The Stepford Florist

by JT Lawrence

  Barnaby stands in her office, looking out the window.

  Neo propels Jasmine into the room. “I found her. The cheek of her, walking in here today.”

  Barnaby swings around and cuts her a look that could freeze embers. Her arms are crossed smartly in front of her. “You have a funny way of showing gratitude.” Expensive perfume scents the air: smooth carnation, incense, and cinnamon.

  “Excuse me?” says Jasmine. She’ll play dumb as long as she can, but the blood pulsing in her head is not helping.

  “What do you know?” Barnaby demands.

  Jasmine blinks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The woman motions for Jasmine’s snakewatch. Neo takes it and gives it to Barnaby, who tries to check her bump history but the information has self-immolated. She throws it across the room in frustration. It smashes a framed certificate on the wall, breaking the glass.

  “What are we going to do with her?” asks Neo.

  “Shut up,” says Barnaby. “I’m thinking.”

  “Worse case scenario, she’s already told the authorities,” says Neo.

  “The authorities are not a problem.”

  Jasmine thinks of Detective Solaris and his notoriously greasy palm. And he still tried to hit her up. Bastard.

  “Then, what?”

  “If the public find out about the serum they’ll burn our reputation to the ground.”

  “The influencers,” says Neo, “and the press.”

  “We need to contain it. Contain her.”

  “But we can’t do that indefinitely.”

  Barnaby shoots more ice torrents in Jasmine’s direction. “Well, maybe she should have an unfortunate accident.”

  Neo frowns. Jasmine’s not sure if it’s because she thinks the action is too drastic, or if she’s thinking of creative ways to shove Jasmine off her mortal coil.

  “Will anyone miss her?” asks Barnaby.

  She has no way of letting Seth or Keke know she’s in trouble.

  “Not likely. No family. Just a couple of rag-tag friends who we can take care of. I mean, accidents do happen.”

  “This is why we choose our employees very carefully,” says Barnaby. “Ex-crims, punks, loners. We can’t have people asking questions if they disappear.”

  “Reeves fits all the criteria,” says Neo. “I made sure of it. She was perfect for the job, until—”

  “Until she started snooping around. Stupid girl,” says Barnaby. “Do you know how hard I’ve worked to be where I am? Do you know how many sacrifices I’ve had to make? Of course you don’t understand. What did I expect? You’re too clever for your own good. You’ll never amount to anything of value. You live like a gypsy. You’re nothing but a vagabond.”

  Wait, what?

  “You’ve been to my house?” asks Jasmine.

  Neo snorts. “You call that a house?”

  “Of course we have. Well, not personally, of course. We sent a microcam.”

  Jasmine remembers the beribboned blue suede cat collar that arrived for Chairman Miaow, pictures the small silver eyelets. Turns out it wasn’t a gift from one of her admirers at all.

  “We check the living conditions of every prospective employee. We’re usually very …” Barnaby side-eyes Neo. “… careful with who we hire.”

  “I’m sure you are,” says Jasmine.

  “What do you want me to do with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Barnaby rubs her temples. “I don’t know the extent of the damage yet, and I can’t think when she’s in here. Lock her in the CryoGenix chamber until we decide what to do.”

  Chapter 12

  Arctic Mist

  Neo unlocks the huge steel door of the cryo chamber and the door opens with a hiss. The guards stand back and allow the women access. Jasmine’s about to start fighting when she feels something bite into her neck, and she sees the empty syringe in Neo’s hand. White light starts foaming in Jasmine’s head, stealing her consciousness. Her knees give in and Neo supports her body, carrying her over to an upright glass pod and strapping her in. The restraints are secure, but Jasmine can hardly feel them as her whole body fades into numbness. Neo closes the door of the thin glass capsule and leaves the room, and the door auto-locks behind her.

  Jasmine is breathing hard. She sees her chest pumping up and down in panic, but can’t feel it. She thinks she’ll use up all the oxygen in the pod if she doesn’t calm down. The drug is pulling her eyelids down, but she resists. She needs to get out of here, or she’ll never wake up. She writhes, trying desperately to get her wrists out of the restraints, but she can’t feel her skin. Is she even moving? It doesn’t feel like it. Her mind is mist. It’s difficult to hold on to any thoughts, but she forces herself to focus. Out, she says to herself, out, out, and she wriggles some more. It feels like a superhuman feat, keeping her eyes open, and struggling against the ties. Eventually the fabric on her left wrist gives way.

  Oh, thank the Net.

  With one hand free, it’s easy to remove the other straps. The CryoPod was designed, after all, as a space for a voluntary treatment, not a prison. Once her body is unrestrained, Jasmine focuses on getting out of the capsule. She feels around for any kind of handle or catch but comes up empty-handed. The air feels thinner now, and her lungs are pumping with panic. She’s going to have to smash the glass, which is more easily said than done, because she’d bet her bottom blox that it’s superglass: impossibly thin, and almost impossible to break.

  But she doesn’t have to smash the whole panel to get out. All she needs is a small hole that her hand can fit through, to reach the control pad and release the door. She searches her beehive for one of her heavy-duty hairpins, finds one, and puts it between her teeth while she takes her steel-heeled pumps off. She finds the place she thinks is closest to the panel and starts hammering the nail into the glass. It slips away on the first few attempts, and Jasmine worries it will never work, but once it penetrates just a fraction it gains enough purchase and she starts to hammer as hard as she can. Twenty minutes later the nail has penetrated half a millimetre. Her half-numb limbs begin to droop and she’s sure she won’t have the strength to finish the job. The thought makes her drop the hairpin and melt down to the floor. There’s not enough air in the pod. She’s not strong enough. Her hands are aching; her face is wet with tears.

  Jasmine takes a few deep breaths and gathers her wild, desperate thoughts. She pictures her caravan, her beautiful wild flowers.

  No family, Neo had said. Just some rag-tag friends.

  No one will miss her.

  She thinks of Chairman Miaow, and wonders who will take care of him if she dies in here. Although, to be fair, she thinks, cats are pretty good at taking care of themselves. Plus, she did a really good job in building that bespoke cat-feeder.

  She thinks of Alba, and all the important work they do there.

  She knows that no one is going to save her, that she’d better save herself.

  Jasmine finds the hairpin on the ground and hauls herself up, breathes deeply, and starts hammering again. Almost immediately, the nail shoots through the last bit of resistance, and the glass panel is compromised. Now she drops the pin and takes her heel and whacks the same spot over and over, and a small puzzle piece of glass pops out.

  “Yes!” she shouts out loud, then covers her mouth. Yes. She puts her shoe back on, holds onto the sides of the pod, and kicks the small hole as hard as she can. On the twelfth kick, another piece of glass gives way, and the hole is big enough for Jasmine to get her hand through. The glass slices her arm as she feels for the control panel. There are three buttons on it. One of them will be the release mechanism. The top one? Or the bottom one? Middle? Probably not. She wishes she had her snakewatch; she could use the Selfie app as a mirror. She’ll just have to guess and hope for the best. She closes her eyes and presses the bottom one, and the glass capsule begins to wheeze. Jasmine’s body is flung backwards, arms once again pinned at her sides, this time not by fabric but b
y an intense vacuum. She feels her cheeks flatten against her skull as if she’s in a personal rocket g-force experiment. The vacuum takes all the air out of her already screaming lungs. The blood from her lacerated arm bleeds into the wall behind her like paint being blown with a straw, and she keeps bleeding until there’s a giant red Rorschach pattern behind her. Her lungs are slowly being crushed. She can’t think of anything but getting oxygen into her body. She gulps for air, but the vacuum steals it all away.

  Then all of a sudden it switches off, and her body drops to the floor.

  She hauls air into her chest in one long, noisy gasp.

  Holy shit, she thinks, over and over. It’s like being vacuum packed. What is this cryo chamber really for? They’re legal, used for cryotherapy treatments, but Jasmine has a feeling this machine is used for other purposes.

  She’s scared, now, to press the next button, but what choice does she have? She sticks her hand out again and clicks the top one. Arctic mist begins streaming into the pod. It’s biting, bone-chilling. It’s going to freeze her alive.

  Chapter 13

  Specimen #586

  The cold air fills the pod like white smoke. Ice crystals form on the glass in front of her, on her eyebrows, her eyelashes. Jasmine is shivering. Her skin is blue. Even her eyeballs feel cold and tearless, as if they’ve been freeze-dried. Blindly she feels for the hole in the glass and thrusts her arm out once more. Fresh air, fresh cuts, but now the blood freezes as it appears. Finding the control panel, she pushes the middle button this time, and the door unclamps. Jasmine leans her body against it and it swings open, allowing her to tumble out, stiff-limbed and gasping, and she falls in a heap on the floor.

  She shakes her fingers, punches her thighs, tries to get some circulation going, and as soon as she can stand, she closes the door of the capsule.

  The cold air keeps pouring into the room through the broken panel. The pod’s temperature gauge is on its lowest setting, and by smashing a hole in the glass Jasmine is sure she’s compromised the thermostat. It’ll keep trying to freeze the inside of the capsule until this whole chamber is below zero degrees. Already there’s a layer of chill on the ground: she can hardly see her feet and she can’t stop shivering.

  The heavy steel door they entered through is locked. Jasmine pounds on it with her cold fist.

  “Help!” she yells. “It’s freezing in here!”

  Surely the guards will let her out?

  “Let me out of here!”

  Surely their plan is not really to kill her? But no one answers her calls for help.

  Her breath spools out in long white plumes. The air is so cold it hurts her lungs; makes them feel hard, as if the air she’s breathing in is freezing them from the inside. She pants into her hands, trying to get some kind of feeling of warmth, and then sees her spark plasters. She clicks her fingers, but there’s no ignition. Her hands are clumsy with the cold. She clicks again and again, and finally she gets a spark, and then a flame. The golden blaze fills her with a dreamlike joy. Fire! But then the cold air extinguishes it.

  A flame is not enough. She’s going to have to find something to burn. The layer of white air is rising, and Jasmine’s feet are numb as she stumbles around the chamber, looking for some kind of fuel. It’s a stark, minimalist space with no furniture. She flails around, pressing the walls, hoping for some kind of hidden storage space, but there’s nothing. Just some square fridge doors—morgue-like—which she’s sure won’t yield anything useful. The only fuel she’ll find in there will be for her nightmares. But there’s nothing else in the empty room, so, at a loss, she opens the first door, and slides the heavy drawer out. It sails out smoothly, and when Jasmine sees the contents she jumps back. Specimen #586, it says on the tag. A naked female teenager with a shaved head lies on her back, arms crossed elegantly over her chest, her face crusted over with ice. Jasmine steps forward and touches the girl’s skin, then draws back immediately on contact. Frozen.

  Jasmine opens another door, and then another, and they all contain frozen bodies. An old man with a silver beard, an old woman with an expensive haircut, a young woman with a birthmark in the shape of Africa, and a laparotomy scar.

  The clinic is freezing people. The ultimate in reverse-aging innovation. Part of their quest for immortality.

  Jasmine can feel her limbs and thoughts slowing, like her brain is slurring. Hypothermia is starting to set in. She takes off her shoes again and jogs on the spot, trying to think, her frozen feet like blocks of lead. In agony and desperation she throws her head back, and she sees a white sensor on the ceiling.

  Chapter 14

  Cherry Slush Lava

  The rapid of cold air flowing out of the capsule doesn’t stop. Jasmine is too short to reach the smoke detector, and there’s no furniture in the room. She’ll have to make a ladder for herself.

  In any other situation, the idea of hauling dead bodies around a room and piling them up to make a set of steps would horrify her, but there’s no time for sentimentality now. She’ll be joining them in their endless icy slumber if she doesn’t work very quickly. She pulls the frozen corpses out one by one, rolling them out and letting them drop on the floor before dragging them to the center. They’re way too heavy to lift, and her poor co-ordination makes her stumble as she works. The exercise helps to keep her core warm, but her extremities are flashing with cold pain. The ends of her fingers are freezing and burning at the same time. Vasoconstriction. Frostbite. She rubs them together every now and then to try keep her blood flowing.

  Eventually she’s dragged every last cadaver out of the lockers and she begins shifting them into a mound. It doesn’t get anywhere near as high as she’d like it to, but it’ll have to do. She uses her hands and feet to climb up the unsteady stack of bodies, and balances precariously on top. She tries to click her fingers but they’re so numb now, like blunt sticks. She blows into them again.

  “Come on,” she says. She’s starting to feel confused, now. The cold is numbing her brain. She forces her shutting-down mind to focus, and tries to click again. One, two, three, she snaps, which makes her think of some kind of nightmare version of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, and the ruby slippers. She thinks of the emerald city, but instead of it being made out of beautiful green glass it’s blue ice instead, and everyone is flash-frozen as if they’ve been put under a wicked witch’s spell. Barnaby, the wicked witch of Tabula Rasa. She pictures the Emerald City people stuck for all eternity in everyday poses like hanging up the washing, eating an apple, having sex. Like Mount Vesuvius burying Pompeii. But that was cause by fire, not ice. Cherry Slush lava. Jesus, she’s delirious. Where was she? Sex. Wicked witch. Magic. She looks down at her spark plasters. She clicks them again, and after the fourth click, the flame comes to life. Slowly, she lifts her hand up towards the ceiling, beneath the detector. It may not be close enough, but it’s the closest she’s going to get. Her arm is shaking with the effort and the cold.

  “Come on,” she urges. “Come on!”

  The LED starts flashing, and an alarm screeches, and water begins raining down on her. It feels warm. It feels like a scalding shower, because her body is so close to freezing. She has the urge to take off her clothes and to burrow somewhere dark and warm.

  The fire alarm disarms the lock on the main door, and Jasmine makes her way down the heap of frozen bodies, shuddering in wide tics. She falls just before she reaches the door and can’t get up. She leopard-crawls for the last few meters and when she makes it out of the chamber she wants to laugh and cry but her body doesn’t have an ounce of energy in it so instead she collapses, cheek to golden carpet, and passes out.

  * * *

  Jasmine doesn’t know how long she’d unconscious, but when she feels Keke slapping her face and rubbing some warmth into her arms, she comes to with a shock.

  “Jassy! Wake up!”

  Jasmine moans. Keke? she wants to say, but her lips don’t seem to be working. She sees Keke’s helmet lying on the floor next to her, a
nd her leather jacket, and thinks how warm the jacket must feel. She wants Keke to tell her that it’s all been a dream, but when she sees where she is, she wants to go back to sleep.

  “Wake up, Jassy,” says Keke. “Stay with me!”

  Jasmine opens her eyes again.

  “We need to get you to hospital.”

  Oh no, we don’t, Jasmine wants to say. I’m fine, now. Out of danger. But not only does her mouth not form the words, her limbs won’t move either.

  Epilogue

  “You got her here just in time,” a male voice is saying.

  A slice of bright white ceiling assaults Jasmine’s aching eyes. “They freeze-dried my eyeballs.”

  Keke turns towards her with a huge smile and lifts her hands in excitement. “She lives!”

  The doctor excuses himself with a silent gesture; motioning that he’ll be back soon. The room is crowded with every cross-species flower Jasmine grows.

  “God, I’m happy to see you,” Jasmine croaks.

  “The feeling is mutual.” Keke offers Jasmine some water. “For a while there I thought you were a gonner.”

  The water paints the inside of Jasmine’s mouth with cool relief. “What happened?”

  “What happened? You tell me. When I read the file you sent me I tried to call you and you didn’t answer. Then that pixel tracking came in and I realized you must have gone back to the clinic to plant it, and I got worried.”

  “The pixel. Did you find out where they were getting the stem cells from?”

  “Yebo. Solaris arrested the owners of three different backstreet IVF clinics this afternoon.”

  Jasmine’s brain is scrambled. “Fertility clinics?”

  “Tabula Rasa was buying discarded embryos from dodgy IVF clinics.”