The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

by Anna Ferrara

  “That’s why I’ve been saying, you need to take a Hyperpro at the start of every shift. The only way to power through the day, remember?”

  Yeah. Who could forget? The catchy Hyperpro jingle that had once been everywhere came back in my head on loop.

  “Hyperpro, Hyperpro! The only way to power through the day! Hyperpro, Hyperpro! Makes sleepy, sluggish, lazy you go away!”

  “Mm hmm,” was all the female guard said to that. She inhaled deeply, the way people sometimes did when their muscles were thick with sleep. “I think it’s all the carbs I had for dinner.” She crossed her forearms on the table in front of her, buried her face in them and stopped moving.

  The male guard glanced at her, chuckled and shook his head in a manner that suggested sympathy. “I need the locker room key to get it for you, Yolanda. You didn’t put it back.”

  The female guard did not reply. She didn’t even budge.

  “Yolanda?” The male guard reached over and shook her gently but she didn’t move.

  He pushed her head up to the ceiling and shook her more violently while calling her name repeatedly but she never did open her eyes.

  “Shit!” The male guard reached for the walkie talkie next to his mug and—

  —Paul, together with the gun on my waist, vanished from my side.

  A loud thud sounded up front. When I turned back, I saw the male guard flat on his back on the ground with Paul standing above him. She rammed the black mug she had in her hands—his mug!—down against his head.

  The mug shattered when it hit his forehead and left a reddish bump and a large gash from which blood spewed. The male guard yelped and went limp. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and closed.

  Paul grabbed the female guard’s white mug from the table and readied herself for another high-powered smash.

  “Paul, no!” I jumped out from our hiding place and dashed towards her as quickly as I could—

  —but the white mug hit him before I could get there. It broke apart and drew more blood. The male guard jerked violently then became perfectly still.

  I pushed Paul aside and put my finger under the male guard’s fleshy nostrils. A weak stream of air could be felt. Faint but most certainly present.

  “He’s dead,” I said to Paul right away. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead, I thought, over and over. My heart thumped hard in my chest and I felt my knees wobble violently.

  “We better drug him, just in case,” Paul said. She grabbed the packet of pink powder from under the table and tried to pour its contents into the male guard’s mouth but I snatched the packet away from her at once.

  “Enough! This man’s a Dad. He has a kid waiting at home somewhere—”

  “So? He would shoot you to get himself a pay raise! You can’t trust people on payroll to do the right thing, Lane!” She tried to snatch the packet of pink powder back from me so I quickly emptied it onto the floor.

  “Stop it!” Paul dug her gun out from the back of her pants and pointed it right at my face. “You don’t understand what people are really like. You need to trust me!”

  Trust a person who’s constantly threatening to end my life? I bit my lip and raised both hands in defeat. “I don’t want to die, Paul,” I said softly. “But fact is, we need help. We’re not normal, we’re murderers.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Shut up, we don’t have time for that right now. The chopper’s in your backpack. Use it to get yourself a right hand. It’s the wrist chip that opens the doors so make sure there’s at least an inch of wrist above where you make the cut.”

  I stared at her and shook my head. “I don’t—”

  “Do it, or you will die.”

  Guess what I chose?

  Paul moved really quickly after we got the male guard’s right hand. She brought us up to the sixteenth floor via elevator and we ended up at the very same corridor we once fled.

  Everything was as we had left it; the lights on the metal squares above the handles of the doors were all still red, not green; the corridor smelled just the way I remembered it.

  With the gun pointed at my head, Paul pushed me towards the door closest to the elevators and shoved a ‘remover’ into my hands. “This door’s Cola’s. Remove her tracker, get her out and do the same with the other ten doors to your left. Tell everyone to meet in front of the elevators. Are we clear?”

  I nodded because I knew that was what she wanted to see.

  Paul blinked a few times, gave me a look I didn’t quite understand, then took a nervous breath. “This is how you open the doors,” she said as she tapped Dr Clark’s dismembered wrist onto the metal square on the door.

  The metal square’s red light turned green the moment the wrist touched it—a green I recognised from before.

  Paul opened the door, shoved the male guard’s dismembered hand into mine and pushed me in.

  I expected a small room with black painted walls but what I saw was nothing like that.

  I found myself in a high-tech laboratory of sorts. There was what looked like a laboratory set up on one side of the room—complete with sink and microscope—and a long desk with computers and eight monitors on the wall on the other side. The room smelled surgical, the way my pillow at Wonderdrug always smelled, and was perfectly silent. There were many boxes of latex gloves stacked to the ceiling right beside a door that was slightly further in.

  “She’s the one who can read your past. She can give you the answers you seek.”

  Could she? Really?

  I stepped towards the monitors on the wall and took a good look at the four monitors that were switched on. All of them showed black and white images from cameras mounted on ceilings. One showed the very lab in which I stood, with me in it; another showed a small room with black painted walls and two doors—the room I had expected to see; the third showed an empty bathroom that looked exactly like the bathroom I used to use while living at Wonderdrug; and the fourth showed a ward exactly like the one I remembered living in! It had the same bar table, queen-sized bed, bookshelves, white chairs and all. The only object I didn’t recognise was the person lying in the bed, fast asleep. She looked really small and thin.

  A really short and skinny woman, perhaps?

  I went to the black door next to the boxes of latex gloves and tapped the male guard’s dismembered hand against its red-lit metal square. The blueness, hardness, coldness and fleshiness of the dismembered hand made my stomach churn so I averted my eyes and pushed the handle down without waiting to see if the red light turned green.

  It must have turned green because the door opened without a hitch. I found myself back in the space I recognised—the small room with black painted walls. It even smelled familiar. Like paint.

  I went towards the door at the end and unlocked it with the hand. The red light turned green. Easy.

  I pushed in but froze at once. The woman on the bed was not what I had been expecting to see.

  In the flesh, in colour, it was clear she wasn’t even a woman at all. She was just a child. Seven or eight years of age, maybe? No older, definitely. She was in the same blue gown Paul and I used to wear.

  What did the document in Dr Clark’s laptop say her illness was? Schizophrenia? Was that why we were all on the same floor?

  No, I decided. I was not going to deprive a child of medical treatment. I would have to go back out to the laboratory room and look for a way to get help. I turned and was about to open the door when I heard—

  “Hi.” The voice of a young girl. Right behind me.

  I turned back and saw tiny black eyes, now open, staring at me. The child they belonged to sat up and reached for the pair of black-framed glasses resting on the side table next to her bed.

  When the child put the glasses on, I saw Cola Lam for who she really was—an intelligent-looking Asian child with a bobbed haircut and lots of curiosity in her eyes. She looked like the sort of kid who could wow crowds at Math Olympiads. I hid th
e male guard’s dismembered hand behind my back, for her sake, and struggled to think of a logical way to explain my presence in her ward.

  “Are you trying to set me free?” the child asked before I could think of anything. She glanced at the ‘remover’ in my other hand with a look that suggested she knew what it was.

  I didn’t know what to say. Yes, but no? I was supposed to but no, I don’t think so?

  “Come here,” she said gently, as if she were the adult and I were the child. “Let me look at you.”

  She sounded almost like a doctor, which felt very weird because her manner didn’t match her tiny frame, high-pitched voice or cute facial proportions at all. Yet I felt compelled to go towards her. There was just something about her calm, unfazed demeanour that suggested she might just really have all the answers after all.

  The moment I got to the side of her bed, the child put her hand on mine. Her hand was only about as wide as a tomato but her touch was firm. The dismembered hand I accidentally swung forward didn’t appear to bother her at all.

  She stared into space and suddenly said, “Ah!” As if she realised something. “Okay, now I get it,” she added after some time.

  “Get what?” I asked. My voice came out shaky. I realised I was more afraid of her than she was of me.

  The child swivelled around and lifted her blue gown so that her unclothed back faced me. “Just do it,” she said. “Don’t worry. You’re not depriving me of anything. I want to get the hell out of here too.”

  I blinked hard and blinked again. Then I made myself take a few long, deep breaths—the sort I heard could calm you in times of anxiety.

  “Paul isn’t crazy, Lane. I really can tell you everything you want to know but first, you need to get my tracker out. Hurry, we don’t have much time.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Her manner of speech was completely unlike a child’s. Because her mouth wasn’t visible to me in that moment, I couldn’t decide if she had really spoken those words or if... psychosis was making me hear things.

  “Just do it, Lane!” she said. Just like Paul would have.

  I ran my fingers down her tiny, warm body and did to her what I had once done to Paul. The tiny blood-covered chip came out of her back as easily as Paul’s had done before. Seeing it brought on a sense of déjà vu. I couldn’t help but remember Paul and I holding similar chips in that stairwell I jumped from.

  The child replaced her gown and turned around as if she knew the tracker was out. She hadn’t even twitched. “Somebody did push you,” she told me. “The woman with blonde hair and red lips? That really happened.” The child’s lips moved this time. I saw them move myself.

  I gulped. “Who is that woman? Why did she push me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know the people you do, but I do know you didn’t kill Uncle Tim or your parents. You were fast asleep both times.”

  My heart jumped. “I was?”

  “Yes. You were,” she said with the conviction of a professor confirming a scientific fact. “A blue woman did it. Both times. She even left you a message and a phone number. Said you are to find a way to call her if you ever end up stuck at Wonderdrug.” The child read out the phone number. It was local, a New York number, but not one I recognised.

  “When did she say that?” I had no idea what a ‘blue woman’ meant. A woman who was sad? Or a woman who was physically blue? I had no clue.

  “She sat on your bed and spoke to you before she gassed your parents and injected you with the serum that wiped your memories. She came to check on you the night she killed Uncle Tim too. I think she cares about you.”

  What in the hell? Why would someone who cared murder my relatives? “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. I could probably tell you if we had more time but we don’t.”

  The door that led to the outside suddenly slammed open. Paul barged in with her hand on the handle. “We have to go! The alarm just went off! Come on!”

  Paul propped one of the white armchairs against the door to keep it open then vanished as suddenly as she had come. The child jumped off the bed and ran after Paul as if she knew exactly what was going on. I ran after the child because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t hear any siren but Paul had definitely been in a panic. What did that mean?

  Once we got out to the corridor where the elevators were, I heard the alarm Paul had been shouting about at last. It was deafening and incessant, blaring like sirens I only ever heard in war movies during scenes involving air raids. I stopped following the child and stared because the corridor was now full of women in blue gowns. They all looked as bewildered as I felt. There were only two men amongst them—one old, one young.

  “Dad?” the younger male was saying to the older one. “You’ve been here the whole time?”

  “Dustin? Oh my goodness, Dustin, you’re sick too?”

  “Why didn’t you just tell us you were in a hospital, Dad? All this time we thought you were just being a jerk!”

  “What do you mean? I wrote your mother and you so many emails, none of which either of you replied!”

  “You must have gotten the addresses wrong. We never got them!”

  “Everybody, listen up!” Paul suddenly shouted. She was right in front of the elevators, holding one of them—‘Elevator A’, according to her sketches—open. “Get in! We’re going to make a run for it!”

  She looked... scared. I had never seen Paul scared before so I could tell ‘a run’ definitely hadn’t been part of her plans. Some of the patients dashed past me and went towards her as if they trusted her—the child was one of them—but many others stared at her with that same dazed look I believe I had on as well.

  “Lane! Come on!” I heard Paul say. Her eyes were wide and frantic like a mad person’s when I caught sight of her; her cool and controlled manner completely gone. She was trying to get the patients within the elevator to move further in but her eyes kept turning towards me. “Come on, Lane, move!”

  I didn’t move. I didn’t want to. The chaos of the moment was all too much for me to take. I didn’t know what to expect or what I wanted out of all this. The child’s words had shaken my understanding of reality all over again and I didn’t like how I was feeling. I had enough of confusing contradictions; enough of not knowing, rethinking and running all the time. All I wanted at that point was stability and inner peace—exactly what I had at Wonderdrug before Paul came into my life and ruined everything! I also wanted to drop the disgusting dismembered hand I was still holding on to but, for some reason, couldn’t relax my fingers enough to let go.

  A chime sounded from the other elevator—‘Elevator B’. The number ‘16’ appeared on its indicator and its chrome doors began to open.

  “Lane, hurry! Now!” I heard Paul shout.

  I didn’t move. It was too late, I knew. I’d just be running into the arms of the person or persons coming out of the other elevator. I stood where I was, relieved that the choice had been made by somebody other than Paul for a change.

  Five armed security guards barged out of ‘Elevator B’ the moment the doors opened. Four of them had rifles which they immediately used to shoot down the patients running towards ‘Elevator A’.

  The only one of them without a rifle was also the only one of them without a right hand. He had a blood-soaked jacket wrapped around his stump, blood all over his forehead, pale lips and eyes fixed on the dismembered hand in mine.

  When his eyes climbed upwards and met mine, I saw nothing but hate and fury.

  “Eleven o’clock, P-eight-seven!” He pointed a finger at me with the hand he had. “Get her!”

  The armed security guard closest to him turned his rifle towards me and I felt a sharp, painful sensation in my shoulder immediately after.

  My legs lost strength and I felt myself melting into the ground, along with the other patients around me.

  My vision became a blur, first of blue, then of black.
<
br />   I found myself thinking that Paul had been right about the male guard without a hand. Whether she had been right about everything else, I couldn’t say, but with regards to the nature of the guard without a hand, she had been so right.

  I didn’t understand what people were really like indeed.

  Chapter 24

  Date Unknown

  The next time I opened my eyes, I found myself on the back of a man. His stark white t-shirt smelled unwashed and fresh-out-of-the-store but his head—full of thick, light brown curls—smelled like a mix of male sweat and shit.

  I recognised the growl overhead and the darkness of our surroundings shortly after. Of course. We were back in the stinky underground maze of sewage tunnels. Every vagabond’s favourite mode of transportation.

  What the hell happened? Hadn’t I passed out just feet away from my old ward? Why was I not back at the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre yet?

  The man I was on grunted and pushed me higher up on his back. He turned his head and strained his neck to look at me. “You awake? Everything okay?”

  His finely chiselled profile was familiar—I had seen it at the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre during the chaos along the corridor. The man I was on was one of the two men who had been present. The younger one. Just no longer in that blue gown. He wasn’t ugly and had I been into men, I probably would have found being on his back quite the treat. “I’m not sure,” I said. My voice came out fine.

  A woman I didn’t know, with bangs and straight blonde hair just above her shoulders, ran up to walk alongside us. She was in grey jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt—an outfit eighty percent of women in New York would wear—and had on a pair of black galoshes that came to her knees. She was possibly about my age, or just a little younger, and she smiled at me but all I did in return was stare at her with my mouth wide open.

  The woman I didn’t know looked exactly like my mother. She had the same platinum colour of hair, same rich blue eyes, same large lips, same cleft chin, same high forehead.

  “Hey,” she said to me.