Soul Suites

by Hulden Morse

  “Gary! Eh, Gary! Come here!”

  “Wuz up?” a skinny, short man said through crooked teeth.

  “Come. Here!” Herman yelled impatiently.

  “Aw shit. The hell is that?” Gary said from behind his roommate.

  “Don’ know. Just appeared. Damndest thing.”

  The short man sat on the floor and put his eyes against the hole, peering through it to a foreign world on the other side. All he saw was another bathroom and two pairs of legs standing nearby.

  “Hey! Hey!” he called out to his neighbors. “You!”

  Charles knelt down beside the opening and saw a man staring back at him. The man had curly, black hair and brown eyes with specks of color in them as if they were dirty.

  “Um, hello,” Charles said awkwardly.

  “The hell is going on?” Herman called from the background.

  The CEO noticed a wheelchair parked behind the man with whom he spoke. He could see someone with painfully skinny, crippled legs sitting in the chair, though his face was out of view.

  “We’re trying to escape,” Charles responded. “Trying to get into the walls.”

  “How’d you do this?” Gary asked curiously.

  “With a chisel. We got it somehow. But this was the only place we could make a hole. There aren’t cameras here.”

  “Cameras?” the small man said in confusion.

  “Oh shit. Where are your cameras?”

  “Well, I think there’s one in the corner there. Yeah. It’s there.”

  “Where’s it facing?”

  As Charles spoke to the man, Damian had started to back away from the bathroom as if preparing for the inevitable.

  “It’s… uh, oh. It’s facing us.”

  The CEO darted away from the hole and into the main room where Damian was leaning against a wall with his hands on his head. They stared at each other in utter shock, the panic settling into their brains.

  “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Damian said in terror.

  “We’re screwed.”

  Without another word, the two men sprinted back into the bathroom and began to stuff the mess of plaster on their floor back into the hole, desperately attempting to fix what they had done.

  “What do we do? What do we do?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Damian suggested that they shove the chisel through the hole in order to blame the other room, but Charles nixed the idea, not wanting to incriminate someone else for something of which they alone were responsible.

  “We’re going to get killed! Or worse, tortured!”

  “They’ll do the same to that other room,” the CEO argued. “We can’t do that to them. This is our problem. We need to fix it.”

  Just then, they heard the loud creak of a metal door and banging on a wall. Fearful, both men looked up in anticipation of a rear attack by the guards, but found no movement in their room. Charles looked through the hole and saw that the dwelling of Gary and Herman had been infiltrated.

  “It wasn’t me! They did it! Over there!” the man in the wheelchair screamed.

  Through the hole in the wall, he watched a scuffle ensue where Herman was knocked to the ground, his wheelchair being shoved to the side carelessly, and a guard pinned his torso to the floor. Gary was treated equally poorly, being thrown against a wall and his face shoved violently onto the cold material. Both men pleaded for their release, stating that they did nothing wrong, but their cries went unheeded.

  Unsure of what to do, Charles and Damian left their spot on the floor and returned to their main room, running aimlessly around the table as they fought to produce a solution to the deadly issue.

  “We’re going to die. They’re going to kill us,” Damian said in terror.

  “Shit. I know. But-but, shit. I don’t know what to do!”

  Within seconds, their own door burst open with such force that both men staggered backward in shock, finding themselves either leaning against a wall or sitting on the ground, desperately working out some way to avoid what was about to happen.

  Four guards stormed into their space, and two of them threw Damian onto the ground, pinning him down with their hands and knees. Charles, who was already sitting, was pushed forward so violently that he didn’t have time to throw out his hands to absorb the impact, leaving his chin to suffer the majority of the collision. The world went momentarily dark as the CEO was attacked by the facility employees. He quickly regained full consciousness, hearing the expletives and angered questions being directed at the two men.

  With the subjects contained, one of the guards stepped into the bathroom and grabbed the chisel from behind the door. He then ordered both men to be stripped completely and searched for any other contraband, along with the entirety of their room.

  Before he could react, Charles’s clothes were pulled off of him and every cavity was unpleasantly probed by a gloved employee. The CEO could hear his roommate crying out for mercy, begging the men to stop their senseless exploring, yet the investigation continued until there was no doubt that the metal chisel was the only object that had been snuck into the facility.

  They were both told to put on their grey clothing and return to their prone positions on the ground, a vulnerable pose that left Charles expecting some sort of kick or punch from his captives. Instead, the guards pulled each man into a standing position and dragged him out of the room and down some stairs as if they were headed toward another trial. The subjects welcomed this fate, understanding that they knew how the trials felt and that temporary death would be a fair punishment for their escape attempt. However, after they descended the stairs, the guards took them through a long, foreign hall and then down another staircase, into an area that neither Charles nor Damian knew existed.

  The men looked at one another, hoping for some reassurance or strength from their companion’s expression, but were both met with equal visages of fear and confusion. They were going to be punished, that was inevitable, and neither man knew what to expect.

  Before long, they were brought through a set of double doors and into a large room that seemed to be twice the size of a trial room and twice as tall, with a lofted ceiling that made the space seem even more ominous. In the center of the room was a massive, cylindrical object that had a metal base and a clear, glass tube comprising the rest of the body. It seemed to be full of some clear liquid and had hoses running from the bottom of the contraption. It looked complicated, expensive, and deadly.

  The captives were thrown onto the ground once more and told not to move. Charles was desperate to protect the other room of subjects from any sort of wrongful retribution thanks to his own actions.

  “They didn’t do it!” he cried out.

  “Shut up!” one of the guards yelled.

  “The man in the wheelchair and the other guy. They’re innocent!”

  “I said shut up!”

  The guard then pulled out a gun from beneath his belt and aimed it at the CEO, a threat that was immediately followed by the other guard pointing a gun at Damian. The two men stared in surprise at the excessive show of force, unaware that the facility even provided such powerful weapons for its employees.

  “Holy fuck,” Damian said, his eyes big and tearful.

  Charles decided that it would be best to remain quiet. He gazed around the room in order to absorb his surroundings. The first thing he noticed was two other people lying in the room, just a couple yards from where he and his roommate had been forced to the ground. He recognized one of the men as the individual with whom he spoke through the hole and the other man was crippled from the waist down, and he could only assume it was the man from the wheelchair. Both men seemed confused, terrified, never expecting something of that magnitude to have befallen them so suddenly.

  As everyone waited tensely, with the subjects unmoving from their submissive pose on the grou
nd and the guards stationary with their guns drawn and faces fierce, a nearby door opened and two Trial Technicians ran into the room.

  “What’s happening?” one of them said.

  “Escape attempt. These four are involved,” a guard stated sternly.

  “Damn. Well, we notified the doctor that something is happening. He’s on his way now. And shit, is he pissed.”

  Chapter 49

  A wise man once said, “Understand your enemy. Befriend your enemy. This is the way to finding peace.” That man was killed by those who opposed his views. His body was found lying in a ditch, dumped there like trash, a total of twenty-seven stab wounds riddling the flesh.

  Society rose up against those who were responsible for the man’s death. They rioted in the streets, demanded justice for what had been done, and chanted his name into the night. Pressured by its irate and borderline hostile citizens, the government launched an investigation into his death, promising that the enemy of such a peaceful soul would be revealed to all, and properly punished.

  However, as the investigation was conducted, authorities discovered that the deceased man was not who the people thought he was. That man’s past was tainted with racist writings, sexist exclamations, violent tendencies, and a murderous history. He had covered his trail of crimes not by hiding from the public eye, but by standing out as a spokesman for human rights and world peace. Who would suspect a kind, gentle person to be at fault for those killings or rapings or burglaries?

  He was brought down by those who knew the truth. Few in number they were, yet brave enough to stand up for what they knew to be right, even if that meant going against society as a whole. They were charged for their crime, it being illegal to kill even a guilty man, and they were executed with pride in their hearts.

  Hamilton thought of that man, a sinner hiding beneath a halo, and wondered if the same could be applied to Reaching Dreams. Was her own company not the perfect cover for someone wanting to do harm? Yet that still begged the questions: who, what, why, and how?

  She decided to do what the police should have done in that story; she was going to tear apart the district from where Charles disappeared. She was going to dismantle that office piece by piece, in search of every file and every speck of evidence that could point her in the direction of those missing people, and of Charles.

  The assistant had already contacted Bob Seeker and explained to him what she felt was the right course of action. He shared with her that such a plan was already in the works and that if she and Pinner wished to join him, they were welcome to meet him in Chicago.

  A wolf howled to the foreboding moon. A branch creaked in the telling breeze. A scream echoed through the unsettling night. There was suddenly silence. Even the wind seemed to have ceased its efforts. The only sound was the splatter of liquid upon the ground, followed by the clatter of metal and the collapse of something heavy. Who’s to say it was not the sound of justice?

  Chapter 50

  An explosion of fury burst through the door, followed by loud footsteps against the hard ground. Charles trembled in fear, fighting the urge to urinate. The sight that Dr. Raymond met would have been memorable to anyone watching from the outside. It was like the scene of an overproduced tragedy, a group of armed men forcefully detaining the oppressed.

  The doctor moaned in what sounded like semi-perturbed amusement. “What the fuck’s going on?” he yelled at the security guards in the room. They huddled closer together, intimidated by the power that the doctor held, not one of them wishing to break the news of the escape attempt to their boss.

  “Well, who’s going to tell me what this is all about?” the doctor continued. “I’m getting real—”

  He paused suddenly when he looked at one of the men involved in the disturbance. What seemed to be initial frustration subsided into a rage, so visible and obvious that Charles feared the doctor would take one of those guns, point it at his head, and pull the trigger without the tiniest bit of hesitation.

  “Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Dr. Raymond did not approach the CEO but stood motionless, staring at the man in disappointment. “I shouldn’t be surprised. What the hell did you do, Pearson?”

  “They made a hole in their bathroom wall,” one of the guards said. “Found a chisel behind the bathroom door.”

  Charles felt like he would throw up on the spot. His stomach churned uncomfortably, and his heart beat like he had just run a marathon. That kind of pressure on his failing body produced an ache that was hard for the man to understand. He was fatigued without having done anything, winded without any exertion, sore without any signs of physical trauma. His body was a car that was being pushed to the limit of its abilities after having been banged up in an accident. Things weren’t the same, something would always be off, and because of that, the performance output was greatly diminished. The CEO had suffered numerous accidents and was paying the price for an experiment he strived to shut down.

  “How’d they get a chisel?” Dr. Raymond asked as he stalked toward the subjects.

  “It was given to us,” Charles responded to the question that was not directed at him.

  “It was fuckin’ given to you?” the doctor snapped.

  “It’s true,” Damian added. “It was suddenly there one night.”

  “You expect me to—” the doctor started, but he was interrupted by a guard who stepped forward and cautiously raised his hand, as if asking permission to speak.

  “Um, sir? We found a note in there as well. It appears to be an inside job. Not sure who.”

  He handed over the note and then shrank into the background, as if hoping to disappear from the doctor’s radar. No one else dared to speak, including the terrified subjects that laid on the ground. The room was still. Even the cold air seemed to stagnate around them, waiting for the next word to be uttered, not wanting to break the horrid stillness that ate into the minds of an anxious crowd.

  “Who gave you the note?” Dr. Raymond asked Charles, standing over his body.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t say,” the CEO mumbled, knowing that his answers were going to make the entire situation worse.

  “Dammit, Pearson. Who gave you the note?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I will not harm you if you tell me who’s responsible.”

  Charles gave the doctor a cold look, hoping his sincerity would be accepted or at least communicated with no doubt as to its veracity. He had found himself in the worst-case scenario, staring death in the face with no opportunity to escape. He had been given a gift from someone within that facility, a chance to free himself from a barbaric, human experiment, a chance to see his family again and send a murderous doctor of eugenics to the chair. That possibility was gone. It ended long ago when he decided to sleep on the ground amongst ultimately moral, yet forgotten people he had vowed to save and protect. That was the moment when his fate had been sealed. His decisions, born of perfect ignorance, led Charles to that hard floor, lying at the feet of a serial killer, with vomit threatening to erupt at any instant and pores oozing with sweat.

  “I. Don’t. Know,” the shaking man said.

  “Alright, Pearson. That is fine,” Dr. Raymond uttered, turning away from his subject and looking to the immense, mysterious machine in the center of the room. “If you do not wish to talk, that is fine. But I will make someone talk. Where are my technicians?”

  Paul and Ramona, who had been standing in the background away from the action, bounded forward and awaited their commands.

  “Please set up the machine. We’ll be using it momentarily.”

  Ramona looked at her partner and then at the machine, admiring its complexity and menacing power. The technicians then walked to a control panel on the wall and began pushing buttons. Charles watched as the liquid inside that great, glass cylinder began to fill with bubbles. The hoses around the base of the machine started to sh
ake and hiss, but he could not discern what the purpose was.

  Dr. Raymond ordered the guards to bring Damian to the platform. One of the largest men grabbed the subject by his shirt collar and forced him onto his feet. With a gun in his back, Damian obediently staggered toward the machine, while his roommate called out impotent commands from the background.

  “Leave him alone! Stop!”

  The man was brought before a small, metal staircase that winded behind the machine and concluded above the glass cylinder. He was shoved up the stairs and brought to his knees at the top of the platform, where he knelt over the large pool of water, which had ceased bubbling and was now eerily placid. Paul then rushed up the staircase with Ramona at his side.

  With one guard remaining next to Damian, the gun still drawn, the technicians fitted the man with a large black mask that covered his nose and mouth, and had a small hose running from it. The hose attached to a nearby machine, and for a brief moment, Charles felt relieved. He was worried that they would drown his friend and that he would be forced to watch the gruesome sight, but the object on his face looked to be a gas mask, something that could provide oxygen if the body were submerged. These positive thoughts were obliterated when the technicians bound the man’s hands behind his back and strapped his ankles together, sending Damian’s body into horrified fits. Sensors were then attached to his chest, and more wires were placed on his arms.

  The subject was then instructed to sit on the edge of the platform so that his feet dangled above the water. There was a loud clanking as the metal lid of the cylinder slid open, causing the horrified Damian to glance down at the liquid below. Herman and Gary watched from their spot on the floor, so distracted by the bizarre scene before their eyes that they failed to notice the guards around them were also fixated on the machine.