups. It might be too soon to bring this up, but . . .”

 
“What is it, baby?” Candace prods, but her gaze is sharp.

  “Last month, this cat in one of the anti-VerenTech organizing forums started acting real weird. A dude out in Detroit. He was saying that—that people was disappearing, and the neighborhood was gentrifying fast. He kept trying to show us all this evidence, these articles, but they just seemed like regular news, right? We all thought he was maybe going through some things. He left the group, but he sent me an invitation for a new one that he’d made. I had joined just to keep an eye out for him, but hadn’t checked in in a while . . .”

  “Show them,” Ashley says gently.

  He pulls out his phone and as it passes from person to person, their expressions drop.

  When it gets to me, I hold it between me and Theo as we read.

  It’s a thread on a private forum, with dozens of responses. The top post is a longer version of the story Jamel told, with links; the way the page is set up we can only see the first few lines of each response in the thread, but that’s enough.

  Belquise Ramos (Queens, NYC): In my neighborhood, they just straight up rolled through with a tank. Arrested a man who had been going to community meetings and asking why the houses of deported citizens were getting flipped and sold for ridiculously high prices.

  Sandy Smith (Jasper, AL): Oh thank god I found all of you, I was starting to go crazy. I’m white, but my town is poor. A distribution plant opened up that was supposed to bring us jobs and improve things, but I swear, everyone is disappearing, and more and more land goes to the factories.

  Andrew Chen (Los Angeles, CA): Health inspectors showed up at my parents’ restaurant and shut it down so they had to sell, and now it’s a Panera. They’d been refusing a lot of buyout offers right before that. Lots of my childhood friends who grew up around Chinatown say the same thing—it’s like someone is picking us off and just taking what they want.

  Gloria Pierce (New Jersey): It was slower here and less scary and maybe it’s not part of . . . this, but maybe it is. Things changed, people moved, but they suddenly upped the taxes. Overnight, all the original inhabitants of my neighborhood went from living the American dream of owning property that had appreciated in value to having to sell because only millionaires can afford these kind of taxes. Where are we supposed to go?