by Arthur Slade
I listened.
And I heard crying. My food next door was weeping. Not the wailing of a mourning parent. But the quiet snuffling of, say, someone who had just broken up with their boyfriend.
Paperwork! I nearly shouted. Or maybe I did shout it.
The person on the other side might actually be experiencing some sort of regret.
I certainly was.
29
BLOOD RED BLOOD
The following day was my last in the Sunshine Room. I woke up bone and flesh tired and wondering whether the crying I’d heard had been my imagination. I began by pacing, then I sat and fidgeted while I read about the use of vellum for books, then I paced again. Paced. Paced. At 3:00 p.m., Dermot’s usual visiting time, the red door did not open. I glared at it, willing him to come in. Perhaps I could tear it off its hinges. No. I’d have trouble getting through that much reinforced steel. I was having difficulty breathing, and it crossed my mind that the League had perhaps grown tired of me and had cut off the air. Oxygen and blood, my two loves.
I dabbed at the sweat on my forehead.
The second hand clicked by, but the minute hand refused to budge much more than a micrometer.
Four o’ clock. Dermot was late—much later than he’d been any other day. What could have delayed him?
And where was the paperwork?!
There was more crying from the other room. I jumped to the door, landed silently, and listened. No. It was my imagination. No noise.
What if the hunger came and there was no food here?
I crawled up the ceiling and stared in a camera, hissing, “Where’s Dermot? Send him in here. Now.”
Then I dropped down to the floor again. Pacing.
I did the same thing to another camera. And another. I went to all twelve of them.
For a moment, the whole room went red. Then it all flipped back to normal, as if an eye doctor had flicked a lens in front of my eye. The color was right. Proper.
And again it flicked. Red. Red. Red. Painting the room.
Then back again. I put my hands to my head. A scream of rage bubbled closer and closer to the surface. I squeezed, and that slowed it.
Then red again. Just like that. And when it came back, the clock was ten minutes ahead.
The table was broken.
I looked around. Someone else had been in here. Had broken the table and punched the screen on the wall, cracking it in several places. I ran from one corner of the room to another, into the washroom, the shower.
No one was here. No one but me. No scent.
I stood in the center of the room. Breathing slowly. Deeply. Calming myself. I’d broken the table and the TV. It was me. Somehow.
Red again. Red. Red. Red.
Twenty minutes passed. The couch had been shredded.
I hadn’t moved from the center of the room. But of course, I had done it all. And I was sweating like a pig. I knew pigs didn’t sweat. Neither did I. Most of the time.
Then another ticking sound, like the door of a safe opening. The black door.
The one between the two rooms.
I didn’t dare move. I sniffed and smelled the scent of a human being. The delicate aroma went straight to my head. I momentarily thought all would go red again.
They were letting my meal in.
“H-hello?” a female voice said. She peeked in. The door was at least a foot thick. “Hello?”
I said nothing. But I could hear her heart beating slightly faster. She’d showered recently, used strawberry shampoo. I did not twitch a muscle. I waited in the center of the room. Every nerve ending on my fingers tingled. Each muscle prepared to pounce.
She was a sprite of a woman, white pale skin with dark hair and wide eyes. In a white blouse and pants. Why would they dress her in sacrificial white? It made feeding messier.
And made me hungrier. I didn’t know why.
“Who-who are you?” she asked.
“Go back to your room,” I whispered.
She stared at me. Did not move.
Then to the cameras I said, “I need papers. I need proof!”
“Please tell me who you are,” she said.
“You start. What’s your name?”
“S-Susan.” She looked like a Susan. I didn’t know what that meant, but she did look like a Susan. She seemed normal. Not a killer.
“I’m Amber,” I spat the words. My voice was ragged. Her heartbeat was slightly elevated. I licked my lips. “Who have you killed?”
“Killed? No one. Did someone say I killed someone? I haven’t.”
“Why were you in that room?”
“I was told to wait there. They said I’d be released if I was good.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“I don’t know. Some men in gray suits picked me up off the street. I was walking to the post office. I was mailing letters to my mother. And my father. They’re in a retirement home in Tampa Bay. Then a black van squealed to a stop, and the men grabbed me, put a black bag over my head, and brought me here.”
Her heartbeat hadn’t sped up during her recounting of the episode.
“What do you do for a living?” I asked.
“I’m a dental assistant. For Dr. Mueller. He does cosmetic dentistry. Smile makeovers, veneers. Why all these questions?”
This wasn’t adding up. Why would they put a civilian in here? The League wouldn’t just scoop someone up off the street. They weren’t that type of organization. Unless I was reading them wrong.
The room went red for a moment.
Susan’s eyes were wide. “Do you always swear that much?”
“Swear? I wasn’t swearing. What are you talking about?”
“You did. Swears that I can’t repeat. And you said someone’s name. Dermot.”
“Dermot?” I clenched a fist, my nails digging into my palm.
“Is that a boyfriend?”
I refrained from slapping her. “No. Never. An extremely annoying human. Go back to your room.”
“But why are you here? Why are we prisoners?”
“I’m not a prisoner.” The words sounded false. “This is just a temporary home.”
I wiped another splash of sweat from my forehead. It dripped down into my eyes, stinging enough to make me blink.
“Are you certain you’re all right?” Susan asked.
“I’m fine!”
Again, her heartbeat didn’t quicken. I should’ve found that curious. I was having difficulty holding my thoughts together. Putting them in line one after another. They were. Order. Out of. What was her name again? Susan. Susan.
“You seem to be perturbed,” she said. Her teeth were perfectly white. But she was a dental hygienist.
“I’m far beyond being perturbed.”
“Well, how do we get out of here?”
“Get the fuck back to your room!”
The room flashed red. My thoughts fled. When I came to, they flocked back to me. Susan was in the corner. Hiding behind a chair.
“Are you done?” she asked.
There were holes ripped in the roof. I had pried five of the cameras out of their slots. They hung in various states of destruction. Lights blinking. Every book in the room had been torn to shreds. I had damaged books!
“I don’t know,” I said. The sweat. The sweat. The sweat. I never sweated. Why was this happening?
“Can I stand up now?” She raised her head a little, reminding me of a meerkat. Her neck was so perfectly bare.
“Do whatever you want.”
“You … you threatened me several times. And ... and in your mouth. I’ve never seen teeth like that.”
For the third time, I noted that her heartbeat hadn’t accelerated. If I’d been threatening her, she should have manifested all the signs of fear. Freaking the shit out. Instead, she was calm. If I’d flashed my fangs, a normal human female would have peed her panties.
“You’re not a dental assistant,” I said.
“I am. I work for Dr. Mueler. On Sev
enth Street.”
“No. You’re too calm. It’s as if all of this is normal for you.”
She shook her head. “I’m not lying to you, Amber. I wouldn’t lie. My mother taught me better than that.”
“Your mother in the retirement home. Yes. And your father. In Florida. Details that you’ve given me. Are they real?”
“Of course they are.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I loved them. I love them. Why won’t you believe me?”
“Because you’re too calm. You’ve just had your life threatened, and you sit as calm as ... as ...” Words were flowing around my brain, but I couldn’t grab one. A flower? A turtle? “You’re just too calm.”
Her eyes narrowed the slightest bit. “I am who I say I am. I never lie.”
“No. Why are you here? Your story seems so ...” Stupid words. They were failing to flap into my brain. I’d read dictionaries from cover to cover. “...contrived.”
“I’m a fellow agent,” she said quietly. “They got sick of me. So they put me in here beside you.”
“Who are you?”
“Susan. That’s my name. But I’m a systems analyst. That’s what I do. Always looking at numbers. I help plan your … your … missions.”
“My dining expeditions,” I said.
“Oh. Yes, them. I plan them. I do. All the best restaurants.”
There was a crackling above me. So loud my ears hurt. I clamped my hands over them.
When I removed my hands, Chairperson Margaret’s voice came from a tinny speaker, “She’s a killer, Amber. You have a green light. Go.”
“I want paperwork!” I shouted. “I don’t eat without paperwork.”
In retrospect, that demand sounded ridiculous. But I did need to know.
“What do you mean, ‘eat’?” Susan asked.
I pointed at her. “You. Shut up.” Then I jammed a finger at the nearest camera. “Come in here, Dermot. Come in here now!”
“He can’t come in there, Amber,” Margaret said, her voice still crackling. “He’s not here right now.”
“Not here! Then show me the papers. I want a file.”
“We can’t provide files at this moment. You have to trust me, Amber. She’s a grifter, a very gifted one, and she’s playing you. She killed her parents first. She fits your moral criteria.”
She sounded like a bureaucrat. Like I was asking for my taxes.
“Who are you talking to?” Susan asked. Then a heartbeat later. “I didn’t kill my parents. I loved them. Love them.”
“I don’t know exactly who I’m talking to,” I said. The statement rang with truth.
Susan turned toward the speaker. “Hey! There’s been a mistake. You have the wrong person in here.” Then she looked at me. “The wrong people.”
“She killed a male senior citizen,” Miss CEO said. “In Memphis. When her grifting went wrong.”
“What?!” Susan said. “This is all lies. You have the wrong person. Let me go.”
But her heartbeat was not speeding up.
“Did you do those things?” I asked.
“Never,” Susan said. “I’ve never even been to Tennessee. I’m one of you. We’re both prisoners here. We have to work together.”
“Did you ever feel regret?” I asked.
She opened her mouth, but her reply was drowned to by a roar in my ears. I was going red again. A sudden shift in my eyes, over my senses. And then.
She put up her hand. She ran from me. A blow. A river of red. Her carotid artery.
Her red came out.
And into me.
30
SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM
I slept for three days. Then I rose. I knew it sounded religious. But it wasn’t. I was shaking like a leaf in a breeze of anger. I was in a white hospital gown and on a gurney. Someone had changed my clothes without my consent. Someone had touched me! And put this horrible, scratchy goddamned gown on me.
I’d slept in the presence of humans.
I tried to sit up, but straps held me down, and there was an IV beside me—a pale liquid dripping into my bloodstream.
A nurse with a surgical mask came into my vision, and her eyes widened. “The subject is awake,” she said.
I thought she was talking to me. But it was into a small communicator on the wall.
“The subject is pissed!” I shouted.
It didn’t come out like that. In fact, the words didn’t come out at all. Just a blast of slurred syllables.
“Where am I?” I asked. More slurring. “What’s going into my arm?” Those words did come out clearly, and the nurse nodded.
“A blood substitute. An adjusted glycol. Doctor Einer thought it would be help to reset your … um … how to put it?”
“Your clock,” another voice finished.
Then Dermot was above me. I was hit with the need to both kiss and scratch his face. Neither happened.
“Get it out of my arm,” I spat.
“Not yet, Amber. It’s balancing your system. Well, as far as we understand your system. How do you feel?”
“Undo these straps and find out.”
He smiled that Boy Scout smile of his. “Yes. Well, we can’t quite do that yet. I want to be sure you’re back to normal.”
“I feel like scratching your eyeballs out. Normal enough?”
“You are feeling better. Have you had any more red episodes?”
Things came back to me. A destroyed room. Susan. The redness. It was all a long time ago. Distant. Almost as if someone else had done it.
“No. What happened to Susan?”
“You fed,” he said quietly. “And then you fell down and have been in stasis for the last three days.”
“Stasis?”
“Well, more like a coma. We did a few blood tests, and from what we understand of your chemistry, it’s back to normal. We believe your clock is reset.”
“You poked needles into me?”
He shrugged. “We had to, Amber.”
“And why didn’t you have paperwork on Susan? Why didn’t you have proof?”
“We were still working on her case. We had circumstantial evidence. Her DNA was found at crime scenes where it shouldn’t have been found. So we were ninety-five percent convinced. But proof moves slow in our world.”
“Did she regret her murders?” I asked.
“I—I don’t know.”
“Well that’s kind of an important distinction to me.” Dermot said nothing. “And where were you? Why was your boss talking to me?”
“I …” A long pause. He looked toward one of the cameras on the wall and back to me. “I was detained.”
“You sure picked a convenient time to be detained. I needed you. I needed you. To talk. Talk.” Why was I repeating things? “Why am I repeating things?”
“You may still be adjusting to your medications.”
“There are medications too?”
“Yes, just something to calm you down. It’s a cousin to the sedative we used on you in our first encounter.”
“I’m not a lab rat!” Then the realization. “You took samples, didn’t you?” There were several needle marks on my arms.
“We did tests. You weren’t harmed.”
“Shouldn’t I have a choice?”
“Calm down, Amber.” He leaned a little closer, and I strained at my leather arm bands. “You couldn’t expect us not to test you. And what we learn, well, it can be used. Perhaps to save your father.”
“And what you learn could be used against me. And my kind.”
“I realize trust has to be built up again. We made a mistake.”
“Several mistakes. She didn’t get a chance to express her remorse. I shouldn’t have eaten her.”
“I know. We messed up. But we saved you, Amber. The clock is reset. You’re back to normal.”
“You put me in this situation. All because you wanted to save your girlfriend.”
“There were reasons, good reasons.”
My brain was liquef
ied jelly, and my thoughts were tadpoles. Angry tadpoles. But I bit my tongue. “I need to sleep,” I said. “Or I may see red again.”
“Then sleep, Amber. We’ll talk again when you feel more energetic.”
I slept.
And by slept, I meant I went for another fifteen hours without waking. Who knows what they poked me with during that time? But I was refreshed when I awakened. The same nurse was there. My headache was gone. The toilet bowl of my thoughts was clear.
“I’m checking out,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady, though my throat felt a little ragged.
“What?” the nurse said.
I curled my wrist back and cut through the bands on my right arm. They’d obviously forgotten about my beautiful, perfect nails. I reached across and cut my other bonds. “Please keep your hands away from the alarm or the speaker phone.”
“You’re on camera,” she said.
“No, I’m not.” I leapt, pulled the camera out of the ceiling, and landed on my feet. It felt rather good. Maybe the stuff they’d given me was making me stronger. Faster. Smarter.
Woozier. A wave of nausea came over me. Then I straightened and got control of myself again. “I’m checking out,” I repeated. “I won’t hurt anyone if they don’t stop me.”
Nurse Blondie backed out of my way. There was a door, but it was unlocked, and I opened it. Then I walked down a hallway. “I won’t hurt anyone,” I said, certain I was on camera each step of the way. “I promise.”
Guards appeared at the end of the hall, hands on their holstered guns. They looked uncertain of their orders. I strode calmly toward them. There was too much to sort out. My father was here, perhaps in another bunker. My mother was gone. I couldn’t fully trust Dermot or any of them. I was muddled. I needed to tease out the details.
I heard the words, “Let her pass,” come out of one man’s earphone thingy. The guards backed out of my way. “Thank you, boys,” I said.
Their heartbeats were slightly elevated. They’d been well trained.
I opened that door and strode into the orange elevator. I pressed the M button, and a few moments later, the door opened into the analyst room.
The geeks had fled. Their typewriters still had papers in them, reports half composed. Warm coffees still sat on their desks. Obviously, I’d set off some evacuation protocol. Now which way was out? They wouldn’t just let me go, would they? I expected some show of force.