by Shanon Hunt
A dark pool closed over her head, and she submerged.
Hello, ladies. Her mind’s voice sounded different than her physical voice. It had a devilish hiss to it, perhaps like the voice of the serpent who spoke to Eve in the Christian Bible.
The walls between her and the others seemed to dissipate like smoke, and she could see them rising from their beds and desks and coming toward her, gathering around.
It’s time for Eugenesis to pay, she thought.
Yes, it’s time, they answered, nodding.
The fireball inside Layla’s chest threatened to expand again. Perhaps it would grow so big it would explode, burning her to a crisp. Their work is not in the spirit of a better human race.
No.
They lied to us.
Yes.
We have to stop them.
Yes.
Sweat beaded on her forehead as the fireball pulsed and swelled inside her. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist. The corners of her mouth turned up as the idea wriggled free. We’ll burn it.
Yes.
I need your help to get out of here.
They all sat down in a large circle that filled Layla’s mind.
Lucinda’s voice echoed in her head around the vacillating image of Lucinda pointing at the door at the opposite end of the stairwell. That door is another stairwell, but there’s also a hidden door under the stairs that goes into the underground tunnel system. It connects with the research center and the infirmary. Not many people know it exists.
How did you discover it? Layla asked in her serpent voice.
It’s how I arrived. Shae, the sarcastic woman from the end of the hall, sat cross-legged and barefoot with her fingers threaded between her toes.
Shae was knocked out in their world, Lucinda continued, but in our world, she came down that hallway swearing like a drunken sailor.
Shae snickered. Good times.
The fireball spun faster in Layla’s chest as the idea crystallized. She hated to manipulate Isaac after everything she’d done to him. His compassion was such a noble quality. But it was also a weakness, and now she would have to use it against him.
She scanned the beautiful faces of the women who waited silently for her guidance. I’m asking you to make a sacrifice.
We are at your will.
Her physical body was still facing the wall when Isaac sauntered by later. But her mental self—her new, evolved self—stood erect, high above the others, as she told them what they needed to do.
49
October 2022, Mexico
Saving the human race doesn’t come without sacrifice.
Sacrifice was a culturally embedded mindset built from the first moment that a recruit became an inductee and nurtured all through that individual’s purification. The Colony’s vision was bigger than any individual’s, and Layla didn’t know anyone at the Colony who, when asked to make a sacrifice, would refuse. Herself included.
It was a lesson she’d been taught from the first day she could remember. She had sacrificed for more than a year with daily canings, pain-induced meditative states, and inadequate sleep. The stress of induction had made her lose so much weight that she’d been at risk of organ damage. And after rebuilding a strong, physically fit body, she’d sacrificed again to carry a fetus that was supposed to be a pure and evolved new generation of the human race.
And as if all that hadn’t been enough, here she sat, her mind sacrificed to a parasitic monster and her freedom to an even bigger monster, Eugenesis.
Eugenesis was soulless in its abuse of their culture of sacrifice. As an officer of Eugenesis, James was well aware of every sacrifice being made for their cause, and Layla knew how hard he struggled to hide the forms of evildoing buried within their outwardly utopian society.
Like death. She’d been suspicious about the disappearances for years, but she hadn’t asked because she hadn’t wanted to hear the dirty truth.
Like purification. Purification was merely a euphemism for the inculcation of healthy, compliant experimental subjects. A recruit awarded the honor of becoming pure was simply someone who would willingly submit to infusions, transfusions, transplants, and in vitro implantations of genetically modified DNA.
Like the truth. Sometimes the process killed people. Worse, it turned them into salvage, sending them to a junkyard for humans where they were kept around for parts.
Oh yes, Eugenesis would pay for its transgressions. And as was the case with any vendetta, innocent people would have to be sacrificed along the way.
He’s coming. Lucinda, whose cell was closest to the stairwell, could hear Isaac whistling as he approached the door. She moved to the front of her cell and gripped the bars tightly.
Layla and the others did the same. Her eyes couldn’t see them, but her mind could, and her mouth twitched at the wonderment of it. She took a deep breath and braced herself. Thank you for your sacrifice.
And thank you for yours, she heard in return.
The door opened, and Isaac stopped whistling. Before he had a chance to ask what was going on, all fourteen women—everyone except Layla—slammed their faces into the metal bars.
Layla registered their pain. She felt the blood dripping off their chins, soaking their shirts and hair. She heard the crunch of their noses and cheekbones. Violent, unbearable surges racked her body. She screamed in agony and buried her head in her trembling hands.
Layla, be strong. Lucinda’s voice gurgled.
Layla’s mind’s eye shifted to Lucinda, who pulled back from the bars and flung her head forward again, crushing her forehead, shattering her teeth.
Layla sputtered and coughed. Nerve pain from Lucinda’s cracked teeth shot through her like electricity. She whimpered and fell to her knees.
Sacrifice.
It was impossible, she knew, but her face was swelling with fluid from the violent blows. She tasted blood filling her mouth and throat.
“Isaac!” she cried out.
Somewhere in the distance, she heard Isaac screaming, “Help, please! Someone, help!”
“Raise the bars. Isaac, you have to raise the bars!” She gagged and coughed, expecting to see blood spew from her mouth, but none did.
The security alarm began to shriek. She was running out of time.
“Isaac, raise the bars or they’ll die. You’re killing them.”
She felt a crack in her neck, and fireworks exploded in her head. At the end of the corridor, her mind saw Shae collapse in a heap.
“Please please please please please…” Layla was sobbing now.
Even in the cacophony of wailing and shouts, she heard the click. The bars retracted smoothly into the ceiling.
The self-induced pummeling ceased, and Layla’s pain slowed to a throb. She opened her eyes as a handful of women, her sisters in their world, swarmed from their cells toward Isaac.
Isaac pulled his dart gun and clenched it in both hands, swinging it wildly around him.
Layla grabbed her hair with her fists and screamed into her brain. No! He is not the target. The stairwell.
The bloody, disfigured women staggered past her like zombies, scrambling right by Isaac to the door he’d come through.
The sun! Oh, my god, there’s sunshine, Layla heard as the corridor emptied.
She turned the opposite way, floating on a sea of adrenaline to the door at the other end of the hall. The door to the tunnel system—another secret the Colony had done its best to keep from her. She tried the handle. Locked. She squinted through her sweat-soaked hair to see the numbers on the keypad.
“Layla, stop or I’ll shoot.”
She looked calmly over one shoulder. Isaac was barely a few feet behind her, his gun aimed between her shoulder blades.
She turned back to the keypad. “Don’t. Don’t add one more to this house of horrors. Don’t make me one of them.”
The pinch between her shoulders told her he hadn’t lowered the gun, but she knew he wouldn’t shoot. Anyone else in the Colony would have—Mia, Mich
ael, Harmony. Even James. They would’ve flattened her with a tranquilizer dart or even killed her outright, fetus and all, because she wasn’t conforming to the infallible laws of the Colony. A sacrifice.
But not Isaac. Isaac would never pull the trigger.
She keyed in James’s PIN, flung the door open, and without looking back at Isaac, stumbled into the cool, dark tunnel.
50
October 2022, Mexico
The underground tunnel was dimly lit by dirt-caked emergency lighting. Layla lugged her mammoth of a body over the concrete floor, but she felt as though she were walking through deep sand. Every step propelled her forward, but the end of the tunnel seemed to be moving away from her at the same pace. Her head throbbed. Her muscles were weak, partly from the psychic trauma of fourteen women’s self-destruction, but also from not eating for two days. Now she wanted to kick herself for her stupidity.
She glanced behind herself to make sure she was alone, even though she was certain she would’ve heard the door open, and continued to swing her heavy tree-trunk legs forward, counting the steps.
Thirty-four. Thirty-five. Thirty-six.
She took eighty-three steps before the tunnel widened and she passed a lineup of eight gurneys against the wall. Eight? How much transport back and forth from salvage was necessary?
She paused to listen for a search party behind her—still quiet—and slipped through the first door she came upon, pulling it gently closed behind her. Her breath hitched the moment it clicked shut, echoing throughout the enormous space in which she now stood.
The ward had to be twice the size of her lecture hall for recruits. Hundreds of beds lined the space, one after another. On every bed lay a body attached to a wall panel by a thick spinal IV tube, with thinner IVs in both arms. Despite the glare of the fluorescent lights, not one patient in the room appeared to be awake—or even alive. It was a marionette doll graveyard.
Layla’s instincts told her to flee, to go back into the tunnel and find the staircase back to the main floor. But her body, light as a feather now, floated down the aisle between beds. The sleeping faces were obscured by the tape holding their endotracheal tubes in place. Automatic ventilators next to each patient mechanically breathed life into the otherwise lifeless bodies.
Whoosh. Thump, thump. Whoosh. Thump, thump.
They were all in medically induced comas; they must be receiving a genetic treatment, something that required long-term infusion. She’d seen patients who’d been through similar treatment in the past, but only a handful, a cohort of four or six. Never had she seen a roomful of hundreds.
Double doors beckoned on the far side of the ward. She accelerated that direction, but her gaze landed on a woman with a dark black eye.
Oh god. Vanessa Sykes.
She unhooked the clipboard from the foot of her bed: Vanessa S. Treatment: EGNX 44–9092. Praefuro, Choleric.
She gasped and dropped the clipboard. It crashed to the floor, echoing through the cavernous room. But she couldn’t run or hide because she was immobilized by the horror of her revelation.
It was a factory. They were making—oh, god. They were making a colony of ragers.
A wave of pain shot from her lower back through her abdomen and groin with such force that she doubled over. She lowered herself to her hands and knees to take the pressure off her back, breathing deeply as she’d been taught by Dr. Farid. Release the pain. She closed her eyes and took another deep breath. Release the pain.
A crash from the other side of the room made her tense up again, and her abdomen contracted so violently she nearly screamed. Her hand flew to her mouth to keep from crying out.
Another slam—maybe a cart being shoved against a bed or wall.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” someone bellowed.
James.
Layla didn’t move.
Hasty footsteps. “Sir, my men have surrounded the infirmary and the research building. She won’t get far. We’ll have her in custody in a matter of minutes.”
“You don’t have minutes,” James barked. “You have seconds. Seconds! Or you’ll be fired so fucking fast your head will spin.” His heels clacked loudly as he moved away.
Layla exhaled as quietly as she could.
James stopped dead in his tracks.
She could only see him from the knees down, through the legs of the gurney she was huddled behind.
He turned in a complete circle. “Layla?”
Oh god.
She scrunched her entire face and screamed in her head. Help me!
A second later, she heard rustling from the far side of the room, followed by a dreadful gurgling.
James’s feet moved toward the muffled choke. “It’s a seizure. Call medical. Hurry.”
In the other corner, another body seized. This one she could see from her position. The patient jerked several times and then lay still.
And then another.
“What the fuck is happening?” The clip-clop of James’s shoes traveled down the aisle.
The noise grew, as more and more patients went into distress. The double doors flew open, and a physician ran into the room, trailed by several nurses.
Still on her hands and knees, Layla crawled along the outer aisle, away from the noise and the knot of medical and security staff. She reached the double doors and glanced over her shoulder. James had flattened himself over a patient as the doctor tapped liquid from a needle.
Layla pushed up to her feet and slipped out the doors.
Thank you, she pushed into her mind. But no one answered back.
Outside in the infirmary corridor, three more nurses ran right past her, their hands filled with needles. She had to keep moving. Her breathing was shallow now, and she shuffled, hunched over with her hands wrapped under her belly as if to prevent the inevitable—now imminent, gauging by the intensity and frequency of her contractions—parturition.
Despite her physical condition, her mind was clear. Laser-focused.
We’ll burn it.
Hospitals were filled with flammable materials. There were closet shelves stacked with hand sanitizer. Oxygen tanks were abundant. She just needed a source of ignition: a match, a space heater—ah, the kitchen. A fire in the kitchen would create a distraction, and from there, she could help it spread.
Would lives be sacrificed? Yes. Because saving the human race doesn’t come without sacrifice.
She stepped into an elevator and selected the second floor. If this facility was similar to those on her campus, that’s where she’d find the pedestrian walkway to the cafeteria.
The elevator dinged, and she took one step out before she saw two security guards hustling toward her.
“Stop!” yelled one, as the other grabbed his radio.
She eased back onto the elevator and tapped the fourth floor. Damn it. She’d have to move quickly. She groaned and bent over, grabbing the handrail, as another contraction gripped her. She wasn’t ready, but the elevator opened anyway onto a floor of patient rooms, and she hobbled down the corridor. A door slammed somewhere down the hallway ahead. She stumbled into the nearest patient room and gently nudged the door closed.
She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until the footsteps passed by. She exhaled with a pfft. She was about to slip back into the hallway when she heard a weak voice from behind her.
“Layla? Holy cow, you’re as big as a … well, a cow.”
51
March 2024, Mexico
Nick slowly raised his head off his arms, not certain that the human figure before him was really there. His eyes were bleary, and his head ached from dehydration and hunger. He clutched the table with a weak grip and pulled himself to a standing position.
“Mr. Beaumont, Dr. Meyers would like to see you now.”
“I’d like some water and a bathroom.” Nick’s voice was as weak and tired as the rest of him. His tongue felt like leather.
“Of course, sir. Right this way.”
After
three bottles of water and a supervised piss, he was transported to a cottage that looked more like an adobe casita guest house than an office. A sign out front read Dr. Jeannette Meyers, MD, PsyD. Welcome.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Neither the driver of the van nor the security escort uttered an answer—not that he expected one. No one had said a word to him since they’d left the security building.
He followed the guard up the decorative pathway to the front door, where they were met by a tall woman with a short haircut too sassy for her age. She offered a professional smile as he stepped over the threshold, but she didn’t move in for a handshake or bother to introduce herself.
She glanced at the guard’s name badge. “Mr. Cooke, thank you for accompanying Mr. Beaumont, but I’ll release you of your duty.”
“Ma’am, I was instructed to keep Mr. Beaumont in my custody.”
“I do understand. I’m grateful for your service. But I insist.” The smile remained plastered on her face even as the guard hesitated. It only took a moment before he offered a slight nod and backed obediently out the front door.
So this was someone with some authority. Someone who could be an advocate, perhaps, if he played his cards right. But right now, exhausted and hungry, he wasn’t sure he could do that.
The tidy room wasn’t furnished in the contemporary style of the rest of the Colony, whose decorator seemed to really like white and gray. This place was almost rustic, with soft leather sofas, plush carpeting that looked a lot like something from a seventies TV show, and soft lighting that gave the room a warm, relaxed ambiance. A teapot whistled from a small stove in the corner, catching Nick’s attention, and his eyes landed on a large framed quote: Almost anything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes.–Anne Lamott
Or, say, twenty-six hours and twenty-three minutes.
He didn’t move from his position in the doorway as she strode gracefully to the stove and lifted the pot. “I’ve always been a big fan of tea. A few years ago, a colleague gave me a book on the history of tea. I imagine it was meant to be a joke, but I read it cover to cover. Did you know that it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that tearooms became popular, finally giving women a place to gather outside the house without a male escort? I can only imagine what some of those early conversations were like.”