by Keith Thomas
STONYBROOK ASSISTED-LIVING FACILITY, MEMORY UNIT
BRAIDWOOD, ILLINOIS
“MOM, WE’VE GOT to go.”
“Why now?” Lucy asked, reaching for Ashanique. “We’re talking.”
“Mom—”
The shriek of alarms answered.
And as sound obliterated the normal hum of the memory unit, the residents began to panic. Nursing staff and medical assistants ran to calm them and organize them for evacuation. An old man with a prosthetic leg stumbled over a stool. A woman in a wheelchair held her hands over her ears and screamed.
The door to the memory unit opened and Rade stepped inside.
Matilda stood frozen.
Again, she saw Clark’s throat being slashed.
Rade’s murderous wink replayed in slow motion.
Ashanique grabbed Matilda’s hand tight. The sensation snapped Matilda from her paralysis and she turned and took Lucy’s arm. She and Ashanique ran with Lucy toward the back of the unit, down a long, twisting hallway lined by framed photos. Lucy cried and muttered. She told Matilda that her arms were being hurt, that she was being bruised. Matilda wanted to cry, to apologize, but if she said even one word she knew it would slow them down. Rade was likely only yards behind them.
If you don’t run, you’ll all die.
As they passed her bedroom, Lucy wrenched free of Matilda’s grip and ducked inside. She slammed the door behind her and quickly locked it.
“Don’t come in!” Lucy shouted from the other side. “I don’t know who you are but I don’t want you to come in!”
“Mom! It’s me!”
Matilda banged on the door with her fists. Even as her brain was going into paroxysms of anxiety, she clearly recalled when Lucy still lived at home and would accidentally lock herself in the bathroom. She’d cry, trying to get herself out. Matilda would calmly explain to her how to open the door. It never worked. Matilda would always have to use a knife to pick the lock and open the door. She’d find Lucy calmly sitting on the toilet, smiling like a child.
“Next time, sweetie,” Lucy would say, “please knock before you come in.”
But this time, Matilda knew she wouldn’t get the door open. And she knew her mother couldn’t be calmed on the other side.
“Come on!” Ashanique pulled at Matilda. “Please!”
“Mom!”
Matilda slammed her body hard enough against he door that the wood cracked and splintered. She did it again. And again.
Still, the hinges held.
• • •
Rade moved slower than he would have liked.
It’d been a while since he was last shot.
Each step he took, the broken bones ground together and tiny slivers stuck deeper into his left lung. He could count at least seventy-eight similar injuries over his lifetimes. In one of his bodies, he’d had his right hand severed by an enraged husband. In another, an arrow gouged out his left eye. When he was born again the next time, the injuries had healed; the flesh was intact. Rade tried not to think of the animal encounters—so many maulings, so many bears.
Rade rounded the corner in time to see Ashanique point the Colt at him.
She fired, the shot went wide, but he didn’t flinch.
“I won’t hurt you,” Rade said, doubting she could hear him over the screech of the alarms and the wailing of confused residents and terrified staff.
• • •
Ashanique fired again just before Matilda dragged her clear of the hall.
A framed painting of a bucolic farm shattered just over Rade’s head.
“Come on!”
Matilda took Ashanique’s hand and together they ran toward the rear doors of the memory unit, the ones that led outside to the courtyard. But when they reached it, the door was locked. They were trapped. Sirens deafening, a strobe light flashed wickedly above their heads.
“We have to get to the museum!”
Ashanique struggled with the door, desperate.
“How many rounds do you have left?” Matilda shouted over the noise.
“I don’t know,” Ashanique said. “Maybe five?”
Matilda said, “Use them all.”
Rade appeared at the end of the hall. The reflective strips on the sides of his pants flashed in the strobe light. Despite his injury, he walked quickly.
Ashanique fired the Colt, rocking her back into Matilda.
A light fixture exploded over Rade’s head.
“I’m going to cut you apart,” he said, step quickening. “Just like your mother.”
Ashanique began to cry as Matilda pushed hard against the door with her hip. She was able to glimpse daylight through a crack at the bottom of the door and tried to widen it with her foot. Kicking at it, the door seemed to loosen in its frame. Though it was unlikely that she’d get it open, Matilda had to believe she could.
Come on, Maddie. Push this fucking thing!
Behind Matilda, the Colt shook in Ashanique’s hand as, now only fifty feet away, Rade raised his gun, his grip strong, his hand steady.
“Put the gun down, girl,” he said.
“Please,” Ashanique begged through tears. “Please . . .”
There was a sudden clang of metal before the door moved and Matilda stumbled forward into the wan daylight. Pulling the door open, Kojo stepped inside, 9mm in hand. He moved in front of Ashanique and fired five rounds in quick succession at Rade. Rade, in turn, fired back as he wove and dodged.
“Hurry!” Kojo shouted back to Matilda.
But she was already outside with the girl, running to Kojo’s idling car.
Two feet from the vehicle, a sobbing Ashanique faltered. Matilda caught her and helped her into the back seat. As soon as Ashanique was lying down, she began to seize.
“It’ll pass.” Matilda climbed in and held her. “It’ll pass. . . .”
As she gritted her teeth, Ashanique said, “I don’t want it to.”
“What?”
“These memories . . . They . . . They . . .”
Ashanique passed out seconds before Kojo barreled out of the building and climbed into the driver’s seat, slamming and locking the door.
“Hang tight.”
Kojo slammed his foot on the gas pedal.
The car lurched forward, nearly throwing Matilda to the floor.
“That asshole must’ve been hopped up on something,” Kojo said, looking in the rearview to see if Rade had emerged from Stonybrook after them. “I hit him. No doubt about it. Didn’t seem to slow him down any, though. I should go back in, make sure he doesn’t kill—”
“We have to get her out of here,” Matilda said, holding the girl.
Ashanique continued to seize in Matilda’s arms.
Glancing over his shoulder, Kojo asked if Ashanique was going to be okay. “Her doctor said she has seizures,” he said. “We need to get to a hospital, right?”
“No hospitals,” Matilda said. “We can’t trust anyone.”
“Ashanique doesn’t look okay. She needs help.”
“She has help. Please, just get us downtown.”
As Kojo radioed in the shooting, he pushed the car down a suburban street as fast as it would go, fishtailing around corners.
In the back seat, Matilda pulled Ashanique closer.
The girl’s convulsions slowed, their violence diminished, but still her eyes moved in frantic arcs under her eyelids.
Matilda wondered what new nightmare she was seeing.
50
7:28 A.M.
OCTOBER 15, 1979
THREE SAINTS BAY
KODIAK ISLAND, ALASKA
JANELLE IS ELEVEN and she follows her mother through deep snow.
The sky is translucent, the no-color of water. But the sun is nowhere to be seen. Janelle assumes it’s hidden behind the towering fir trees that they’re walking between, but every time she looks, she can’t see it. They are both wearing snowsuits; the crunch of their boots is the only constant sound. They’ve been walking for nea
rly twenty minutes.
A crow croaks somewhere closer to the mountains, and Janelle is glad to hear it. Dr. Song had explained to her that they’re some of the smartest creatures besides people, dolphins, and apes. He’d pointed up at a tree that was filled with crows—a murder cawing in the dusk—and told her that they were social, just like people. Crows can remember faces and voices. They’re always watching because they’re infinitely curious.
Janelle and her mother come to the edge of a rocky escarpment, and her mother stops.
Below them, the waves crash against black, jagged rocks that look like giants’ teeth. Janelle once called them the Nephilim’s Molars. The first time she saw them she wondered how many ships had been chewed up there. Surely there were just heaps of old shipwrecks under the water. Janelle imagined scuba diving down there and picking through the wreckage. She’d find cannons and crown jewels, just like the explorers in the pages of National Geographic did.
Her mother kisses her, bringing her out of her daydream.
“None of this is going to make sense,” she says. “But if you survive what happens next, then you will be stronger than I ever was. Don’t let them break you, okay? Promise me you won’t let them break you.”
Janelle has no idea why her mother has taken her out into the snow.
She doesn’t understand what her mother is saying.
Truly, none of it makes sense.
• • •
Dr. Theriault is exhausted.
She’s been sick to her stomach for five weeks straight. She hasn’t slept in three days and she’s been seeing things—not people or imaginary beings but distortions, wavy lines and shifting ripples of light. She knows the problems are in her visual cortex; lack of sleep and never-ending stress will do that. The visions are warning signs. It’s her brain’s way of putting the brakes on thinking, the brain’s way of protecting itself.
And Dr. Theriault knows it’ll only get worse. At this point, there is no way to stop it. Every passing minute, her body fights to pull her back into the lanes of sanity.
Not now, though.
Standing two hundred feet above the raging ocean, the hallucinations have stopped. Maybe it’s the fresh air, but her stomach is no longer trying to turn itself inside out. Her mind is clear. Her daughter will be just fine. She is strong enough.
With that last certainty, she runs and jumps.
She expects gravity to kick in quickly. Throw 142 pounds over the edge of a cliff and it will fall fast. But there is a fraction of a second where Dr. Theriault feels weightless. Like maybe she will blow out across the sea.
The sensation doesn’t last. It’s a trick, another of her mind’s contortions. She plummets too fast to even cry out. She doesn’t hit the water. Her body shatters against the rocks before it is caught up in the churning darkness.
A single thought burns before her soul powers down:
Coral. We are coral.
• • •
For Janelle, it happens before she can even process it.
Her mother is there and then she is not.
Janelle steps to the edge of the escarpment and looks down into the ocean. There is no sign of her mother. Janelle knows that they won’t recover her body. Her mother did exist, she is certain of it, but outside of whatever few pictures remain, there is no evidence now.
Janelle stands there, staring, and the snow starts to fall.
She is still there when the snow stops and the sun cuts through the clouds. It illuminates the faces of the men, soldiers from the base, who crash through the forest and sweep Janelle up. One of them carries her like he’d carry a newborn. He says something about hypothermia, about how her lips are blue. Janelle tries to imagine what that looks like. Mostly she pictures the women with funky makeup she saw in a fashion magazine once. She tries to laugh but no sound exits her mouth.
Back at the base, Dr. Song wraps her in warm blankets and plies her with hot tea. It’s sweetened with a ton of honey, something her mother would never do. She’d only add milk and tell Janelle that was enough. Janelle doesn’t want to think about outside—about the ocean and the molars that ground up her mother. She wants to be warm and sip tea. For the first time in a very long time, Janelle honestly thinks that people like her. Why else would they do all this?
That’s when it hits her: the other children, the damaged ones behind the numbered doors, don’t ever feel this. Even though her mom and the other scientists explained it to her, saying that those children needed help, that they were sick, she knows that sick, damaged children need comfort too. Suddenly the tea she’s sipping isn’t sweet. The warm blankets feel like wet sheets.
She kicks them off and puts the tea down.
The numbered doors don’t have windows, the experimental subjects can’t see her, but Janelle feels terrible being in front of them like this. Carrying on like she can’t help herself, like she doesn’t have free will. Though she came to the facility a visitor, she’s become a patient, just like them. And her mom must have known. Janelle realizes that the stuff her mother was saying near the cliff—about being strong, about not breaking—that was in preparation for this moment. Janelle realizes that she needs to be strong, not just to survive this place but to ensure that what happens here never happens again. Janelle also knows that the comfort, the kindness, won’t last.
She will be next.
Sometimes the universe makes everlasting decisions in the blindingly brief segments of time. In less than a fraction of a fraction of a second, whole stars can evaporate and massive black holes can come into existence. So it is with Janelle, in between heartbeats she becomes the fighter she knows she’ll need to be.
Janelle doesn’t have to wait long. She sleeps terribly that night, her dreams clotted with visions of her mother floating and falling, floating and falling, in a terrifying loop. And she wakes frequently as the scientists fight just around the corner. They’re arguing about where to go next. About how everything might be lost because Dr. Theriault, “the damned bitch,” took the solution with her.
Without that, they may as well start from scratch with a new method.
Though Janelle only hears bits and pieces, it is enough to convince her unconscious mind that she needs to leave. When they come for her, soldiers dragging her out of her sleeping bag at two in the morning, she is ready for them. She fights, her nails raking Morton’s face. He howls and hits her hard in the stomach. Stuck gasping, she is dragged on her back down the hallway to the machine.
Morton presses an old napkin from his pocket up against the angry scratches on his face. He flicks Janelle off while two soldiers hold her down and Dr. Tamiko Kadrey injects her with a stinging liquid that burns as it runs into her veins. Seconds later, Janelle goes woozy. Her brains turn to wool, and her body evaporates around her.
Dr. Dorothy Sykes materializes.
She stands over Janelle, hands clasped before her like she’s going to ask a favor. Which is silly. She’s in control here. “You know what we do here,” Dorothy says. “You know how important our work is. I need you to help us, Janelle. You can be a part of what your mother was trying to accomplish. You don’t want to see all of her hard work, the work she lived for, go to waste, right?”
Janelle feels herself nod.
“This is a waste of time,” Tamiko says. “We can pull the information.”
“Pull it how?” Dorothy barks. Her voice softens as she addresses Janelle again.
“Good. That’s excellent. Your mother, sad to say, left some unfinished business. She was working so hard; maybe she just forgot to let us know how to continue her work? We need some numbers, very, very important numbers. I need you to think back to every conversation you had with her, every conversation you overheard, every note you might have seen, every paper of hers you might have colored on the back of. You’re a smart girl, very clever, do you think you can go back through all those memories?”
“Yes,” Janelle says. It comes out as “Yesh.”
“Good.
Good.”
Dorothy kneels down beside Janelle and strokes her hair. Dorothy’s hands are too cold; they feel like icicles scraping across her scalp. “I need you to search your memory for numbers and letters, a formula like in chemistry, and it’s associated with a complicated series of words that go in short palindromic repeats. Do you understand?”
“Yes. But I don’t . . .”
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t have any memory of anything like that.”
Tamiko stomps over. “This is absurd. She won’t remember this way!”
“What if she’s not one of them?” Dorothy asks Tamiko. “What then?”
Tamiko says, “We make her one.”
Dorothy glances over Janelle, at the scientists on the other side of the room. They all look at one another, uncertain, before they nod.
Tamiko looks closely at Janelle and says, “She’s healthy enough that we can increase the wavelength without doing much damage to the neurons. We give her an extended exposure and we do it until we see the activity. Truth is, the mechanics of activation in the Null Cohort is unclear. Could be it’s not a mutation, could be it’s just something natural that’s been reactivated, atavism, in a way. We all carry the DNA to have tails but it’s not activated. I honestly think we might be seeing some deeper process with the Null—some underlying memory system that most humans have either lost or, possibly, sublimated. If I’m right and we can pinpoint the source of this archaic memory network, then we can not only reactivate it but also alter how it functions. This might not be unique, with enough prodding, so to speak, we might be able to make anyone Null.”
Dorothy doesn’t need to think it over.
“Get her ready.”
Fifteen minutes later, Janelle’s head is shaved and she’s in one of the jumpsuits that all the experimental subjects wear. She’s one of them now. As they wheel her to the LINAC machine, she sees two of the soldiers spray-painting the number 51 on an empty cell door. Her new home. Her head is still as light as helium, her body still stretched out and rubbery as chewing gum.
In position beneath the machine, Janelle closes her eyes.
Dorothy gives the signal, and the LINAC is turned on.