by Kyle Andrews
She stumbled backward, unaware that she was even doing it, and tried to put a hand to her head. She nearly took out her own eye in the process, because she forgot about the knife that she was holding.
As bad off as she was, he was worse. He had his hands to his face, and was sniffing repeatedly.
“You bitch,” he said, in a normal tone now, not a whisper. “You stupid...”
Libby assumed that he was saying all sorts of nasty things about her, threatening to track her down and all of that. He could add himself to the long list of people who wanted her dead, for all she cared, but she wasn't going to stand around and wait for him to come at her again. Instead, she turned and ran out of the store, still clinging to the knife, just in case.
When she hit the sidewalk, she ran faster than ever before. The pain in her head was horrible. Her bloody hand felt like it was swollen to twice its size, and it was throbbing with each beat of her heart. But she was willing to take victory wherever she could get it, and she rode high on that victory, all the way back to the Garden.
14
Collin had been in silence for hours. There were no voices over the speakers. No questions or demands. The only way that he could be sure that anyone was still watching him was the pain. The intensity of it grew and then shrank back down. Time and time again, he would begin to settle into as relaxed a state as possible, and then the pain would rise, catching him off guard. It would intensify until it made him want to scream. For all he knew, he did scream. He was too blinded by pain to know one way or the other.
Then it went back down and he was left alone, just long enough to begin to get comfortable again.
They enjoyed torturing him. He knew this because they weren't demanding answers anymore. They played with his pain, just to see what would happen. They wanted to hear him scream and beg. Screaming, he couldn't help, but he never begged. He would never give them that much.
The light in the room never changed. He couldn't tell whether it was night or day. He never knew when one batch of torturers went home and a new shift moved in. It didn't really matter. It wasn't as though he would be allowed to rest, no matter who was on shift.
When the worst of it came, Collin tried to distract his mind from the pain. He tried to focus on something else. Sometimes it was a place, like Hawaii. Not the real Hawaii, which Collin knew little about, but the Hawaii that existed on old, faded postcards, and in his dreams. The place where families went to escape their lives and lounge around. Places like that didn't exist anymore. Vacations didn't happen in his world. They were urban legends, like the phantom HAND officer with a hook hand, who punished those who defied the system.
Thinking about vacations always brought Collin back to Liz; his ex-girlfriend. Apparently, the love of his life, since he was only ever afforded the one option. She was gone long before he was arrested, but she now visited him in his daydreams. When those daydreams became delusions, memory and fantasy all blurred together.
There were times when Collin could swear that Liz was standing in the corner, right behind him, watching him silently. He couldn't see her, but he could feel her presence. She would move toward him, reaching for him each time they increased his pain level. She would wince as he screamed. She would cry, and that's how he knew she wasn't really there. Liz never cried.
As weeks passed, his delusion grew. He could hear her breathing, and he was comforted just to know that he wasn't alone. Someone who cared for him was nearby. Even if she couldn't do anything to help him, and even if she wasn't really Liz, he felt a little bit better each time he heard the sound of her breath.
Time went on, and when Collin heard himself scream in pain, he could swear that he heard her screaming with him, begging his captors to stop. The thought would be funny to anyone who knew Liz. She would have been even less likely to beg than she was to cry.
She was growing more real to him by the day, but Collin never saw her. Maybe he hadn't been driven crazy enough for that yet. That was a good thing, he supposed, though he hoped to catch at least a glimpse of her before they killed him. He wanted to see her eyes one last time. He knew that she would wink at him as he was taking his last breath, and smile because the joke would be on HAND. He'd be free at last, and they would have nothing to show for all the time that they had put into torturing him.
Collin was careful to never speak to Liz out loud. He kept his comments confined to his imagination, where she and she alone would be able to hear him. If HAND heard him talking to her, they would know that they were succeeding in breaking his mind. He couldn't let them have that victory.
The door opened, and a thin blond woman walked into the room. She was wearing all white, like a nurse, but it wasn't a nurse's outfit. It was a suit that she was wearing.
The woman had been in to see Collin before. She was the only person who ever entered the room. She gave him his injections. She fed him and cleaned him. She never said anything to him as she did this though. She wasn't allowed, because talking to him would humanize him. She might grow attached, and they couldn't have that. But Collin wasn't one of them. He didn't obey the rules.
“Hello,” he said to her with as warm a smile as he could manage, having no energy to speak of.
The woman didn't say anything. She simply placed a box on a nearby table and opened it. From the box, the woman removed a metal bottle which had some sort of sprayer on it. She went to Collin's left arm and began to spray.
Whatever she was putting on him had a strong chemical smell to it, as though they had boiled down and concentrated the scent that humans instinctively dislike about hospitals. It was a preservative, no doubt. Something which would allow them to keep his wounds open without troublesome things like infection or death setting in.
“How are you tonight?” he asked her. He paused, as though waiting for a response, but she said nothing. So he continued, “You look tired. Have you had a long day? Or is it morning and you're still partly asleep? I can't tell anymore.”
The woman finished spraying Collin's left arm and moved around to the right.
“Does your family know what you do? Or are you under orders not to talk to them either?” he asked. “I don't blame you. I want you to know that. Whatever happens in here, I know who gives the orders. I know that you couldn't do anything to help me, even if you wanted to. None of this is on you.”
She stopped spraying. Collin could have sworn that he saw the slightest of hesitations before the woman moved away from the table and back to the box. She put the sprayer away.
“Have you ever heard of vacations?” he asked her, turning his eyes back to the bright lights above and closing them. As he did this, he allowed himself to imagine that those lights were the sun, even if the color was wrong and they gave off no warmth.
His pain level increased and caught Collin off guard. He clenched his jaw and tried his best to suppress a scream, but the more he held back, the stronger they made his pain. There was not one inch of his body that didn't feel completely raw.
The woman continued to go about her work, checking over his cuts and burns and whatever else he couldn't see. She gave him an injection. He didn't know what it was for, but he didn't feel any different after if was given.
For as long as the woman was in the room with him, the pain continued. Then, when she was done doing whatever she had to do, she left the room and the pain pulled back.
Even minutes after the pain was cut off, Collin's body hummed with the memory of it. For a long time, he waited for them to bring the pain back. He knew that it was only a matter of time, and he was ready for it. He might be able to handle it better because his guard was already up.
But the pain didn't return. As long as he was ready for it, they would hold off.
Liz was in the corner, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and her head buried in her hands. She couldn't stand to watch what was happening to Collin. She was a loving delusion. Collin was thankful to have her there.
15
Libby
stood just outside of the vault in the ruins of the bank, shaking. She couldn't bring herself to go into that back room and knock on the door until she could calm herself down.
Whether it was adrenaline or terror, she wasn't quite sure. All she knew was that she felt like the entire world was about to fall out from under her, and she was going to disappear into oblivion.
How was she going to go back into that place and tell people what happened to Simon, Leo and even Paul? The last time she saw Paul, he had HAND vehicles chasing him down. It didn't seem like there was any way for him to escape. But she escaped. How would people in the Garden react to the knowledge that she had endangered their people once again? If they hadn't believed that she was worth the sacrifice of Collin Powers, how would they react to her returning without the three other people who left with her?
Part of her didn't even want to go back in there. She could camp out in the vault for the night. It would provide some shelter at least. It wasn't well hidden or secure, so if someone wanted to track her down and kill her, they would be able to. But at least she wouldn't have to walk through the Garden and see all of those eyes on her. It was bad enough on a good day.
Of course, she knew that she couldn't avoid it forever. What they'd discovered inside of her was too important for her to just ignore. It belonged to those people as much as it did her. She didn't have the option of running off and hiding until she could deliver it to them.
She stayed in that one spot for at least twenty minutes, trying to calm herself down. Then she moved into the back room and opened the cabinet. She gave the secret knock, and the door was opened for her.
When the man behind the door saw her, he couldn't help but stare. He didn't rise from his chair, but he put his magazine aside and watched her move through the doorway, closing it behind her.
She stepped toward the stairs that led to the tunnels below, but stopped before going down. She turned to the man and asked him, “What is your name?”
“Wally,” he replied.
“I'm Libby.”
“I know who you are,” he told her, in a tone that sounded as though she should have known that he knew her. As though everyone knew her.
“I'll see you later, Wally,” she said with a slight nod goodbye, and she moved down the stairs.
The tunnels were mostly empty as Libby walked through them. She did pass one man who was working on a repair of some sort, but he was so distracted by his work that he never noticed her.
She made her way through the twists and turns of those tunnels, finally entering the Garden and stopping once again as she stepped inside. People were looking at her, and that made her nervous. Her heart began beating faster and faster in her chest. Her palms were sweating, which stung the hand that still had thin shards of glass in it.
Nobody said anything to her when she finally started to walk through the building. She wished that they would have. She would have preferred to have garbage thrown at her, rather than face silence.
It wasn't until she saw Aaron in the distance and started to walk toward him that she heard Rose's voice say, “What the hell happened to you?”
Rose was approaching from Libby's side, and put her hand on Libby's shoulder as soon as she reached her. Libby stopped walking as Rose looked her up and down, cringing.
“You need to get this taken care of,” Rose told her.
“I need to talk to Aaron first.”
“No, you need to stop bleeding all over the floor first. Then you can talk to Aaron.”
“I'm fine.”
“You're not fine. You're holding a knife.”
Libby looked down at her hand and saw the knife that she'd taken off of her attacker. She'd forgotten that she still had it.
Libby looked Rose squarely in the eyes and said, “Leo's dead.”
Rose took a step back. It was as though Libby had punched her in the stomach, but Libby kept her eyes locked on her. She didn't want to see the reaction of any others who might have overheard.
Continuing while she was on a roll, Libby said, “Simon was stuck at the hospital, trying to download the information we gathered. Paul was being chased the last time I saw him. I just really need to talk to Aaron.”
When Libby mentioned Paul's name, Rose's eyes changed. There was panic in them. Fear. Anger. It was subtle, and Libby had to wonder what it meant, but she couldn't focus on that now.
She turned her eyes toward Aaron and saw that he was already coming toward her. When he reached her, she repeated the same thing that she told Rose, in the exact same words. She couldn't think of any other way of telling these people what had happened, but Aaron forced her to try. He walked with her to see a doctor, and had her explain everything that happened in detail.
Libby told him everything that she could remember about leaving Simon and seeing Sim in the hallway. She told him about everything that she saw happen to Leo, and how she stood there, doing nothing as it happened.
She wanted him to get mad at her, but he didn't. It would have been so much easier if they blamed her and told her that it wasn't worth the loss of lives to save her, because she would agree and at least they would be on the same page for once.
But he didn't. When she was finished explaining everything, and as a doctor was fixing up her swollen hand, Aaron asked her, “What happened to you? How did you get these wounds?”
In response to that, Libby actually smiled. It seemed almost humorous to evade HAND and the police, only to be taken down by some random thug on the street.
Somehow, neither Aaron nor Rose appeared to see the same humor in it.
“I don't mean to sound unsympathetic or anything like that,” Rose cut in, “but you never told us what happened with the scan. Was it worth it? Did all of this happen for a reason?”
That was a good question. Libby hadn't even realized that she had forgotten to tell them what the scan revealed. It seemed so unimportant to her in that moment, compared to the growing number of bodies that she left in her wake, but when she told Aaron and Rose about it, their eyes immediately moved to the bloody gauze that the doctor was holding.
Even the doctor went from throwing around dirty bandages, to holding them in his hand as though they were made of gold.
“Was it worth it?” Libby repeated the question, still unable to answer it for herself.
16
Justin sat by the bed all night, watching Amanda struggle in her sleep. She was twitching and flinching, as though she was being attacked by something, or someone, in her dreams. Justin kept trying to think of something more that he could be doing for her, but nothing came to mind.
Amanda was pale and thin. He could almost see her wasting away, right before his eyes. When he couldn't stand to sit there any longer, Justin went to the kitchen and warmed up some broth that he'd been given when he had the flu. He put it into a cup and held Amanda's head up as he poured the broth into her mouth.
He didn't even know if he was doing the right thing. Was it safe to pour broth into the mouth of an unconscious woman? But he didn't have any other choice. She needed strength if she was going to get better, and she wasn't about to wake up and eat a meal on her own.
All night long, he adjusted her blanket and the pillow under her head. He added an extra pillow for a little while, when he thought that she looked like she could use more support. Then took it away, when he decided that it looked uncomfortable.
He paced a lot that night, because there was no chance of him getting any sleep. At three o'clock in the morning, he started talking to her. He told her that Libby was doing fine, though she was as closed off as ever. He chuckled as he spoke of Libby's stubbornness, because he was sure that Amanda would understand what he was talking about. Of course, she didn't respond.
What he didn't tell Amanda was that Libby was currently living with a group of people who had been declared terrorists by the corrupt authorities. He never mentioned the part where Uly died because he dreamed of a day when everyone in the country was treated equa
lly. When everyone would be given a fair chance, and not just the elite few who were allowed to enter the superior class of politicians, celebrities and whoever else might be able to help keep oppression alive.
It wasn't that he didn't want to discuss such matters, but it seemed a little heavy for him to be discussing in the middle of the night, with an unconscious woman, who may very well be on her deathbed.
The sight of her there angered Justin. He should have been able to find help for her, but there was nothing he could do. The black market doctors wouldn't have access to the type of treatment she would need. He would probably be kicked out of the Garden forever if he brought Amanda in there, and risked her knowing the truth.
The religious undertones of that last thought were not lost on Justin, but he couldn't even discuss those with Amanda without committing several hate crimes.
Knowledge of good and evil. That's what it all came down to, wasn't it? Only in this case, understanding the nature of the world was the only way for a person to gain access to the Garden. The fall from evil's grace. Corruption of corruption.
It was around the time that these thoughts took over Justin's mind that he realized how tired he was. He was rarely this philosophical on a good night's sleep.
Once the sun was shining in his face, Justin cleaned himself up and made himself breakfast. He turned on the TV and listened to the morning news ramble on about the rise of hate crimes in the city, and the push for stricter legislation.
Roughly translated, that meant that the authorities had noticed the 'FREEDOM PREVAILS' markings popping up around town, and they needed to find some way to quash it. The people on the TV spoke of Freedom, using the name Hate instead. They continued to do this, even after those markings appeared. Rather than change how they referred to the group, they simply failed to mention what was being written. They made only vague references to vandalism and graffiti.