Soul Suites

by Hulden Morse

  “Huh. Maybe there is a brain in that head,” the doctor said. “Too bad it will soon be useless.”

  Dr. Raymond uncapped the needle and shoved it into Dominic’s neck, just below his jaw where the muscle was tense and the vessels were thick. The shocked man, swinging wildly at his attacker, stumbled backward as the plunger was quickly depressed, releasing the entirety of the syringe’s contents into his body. The doctor stood tall, calmly watching his employee tumble onto the ground and fall back against a wall, shaking violently, his eyes wide.

  “The fuck? The fuck did you put in me?” Dominic cried.

  “How’s your chest feel? It hurt? Hard to breathe yet?”

  “You bastard! You injected me with stimulant!”

  “Understand this.” Dr. Raymond leaned toward the dying man until he was inches from his face. “You are not going to stop me from getting to Heaven. Got it? Your little stunts are nothing against the power of Soul Suites.”

  “But-but why? Why are you doing this? Why suicide?”

  “I’m going to see my brothers.”

  “What?” Dominic’s face turned unnaturally red. He clutched his chest in agony while his heart beat painfully fast. Breaths were strained, rapid, as oxygen struggled to reach his organs.

  “My brothers need me,” Dr. Raymond said. “I couldn’t be there for them when they were younger, but I will be there for them in the afterlife.”

  “The clinic. I-I-I heard you were preventing people with a history of genetic disorders from having children.” His speech was forced, the words almost unintelligible when uttered between frantic gasps. “Why would you do that if—”

  “Having a kid with a birth defect or mental disorder is difficult, but doable. It can be incredibly rewarding at times. But the brutality that society directs at these children is unbearable. No parent should ever go through that pain. I was protecting those men and women. It’s better to be infertile and never have children then to watch them suffer their entire lives because no one will ever accept them.”

  “All this? Thousands of people dying, millions of dollars, just to see your brothers?”

  “Everything’s going dark, isn’t it?”

  “Oh god. I, I didn’t do it. I believed you, Doc.”

  “Your heart has stopped. You can’t breathe, can you?”

  “P-p-please.”

  Dr. Raymond stood erect as Dominic slumped to one side, slowly falling to the ground in death. He disposed of the syringe and then called someone into the room to remove the body. He smiled to himself, as much internally as externally, and looked at the deceased custodial crew member, wondering if that man had someone to find in the afterlife, someone that would welcome him into their spiritual arms, someone that loved him at one point in his life. The doctor found that most often, those that feared death were the loneliest of people. They had no one to see when their eyes were closed, no one to visit them in their dreams. What an awful passing that would be. God, can you imagine? Committing suicide with fear in your heart rather than excitement?

  Chapter 60

  When Dr. Raymond exited the room following his conversation with Dominic, Hulden’s sphincter tightened up like a noose around some poor soul’s neck. Even the sight of that man was enough to erect the hairs on his neck. He had worked with that maniacal researcher for over two years, thinking he could stomach the wretchedness of human experimentation long enough to make some decent money and give his family the life they always wanted, the life they deserved. But he simply could not bring himself to be complacent to so many horrid actions. Many of Hulden’s fellow guards enjoyed their job, finding it easy to escort weakened subjects around the facility for a six-figure salary, and seeing no real issue with the torture of homeless individuals. But the voice in his head screamed at him to do something.

  And so he had. The chisel was easy enough to plant. His partner waited outside the door to ensure there was no escape attempt, and Hulden entered the room with the subjects. Following a simple diversion technique, the chisel slipped easily into the fresh sheets of the top bunk, and then there was nothing left to do but wait for the two men to escape. However, they accidentally made a hole into another subject room! Hearing that the plan had failed was horrendous, heart-stopping, and forced the guard to move onto his backup plan: setting off the explosion. With a few cans of gasoline in a surgical room and a long fuse, the greatest distraction was set to take hold of that facility while Charles escaped the building. Unfortunately, Hulden did not count on Dr. Raymond patrolling the grounds for suspicious activity. He should have known, considering the doctor was already on edge after discovering the tool and note, but the guard had prayed that his boss would focus on the roommate trial rather than hunting for someone either breaking into or breaking out of the compound.

  To his relief, the effects of luck were not totally against Hulden. He failed to anticipate that his actions would be blamed on Dominic, God rest his soul. That doomed man was in the wrong place at the wrong time, twice, which allowed the guard to sink into the background where no one would question his dedication to the project. Could he have fessed up and saved Dominic’s life? Sure. Would that have been wise? Absolutely not. He felt awful, undeniably guilty for that man’s demise. But as far as his knowledge went, he was the only one making an effort to expose the truth about Soul Suites. He could blow the whistle on that experiment, alerting the authorities to the whereabouts of the illegal operation, and then be slaughtered faster than a political candidate preaching democracy in a dictatorship. Jail would be his future home, that was inevitable, which was a fine option compared to dying at the hands of Dr. Raymond. Hulden’s family would not be left without a father and husband, nor would they have to live with the knowledge that their loved one willingly partook in the torture of so many people. They could visit him in jail, he would be able to see his children grow into adulthood, and he would rot in a cell with pride in his heart, satisfied that he had brought an end to Soul Suites.

  For that reason, Dominic had been permitted to die. He took the guard’s place so that the rebellion could continue.

  But then what? How was he to expose the nature of that facility? In Hulden’s mind, he hoped the police would discover the existence of Soul Suites. Charles Pearson had made national news, which meant there was a chance his disappearance could lead to the unraveling of the experiment. Over the past few months, he had been slowly preparing for a possible raid of the building. Every morning when the guard came to work, he imagined the police arriving at the outer gate, guns drawn, demanding entrance into the compound. Oh, how sweet that would have been.

  He was slyly, coolly, carefully interviewing people concerning the project’s operations. Hulden had even taken photos of important documents when the opportunity arose, allowing him to eventually compile the factual stories and physical evidence into a true account of the happenings within those walls. From the day Charles arrived on the mass casualty bus, the guard had expected him to be the one to blow the roof off that place. Therefore, Hulden had collected the CEO’s backstory to provide context, a history of the man that brought down a multimillion dollar organization.

  Alas, all that work seemed to have been in vain.

  Chapter 61

  After the media received notification that a heavily funded human experiment had been carried out for multiple years undetected, Dr. Raymond quickly abandoned his facility in Southern Indiana and sought sanctuary under an alternate name. This came two months after the murder of Charles Pearson, who was properly vindicated and considered a modern hero and martyr for his service to the homeless community. However, the company he created could not withstand the lasting effects of human greed and rehabilitated its last Resident in 2018.

  Even after Reaching Dreams shut its doors for good, the criminal investigation continued, with government officials scratching their heads over the vast number of potentially guilty participants the
y needed to charge. The members of PIC DC, other representatives from the five districts, and corporate big wigs that had invested money into Soul Suites were fleeing the country as quickly as possible, publicly stating that they had always wanted to live in Brazil and that their relocation certainly had nothing to do with the ongoing investigation.

  With great swiftness and premeditated brutality, armed forces extricated as many employees as they could from the research facility. To the authorities, Hulden Morse offered every piece of evidence he had acquired against his coworkers, though no one cared to listen to a guilty man. He and every other member of the staff were locked away by tearful, disgusted juries that looked upon the defendants as individuals of an alternate species, organisms vastly different from humans given their lack of a conscience. Unable to gift his personal evidence to the investigative bodies, Hulden Morse chose to amass his wealth of information into a book, one that would serve as a reminder to the public that Soul Suites existed, and it must never be forgotten.

  The surviving subjects were rushed to hospitals and treated for their plethora of ailments, both physical and psychological. The attending nurses and doctors found it strange that some of these patients incessantly screamed, “It’s a trick! It’s not real!” throughout their stay in the hospital. As one physician put it, “It was like they couldn’t accept that we were trying to help them.”

  Fearing that the public would recognize him, Dr. Raymond spent his time in hiding, denying himself the pleasure of interacting with other people or (and most importantly) practicing what he had been trained to do. He lived alone, without comfort or companion, tortured by the dreams that he had yet to reach.

  No more than a month after his facility was raided, Dr. Raymond Shepherd was found in an aging apartment after a neighbor contacted the building’s owner about a strong odor coming from next door. The man’s corpse was discovered burned and bloated in a bathtub, both hands still clutching bare wires that had been shoved into an outlet, his skin fused to the exposed metal. Upon the edge of the tub was a photo of three young boys, the middle one later determined to be the doctor when he was ten years old. Next to the photo was a torn piece of paper with these words scribbled on one side:

  “I never cared about money. It was never about resuscitation. At last I can see my brothers again.”

  After further investigation, the two other boys in the picture were found to be the elder and younger siblings of Dr. Raymond. The eldest brother was killed in an apparent hate crime when Raymond was only twelve, and the youngest of the three drowned in a lake two days after that particular picture was taken. Both of those boys were diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder around their second birthdays.