by H. R. Romero
The repetitiveness of it grates her soul and makes her brain feel all itchy, like ants crawling in her head looking for cake crumbs. She sometimes finds herself scrubbing her scalp with her fingernails, trying to lessen the itch, but it doesn’t help.
Today her section is led to the room labeled, Research 06. The way is right, left, left, and then through a door that leads one floor down, and all the way down a long corridor to the last room on the right. This room is easy to remember because there is a big poster tacked to the wall. On it is an ancient looking, white-haired man. He wears a red, white, and blue suit, and the words around him read: I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY. Rose gives him no consideration. It’s not her concern. She doesn’t care about what he wants from her right now. People in Hell want ice water. She has wants and needs too. She doesn’t want to be a prisoner in this place. She needs to be with a family that loves her and cares for her.
Her section is carefully released from the restraints. There will be no book reading today, no quiet time, no threats from green men cowering in cages. The children are steered, at gunpoint, to little school desks, with the chair built in. They’re set indiscriminately throughout, Research 06, which is at least, three times larger than the library.
The others take a seat without being prompted as if their places were predetermined. Rose, however, requires a nudge from a rifle barrel to her scapula. She staggers slowly to a desk. Soon they are all joined by three adults, Dr. Valentine, Dr. Shaw, and another woman, Rose has only seen one time before, but the woman has never spoken to her.
Each of the three adults carries cardboard boxes with faux woodgrain paper on the outside. The boxes are stuffed to the brim with papers and file folders that stick out haphazardly from the tops. There are two children per adult. Rose can’t help herself. She gasps as the Man-In-The-White-Coat sits across from her and Ivy.
"Hello again, R – Zero – Five – E, and, R – Zero – Six – E, shall we get started?" His voice is flat.
He’s as unfriendly as Rose remembers him to be. If the Man-In-The-White-Coat is silently pleased with her unsettled reaction to him sitting across from her, he doesn’t show it outwardly.
Ivy is not impressed and displays her boredom by sneering. Her eyes cut right through the Man-In-The-White-Coat.
He carefully chooses several pieces of paper from inside the box that he brought with him, he then places the box onto the floor, nudging it under the small table with his toe, so that is bumps against Rose’s feet.
Rose pays no attention to his greeting, or the way he intentionally pushed the box against her, or his question, even though she heard it plainly, and replays on a continuous loop in her mind. She must focus to make it stop repeating.
This man is too full of questions for her liking. She can’t help but look at his face, and the unwelcoming beauty of it. Smooth and perfect, but his smile is dangerous.
Some might think Dr. Shaw is a nice-looking man. Some might even say he’s handsome in many ways, but it’s only on the outside though, because on the inside, he is a horrid thing, with jagged-razor teeth, and sharp spikes, and poisonous venom, waiting to eat the children at Camp Able, all up.
She’s distracted by the presence of Dr. Valentine when the woman passes behind her and Ivy. Dr. Valentine’s going to the next desk over. Hawthorne and Cane are there, waiting for Dr. Valentine to arrive.
Dr. Valentine’s sweet smell floats through the room, settling deeply in Rose’s nares. The scent of peaches intoxicates her. Dr. Valentine smiles and nods to her, comfortingly, before starting her work with the two boys, but it doesn’t do anything to ease her unease. The question is repeated once more, this time much louder.
“Shall we get started, R – Zero – Five – E? R – Zero – Six – E?" repeats the Man-In-The-White-Coat.
Ivy says nothing and continues to sneer. Rose turns to him, looks deep into his eyes and says, “My name is Rose, Dr. Shaw. I’m not a thing, I’m a person.”
Dr. Shaw freezes, before returning to the stack of pages he was arranging in order a moment before. He takes a pencil from his pocket and jots a note on a notepad. The pad is already so crammed with writing that it must be written vertically in the left-hand margin of the page.
Rose lifts her head and leans forward a little to see what’s he’s writing, but she can’t see it.
He says nothing and continues to rearrange the pages before saying, “You are – a research subject and are assigned a number. You do not have a name, a real one at any rate. And you most certainly are not a person.”
Rose is confused by this information. The back of her neck heats with anger and embarrassment. She fights an overwhelming feeling of wanting to cry, but her eyes tear up against her will, anyhow.
She slides down in the little desk not knowing how to react to what was said to her. She can hear Ivy snickering, but she chooses to ignore it. The other children are pointing at pages with photos and diagrams on them. Some are talking to Dr. Valentine and to the other woman, about what they see and questions they are being asked. Some are demonstrating little tricks they can do, but only under the strictest supervision, and under the watchful eyes of green men patrolling in the back of the room.
During all of this, Ivy says very little, giving only one-word answers, if bothering to answer at all when Dr. Shaw asks questions and holds up page after page.
Hawthorne sulks just like his sister. He refuses to answer any of the questions that Dr. Valentine poses. Cane is more than eager to show off how smart he thinks he is.
Someone’s whistling what Rose has come to know as Hawthorne’s tune, but it’s not the boy this time, it’s the same green man, the one from before, the one in the library cage. Curious.
Dr. Shaw snaps his fingers, redirecting her focus. “What is it you think you are, exactly?” he asks Rose, clearing his throat he waits.
“I’m a girl. Anyone with a brain can see that.”
“Okay,” he says, mocking her. He writes on his notepad. The yellow papers make crisp crinkling sounds beneath the weight of the lead pencil tip scrawling across the paper.
“How was the book?” says Shaw.
She’s about to ask which book, but she puts two and two together quickly enough. Dr. Shaw was watching her when she selected A History of Man, from Prehistory to Present Day, from the library shelf. “It was disappointing.”
“You think it was disappointing? Tell me why.”
“All that men can do… but instead of doing good things, they mostly do bad things. Horrible things, and usually it’s to each other.”
He notates her answer and shows her the first of many pictures. “What do you see here, R – Zero – Five – E?” He taps the photo with the end of his pen.
“A puppy,” she tells him. The picture cause her to smile, but she intentionally forces that emotion from her face.
He writes. The next photo is a solid blue octagon. “How many sides?”
“Eight,” says, Rose, tilting her head, feeling proud at her own intellect.
He flips a page of his notepad, looking for an empty place to make a notation of her response. He finds a little spot and writes it down.
He’s about to go to the next item in the stack when she asks him if he wants her to tell him the color of the octagon too.
“Colors are easy you know, but I’d love to know anyway, if you’d like to tell me.” But he seems more interested in making further notes, rather than wanting to hear about the color of the shape.
She’s curious about how much he knows of her, and how much more he wants to know. She wonders if his observations of her has taught him that everything she sees and hears is classified, and categorized, and remembered. But, no, that’s the whole point of all this, isn’t it? To learn about her and the others.
“It’s blue,” mumbles Rose, already growing tired of this exercise. As she expected, his response to her answer is anticlimactic. Her nose wrinkles. He’s right, colors are easy. Even kids younger than her know their c
olors.
The little things Dr. Shaw does continuously remind her of exactly why she doesn’t like him. Plus, it makes her feel uncomfortable knowing he watches everything she and the rest of the children do.
The next photograph is of a vehicle. Shaw passes it in front of Ivy first. Ivy turns her head away from it, as if someone had ran a rotten fish under her nose, and chooses to stare at a wall, instead of giving him what he wants.
“Okay, Ivy. Thank you for nothing. How about you then, Rose?”
It’s a black and white photo, developed on thick white paper. Even though the vehicle on the paper is painted in shades of black and white and grey, Rose can push the colorless surface away and see the real colors of the image underneath. The vehicle is drab green.
She stares at the photo, tilting her head to the side, concentrating on it because the image is beginning to vibrate and lift from the page. The vehicle becomes a floating rotating, three-dimensional model, on which the doors and hood open and close.
She sucks in a breath and looks around to see if Ivy, or Dr. Shaw or anyone else can see it. She turns back to the sound of Dr. Shaw tapping the photo to regain her attention to it.
Words and symbols come into view and hover over the face of the photo as if they are floating on the surface of an ocean. This is a new experience for Rose. Nothing like this has ever happened to her before, at least she can’t remember if it has.
The sensation of the photo coming to life is dizzying. She feels as if she is falling backward in her chair. She lurches forward to correct the feeling of tumbling over. Motion sickness triggers sour bile to rise in her throat. She forces it back down into the pit of her rolling stomach. Her head is spinning like a toy top. She can read and understand the meaning of the words written in English, but they jockey for position with strange symbols before her eyes. The unrecognizable symbols swaying on an invisible pendulum are unfamiliar to her.
She thinks she should know the strange language, if language is, in fact, what she sees here. She can’t decipher any of it. She recites what she thinks Dr. Shaw wants to know about the photo.
“U.S. Army Jeep, manufactured by Dodge Brothers Corporation, three-quarter ton, four-wheel drive, olive drab green.”
She waits for him to write it down. He doesn’t. She swallows a gulp of air into her lungs, so hard she can feel her ribs aching. She settles back into her chair and waits for another image.
“What just happened to you, and how do you know so much about the vehicle in this picture?”
She’s uncomfortable. She can feel Cane, and Hawthorne, and Lily, and Aster’s eyes glued to her, drilling into her. Even Ivy, who has stopped sneering, and staring at the wall, and has turned her interest to her. She’s hoping the answer to Dr. Shaw’s question will lift off another picture somewhere to help her explain herself, but it doesn’t. She has no idea how she knows so much about the jeep and decides the best thing to do is say nothing at all.
“How do you know the color of the jeep is olive drab green when the photo is black and white?” said Shaw, inspecting at the photo himself.
“Isn’t everything here painted green?” Rose says.
Shaw nods his head slowly and writes. “Very impressive skill you have there, you know?” I would be very interested in knowing just what all else you have floating in your pretty little head.” He turns to Ivy who is still studying Rose. “Can you do that, R – Zero – Six – E? Can you look at a picture and know everything about the thing on it?”
Ivy returns her gaze to the wall.
He turns back to Rose. “What else can you tell me, R – Zero – Five – E?”
More information than she cares to know is bubbling to the surface of her brain. It tickles like goose down brushing the grey matter. Collected bits and pieces of trivial information have taken form and flashes before her eyes.
Overheard snippets of conversations, barked orders, a cacophony of discussion in the corridors at night, and the posted map to escape the building in the event of a fire, have Rose with useful information that she can’t keep from spilling out of her mouth. “Camp Able, Brownsville, Texas, 7th Field Hospital.”
Shaw drops his pencil. His mouth opens, he consciously makes himself close it, so it’s not hanging open. He peers into her eyes. “Please, continue.”
“Original troop capacity of 2,237 officers, 19,247 enlisted men and women. There are less than seventy-five soldiers still here, and there are twelve children who you keep here to study. I bet there were more once. I bet you did something awful to them. I bet you cut pieces off from them until there wasn’t anything left to cut on. Didn’t you?”
Dr. Valentine is right, you are different, and soon…” he taps her on her forehead, smartly, with the end of his pen, “we will see just how different you are, Rose.”
Rose leans back to take a much-deserved rest in her little desk. The falling sensation has subsided. She smiles because for the first time Dr. Shaw calls her by her name. “Let me show you one more photograph, Rose. What do you make of this one?”
The photograph he’s showing her means nothing to her. It’s of a vast machine hovering in the black of night. A spewing jet of fire is escaping out from below the hulking thing. It’s lit by enormous beams of light coming up from the ground, but still, only a small portion of the machine’s silhouette is visible.
Though she’s never seen anything like it, the design of the thing feels familiar to her. There are no ‘English’ words written on the photo, only the strange symbols that only she can see because they aren’t really there, they just, sort of appear. She tries to hide any emotion on her face which would give her away. She feels a vague connection to the thing in the photograph. She shakes her head, no, and shrugs her shoulders. It must have worked because Dr. Shaw places the photo along with the others back into the box. She’ll file the symbols from the photo away in her little box.
“That’s enough for now. R – Zero – Five – E and R – Zero – Six – E, go to Dr. Valentine’s table,” says Shaw.
She does as he instructs her and moves to the next table to be assessed by Dr. Valentine. Rose decides that she likes Tuesdays most of all because she gets to spend time with Dr. Valentine.
When she’s released back into her room the day is mostly over. She can sense the darkness behind the exterior walls of East Wing, and the humidity rising behind her blocked-up window. The light bulb is still lit. Her slippers, she kicks them into the corner, and she remains on the gurney. It squeaks beneath her body, though she weighs hardly anything. She can feel the coiled springs through the thin, musty mattress pad.
The light flickers overhead and dies out, and the stars on the ceiling glow happily. Rose feels her insides rumble hungrily… wantonly. She’s craving something, but she doesn’t know what that something is. Nevertheless, life-giving energy wells up within her, all the way from the tips of her toes to the very ends of her hair. It courses through her like currents of unbridled, raw electricity. Like the spark of life itself running up and down the length of her spine and dancing in her stomach.
She slides from the gurney. Her feet hit the cold tile with a clammy splat. Something is happening, something important. She feels the rumble of it inside of her before the rumbling manifests itself into an actual glorious sound. The smell seeps in from around the edges of the boards fitted securely across the window. A scent even better than Dr. Valentine’s peach fragrance.
Rain.
Rose can’t hear it splashing against the barricaded window boards. She listens to the thunder. She’s dizzy; not dizzy like when Dr. Shaw slipped her the medicine before, but happy dizzy, thirsty dizzy, confusion swims in her brain. She feels dehydrated, her mouth and tongue are dry and sticky. She can’t cry no matter how much she wants to.
She sways drunkenly, almost falling. She’s entirely and appropriately intoxicated by the falling rain. She grabs the bars on the window casing, so she doesn’t fall to the floor in a boneless pile of flesh, overcome by the smell of i
t. She places her forehead against them so forcefully that they make blunt, elongated imprints into her into it.
She reaches through the spaces between them to touch the plywood sheeting. And there, on the very end of her slender fingers, she can feel the raindrops bounce against the other side of the board. The feeling of it works its way into the tips of her fingers, working its way up her arms, and it doesn’t stop until it reaches her pounding heart. She feels rejuvenated and hopeful for her future.
She stands, swaying, from side-to-side until early morning. Her legs cramp terribly after the first few hours, but thankfully she’s lost the feeling in them. They’re all numb and tingling.
She experiences the storm raging through the vibrations in the wood window-covering, the smell of rain in the air and the sound of quaking thunder shakes her to her roots.
Rose never stops smiling, and she sings a happy song under her breath, so the green men can’t hear, about a rainy day. She must have learned the song, a long time ago, when she was very little; about sweet raindrops falling on her window sill.
Tomorrow she could be a monster again, to satisfy the green men’s need for something to hate. For now, she’s satisfied just being a happy little girl, loving the rain, even if the drops would soon turn to blood.
Chapter Five
“Some ghosts are so quiet, you would hardly know they were there.”
-Bernie McGill
Dr. Merna Valentine is sick. Plain and simple. Sick and tired of the whole, god damned, situation. Literally… nauseous to her stomach; ulcers boring into her gastric lining. Her nerves are transformed into little white-hot pokers looking for a route to burn their way out of her body.
She’s had way too much of the thick, instant, sludge they call coffee around here, at scenic Camp Abel. Thanks to the Turned she can’t go to a local diner for a cup of the good stuff; the slow-brewed stuff, dripping golden-brown, drop by drop into the pot. The liquid black-gold flowing down a throat like a fountain of youth. The crap here slides down like a reluctant luke-warm mudslide.