Dr. Felice Bennett decided to take Danny’s blood instead of leaving it to one of the technicians drawing samples from the others. As she filled each capsule, Dr. Bennett’s face grew rigid and noticeably somber. Danny looked up at the doctor, immediately sizing her up as a woman, telling himself that he probably wouldn’t give her a tumble. She was older than his maximum requirement—maybe thirty-four, thirty-five—that age for women when they’ve figured out a few things, none of them good when it came to making a play. Still, she was pretty, especially when that curly wisp of hair fell across her forehead, but it was lost when her face seized up in that official, professional mask she put on each time she spoke to him.
“Leave me a few drops, Doc,” Danny said.
Danny noticed Felice’s stoic face not registering the slightest reaction.
“Married?”
Felice gave Danny a halting look, then glanced over at Dr. Sarkis, supervising director of the Premium Sentencing program, observing a technician drawing blood from Kyle Thompson, and let escape a soft laugh.
“There it is,” Danny said, “I knew you had it in you. What’s your name?”
“Dr. Bennett.”
“Got a first name?”
Felice’s face became rigid again. “We’re not in a bar, Mr. Fierro. Anyway, we’re almost finished.” She hadn’t felt nervous around Danny. Even though he was up for murder, Felice had read in his dossier that he never fired once. For all she could make out, he was just some cheap penny-ante hood who played it too far one night.
“Don’t be like that. It’s just that I haven’t talked to a girl in so long.”
Felice capped the last sample and withdrew the syringe. She made her voice sound slightly irritated. “And I haven’t been called a girl in so long.”
“My girl—her name’s Sonya—she wrote me back in the joint and told me goodbye.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, that hit me pretty hard. But she doesn’t know I’m getting out of here. And then, we can start over again.”
Felice looked down. “You’ll have a chance to speak to a psychiatrist when you go through the readjustment stage. I want you to talk to him about it. And see what he says.”
“You know, some chicks they like older guys—a little gray around the temples—reminds them of daddy,” he chuckled.
“I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. Fierro.”
“Danny.”
Felice stood up to leave. “I wouldn’t know about that, Danny. Goodbye.”
“See ya, Doc.”
Dr. Bennett stopped. “It’s Felice, by the way,” she said.
Then she turned on her heel abruptly, walking away as a guard stepped forward to take Danny back to his cell.
Fourteen months earlier, Dr. Rhys Sarkis thought he was peering over the edge at calamitous failure. He took a slow, deliberate look at one blood sample and then the other. His mouth grimaced his dissatisfaction as his young assistant, Dr. Jon Billings, waited in silence.
“What’s wrong?” Sarkis muttered angrily to himself.
“Shall I have Haller take the subject back to his cell?”
“No,” Sarkis said with an irritated twist in his voice. “Give me a minute.”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to finish the test in time, Doctor.”
Now Sarkis’ mounting frustration expressed itself. “Give…me…one minute,” he hissed.
Billings immediately stepped back and pressed his lips together.
Sarkis looked at the subject: a pale, sickly-looking young man in his late twenties with a shock of dirty brown hair, strapped down and sedated in a seated position inside a clear glass pod about the size of a single-pilot cockpit. The semi-conscious young man made a few guttural sounds. He would open his eyes in a moment, Sarkis thought, panic slowly seeping into his focused thoughts. Then: “Give him 3-B.”
Billings glanced back at Sarkis, his eyes incredulous as if he had heard the doctor tell an ill-timed joke. “He’s already got the 2-B.”
“Give him the 3-B”
“It’ll kill him.”
“I think I know what the subject can withstand. The second injection doesn’t double the dosage, it concentrates the serum to its maximum potency. Give it to him.”
Billings apprehensively leaned into the pod. Swabbing the entry point hurriedly, he injected the serum from the second syringe into the large artery in the young man’s neck. Billings looked back at Sarkis with somber disapproval.
“Now step back,” Sarkis barked. “Quickly! We’re losing time—”
Billings put on his viewing goggles and looked on as Sarkis activated the pod’s interior lamps. A blast of searing white incandescence enveloped the young man’s strapped down frame. Finger twitches, facial muscle spasms, hair actually rising like tendrils from the scalp—then the screams, as if the subject were being immolated from the inside out.
“Dr. Sarkis!”
Three interminable seconds passed until the subject’s chest expanded out like a cruelly inflated balloon. And then: the light ceased, the body collapsed into itself, looking soft and boneless.
Dr. Sarkis and the assistant slowly approached the pod, opened it and carefully reviewed the young man’s transformed body.
“Dr. Billings, look at what you tried to talk me out of,” Sarkis said, smiling, his hands almost shaking with excitement.
At ten o’clock in the morning, three days after Danny had supplied blood samples, there came a sharp knock on his cell door, followed by his departure with a three man armed escort to a room with no number, two levels down. He had been denied any food for the previous twelve hours and had been given a solution to help clear his system. Also, he had been encouraged to drink as much water as he could stand, for the process he was about to go through had a dehydrating side-effect.
When he was led into the large numberless room, Danny saw another prisoner sitting in a comfortable looking chair with two guards facing him. He looked about thirty-five years old, twenty pounds overweight with thinning hair and soft pink skin. Next to him was another chair Danny presumed was designated for his use. The waiting area was wide open and spacious and the two chairs constituted the only furniture placed there. There was a double door at the far end with a light above it which currently was not on.
Danny took the empty seat next to the other prisoner. They both turned and smiled at one another, like two strangers seated side by side in the front seat of a roller coaster which was about to lurch forward.
“Sam Glass,” the other man said.
“Danny. Danny Fierro.”
“After you,” Glass said.
“No, please. After you,” Danny chimed back.
For a brief moment, the cheerful banter felt odd to Danny. He was no murderer and for all he knew, this guy Glass could have chopped his wife into pieces and served her up in a simmering stew. But Glass seemed to be trying his best at cordiality, and anyway the five guys standing around them with guns would make sure Glass didn’t go ape-shit on him.
“Five guards. Like we’re going somewhere,” Glass laughed nervously.
“You must have one bad-ass reputation.”
“Me? I killed a guy, sure, but it was a stupid bar fight. I don’t even remember what happened I was so drunk. How about you?”
“A cop got killed by the guy I was with.”
“Hot head?”
“Yeah. He’s dead and I get to look at the cop’s widow in court.”
“That’s tough,” Glass said, shaking his head. “So what do you think is going to happen to us?”
“Just what they said, I guess.”
“They taking twenty-five years from you?” Glass asked.
“Thirty.”
“Jesus,” Glass shook his head in sympathy. “Sorry, brother.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“You hear outside, they’re all calling this thing Bio-Justice,” Glass laughed.
“Catchy.”
“I hope I can still get it up a
fterwards.”
“I hope I can stand up afterwards.”
Glass bust out laughing, loud and easy. He swung his hand around and high-fived Danny.
“Well,” Glass waxed philosophically, “better this than spending twenty-five years getting bent over and taking meat enemas.”
“Yeah, I guess if you put it that way—”
The double doors opened suddenly and Dr. Sarkis and two male assistants walked up to Glass.
“Ready, Mr. Glass?” Sarkis asked.
Glass winked at Danny. “Uh, I think this gentleman would like to go ahead of me. I told him it was OK with me.”
Danny smiled, but Sarkis seemed unamused. “Are you ready, Mr. Glass?” he repeated.
Glass rose to his feet. “Let’s dance, Doctor.”
Danny watched as Sarkis led Glass through the double doors followed by the two assistants. Inside the processing room, Danny could see two more armed guards ready to discourage any misguided resistance.
With the doors closed, Danny could not hear what was going on in the next room. He was sure Glass was good for some last minute negotiating. Then again, he might hear the sudden eruption of frantic scuffling when panic overtook Glass. Danny narrowed his eyes and strained to hear any revealing sound but heard nothing. The only sound in the room was the hum coming from air blowing through the ventilation ducts.
After a few minutes had passed, Danny stretched his arms, feigning some congeniality towards his captors. He started to say something just to hear his own voice break the conspicuous silence but observed the stoic faces of the guards and decided there was no point to it. He cleared his throat loudly instead and was glad to hear the sound of it.
“Close the doors!” Dr. Sarkis screamed after the double doors opened suddenly, allowing Danny to see what was left of Glass lying on the gurney, before they closed again. He was dead for sure—gaunt, his face horribly creased in a web of wrinkles, his hair almost white. But it was his eyes, wide open and haunted, that shocked Danny—the eyes of one whose last second of life was spent in unutterable shock and horror.
Danny jumped up from his seat and was immediately wrestled back down by two of the guards. He felt his breathing raging wildly as he screamed, “What was that?! Glass! Fuck— Glass, what the hell did they do to you? Glass!!”
The chokehold took away Danny’s voice and the guard’s voice was low, and hardly soothing. “Don’t speak. Don’t say a word. Don’t make me hurt you,” he said. Danny could feel the guard’s hot breath as he whispered his threat.
Danny’s chest rose and fell in violent heaves. His eyes were wide, the thoughts in his brain spinning around feverishly before spinning out. It was all bright stabs of light, the dark hulking guards surrounding him, suffocating him, the image of Glass’ devastated face screaming from the eternal darkness.
The double doors opened again. Sarkis looked angry, and concerned. Danny could see the doctor’s cold, ice blue eyes, searching for the right thing to say. Danny’s shoulders were gripped by the guards, keeping him from rising in his seat.
“What—what happened to Glass?”
Sarkis had his answer. “Nothing. Nothing happened to Glass.”
“Are you crazy? I saw him! I saw what you did to him!”
“Mr. Glass died of a heart attack. Unfortunately, heart disease runs in his family. It is a part of his genetic makeup. He would have died in prison from it and no one would have said anything.”
“But you caused him to die—”
Sarkis shook his head definitively. “Mr. Glass served his sentence. No one said we could override his physical predispositions. He served his sentence, pure and simple. He died of natural causes.”
“How do I know I won’t end up like Glass?”
“You don’t, Mr. Fierro,” Sarkis said calmly, “but you have no family history of coronary problems. I’m convinced you have nothing to worry about.”
Danny drew on all of his strength to break from the guards’ hold. He stood up while his captors lashed onto his limbs to restrain him. “No!” he screamed. “I don’t want this! I’ll take thirty years in prison! Send me back!”
“I’m afraid that is not an option,” Sarkis said.
Danny’s face turned blood red, veins were popping from his temples. He screamed and he struggled to break free from the muscled restraints of the guards.
“Sedate him—” one of the guards shouted at Sarkis.
“We cannot introduce drugs into his system at this point,” Sarkis said. “Use your stun gun on him. To the maximum if necessary, but do not damage him.”
“No!” Danny continued to wail. The corner of his eye caught the guard removing the stun gun from its holster. He heard the crackle of electricity as the weapon built up its power.
One last scream before the steel pins were pressed to Danny’s neck and shot devastating electrical bolts through his body. Danny’s body flailed at first and then planked into a singular spasm of muscle. His eyes rolled back and then his body went limp, crashing to the floor. His collapsed body twitched for a few moments before he became totally still.
“What are you waiting for?” Sarkis said impatiently to the onlooking guards. “Bring him into the next room and strap him down.”
CHAPTER 5
Danny watched helplessly as the guards dragged him into the next room. His limbs were dead appendages his brain had no control over. The guards carried him under his arms as his feet flopped behind on the floor. And then Danny looked up and his heart dropped, as if all of his nightmares, vague and amorphous, now had a shape, a clearly defined design—it was a glass womb where he would be reborn in reverse, into some defiled, degraded version of what he once was.
The guards dropped him roughly onto a form-fitting, slightly reclined seat that took up most of the snug glass chamber. His wrists, his waist and his ankles were strapped in securely with thick leather restraints. Danny’s brain was still reeling from the electrical charge of the stun gun. He tried to employ his muscle control to struggle against his bonds but he could only get his fingertips to move. Dr. Sarkis leaned into the pod and quickly, methodically, tapped a vein in Danny’s arm and injected compound solutions from two syringes, one after the other, into his blood. As Sarkis finished, he closed the pod door and turned the lock.
The glass casing of the pod was thick, looking impervious against an artillery shell. Danny stared up at a bank of floodlights—not yet activated—that were integrated into the chamber wall. Awaiting the transformational change was an eternity between each heartbeat, between each drawn breath. So here it was, Danny as specimen, an impaled pupa in a glass chrysalis awaiting some hideous metamorphosis.
The pod was hot and airless and for one perversely optimistic moment, he hoped that he might die of suffocation. Then Danny felt the effect of the invasive compounds churning through his veins and arteries. It started as a feeling of acute nausea and then everything felt raw and exposed, as if his flesh-embedded nerves had been turned inside out. He heard a preparatory hum above his head and instinctively he shut his eyes. That had felt like cowardice so he forced his eyes back open to face whatever it was they had intended for him to endure.
The light wiped out his vision immediately and bathed his body in searing luminescence. From outside the glass pod, Dr. Sarkis, behind safety goggles, watched Danny light up like some tungsten filament in an incandescent bulb. Danny’s initial scream dropped away and a hollowed out moan filled the air.
Thirty seconds later, the light was shut off. Danny’s eyes looked like they were nothing but white sclera but slowly the pigment of his irises returned and his lids closed, the eyelashes fluttering like pulse beats. Danny’s body looked smaller now, shrunken, and the hair on his slumped over head was thinner streaked with white. His bound hands were spotted and the raised veins on them were pronounced and blue.
And the hands trembled while the rest of Danny Fierro lay still.
Danny was taken back to his cell in a wheelchair. His eyes hurt and his
throat burned, and the sounds reaching his ears were way too loud. He felt no sense of vigor; his energy levels felt exceptionally low, almost non-existent. The guards lifted him onto his mattress where he slept for the next fourteen hours.
When he awoke, there was a tray with water and juice in plastic bottles, yogurt and lukewarm chicken broth on the table. Also while he slept, someone had changed him, into a cotton sweatshirt and stretch pants like seniors wore in nursing homes, the kind that were forgiving when you soiled them.
Danny swallowed but the saliva wasn’t coming, causing a ragged soreness in his throat. He sat up and wiped the crusts from his eyes.
A sharp knock and Dr. Felice Bennett was in the room. A guard stood behind her.
“Hello, Danny,” she said.
Danny swallowed again. This time, there was moisture. He nodded.
“Don’t try to speak. Your voice will return to normal after you’ve hydrated it and had something to eat. I just wanted you to know that your procedure was one hundred percent successful. All your vital signs are excellent and the process did not introduce any new diseases or debilitating conditions to your body. Of course, there will be the usual aches and pains of someone of your chronological years but with a good diet and exercise, even these may subside. You will go through physical therapy, a psychological orientation and what we call a chronological time adjustment, just to get you used to the radical leap your mind and body has made over the last twenty-four hours. So, have a little something to eat and we will talk lat—”
“I’m an old man,” Danny said. The words felt sharp and painful, snagging in his throat like shrapnel.
“You have the body of a middle aged man. Still with plenty of time to make something of your life,” Felice Bennett said clinically.
“I’m an old man!” Danny shouted hoarsely, startling Felice.
“Have a little broth,” she answered, turning to leave.
After the door closed, Danny held his head in his hand, the saliva finally gathering around the corner of his mouth and falling like unspooled thread onto his leg.
Danny closed his eyes. “I’m an old man,” he said faintly.
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