Heartless

by Leah Rhyne

  I guessed the girls didn’t remember how to turn doorknobs yet.

  Lucy and I walked down, as quickly and carefully as we could. And down. And down. On our way, we stumbled, we tripped, we caught and clutched each other as my knees and hips gave out, and Lucy’s bad ankle refused to support her weight.

  It felt like the stairs would never end.

  “Do you think someone’s down there?” Lucy whispered.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But what choice to we have? Do you want to go back up there? Those girls tried to eat us.”

  She shook her head, bit her lip, and walked on.

  After fifty steep steps—I counted—we reached another landing. A huge room opened before us when we slid open another unlocked door. More fluorescent lights filled the room, though a faulty one in the center offered a strobe effect like a bad nightclub on a hot summer’s night.

  Lucy closed her eyes and smiled as we entered the room. She placed her hand on my shoulder, letting me guide her, and she checked out for just a minute.

  Her voice was dream-like. “I can almost hear the bass,” she said. “Remember last semester when we…”

  “Danced on the speakers at the club? Yeah, I remember.” And I did.

  I was alive. Whole. Beautiful. Lucy and I snuck into a dance club using fake IDs and a cheap pickup line on the bouncer. We wanted to dance.

  Boys snuck us drinks, and we were intoxicated with the atmosphere. It was electric.

  Lucy climbed onto a giant speaker beside the DJ booth. All eyes in the room were on her as she danced and swayed. After a minute by herself, her eyes scanned the floor, locking on mine. Her best friend.

  When she reached out her hand to me I took it. I let her pull me up beside her. I let her slide against me, and I let her dance. Soon I danced, too. Our hips shook to the thump thump thump of the beat as it rattled beneath our feet. Our bodies moved together, hands entwined, eyes locked only on each other.

  We danced until the club closed. Until bouncers forced us down from our tower thrones. Until we were so hot and sweaty and thirsty we thought we’d die.

  Together we stumbled home through the snow, back to Calvin Hall, where we collapsed in Lucy’s bed with our shoes still on our feet. We giggled and held each other and told loud, silly secrets until the sun came up, when finally we slept.

  When I awoke, hours later, we were still holding hands.

  But we weren’t at the club. We weren’t even in the dorm. We were in a flickering basement room beneath a morgue disguised as a rustic mountain cabin. And we weren’t alone. Above us a group of monstrous girls waited to destroy us.

  It was time to take stock of the situation. Looking around me, I saw a cot, centered and lonely, bland and militaristic, leaning against a wall on the far side of the room. I walked to it and ran my hand along the smooth metal frame. My “creator” slept here, I thought. I wish I could burn it.

  Lucy hobbled over behind me. “It smells musty down here,” she said. “And like death. Like you.”

  “I guess I should be relieved you’re still distinguishing between the last two.”

  It came out sharper than I intended, and Lucy put a hand on my damaged forearm. “Jo. Don’t be like that.” She paused, and then squeezed, her face contorting with disgust. “Yuck. What happened here?”

  “One of those girls got me. I think it’s broken.”

  “Definitely broken. I just touched your bone. It was pretty jagged.”

  “You’re not gagging?”

  She sighed. “I guess I’m getting used to it. What’s that over there?”

  We walked to a long teacher-desk, all wood veneer on top and mint-green metal on the bottom. The rusted chrome door handles each hung by a single screw, as if the other had been requisitioned for some other use. I ran a hand along my abdomen. Wonder if it’s in here.

  I didn’t wonder for too long. The top of the desk was littered with tantalizing-looking papers and notebooks and office supplies. Lucy reached out to steady herself and knocked a notebook to the ground. “Oops,” she said as she leaned over to pick it up. “Clumsy me. Now I guess I have to read it. See what the hell’s going on here.”

  I nodded. She opened the notebook and started reading, her eyebrows furrowed together to form a tiny crease of concentration. I grabbed a stack of paper close to me and began to flip through them.

  They were memos, mostly, and a couple of letters. There was a thick manila folder deep within the stack, on the cover of which was written, in blood-red marker: OoA—Soldier Design Documentation.

  Soldier? I thought. What soldiers? How do you design a soldier?

  Images of camouflage and guns filled my head for a moment as I set the other papers down on the desk and flipped open the folder.

  On the first page were two crude outlines of a woman. The major organs like the heart, lungs, and brain were there in the first drawing, along with lines that had to represent veins and arteries.

  In the second, the heart was replaced by a box around a positive and a negative symbol. Dots down the front of the abdomen seemed reminiscent of the metal nubs that poked out through my own skin. Arrows and handwritten notes covered the pictures, and most of the notes had been crossed through in darker ink. It looked as though whoever had taken them had been frustrated, slicing and dicing their own notes.

  Or they’ve been corrected by a teacher, I thought. I’d received plenty of papers back from professors, covered in similar cross-outs and arrows and notes.

  I flipped to the next page, and the next. More drawings, and then formulas. Information on chemicals, and I saw the words “embalming fluid” multiple times. My knowledge of the periodic table of elements wasn’t up to snuff, but I could see dozens of chemical formulas listed on each page.

  Lucy leaned over my shoulder, and I jumped.

  “Radium?” she asked. “Barium? What the hell are you looking at, Jo?”

  I snapped it closed and offered it to her. “Design documents,” I said. “Someone’s designing people. I guess they designed me.” I looked around the room, and a bulletin board nearer to the bed caught my eye. It was covered in photos.

  “Do you see…” I started to say, but Lucy was ahead of me, already stumbling toward the photos.

  Dozens and dozens of girls were posted on the wall. Small snapshots, mostly taken from afar. There were girls at local places: the nail salon and the grocery on campus. Others came from as far away as Boston. In the photos, girls smiled, laughed, and chatted with others. They held cell phones, smoothies. They were all young, all beautiful, all well-dressed and well-coiffed.

  Just like me, I thought, nodding silently.

  Across the top couple of rows, each photo had a little red X in the upper right-hand corner. I followed the path across and down the photos with my finger. X, X, X.

  “I think they’re all dead now,” I whispered to Lucy.

  She didn’t respond. Lucy stood, her hand covering her mouth, her skin devoid of color. Anxious to see what had upset her, I sped up my journey through the photos.

  First, I found myself.

  There I stood, leaving Eli’s apartment building on a sunny winter day. I looked perfect. I had been perfect, back then. In the photo I smiled, almost as though I knew someone was taking my picture, although judging from the framing it was taken through the windshield of a car.

  In the corner of my photo, there was a question mark, circled. No X for me.

  I guessed I was a big question mark for them. That was fine; I was a big question mark for me, too. “I found me,” I whispered.

  “Keep looking,” Lucy said, sounding choked and muffled through her hand. She reached out and pointed, her finger shaking.

  Down below, after the X’s ended, were more girls. More targets, I guessed. And there, leaving the Rat only the day before, looking for me, was Lucy. She’d made their wall. She was definitely a target. Beside her was a picture of her mother. The ambassador.

  I jumped back as though the pic
ture had bitten me. “No,” I said, but she nodded again.

  “No,” I said again, more firmly. “No. I will not let this happen, Lucy. No matter what else goes down, this…this…will not happen to you.”

  She nodded, but her hands shook. I pulled her away from the photos, toward me. I wanted to hold her.

  But then something caught my eye. Another photo on the wall was circled, with an exclamation point gracing the corner. It seemed like… “Luce!” I said. “I think they succeeded.”

  “What?”

  “Look,” I said. “There’s me. I’m a question mark. Everyone else has an X. But look! She’s circled. She’s got an exclamation point. That can only mean one thing, right?”

  Lucy’s hand dropped from her mouth. “But what does that mean? They succeeded in what?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m damn well gonna find out. Grab those papers you had. Get the notebook. We’re taking it all, and we’re getting the hell out of here.”

  We gathered all the paperwork we could carry, shoving papers and notebooks deep into the oversized pockets of my oversized parka. We could sort through it all later.

  “So, how do we get out?” Lucy said. She gestured toward the steps. “I’m not going back up there.”

  I shuddered, remembering the surreal feeling of my hand in another girl’s throat. “No,” I said. “Definitely not. There has to be another way. Do you have service yet? We need Officer Strong.” The officer’s involvement would spell the end of me, of that I was sure, but that fact was suddenly secondary to me. First and foremost, I needed to get Lucy to safety.

  She shook her head. “I already tried. No service.”

  “Crap.”

  As if on some unknown, unseen cue, the lights went out again, and we were plunged once more into pitch-blackness.

  “Crap!” I said, more forcefully this time.

  I took Lucy’s hand. “Can you use your phone as a light? So we can find our way out?” I glanced around. “I mean, I can see, sort of, but a light would help.”

  “Yeah. I can’t see a damn thing.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and unlocked it. Its light was bright and provided comfort, and the ability to not knock our heads off on low-hanging shelves. We inched our way along the wall, Lucy’s free hand gripping my shoulder, toward a door at the far end of the room.

  “Hello, ladies,” said a voice. It seemed to come from all around us, from a hidden sound system put to good use in freaking girls out. It worked. Lucy and I clutched each other and froze in our tracks.

  The voice came from everywhere, burying us with its weight. Loud, throaty, mechanized. A computer speaking with a human’s syntax, with no gender, no identifying characteristics.

  It was the voice of evil. My knees went weak.

  “This is bad,” I whispered, as if Lucy needed me to tell her that.

  “Hello, ladies,” it said again. “You do know it’s proper manners to say hello when someone greets you, don’t you?”

  I searched the room, looking for something to show us from where the voice came. I held Lucy’s arm with my decrepit hand. I felt like a girl under a magnifying glass, pointed into the sun.

  For her part, Lucy went suddenly calm. She fumbled with buttons on her phone, squinting in the faint glow of its screen. I didn’t know what she was doing until I saw the red light on. Lights, camera, action.

  “Hello.” She spoke into the darkness. Her voice was strong, powerful. “Who are you? What do you want with us?”

  “You don’t think I’m so silly as to identify myself while you have a camera rolling, do you? I credited you with more brains than that. It’s one of the reasons I decided I want you. I’ve enjoyed watching your ingenuity while caring for your little friend.”

  “Screw you,” I said, maybe a little louder than I intended.

  “Not helping,” Lucy whispered. “Don’t antagonize them.”

  The voice agreed. “Now, now, that’s not how we speak to our friends. I’m your creator, and therefore your friend. I love you, and I’m so glad you’ve come home to me.”

  One minute the voice seemed to come from above, the next from below. I spun my head around, trying to see something, anything, that would tell me how to get us out of there. Keep it talking, I told myself.

  “What did you do to me?”

  “Jo, dear, I thought you already knew. You read our memos, didn’t you?”

  I shook my head. “I had a hard time reading in the strobe light. You know, you guys really should fix your fluorescents. Those lights flashing like that? That can cause migraines. Or seizures.”

  Beside me, Lucy giggled. “I bet you guys have lots of migraines, right? Since you’re all kinds of psychotic?”

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  “Don’t they usually go hand in hand? Migraines and psychosis?” She covered her mouth with her hand as she spoke.

  “I don’t know. I thought we weren’t antagonizing them.” If I’d had a heart that still beat, it would have been pounding right then, I knew. This banter wasn’t helping.

  “I changed my mind,” said Lucy, growling a little. “They deserve to be antagonized.”

  “Hush…”

  “Ladies!” boomed the voice. “Ladies, please, stop this bickering. This is neither the time nor place. Jolene. Dear. You have caused us more than a little trouble. We’ve spent the last two days searching for you, aching to find you, hoping all our work wouldn’t be for nothing. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s not easy, creating you girls. Even with the proper supplies, and blueprints, there are accidents. Some girls don’t take to the process as well as you did. You did so well, in fact, you woke up before we could finish you. You’re a work-in-progress, and I’d like to see you complete. I think you’ll be a masterpiece.”

  The voice paused, and an echoing static filled the room for a second. Lucy let go of me and pressed the heels of her hands to her ears, her face contorted in pain. When the static stopped and the voice continued, it sounded different, like another person was speaking behind the fog of mechanical distortion. “And now, the beautiful Lucille has returned you to us. This is not the time for you ladies to fight. This is the time to celebrate. This is the time for me to get back to work on you, Jolene. To return you to the state you were in prior to your little adventure. I’ve been watching while you explored our home, waiting for my friends to come join me. We can fix you, right here, right now, if only you’ll give yourself over to us peaceably. And Lucy, well, my dear, it’s almost time to get started on you, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. I let go of Lucy and stepped away from her, putting some distance between us. I wanted to need a deep breath. I wanted it so badly. This seemed like the kind of moment that required a deep breath, a pause before I spoke. But I didn’t need it. “Can you actually fix me?”

  “Oh yes,” said the voice. “You’re not yet beyond repair. We can rehydrate, re-skin, re-humanize you. Is that what you want, Jolene?”

  Behind me, Lucy squeaked. I turned my head. “What?”

  She covered her mouth with her hand again, and her voice came out muffled. “Don’t trust them,” she said. “Please. I won’t let them take you. Please don’t let them do this to me. We have to fight.”

  I nodded, but took another step away from her. I looked up to the ceiling, where I hoped the hidden cameras were placed. “It’s what I want, more than anything in the world.”

  “More than anything?”

  Lucy squeaked again.

  “Yes.” I hung my head in shame. It was true. I still wanted, really wanted, to get my life back.

  “Well, then,” said the voice. “That’s more like it. I’m so glad you’re home, Jolene, dear. Now it’s time to say goodbye to Lucy, isn’t it?”

  Lucy began to cry, heaving great, angry sobs beside me. I reached out to calm her but she pulled away.

  She didn’t realize I had a plan. It was the only way to save her. I let my arm drop, and I looked back up to the ceiling, stil
l trying and failing to find the source of the voice. I spoke again. “Peacefully, of course, with one condition. I’ll go with you, quietly, calmly, right now. But only if you let Lucy go.” I hoped my voice sounded as firm as I intended it.

  “Of course, Jolene,” said the voice after a pause. “Whatever you say. Just say your goodbye and it’s time to go.”

  A voice in my head said no, no, no. I did it anyway. As though I was dreaming, I felt myself open my arms to Lucy.

  She held back. “No,” she said, tears ruining the way her pale skin glowed in the darkness. “No, Jo. Have you not seen this place? How can you trust them?”

  I pulled her to me anyway, moving through fog. I buried my face in her hair. I wished so hard I could smell her, then. Her shampoo, her perfume, her lotion. The smells of my life since our first day in the dorm.

  She sobbed and clutched at my arms, my shoulders, her fingers digging into my ailing flesh. “Don’t go,” she cried. “Please, don’t do this. I’ll never see you again. Don’t give up.”

  “It’s the only way to save the both of us,” I said. I hope it’s true, I hope it’s true. “You’re going to be safe. You heard him. Safe. And they’re going to fix me.”

  Hope rose in my chest, my throat. It could happen. Our happy ending could really happen.

  I peeled Lucy off me. “I’m going to see you again,” I said. “Soon. But just in case, I love you.”

  She fell to her knees. “They’re lying,” she sobbed. “How can you not see that? They want me, too, and they’re going to kill you.”

  I had to let her go. I had to try. I lifted my head high and walked to the door. It opened easily in my hand. The sounds of Lucy’s cries filled my ears as I stepped across the threshold. I let the door close. There was a click as the door locked behind me, and lights surged on.

  Then the sound of moans, insistent and hungry, filled the room where Lucy stayed, as the other door had opened and the monster-girls came pouring in.

  Lucy screamed. “No! Jo! No!”

  Design Doc 36-J

  Iteration 7