by Keri Lake
His cheek dimples with a devilish grin.
It’s midday when Six and I finish the chores—weeding, irrigating the plants, and hanging out the laundry. My body is coated in sweat as we enter the house, and I pour two glasses of water.
“I’m going to go wash up. Stay in the house, okay? I’ll be down soon. Don’t go outside.”
He nods in understanding, polishing off the glass of water, and fills his glass again.
“Drink as much as you like,” I say before heading up to the bathroom.
Leaving the door cracked allows me to listen for Six, and I undress quickly, nervous that he might get into something while I’m showering —particularly in Papa’s off-limits study.
A part of me questions whether, or not, I should shower with him roaming the house, but the moment the cool fluids hit my skin, all that worry melts into the comfort of the water washing away the sweat and dust.
I close my eyes, tipping my head back to saturate my hair, and can hardly contain the quiet moan that escapes me.
When I open my eyes, Six is standing outside the stall with the door open, his eyes fixed toward my bare flesh.
With a gasp, I stumble back, arms covering my breasts, and I reach for the washcloth at my side to hide my exposed sex.
“You scared me!” The wobble in my voice reflects the nervous tickle in my stomach. Yes, only hours ago, I was standing outside the shower eyeing his nakedness, but somehow, this is different.
Six reaches for the washcloth, and before I can react, he soaks it with water, leaving me standing, arms crossed over my body. He lathers the soap in the fabric and sets it to my throat, gently rubbing in small circles.
The agonizing seconds that follow, as I remain on display for him, allow my head to relax, and with a harsh gulp, I lower my hands to let him touch me.
If I stare at him long enough, his scars blur into his skin, and Six becomes the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on. The blue of his eyes pulls me under, while I drown in his soft caresses, his gentle care as he washes the dirt from my body and makes me clean again.
Beneath the cloth, Six explores every dip and valley, skimming his large palm over my curves. There’s something both erotic and innocent in his movements, and I allow him this small moment of pleasure that seems to fascinate him.
He feasts his eyes on me, and when he drags the cloth over my breasts, mine shutter at the dizzy sensation as the soft cotton glides over my puckered nipples.
I’ve always had larger breasts, for as small as my frame is, ones that make me feel heavy and clumsy, but Six seems rapt by them. Perhaps it’s the rapid rise and fall of them with my hastened breaths that break his momentary trance. He studies my reaction, imparting the same attention to the other breast, before trailing the cloth over my shoulder and down my arm.
To my forearm.
Pausing his exploration, he stares down at my scar there, and the pad of his thumb drifts over the raised skin. His eyes flick to mine, brows upturned with what I surmise as concern, but I shake my head.
“I don’t remember how it happened.”
Releasing my arm, he lowers to his knees before me, just outside the shower stall. Dragging the washcloth over my belly with one hand, the other grips the back of my thigh and when he lifts my leg, spreading me open for him, the first pangs of embarrassment strike.
It’s not overtly sexual, but the sensations that rush through me have me feeling a bit drunk. Like the times I’ve sipped Papa’s liquor and that warm feeling hit my belly at the same time my head felt light.
Something like butterflies explode inside my stomach, and I have to look toward the ceiling, as he washes the inner part of my thigh with his gaze glued to my sex.
I slide my hand down to cup myself in the same manner that he held himself from me, and he glances up at me, slowly rising up to stand.
Handing me the washcloth, he seems to pick up on the fact that I’m as equally uncomfortable as when I washed him there the night before.
Still, the gesture is sweet, and I muster a smile. “Thank you, Six.”
Head bowed, he closes the shower door, and through the distorted frosted glass, I watch him exit the bathroom. Once my hair is washed and twisted up into a towel, I dress in clean clothes and enter my bedroom to find it empty.
After a peek into Papa’s room, making sure he didn’t venture inside there, I head down to the kitchen.
For the second time today, my heart catches in my throat. My muscles stiffen and paralysis settles over me.
Papa stands just inside the kitchen with a shotgun propped high, and at the business end of it, Six stands waiting for the imminent shot.
Chapter 11
Dani
The man screams, with his limbs stretched in four directions by the restraints. His ribcage is hardly contained by the translucent skin pulled taut over his bones, covered in the telling sores that I’ve already recorded. It’s amazing what two months in this place does to the mind. I no longer see them as human anymore. I don’t attempt to memorize their numbers. Everyday new ones are brought in, requiring measurements, photographs, and finally, surgery. I snap a picture of the inside of his mouth, propped open by the metal mouth gag that keeps them from biting.
His throat twitches with a scream and a growl, but I continue to snap away. The faster we finish this, the faster I can see my brother.
In the last month, Abel’s improved some. Not enough to rouse suspicion, but enough that I don’t worry as much as before. He’s even begun to play with some of the other children in the yard during our visits. I met his best friend Sammy, a boy slightly younger than Abel who likes to crash into things, headfirst. Abel still carries the bruises of what I assume are beatings, but he hasn’t ended up here, and that’s what I focus on, for now.
Always the good, never the bad.
Garbed in full gear, Doctor Falkenrath enters the surgical suite, and I set down the camera, preparing to take measurements and samples.
“All documentation complete?” he asks, smoothing his hands over the gloves.
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop with this sir shit. Josef is fine.” He’s told me this a number of times, but I can’t bring myself to call him this. Occasionally, I’ll call him Doctor F, but never Josef. It’s too friendly, and I have no friends here.
The man has kept me alive, when most of the boys from my hive have passed through with late stages of the disease. I’m thankful that these are the only cases I see here. It’s easier for me to watch them die, knowing there’s no hope for them.
Not yet, anyway.
Doctor F believes he’s close to replicating the antibodies against the Dredge, but the proteins keep changing. This is the only part of this hell that pushes away the guilt that I wear like a second skin. The light at the end of a very dark and frightening tunnel. He says, someday, these boys will be cured, instead of cut apart.
So I keep on.
He goes to work on the subject, as usual, cutting and pausing to quietly observe, or collect a sample that I’m to label and jot notes on. In between, I doodle diamond shapes on the notebook to pass the time.
“Doctor, why don’t they eat the infected?” It’s a question I’ve tried to tease out in the notes and brief conversations with him, but still can’t figure out the answer.
Bent forward, he drags the scalpel in short, meticulous lines over an existing scar at the subject’s armpit. I’ve learned this is where they harvest the lymph nodes. “They do. You, as all second generation, carry the disease, and they’d surely eat you, if given the chance. But you’re not third stage, and that’s when something truly remarkable happens.”
“What?”
“Perhaps the only known source of immunity at this point.”
Words that were once a whole other language have become a permanent part of my vocabulary, and his response sparks more questions. “How?”
He snorts his amusement, but doesn’t bother to turn. “You’ve grown to be quite
the curious little cat. Well, in Stage One, you experience nothing more than a common cold. Coughing. Sneezing. Fever. You could essentially function and even not gain much attention. Second Stage is when the organism overwhelms your body. You’re weak. Confused. Fever is climbing to dangerous levels. It’s at the latter part of this stage that it infects the brain. Once that happens, there’s really no hope, at all. However, the organism induces a pheromone that is excreted from the sweat glands into the air around you. It tells the others you’re one of them, and to stay away.”
Another question has been burning a hole in my thoughts for weeks now. “What … what is … the Alpha project?”
He pauses to glance back at me, then returns to his slicing. “Where did you hear that?”
“One of the boys in the commissary. I overheard it. They said some of the boys had been taken and placed in the Alpha project.”
“The pheromones I described are very powerful. There is one strain, quite rare, though, that doesn’t require Third Stage infection to keep them away. It’s produced in second generation males, thought to be ancestors of the indigenous people in whom the organism was originally harvested.”
“They don’t get sick?”
“They can. The disease remains dormant in your generation, but it can be induced. Reactivated. We’ve not determined what activates it, though. Bites from Ragers, of course. But in the absence of that, it seems to be random.”
“Is that why we’re here? Why you only take boys?”
“Yes.”
“The boys … they said they mess with their heads in S block. What does that mean?”
“As I said, we’ve not found what activates the disease in these special subjects. The physicians in S block have incorporated a number of mental and physical stimulants.” He clears his throat, and I catch the shift of his shoulders beneath the suit. “No more questions.”
We’ve dipped into his discomfort, the part of this place that unsettles him—the same part that keeps him from wheeling the bodies down to the morgue. “Yes, sir.”
When we’re finally finished, he drapes a sheet over the patient to send him off to the incinerator.
“Before you take him down, come with me.”
On Doctor F’s heels, I wait for him to doff his suit, then shed my gloves and washing my hands, before I follow him through the door to the anteroom. From there, he leads me to his office, which is nothing impressive. There are no pictures, or plants, nothing personal in his small space. Books line the wall on shelves behind him. Most are medical references, but I catch sight of three bibles stacked beside each other.
He passes an object to me that I recognize as my book, the one I nabbed from the coffee table back home, and I instinctively clutch it to my chest.
“I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed it.”
“You read it?”
“I did. I found it to be … diverting.”
Pulling away the book just enough to see the cover, I stare down at the last vestiges of my home, trapped in my arms. “My mother used to read it to me.”
“Your mother. What was she like? You?”
The thought makes me chuckle, and I shake my head. “No. My mother was calm and soft spoken. My sister, Sarai, was more like her.”
“Younger sister?” He never usually asks about my family, which almost makes his questions seem intrusive.
“Yes. My brother’s twin. Both of them are like my mother. They have her eyes, too.”
“And you are more like your father?”
Considering his question for a moment, I shrug. “In some ways, yes. In others, no.”
“How so?”
I drop my gaze from his, rubbing my thumb back and forth over the cover of the book. “He’s smarter. Braver. He would’ve fought back when the soldiers came for us.”
“And he would’ve surely been killed for it.”
He’s probably right. My father undoubtedly would’ve sacrificed himself to protect us.
“How did your father die?” he asks.
“Ragers. He was out scouting. They attacked the camp. He died saving one of the men.”
Doctor Falkenrath leans forward, entwining his fingers. “The world has no place for heroes anymore. It’s an admirable, but foolish, quality. You’ve played your cards much smarter, Dani.”
His words are a slap that sends a tremor of anger through my blood. All I did was as my mother told me. And everyone else I’ve come in contact with since that day.
“My father is no fool. He wouldn’t have so easily fallen to his knees like me.”
“And yet, here you are.”
Yes. Here I am. “Es mejor la muerte.” Death is better.
“Perhaps it is.” From the drawer beside him, he pulls a cigar and clips the end with a metal object. Stuffing it into his mouth, he lights it and puffs three times. The warm tobacco scent drifts across the room, watering my mouth. “It’s why I don’t feel so bad indulging in the last of these,” he says, lifting the cigar. “How is your brother?” His question catches me off guard. He’s not asked about Abel since offering him the cake.
“Okay, I guess. I think they’re still punishing him, though. He has bruises.”
“Are you certain it’s punishment? Have you examined the bruising?”
I frown at that, setting the book in my lap. “What else would it be?”
“Injections. Bruising from the needles.”
“What kind of injections?”
“There are a number of stimuli they use to reactivate the virus. Anything that might encourage physical, or emotional, stress. Hallucinations.”
Monsters.
“Why are you doing this? Telling me these things. What can I do about it, if it is?”
“My apologies. Your curiosity over his bruises sounded genuine. There’s nothing you can do. He’s part of a study.”
“A study that starves children? Forces them to walk around in their own soiled diapers? One that subjects him to monsters!” Anger courses in my blood, and I shoot to my feet. “What exactly are you studying? How to properly torture a human being?”
Doctor Falkenrath doesn’t move, still casually leaned back in his chair. “For some studies, yes.”
“Why? Why are you doing this to us?”
“Us? As I recall, you’ve not been subjected to any of it.”
A sharp sting hits the rim of my eyes as they fill with tears, and I fall back into the chair. Guilt gnaws at my gut—the same cold guilt I fall asleep with every night in this place, when the screams bleed through the walls. “I would take his place at a moment’s notice.”
“And you would die the moment they learned you’re a girl.”
“I’m going to die, anyway, aren’t I? Eventually?”
“Indifference to death isn’t going to help you here. Learn to be indifferent to pain, and you’ll become invincible. Defiant.”
“Inhuman. No one is invincible.”
His gaze falls to my lap and back. “In your book, had the boy suffered the burden of a brother, or sister, he’d have surely perished.”
I catch a glimpse of the bibles stacked behind him. “And in your book, a man dies on a cross for his people.”
A smile lifts the corner of his lips, but my anger is too at its height to appreciate that it’s one of the first genuine smiles I’ve seen on the man. “Touché. You are a fascinating child, Dani. But for the record, I gave up on that book a long time ago.” He rises from the chair, tapping his cigar into the ashtray on his desk. “I’ll inquire about your brother, but no promises. That’s all I can offer you, for now. Please take the corpse to the incinerator before you head out for lunch.”
I wheel the body down to the basement, as usual. I’ve made it a point to lift the sheets of the other beds, praying that I won’t come across my brother. Every day, I hold my breath, looking at the mutilated, skeletal bodies, preparing my mind for the day I see my brother’s sleeping face. And now that I know they’ve been injecting him, the knots in my sto
mach wring tighter than before. In minutes, I make my way to the very front of the lineup, and the doors open, sending a wave of heat and the nauseating stench of burnt flesh.
“How goes it, Danny boy?” Mike calls me Danny boy, which always strikes me odd, no matter how many times I hear boy. He’s the operator of the ovens, the one who burns the bodies and scared the ever-loving crap out of me the first time I came down here.
“It goes. Fewer today, huh?”
“It seems. Some docs transferred to another building.”
“That’s a relief.”
“For us? Yes. For the poor bastards who get ‘em next? No.” Donned in his usual apron and mask, he sets his hands on his hips, drawing my eyes to the blood I try not to look at, spattered across the front of him, and the white bandages wrapped around his hand.
I jerk my head toward it, noting the shoddy wrap job that tells me it wasn’t one of the docs upstairs. “What happened to your hand?”
“Ah, this?” Lifting his hand, he examines the dressing, and sets it back on his hip. “Splashed stew on it.”
“Stew?”
“Some kinda chemical cocktail. ‘Swhat we dip the bodies in before burning ‘em. Kills off the infection, so it don’t spread through the air.” He tips his head and hides the bandaged hand behind his crossed arms. “Can I ask you somethin’? Why d’you look under all the sheets?”
I glance back at the two-dozen, or so, beds lined for the incinerator. “I’m looking for someone. You see a boy down here, blond curls, blue eyes. You’ll let me know, yeah?”
“Sure thing, kid.” He jerks his head. “Get outta here. You don’t need to be down here in all this.”
A request that doesn’t require prodding on my part.
With a nod, I scamper back to the elevator and press the door to the second floor. When I reach the surgical suite, I discard all of my gear into the bin, wash up, and push through the doors into the anteroom, en route to the commissary.