Little Emmett

by Abe Moss

  “I didn’t lie,” Emmett said.

  “I didn’t say you lied. Relax.” She gave him one of her charming, phony grins. “I only said they were similar. But I don’t know that I’ve seen patterns like these, which is what makes me wonder if the recording was damaged somehow…”

  He hoped not. Prayed. Nothing to force them to do it again.

  “My colleagues tell me I have a real knack for deciphering these results, but yours… it’s almost like…” She set the page down. She turned her eyes to the ceiling, thinking privately. When her eyes fell on him, he tensed. “It’s almost as if your little brain knows something, and…” She shook her head, still watching him, a smile of great intrigue. “… and it doesn’t want you to know. Like you’re hiding something from yourself.”

  He wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. He felt the need to defend or explain himself, but he wasn’t sure what needed explaining.

  “I suppose it’s a possible sign of trauma,” she said. “Your mind is trying to suppress something to protect you, because of the trauma involved. Except I’ve seen those patterns before, and this is still different, somehow.” She laughed, and it was such an alien sound that he recoiled in his chair. “I really don’t know what to make of it. Kind of fun, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t think so in the slightest.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll give your fascinating little brain more time to recover. How’s that sound?” She put the folder away. “Is there anything on your mind these last few days you’d like to share with me? Questions? Concerns?”

  There were many things concerning him, but he had already decided he would share none of them with her. Nothing to label him as a worrier.

  Wanting to escape her office as quickly as possible, he answered no.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  At the sound of music, Emmett opened his eyes, heart pumping, at first assuming it was their alarm. But no. It was much too soon for any alarm—he’d barely slept.

  This wasn’t the intercom he heard. A different music entirely…

  …a music unlike anything their world could produce. A music which had unnerved him before—something borne of the dark, strings plucked by the darkness’ fingers, flutes played by its lips, enough to break a full-bodied, cold sweat—but now filled him with an intimate, comforting relief. Recognizing the sound, his heart slowed. He found his breath. He pulled his curtain back and viewed the bright room with curious eyes. Nothing.

  Quietly, he slipped out of bed and crept to the door. With his face beside it, the music was closer, clearer. He smiled as he listened. He stepped back and eyed the door’s high window but it was empty.

  Discreetly, he whispered, “Hello?”

  He waited, hoping.

  “Is that you?” he whispered.

  Now it had found him, the music swelled, circling him like a many-layered lasso, tightening around him. He wished he could grab hold with his delicate hands, reel it in to himself until he reached the curled, unfathomable hands at the other end…

  “Who are you talking to?”

  Emmett startled so badly he shouted. He whirled around. Zachary poked his head out from his cubby, watching groggily. Embarrassed, Emmett wrapped his shame in a hard shell of irritation instead. He moved stiffly back to his own bed, fists balled, head bowed.

  “No one,” he said. Then, muttering, “I wasn’t talking to anyone…”

  He climbed into bed. He flicked his eyes in Zachary’s direction before ripping his curtain shut, and the expression he saw on his face put a crack in his irritation, letting his shame through once more.

  The expression Zachary wore was one of distrust and fear alike.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Emmett and Tobie stood together in line waiting for dinner. Tonight was burgers—tiny things, just a patty and cheese and lettuce and a single tomato—with a helping of pasta salad on the side. Emmett and Tobie agreed: all things considered, at least the food was all right.

  “These are just like what I ate in school,” Tobie remarked. “Weird, rubbery burgers. But they’re kinda good, too…”

  “Come on,” Emmett said. “Zachary’s saving us seats…”

  They moved through the crowd of wandering children until they found him, taking their place beside him.

  “Move over,” Tobie said playfully, sitting next to Emmett. He leaned forward to greet Zachary on Emmett’s opposite side, and paused as he noticed something. “Hey, Zachy boy… you don’t look so good…”

  Zachary frowned. “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” Emmett said. “He’s being stupid.”

  “I’m not being stupid,” Tobie said. “You look… really tired. Even more than you did this morning.”

  Now Tobie mentioned it, Emmett saw it, too. Around Zachary’s eyes were dark circles. His face was especially pale, and his lips paler still.

  Frowning, confused, Zachary shook his head. “I feel okay, I think.”

  “Hmm.” Tobie shrugged, took a bite of his burger.

  “Thanks for saving us seats,” Emmett told him.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Tobie said. “If not for Emmett having the tiniest bladder in the world, we could have gotten in line earlier.”

  “You could have gotten in line,” Emmett said.

  “Nah, it’s a good thing I waited for you. Never know when you might get taken away and we’ll never see you again…”

  “No, you’re just scared of—”

  Emmett paused as he noticed in his peripheral someone standing behind them. Behind Tobie. Another boy stood holding his tray of food. Older, taller. A little chubby. Tobie noticed Emmett turning to see who it was and looked himself. The boy, half-lidded eyes staring blankly ahead, mouth slightly agape, lowered his gaze to meet Tobie’s.

  “This is where I sit,” the boy said.

  Tobie scoffed. “Um… well, I’m sitting here right now.”

  The boy’s open mouth shut for an instant, wrinkling disapprovingly.

  “Move.”

  Tobie looked to Emmett and Zachary and laughed incredulously.

  “There are lots of other places to sit.”

  Emmett noticed the boy’s grip on his tray. His swollen fingers clamped tighter, knuckles whitening. His mouth scrunched smaller. When he spoke again, he shocked them with his abrupt volume.

  “I sit here!” he shouted.

  Those immediately around them stuttered in their talk, a brief hush.

  “It’s okay,” Emmett told Tobie, fearing what he knew would happen. He saw it coming a mile away—the way Tobie’s eyes turned to slits. “We can sit anywhere else. Let’s let him have it…”

  “Oh, I’ll let him have it,” Tobie said.

  Just as Tobie began turning on his seat, the boy grabbed him by the rear of his uniform’s collar and twisted it up in his fist. Tobie coughed as it bunched against his throat.

  “Hey!” Emmett said.

  Tobie reached for the boy’s hands. The boy pulled him against himself. Tobie sputtered. The boy stepped back, dragging Tobie off the bench with him, onto the floor. His feet skidded out from under him. He wheezed, hung by his own weight. Emmett jumped up from the bench, paralyzed at the sight of his helpless friend. The boy moved Tobie forward, lowered him onto his stomach, straddling him. With Tobie underneath him, the boy pulled up on his collar, lifting Tobie’s head backward. Tobie gasped. His tongue stiffened between his parted lips.

  “Stop it!” Emmett screamed.

  In his panic, Emmett’s thoughts evaporated. He grabbed his own food tray, pulled it from the table, scattering its contents across the floor carelessly. Before he registered what he was about to do, he brought the tray back and, as if preparing to throw it, unleashed it in a sharp, sideways arc. It swung, edge-first in the grip of his sweaty, pinching fingertips, threatening to slip away.

  What few children were still capable of emotion screamed as the tray met the boy’s head with a muffled crack. The tray clattered to the floor. The boy sat motionless at first, touch
ed the wound Emmett had opened in him. A ragged, blunt gash. It bled over his fingers. Then he fell sideways from Tobie’s wheezing body onto the ground. His eyes stared distantly under the tables.

  If guilt were a substance, it pumped through Emmett’s veins in equal measure as his adrenaline. He was horrified at what he’d done and also thankful he’d done it. Tobie was safe. He lay breathing raspy on the cafeteria floor.

  The boy who was collapsed beside him, however, was not okay.

  He began to convulse.

  Emmett paled.

  Suddenly a guard appeared, shoving Emmett aside. He stumbled, bumped into one of the other gawking zombies.

  “Oh, Christ,” the guard said. He looked left and right, eyes bulging, eager for the culprit. Without having to ask, several children pointed at Emmett, though most of them hadn’t actually seen much. “You did this?”

  Emmett blathered, “I was just… I just… he was choking my—”

  The guard spun him around by the shoulders and gave a rough shove through the gathering crowd. Emmett paused, tried to turn back to explain himself, but the guard’s hands were on him again, guiding him, pushing him onward. As they went, the guard whistled—a piercing, awful sound—signaling to another guard for help with the boy on the floor they left behind.

  Emmett met eyes with many of the half-dead onlookers, their vacant eyes brightening as they stepped aside for him and the muttering guard at his back. They were headed toward Ward C.

  “I had to!” Emmett said, and winced as the guard gave another hard shove between his shoulder blades. His wobbly feet carried him into the corridor. “He started it! He was hurting my friend!”

  “You should know better,” the guard said.

  “But—”

  “Now you’ve exposed all those sick kids out there to your violence. To a fight. What’s to stop them, now, hmmm? Giving them ideas…”

  At the end of the corridor, a familiar face turned the corner, heading their way. Officer Hollings. His brow furrowed at the sight of them. He recognized Emmett, it was clear.

  “What’s going on?” Hollings asked.

  Emmett stopped, and the guard stopped behind him, hand on his shoulder to keep him in place as though he had plans to go anywhere.

  “Started a fight in the cafeteria,” the guard said.

  “I didn’t!” Emmett cried. “The other boy started it. He was choking my friend! I had—”

  “I only noticed when it was too late,” the guard said. “This one gave the other a good whack over the head. Bleeding all over.”

  “I had to!”

  Officer Hollings regarded them both plainly. His eyes rested on Emmett, so small and incapable under the shadow of the guard at his back. Hollings frowned.

  “Never a reason for violence,” he said. A tinge of sympathy in his eyes. “Everyone learns that lesson one way or another.”

  He nodded to the guard, who returned it with one of his own, and continued past them. Emmett craned his neck to see him go as the guard nudged him forward again. Hollings never looked back.

  “You’ll learn your lesson all right,” the guard said.

  Before long, they were venturing through corridors Emmett wasn’t familiar with. Sometimes the corridors crossed like a large grid, other times they twisted and turned without order. Mazelike. All filled with various doors and windows into rooms he’d likely never see.

  They arrived at one door in particular, with a sign next to it which read: ‘Detainment’.

  The guard knocked three times. When the door opened, a woman greeted them. She wore a lab coat and a mask. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun.

  “Fighting in the cafeteria,” the guard said.

  The woman nodded, and opened the door for the guard to guide Emmett inside. The guard pushed him in, stumbling from the hard floor of the corridor onto the carpeted one in the next room. As soon as he was through, the guard was gone and the door was shut.

  It was a small room, almost bare except for a line of shelving holding various glassed-in mixtures and substances. Across from the entrance was one other door, also shut.

  The woman moved to the shelving. With her back to him, sliding open one of the glass doors holding several tinctures, she said, “Have a seat on the floor for now.”

  Emmett did as he was told. He watched her carefully as she buzzed from one side of the shelves to the other, taking out a variety of mixtures and bringing them to one device in particular. It appeared to be an elaborate funnel, into which she poured the various mixtures. When that was done, she detached a vial from the device beneath the funnel. The vial she held was exactly like the one he had seen before at the police department—when they’d taken his blood.

  “This shot is painless,” the woman said.

  She stooped, gave him a peculiar look as she pressed the tiny needles of the vial into his arm. An itchy pinch. Then a cold sensation, as the refrigerated contents contaminated him.

  “The symptoms, however,” she said, standing and tossing the vial into a small metal chute in the wall, “are anything but.”

  Teary-eyed, he asked, “What’s it do?”

  “Up,” she said. “Follow me.”

  He got to his feet. She led him to the next door. This door had a handle rather than a knob, long and metallic. She pulled down and, with a bit of muscle, pulled it open. There was a sound of air escaping as it did. Then, immediately following—

  “Come now. Quickly.”

  —the distinct sounds of suffering.

  Emmett stayed where he was. He examined the area beyond the door with rising unease.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Through the door was only a simple hallway, short and narrow, fitted with many doors. Eight in all. Four on each side. It was from these doors he heard the suffering. Cries of the wounded. Threadbare agony.

  Impatient, the woman seized Emmett by the hand and pulled him into the hallway, leading him herself before he had much more time to discern the sounds. They moved hastily past three sets of doors, the howling on both sides swelling in response to their presence. Emmett flinched as someone threw themselves upon their door, begging to be helped, to make it end. Involuntarily, he clutched the woman’s hand very tight.

  “Who are they? What’s happening?”

  The woman opened one of the last doors. Emmett stared inside, at the bareness of it, white and nothing but white. A toilet sat in the corner, that was all. He dug his feet into the carpet.

  “In,” the woman said.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said. “I want to—”

  It reached him. The contaminant. It choked the words from his throat. His body grew rigid like a board. The muscles in his back constricted around his spine like coiling springs and he straightened, back arching, neck stiffening, tongue pressed to the roof of his mouth. A full-bodied cramp—as though every part of him, every muscle, was experiencing the likeness of a charley horse. It lifted him onto his toes.

  Quickly, the woman lifted him—like carrying a cardboard cutout—and moved him into the room where she gently placed him on the floor. Inanimate. He rolled onto his back. Though he wasn’t currently capable of realizing, he’d later understand why these rooms were carpeted.

  He lay helpless as the woman retreated, shutting the door as she went. He wanted to cry out, to howl like the others, but couldn’t. He heard a whistling as he lay there, high and rasping. As he focused on the sound, trying not to think about the excruciating cramps, he realized it was him, the scream trapped in the back of his throat.

  The cramps squeezed harder still. His fingers were claws at his sides. Tighter, tighter, tighter. That whistling grew raspier. His skull pounded with blood.

  Then, in a rush of scattering energy, the contractions abruptly bled away and released him into a puddle of shrieking jelly on the floor. The scream trapped in his throat blew out of him like an exploding boiler. Tears sprang from his eyes in coursing streams. He balled himself up on the floor, knees to
his chest, and wept.

  Never again would he step out of line, he decided. He would follow the routine exactly. Live by the chimes. The basics. Be good. Eat your meals. Take your showers. Go to sleep. Be good. He would tell Dr. Marks anything she asked. Anything she wanted to know. If she wanted to put the helmet on him again tomorrow, that would be fine. He wouldn’t complain. He’d be on his best behavior like she asked.

  Reduced to a useless dummy in the center of the room, his mind circled these thoughts helplessly. He thought of his mother, how much he wished to be comforted, to have his back rubbed, to have his head scratched.

  Then the current began pulling him back.

  It was happening again.

  —mommy, mommy, mommy—

  —where are you, please, where are you—

  —help me, help me, please help me—

  “Aaagh!”

  It caught him in its waves a second time, wound him up tighter and tighter, muscles cramping, until he snapped from his fetal ball like a bursting popcorn kernel, spine arched, his body pulled like a bowstring. He felt his muscles wedged from the bone as though by a knife, sharp and searing. Even his lungs fought to draw breath.

  —why did you have to—

  —I’m here because of you, because—

  —nothing is true, all lies—

  —you believe your own lies—

  —we’ll never see each other again, will we—

  In a faraway chamber of his mind, the only place safe from the excruciating spasms, he conjured up his mother’s image and burned with seething resentment. He wouldn’t be here if not for her, he thought. Her delusions brought him to this place. The ideas in her head. Her sick, babbling head. Dr. Marks was right. She was dangerous…

  And still he missed her more than anything else.

  The pain ebbed and released him again. As before, he lay in a messy heap. Even if he truly wished to sit up, he could not. His nerves were burnt. There were no electric signals traveling through his body. No communication. It was all stuck, a bundle of disconnected messages with nowhere to go except bounce around his sizzling skull.

  This was his punishment.