Tabitha

by Hall, Andrew

  ‘Major John Blake,’ he said, edging his chair closer to the table. He rested his hands down gently on the table top. ‘I’m the one who shot you,’ he said. He was well-spoken, with a voice thick as molasses that filled the bare room. ‘It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,’ he said. Tabitha watched him fearfully, still struggling against her restraints. Blake just sat and smiled. His neat back-and-sides picked out his sharp gaunt features. The buzzer went again, and the door opened. An aide strode in with a cup and saucer and a squat, steel, cafeteria coffee pot. Blake smiled at Tabitha as if they’d invited her over for tea. He waited patiently while his aide, who didn’t dare look at her, poured steaming coffee into his cup and left the room.

  ‘It’s a shame to detain you like this,’ Blake mused once they were alone, blowing at the small cup of coffee that he held pinched between finger and thumb. ‘But given your monstrous affliction, I saw no other choice.’ He smiled, and sipped his coffee. Tabitha said nothing; only glared and pulled at her restraints. She slammed the back of her head against the chair rest, so hard that she hurt herself. Blake looked amused.

  ‘So much anger,’ he said with a smirk, placing his cup down in the saucer with a gentle clink. He folded his fingers together on the table. Big clean fingernails, filed to perfection. ‘Or should I say, so much anger wasted. From one killer to another, my advice is this: pour every ounce of your anger into effective actions.’ He sipped his coffee, and took on a philosophical look. ‘Anger is a precious resource, and it comes in such short bursts,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it on superficial displays, or… ineffective expressions. Channel every drop of anger into effective deeds.’

  ‘You talk too much,’ said Tabitha, pale-faced, staring into his dark eyes.

  ‘And you don’t talk much at all,’ he replied brightly, putting his cup down with a clink. ‘It’s not like a captive to say so little.’ Tabitha ignored him and simply stared into his eyes, trying to will whatever alien strength she’d been cursed with to snap her restraints. But they didn’t even rattle.

  ‘I doubt that you’ll break those,’ said Blake, nodding at her cuffs. He sipped his coffee. ‘I’m aware that it’s uncomfortable and undignified, and for that much I apologise,’ he said. ‘But you’re just too useful to us to let you escape. We’d like your abilities, you see. To us, you’re a weapon. A bioweapon.’ He coughed politely, and webbed his fingers back together on the table top. ‘Imagine soldiers immune to the alien venom,’ he said proudly. ‘Soldiers who could heal in minutes, or turn their skin into armour. These kind of abilities could turn the tide in this war. And God knows, we’re in dire need of that. So, if there’s anything you can tell us now that’ll help us, it would be much appreciated. We’d like to know how you tick, Tabitha.’

  ‘Why don’t you come a little closer and find out?’ she replied, through gritted teeth. Blake barked a laugh into the room, sudden and arrogant. Tabitha’s body trembled with anger. Her muscles ached and flexed beneath her skin with the constant effort against her restraints.

  ‘Alright,’ he replied happily, as if he’d been invited to join a game. He stood up and stepped towards her slowly, as if he were approaching an exhibit. ‘I could never refuse the invitation of a beautiful woman.’ He leant in close to her face, breathing his sour coffee breath on her cheek. ‘Even an alien one, apparently.’ He smelled like aftershave and alcohol; cigarette smoke and boot polish.

  ‘I’m human,’ she spat back. The head restraint pinned her. She could only give his face a sidelong stare where it loomed at her shoulder.

  ‘You don’t believe that,’ he replied playfully, looking down at her hands. ‘And neither does anyone else.’ His fingers moved as if he were about to touch her breast; he stopped himself. ‘I mean, you have those hands,’ he said. You drink the blood of an alien species to survive. Even sitting still, you look like a wild animal. You’re a mutation. A monster.’ He looked deep into her eyes, as if he were about to confide in her. ‘An abomination.’ His words bit her, more than she thought they could. After everything she’d been through, after all she’d lost, it was still the weight of words that cut deepest. They always had, ever since she was small.

  ‘And you’re going to cut me up,’ she said venomously. ‘So what does that make you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not the one doing the cutting,’ Blake said with a smile, straightening up to look down at her. ‘We have our own Doctor Frankenstein, here on the base; I’m just the one who brings him the bodies.’

  ‘You mean there are more people like me?’ she said furiously.

  ‘Not like you,’ he replied. ‘Just… people. Failed experiments. We’ve put them down now anyway.’ He said it as if it were a tedious formality, and turned away from her. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he said over his shoulder, walking back to the table. ‘Humanity’s already lost this war,’ he said. ‘To survive this world, we need to become inhuman. And you’re going to show us how.’ He scratched his forehead, searching for the words. ‘Don’t think of us as monsters,’ he reassured her. ‘We’re doing this for the human race, not for me or you. Believe me, I’d have my own mother cut open if it would save the planet. And anyway, I’m told that you died of a gunshot to the throat and then just… came back to life. What’s a few scalpels and needles to someone like you?’ Tabitha said nothing; she only glared and struggled against the chair with a fresh fury.

  ‘It’s such a shame that you’re not more well-built,’ said Blake, with disappointment in his voice. ‘How much more we could have learned from a stronger specimen.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘The one person we find with the potential to help us win this war, and it had to be a bloody w –

  Blake hesitated and stopped himself before he said it.

  ‘What? A woman?’ said Tabitha. ‘Is that what you were going to say?’ Blake said nothing.

  ‘So there’s people listening to us talk?’ she said. Blake’s angry silence was as good as a yes. ‘I don’t think you’re the one wearing the trousers around here,’ Tabitha chuckled. ‘Your boss is a woman, and you hate it.’ He sipped his coffee in silence. ‘So here you are, the big bad major, afraid to share a room with a weak little woman unless I’m bolted to a chair,’ she said. Blake didn’t say anything, or turn to face her. He merely paused for a second, and sipped his coffee. ‘Is that how the big bad Major got his stripes?’ she continued. ‘Getting his men to tie people down, so he could take the piss without getting hurt? You’ll even get them to cut me up and pull me apart too. I think the big bad major’s afraid to get his hands dirty.’

  ‘Are you implying that I’m a coward?’ he said quietly, between sips of his coffee. Images flashed in his mind, stark and fleeting. All the horror he’d seen. He turned to her, and his expression changed. His look took on a sudden ferocity, utterly detached.

  ‘I’m not implying anything,’ Tabitha replied. ‘You are a coward.’ Blake pelted the coffee cup at the wall by her head. He launched himself at her and gripped her hard by the jaw. He stared into her eyes with a burning hate. Tabitha felt like her jaw was about to crack. Blake gripped, harder, and patted the sheath on his belt for a knife that wasn’t there. He’d had to leave it outside, on his superior’s orders.

  ‘Major Blake,’ came a woman’s voice over a speaker, calm and crisp. Blake ignored it. He shifted his grip to squeeze Tabitha’s throat and pulled back his fist, about to lay into her face. ‘Major Blake,’ the voice repeated, insistent. Blake hesitated, and stepped back in a rage. He up-ended the steel table against the wall with a ringing crash, and stormed out of the door as the buzzer blared.

  ‘Bye darling,’ Tabitha called after him, listening to his boots clomp down the hall as the door crept shut. ‘Come and see me again without these cuffs on. I’ll tear your heart out.’

  After a short wait the door buzzer blared again. Tabitha jumped. The doctor seemed to glide into the room, stooped and graceful like a greying vulture. For all the threat of Major Blake’s anger, it was nothing compared with the dread she fel
t at the doctor’s calm expression. He held a syringe and a glass bottle of clear fluid in a veiny hand. His thick glasses framed eyes that looked too big. Eyes that looked over her body, studying her strange hands. They didn’t dare meet the hate and fury in her stare. They simply darted from her secure restraints to the soft pale skin at the crease in her arm.

  ‘You’re here to cut me open, aren’t you?’ she asked him. He didn’t respond.

  ‘I’m going to get free, and I’m going to strip the skin off you,’ she told him. No reaction. She watched him draw clear fluid from the bottle into the syringe. ‘When you cut me up, you just make sure there’s nothing left of me,’ she told him. ‘Otherwise I’m going to come back for you when you’re sleeping, and I’m going to skin you. We could make a night of it.’ His big wrinkly hands trembled when he poked the needle into her vein. ‘I’ll skin you alive,’ she growled at him. ‘I’ll skin you alive! I fucking promise!’ the needle had emptied into her, and she felt anaesthetic plunge her mind underwater. A much stronger dose. Her brain and body had disconnected. The room was a white blur, shrinking from her view.

  When Tabitha woke up she saw two faces above her, standing in fuzzy silhouette against a circle of surgical lights overhead. She lay restrained on an operating table. Her body must have burned off the anaesthetic… no, it wasn’t that. They just wanted her awake now, that was all. They’d already cut her open and looked inside while she was unconscious. She could feel the closed incision in her chest and stomach; the searing sting of stitched-up skin as it healed. She was awake, but she couldn’t move a thing. Not even to struggle against her restraints. Like her body had been unplugged from her mind.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ said the woman standing over her, sounding distant and husky-voiced. Her face drifted and blurred with the lights above her, as if in a dream.

  ‘She needs to be conscious,’ the doctor insisted. ‘The anaesthetic inhibits her abilities slightly. We have to know what she’s really capable of.’ Tabitha was terrified. Again she frantically tried to struggle against her restraints. But she couldn’t even twitch a finger. She was paralysed, and yet she still had feeling in her limbs. She felt the tight restraints around her wrists and ankles; the cold air against her legs.

  ‘Just make sure you don’t kill her,’ the woman commanded him. ‘She’s too valuable. And keep the noise down.’

  ‘Trust me,’ he replied. ‘She won’t make a peep.’ Tabitha tried to shout. She couldn’t make the sounds. Words wouldn’t come. All she could do was watch, blink, breathe. She screamed silently in a fevered rage, and roared words in her head that never escaped her still lips. She urged her arms and legs to flail and strike out, but the muscles wouldn’t respond. She lay motionless in a night terror, waiting for a waking jolt that wouldn’t come.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the woman told the doctor, looking over Tabitha on the table but refusing to meet her eyes. As the woman walked out, the doctor brought a scalpel over from a trolley. He lowered it carefully to press it gently against Tabitha’s leg. Then the pain started. Tabitha felt all of it, the blinding pain of the slice, stretching on for an eternity as her mind writhed and screamed. Her relief was short-lived; another instrument went in. The surgery had begun. She felt every ounce of agony, every inch of surgical steel that clicked and jostled against raw bone. The pain was maddening, drowning out every thought. She wanted to murder him. She’d never imagined herself taking another life before, but now she knew what it felt like to want someone dead. An animal hate burned in the back of her brain. One procedure followed after another, on and on until she’d passed out and come around and passed out again. The doctor was watching her expression as she blinked her eyes open. I’m going to kill you. She screamed the thought at him, over and over, trying to launch her mind at his somehow. Desperate for him to know how much he was going to suffer when she broke free. It was the only thought that kept her going.

  The operations wore on; Tabitha had long since lost her mind to the pain. How long had it been since she’d first woken up on the table? Minutes? Days? Time had bent and warped here under the ring of surgical lights, stretched and distorted as she passed in and out of consciousness. The only constant was the pain of the operations, and the little heavens in between as her body healed and the agony subsided. Tabitha bled, healed, bled again. She tried to distract herself from the insanity of her pain. She tried to fill her mind with a murderous mantra; an angry wall against the searing stabs and cuts. Daydreams of violent revenge on the people who’d stripped her humanity away. Blake and the doctor here. The husky woman. Jackie and Sylvia. Chris. It was the only thought she could cling to in the maddening tide of pain.

  When Tabitha came around again she felt a needle going into her arm. She could only look sidelong at the doctor as he worked, staring and motionless like a living doll. Was it back to the anaesthetic then? Was he finished with his torture? She still felt the pain of her stitches all over. She didn’t feel any more doped, now that he’d pulled the needle out. She realised with a shattered hope that it wasn’t anaesthetic at all. He’d only taken a blood sample. He’d been running wires into her back while she was unconscious. Plugging her in. The next round of tests were far more terrifying, and she felt all of it. Every jolt of current that he sapped from her heartcore, in the place where a human heart used to beat. Every twitch and jerk, every sob, every wail that he coaxed from her with the rods he slid into her spine. And to top it all, it was how he spoke about her to the husky woman while he was doing his experiments. Like they were looking under the bonnet of a brand new car. Talking excitedly about adaptations and hybrid components, as if she wasn’t a person at all. If she had any fear left inside her, any tears or panic or grief, she couldn’t feel it. The doctor’s scalpels may as well have cut out her feelings. The electrodes shocked every emotion away.

  Tabitha woke up again in the interrogation room. She stared in a daze at the doctor’s clicking fingers in front of her, her bright eyes fixed on his hand like a child. Everything slid back into focus. The doctor sat opposite her at the steel table. To his right, the husky woman. Her sandy-blonde hair was greying. She had thin lips and a stern look, devoid of compassion. The white fluorescent light hummed above them on the ceiling. Tabitha stared dead ahead in her seat, a zombie, looking past both of them sitting opposite. She stared at the far wall; stared at the painted bricks. Tried not to think about the surgical slices and bruises that covered her arms and legs. She had no strength left to struggle against her thick restraints. There was that hospital smell again like cleaning fluid, and the plastic stink of her gown. The clammy feel of patient slippers on her feet. And that cold hollow trembling in her body lately; a shiver that she couldn’t stop.

  ‘We’ve found so much that we can’t interact with,’ the doctor told the woman. Tabitha heard his high croaky voice and it ran down her back like a rusty nail. Her dosed-up thoughts were swimming and hard to grasp, like vague glass fish in murky pond water. But she had a memory then. Of a needle going in, and a threat she’d made to him. It was a distant thought, fleeting and forgotten again. Someone had held her by the throat in this room. He’d gripped her jaw and hurt her, and tried to reach out and touch her. She’d made him angry somehow; made him overreact. She felt a spark of joy then. For making him angry. There were more memories bubbling up in her mind, but from a different time. Long ago. She remembered happiness, and her mum and dad. No… they were gone. They’d died. Murky memories of friends, old and new, and a dog. They were all gone too. It was just her now, stuck to a chair in a bright white room, bruised and sliced and stared at in all her stark fault and mutation. Dosed up on something that made life swim like a bad dream. The woman and the doctor were talking.

  ‘You don’t have any concrete findings? Nothing we can apply?’ said the husky woman, short-tempered. Tabitha’s eyes drifted from the far wall between them; flicked to the woman. The woman held Tabitha’s gaze, and then looked away from her.

  ‘I need more
time,’ the doctor replied, apologetic. ‘There’s no frame of reference… I need to try different approaches. This is all new to me.’ Tabitha’s eyes flicked to him. He looked away too. The hard light overhead bared everything. The grey skin of her hands, the stapled slices in her skin, the plum-purple blush of her bruises. Her hands shook.

  ‘Can she hear us?’ the woman asked the doctor. She could. She could hear them. Yes, Tabitha said in her head. I can hear you. Her throat and her mouth wouldn’t make the sound come out, like her voicebox was on mute. She blinked her stinging eyes, and gulped in her dry throat. Water, she said in her head. I’d like some water please.

  ‘She can,’ the doctor told the woman, after studying Tabitha’s doped stare. Tabitha had zoned out, trembling and staring at the blank white wall. When she looked around she found herself in the interrogation room. She saw the doctor sitting there at a table in front of her, and the husky woman beside him. The white fluorescent light hummed above them on the ceiling. Tabitha found herself covered in cuts and bruises that stood out hard in the light. She tried to speak; nothing came out. She panicked. Why couldn’t she speak? Why couldn’t she move? What had they been doing to her? The woman and the doctor just sat there, staring.

  ‘It’s unfortunate that she needs to be conscious for the procedures,’ the doctor observed. ‘But her nanotechnology is so much more pronounced when she’s awake. And it’s in everything. Cell regeneration, bio-electrical current, respiration.’ Tabitha looked at him and understood, and a creeping dread fell over her in that rare moment of clarity. Experiments. Operations. She remembered now. She pulled frantically against her restraints. Within seconds she was exhausted, and looking around at the room again.

  ‘Does she even know where she is?’ said the husky woman, studying Tabitha’s lost expression.