by Alice Reeds
The room it led to was small. And empty. Layered with dust and spiderwebs and dead air.
“This makes no sense,” I said, my voice simultaneously too quiet and too loud, a weird, very off-key feeling pooling in my stomach, unsettling. “This is the only place it could’ve gone but there’s no one here.”
“I…”
“Maybe we just imagined it? Or it was one of our shadows and we didn’t realize?” There had to be a logical explanation. Nothing else made sense.
Then again, how did our being on this thing in the first place make sense?
“I agree, I don’t like this, either,” Fiona said, echoing my statement from minutes prior.
“Let’s go back outside. All of this is giving me a very bad feeling.”
Caught in my thoughts, not a single word passing between us, we returned to the deck, the sky just as blue and everything just as quiet and empty as before. Nothing had changed. Not that I expected it to, but foolishly I hoped that perhaps someone or something would’ve appeared that could help us.
There were so many questions and worries, possibilities and contradictions, plaguing my mind, but I tried to shut it all out, ignore it, at least for now, and instead focus on our surroundings.
Silently we continued walking, the metallic sound remaining absent long enough that I started to wonder if maybe we’d just imagined it. Or perhaps it was just the type of noise an old ship like this made, its parts a little loose and rusty, whining the way old cars or houses did sometimes. Nothing to worry about. Right?
“Bridge?” Fiona questioned a little while later, her eyes on the word written across a door in peeling black letters.
“Should lead to the space where the captain sits and navigates from, I think,” I offered with a shrug. “Might be worth a try.” At least that seemed a little less terrifying.
“If the captain dude is actually there, I will kick his ass. Or hers, or theirs, I don’t care.”
“How about we ask what all of this is about, and if you don’t like the answer, then you can kick their ass?”
“Way to ruin the fun,” she argued, but her faint little smile betrayed her act. She playfully bumped her shoulder against mine. “Fine, we’ll do it your way. Ask first, kick later. Got it.”
The door to the bridge opened easier than the other ones, didn’t whine or groan as we pushed it open, either. The hallway beyond was dark but relatively clean. The floor was dirty, though, the walls scratched and… Were those bullet holes? I walked closer to four similar-looking, circular holes in the wall to my right and carefully ran my fingertips across them. They felt deep and narrowing, but I wasn’t sure if there were exit holes of some sort.
Walking closer to the wall, Fiona also reached out and touched one of the bullet holes, a frown pulling her brows together. “Those were most likely Colt Delta Elite using 10mm auto cartridges.”
Blinking, I tried to process what she’d said. “And you know that how?”
“The diameter of the hole, the light fraying, the distance between them,” she answered, as though I’d asked her what two plus two was instead.
“I meant how you know any of that stuff, in general. Since when are you a weapons expert?”
Hesitating, she turned her head just enough to look at me, the expression on her face, so lost in thoughts a moment prior, now melted into something more troubled, confused, taken aback even. “I…don’t know?”
I crossed the small distance between us and touched her wrist. Her eyes briefly caught that simple point of contact and then shifted to look right into my eyes. That troubled expression only deepened the longer we were silent. I could practically see the gears turning in her mind as she tried to figure out what was happening and where that knowledge had come from.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes…no…both?” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know how I know that, I just…do. I also know which kind of bullets wouldn’t pierce that metal, which would ricochet instead, and which would lodge themselves into it without making it through to the other side. But I literally have no idea where this knowledge came from. I don’t remember learning it or studying it. It’s just…there.”
Was this all connected somehow? Another piece of the puzzle? The two of us on a freighter, a disembodied shadow and metallic sounds, and Fiona suddenly knowing something she hadn’t before? Or did she know this before as well but somehow had forgotten she did? No, that made even less sense.
“Hey,” I said and pulled her into a hug, “it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just continue and we’ll worry about this later, okay?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was soft against my chest, her hold on me tightening for just a moment before she pulled away.
“Hopefully whoever shot those holes isn’t here anymore,” I said as we slowly continued down the hallway. “And that we won’t find rotting corpses of the crew, either.”
An odd feeling at the back of my consciousness told me it wouldn’t be the first time, the flash of a memory—the two of us lying in a dirt pit with four corpses on some island—but it was gone just as quickly as it appeared.
Chapter Five
The Villa
Pamela arrived moments later, and we were led through the Villa again. The hallways and stairs were just as deserted as they’d been before, the only sounds a quiet melody played on a piano somewhere, and even fainter, mumbled voices.
Back in the main foyer, Pamela and Leon turned and continued down a side hallway and opened a stark white door. Another staircase led down, and there were two CCTV cameras on either side of it. Why such high security for a place that’s practically empty? This staircase was basic, not decorated like the others, like something that led to an underground car park. Two flights down, Pamela led us through a heavy-looking door made of painted wood and metal.
The hallway here was brightly lit with LED lamps spaced out along the center of the ceiling, and the floor was light gray linoleum, the walls off-white. If I didn’t know we’d just come from the Villa, I would’ve thought we were at a hospital now. The air had a sterile, antiseptic scent.
“This is the medical bunker,” Pamela said, her voice too cheerful for a place with a name like that. Also, seriously, what villa has a medical bunker beneath it? This place couldn’t get any more bizarre and terrifying. Though, the way things were going, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a human slaughterhouse hidden somewhere. “All medical facilities are down here,” Pamela continued, “so if you ever feel ill or injure yourself, this is where to go.”
She and Leon came to a halt in front of a door, another obnoxiously white one with a frosted glass window and a small silver sign beneath it that read Dr. Richard Bowie. Leon knocked on the door, waited a moment, and then pushed down the handle to open the door. I hadn’t heard anyone say to come in.
“About time,” said a deep, raspy voice like that of a smoker. The man looked in his early or mid-fifties, his hair pitch-black and neatly combed back, his skin tan, though a shade or so lighter than my own, his face all sharp angles, and cold eyes—literally and figuratively, their color almost that of ice.
“I’ll come back for them later,” Pamela said, then she and Leon left us, the door clicking shut behind them.
Words I could only assume were of an Asian origin, formed what sounded like a question coming from Doc Bowie. His eyes were cast toward Fiona, their expression patient as he waited for her response.
She answered something, her tone much more hesitant than his, but sounding like the same language I couldn’t understand.
Then he looked at me. “E tu? Mi capisci?”
I blinked, unable to process the words at first, even though I recognized the sound and what they meant. He asked in Italian if I understood him. Was this some kind of test? Had he asked Fiona the same but in either Mandarin or Japanese, since those were the only two Asian lang
uages she spoke?
“Sì,” I said.
He nodded, his face relaxing. “Very good. You’ve retained your knowledge of foreign languages,” he said and folded his hands together in front of him on his desk. It looked much too dark against how bright everything else was here, too big and heavy, wooden with carved legs. It reminded me of a similar one standing in my father’s barely used study at our house. On the wall behind the doctor hung simple charts and two silver filing cabinets; a small plant with long vine-like branches stood on top of one of them. “It’s good to see you two again,” he said. “Even more so, since you don’t show any outward signs of serious injuries or other health-related issues. I knew you two would be just fine. See, Kellie, you’d been worried for nothing.”
Fiona chuckled next to me, the sound catching me off guard. She had one brow raised questioningly, perhaps even disbelieving. Like this was so unbelievable it had to be a joke. Meanwhile I tried my best to keep my face as expressionless as possible, something that used to be far easier just weeks ago.
“What the hell is all of this supposed to be?” she asked, her voice steady yet holding a note of challenge. “What kind of game do you people think you’re playing here?”
“No one is playing any kind of game, Kellie.” He seemed completely unfazed by her slowly rising temper. He was calm, observant, like he took note of even the smallest twitch of our muscles or where we looked and how we spoke. “There is no need to get upset. And here I thought we had your anger issue under control. You were doing so well before, but it seems that all went down the drain while you two were gone.”
As he spoke, he picked up a pen—one of those fancy but old-fashioned ink pens that usually cost way more than a pen should—and started to write down some kind of notes in one of the two folders on his desk. From where we stood, I couldn’t tell what he wrote or what those files contained, though it was rather obvious that they were our files. A shiver went down my spine.
Why did those files have so many pages, and what was on them? What kind of things did he know about us, and who gave him the right to keep any records at all? He knew we spoke different languages. Maybe Leon told him about my skills, though how would Leon know? I didn’t start learning Italian until after he’d been gone for two years. And he only just met Fiona. Right?
Was there a chance this was all just a farce? No. That couldn’t be. We weren’t in a movie or TV show; the FBI was the FBI and not some kind of group of contractors playing pretend. But what if that’s exactly who they were?
Turning my expression even more closed off and serious, much the same way I would with any other stranger who rubbed me the wrong way, I waited another moment before asking, “What’s actually going on here? Why is everyone treating us like they know us even though we’ve never been here before?” Even if he wouldn’t answer, that would be a telling sign that he lacked a plausible enough lie, though really, I wanted just a smidge of clarity, something, anything, to work with.
Doc Bowie shook his head as I spoke and sighed loudly before putting down his pen. He folded his hands over the files and for a moment he just looked at me, his head tilted to the right, his mouth pressed in a firm line, his eyes unreadable.
“Oscar, I was worried this would happen, but we knew from the start that memory loss would be one of the more likely side effects. The formula and dosage isn’t quite perfect yet.”
Was all of this connected to the implants? While we were on the island, we’d been convinced we saw and were pursued by a bear. Then we realized the bear was only a hallucination caused by implants in our necks. But—
“Well, there isn’t much we can do but wait and see how long it’ll take for everything to come back to you,” he said. “Being here should be helpful, but regardless of what the case may be, we’ll do a few checkups to make sure you’re okay, mentally as well as physically. Standard procedure.”
In the corner of my eye I noticed Fiona’s hands tightening into fists, though shortly after, she relaxed them again, the only sign of anger left being the way her eyes were ever so subtly squinted. I didn’t like any of this, either, but anger wouldn’t get us anywhere, that much I was certain of. Through most of my life, remaining calm, trying to read everyone around me, and acting just the right amount of smart and cocky usually worked out well.
Focusing back on Doc Bowie, I couldn’t quite figure him out, or which angle to use on him. Hiding how all of this truly made me feel seemed like as good a start as any.
The door behind us opened, and I expected Pamela and Leon to come inside, but instead two nurses, a man and a woman, stood there expectantly. Their clothes were shades of light blue and green, white rubber gloves covering their hands, their shoes gray Crocs.
Fiona crossed the small distance between us and the desk, and then slammed her fists down onto it, the sound loud and echoing off of the walls. The nurses flinched, but Doc Bowie appeared unimpressed and annoyed, like maybe he expected this from her.
“Listen, asshole,” Fiona said, her voice charged and predatorial, “we won’t do any of that until you tell us what the fuck is going on, who you people are, and what exactly it is you want from us.”
The man grabbed my arms from behind and pulled me away. “What are you—Let go of me!”
The other nurse quickly walked over to Fiona, touched her shoulder calmly, yet all it did was pull Fiona’s attention from me onto the woman, her hair flying as her head snapped to the right. I caught her expression before she turned, though. She was panicking.
That made two of us, even if we showed it in different ways.
Fists and hands, arms and legs, it all turned into a blur, bodies moving, switching places, groans and angered growls. The nurse grabbed hold of Fiona from behind the way the other one did with me, and suddenly a loud crunch sent the scene into a pause.
Then the nurse let out a wailing cry.
Blood ran from her nose, now crooked and definitely broken, while Fiona breathed heavily, her expression shifting. “Oh my God…” she said, reality sinking in. It all happened so fast. “I didn’t mean to…do that.”
The guy holding me finally let go to help the other nurse, grabbing some gauze from a drawer and tearing the package open in one swift motion. She howled again when he pressed it to her face, but she didn’t move. The puddle of red at her feet stopped growing.
I walked over to Fiona, pulled her into a hug, her body turning slack before her hands grabbed fistfuls of my shirt.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to her, trying my best to sound convincing. “No need to fight anymore, you’re okay, no one will do anything we don’t consent to.” Those words tasted like lies, bitter and repulsive, but they were all I had to give.
More people flooded into the room, security staff instead of nurses, their uniforms similar to that of the security guy at the gate. Doc Bowie said something to them, an order, but I was too overwhelmed to listen or understand any of it. With quick, trained moves they pulled Fiona and me apart and then out of the room and down a hallway.
The male nurse hurried after us and opened another door through which the security staff pushed us, lights above us flickering on, and then the door slammed shut. A quiet click followed, the door locked, though foolishly I still reached for the knob and tried to turn it. Nothing happened. The room was relatively small; I could take a few steps in either direction, nothing more, no furniture, no other doors or windows.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She looked up at me, her eyes wide and lost, searching mine as though she thought she’d find answers in them. I wished I could give her anything she desired.
“I—” she started, but then the walls…moved. Large screens covered most of them. Wherever I looked there was a screen appearing, and all of them showed part of a white table, a glass of water, and a black chair.
The screens flickered and jumped, like a bad internet connec
tion on YouTube. Fiona flinched and practically threw herself against me, her eyes going wide as she stared at the man now sitting behind the table. A date and time were stamped in the bottom right-hand corner. The same man was on all the screens around us, and it didn’t take long to figure out who he was. I’d never met or even as much as seen Fiona’s father, but I was sure that was who this man was. Their resemblance was uncanny.
“My name is Anthony Jackson,” the man began, his voice a little lighter than I thought it would be. His nose looked a bit crooked, and there were several small scars on his forehead and jaw. Fiona once mentioned that her father used to be a kickboxer, like her, years ago. That explained the marks in the same way that it explained most of Fiona’s scars, each one making my heart hurt just a little when I looked at her. “Living in New York City,” he continued.
The longer he spoke, giving random details without any auditory queues—someone must’ve edited them out—about his life and family, and finally his daughter whom he called Kellie. At that, Fiona gasped, her grip on me tightening, desperate. I hugged her closer, tried to shield her from the screens and what was being said, but there was no way to turn them off or mute the sound. No escape.
Anthony wasn’t just saying all these things for fun, for some documentary or home video. Looking at the date, and the fact that he’d said New York instead of Florida, it had to be the interview that led to him, or rather Fiona’s stepmother, Carla, signing Fiona away for an obscene amount of money to Briola BioTech.
We were supposed to go to an internship at their office in Berlin, only that never happened.
Briola had bought us, implanted us with some kind of capsules that gave us hallucinations—forcing us to literally cut the implants out of each other’s necks to make the visions stop—shipped us off to a deserted island, and sent a killer to eliminate us once we’d served our purpose. Whatever that purpose even was. Then we’d escaped them, got saved by the FBI.