by Astor Penn
Grunting, I shake myself loose enough that I fall from the bed and land in an uncoordinated heap. I let loose half a scream before I remember to shut myself up before a hazmat hears me and comes looking. My shoulder collapses painfully under my body weight until I can convince my torso to shift enough to alleviate the pressure. Lying flat on my back, I stare up at the so-called bed I was on: it’s a metal table chained to the wall. It looks almost like an autopsy table, but on top of it is a long piece of board with straps and buckles. It looks like a straightjacket strapped onto a portable board.
Tubes pull at my wrist and elbow, lines still hooked up to the IV. Compared to the pain of my shoulder, the prick of pulling them out doesn’t register. There’s blood from the needle points but not enough to worry about. Meanwhile the plastic ring and attached cable around my finger is something I recognize—it’s my connection to the heart monitor. I leave it be, afraid that if I remove it and the machine loses my heartbeat, someone will come for me. Or maybe I leave it alone because it’s comforting to see the jagged lines of my heart, rising and falling on a tiny screen next to my IV. Each time the line surges, I imagine the noise it would make. It’s a comfort of routine and familiarity.
There’s no way to know how frequently the hazmats come around, so I have to plan. There’s not much I can do right now, but if I’ve cut off the sedatives, it’s possible I’ll regain mobility soon. For now I have to be still and listen. Listen to the noises around me. Look for clues.
Behind my door I can hear more artificial lights humming. They seem so loud now, or maybe it’s the buzzing of my dying ear cells. When I forcibly move my head, tilting it to the other side, I have to wait. Listen. Listen carefully, because I hear nothing. It takes a moment before I think I hear wind—my room must be on the exterior of whatever building we’re in. That’s why the window must be blocked, because it wouldn’t do to just put up bars. No, they completely sealed it shut so not even the faintest bit of fresh air can make its way inside. It’s just me and death in here.
From the length of their footsteps’ approach last time, the hallway in front of my door must be of substantial length and connected to I can’t even imagine how many other hallways. There’s no way to tell from in here how many stories the building has, or any other component of the layout. It’s almost hopeless to plan any kind of escape, for as well as the hazmats covered the impenetrable woods, I’m sure they must have dense security measures here.
I wonder if there’s even a point to escaping now; I have no idea where I am, but I’m sure wherever it is, we’re miles and miles away from where I want to be. Where I wanted to be, I should say. Did I ever think I’d make it all the way home? I’ve always imagined only the worst could be waiting there. The bodies of my parents in their bedroom or the kitchen. Maybe down the street in clear signs of struggle. Maybe I’d find the house empty and devoid of any sign—maybe that’d be the worst of all, that I could possibly imagine they’d made it out of there. That they might still be alive and waiting for me.
I have said my final good-byes to my family in my heart; I whispered those things in the darkest of night when I had to. They’ve been laid to rest so long in my thoughts that it is not their departure I feel so poignantly now. It’s Raven I think of most, and the brief kiss we were able to share before the end that was inevitable, even if hastened by my own actions. We could have left Poppy behind. Maybe we’d still be together. Maybe Raven would still be alive.
She may still be alive. I cling to this mercilessly. She was strong. She was healthy. They surely didn’t need to kill her. But whenever I close my eyes, in the darkness all I see is Raven’s face against the interior of a body bag. I force my eyes open, and for as long as I lie on the hard ground with the cold tile seeping through the rumpled paper gown on my back, I keep them wide open so I don’t have to see the sight ever again.
Eventually the room begins to feel different, though the lights never so much as flicker and the hallway remains mysteriously quiet. It’s like tidal waves of energy that come and go, and I wonder if it’s the day turning into night or night into day. The other thing that keeps me company is the constant light of the heart monitor, jagging up and down the same as my thoughts of hope and expectancy.
In all the time that passes, I hear no signs of human life. If there aren’t any hazmats walking down the hallways, maybe there aren’t any other prisoners in the rooms around me. It doesn’t add up—why would I be the only person in these halls? Are there more locations filled with more infected? Are we all so sick that we are condemned to die alone in a ten-by-ten-foot square?
I’d like to think I can feel them before they come—the electricity in the air changes, or the wafting of their toxic suits triggers alarms in my nose. Whatever it is, I’m not surprised when I hear footsteps coming for me. I have been waiting for them, because what else is there to do but wait? By now more feeling returns to my limbs, and although it’s painful to work through the muscle spasms and cramps, I can maneuver myself enough to crawl around the floor so I am away from the door when it opens.
When I settle in against the wall of the door, I halfheartedly think about attacking whoever comes in from behind. When the hazmat walks in, I’m too weak to do anything but give him a look of pure indignation. Turns out, this is alarming enough for him.
“How did you get there?” she asks, half outrage and half fear. I smile, noting that it’s a female today and thus the complete deterioration of mankind. Well, not just mankind, it would seem. I can just barely make out the look on her face. Maybe it was worth dragging myself over here.
She lunges for something worn on a thick black belt. A syringe, it turns out. Typical around here, I suppose. A needle for this, a needle for that.
“That’s hardly necessary.” My voice is wheezy and rough. She flinches as if I’m speaking a devilish tongue. “Not with the massive lock on the door.”
And it is massive—it’s not quite industrial strength, but it’s bigger than I’ve ever seen and clearly added to the decrepit door recently. There are scorched black marks where a handle once used to be, and the lock gleams like polished silver still. My guess is that it’s another tranq in her hand.
“You shouldn’t even be standing.”
“I’m not.” I suddenly feel like laughing now that I’m having a conversation with the invisible monster that has been haunting my every move for so long. She’s a monster, all right—a very redheaded monster. A pang of guilt consumes me over the sight of red hair.
There is hesitation clearly written on her face; she must not be used to talking patients, just the comatose ones.
“Here. Will it make you feel better if I lie down again?” I crawl toward the nightmare bed and with satisfaction note that my legs are working better now. The tranqs are working their way out of my system, then. There’s a price, of course—my shoulder is throbbing again, ankle too, although not nearly as badly as it was a day ago. Forced rest does wonders.
I put on a good show of heaving myself onto the bed; she doesn’t need to know I’m feeling better. If she lets her guard down, just enough—maybe I can at least make it out of this room before they kill me. My shoulder strongly protests the movement, so at least I’m not faking that.
She hesitates by the door still; today the hazmat that comes to me is wearing purple. The man yesterday wore yellow. I wonder if the colors mean something, or if it’s completely arbitrary based on the supplies they have.
“How are you feeling?” she asks. With extreme caution, it would seem. She lowers the needle, at least.
“Dandy. Especially in the shoulder where you shot me.”
“I didn’t shoot you.”
I scoff. “Your people did.”
“Actually, the people I work with never leave this facility. We stay here, day in and day out, to search for a cure. We’re the future of civilization.” She sounds like an academic if there ever was one, and this speech is either rehearsed or copied word for word from someone. She
certainly isn’t someone who wields a weapon, that I can tell.
“Well, I didn’t shoot myself.” Nor did I drug myself and put myself in a prison I’m not likely to escape.
“You shouldn’t worry about your shoulder,” she says so quietly, I’m unsure if she meant me to hear it. She moves forward, drawing the needle toward her face in a mockery of a defensive position. Had I even the slightest strength, I could shatter that syringe and her with it. “I’m going to restrain your arms. Don’t do anything stupid.”
My heartbeat kicks up; she notices, glancing briefly at the monitor. Now would be the perfect time to jump her—but I can’t. Not yet. So I let her cuff me to the bed, but she doesn’t wrap my arms up in the jacket. She leaves my feet alone for the moment. I lie still, cooperating for now. When she’s done, she straightens up and looks at me, confused.
“I want you to tell me how you’re feeling.”
Rolling my eyes, I glare at her, slightly relieved that even if I have limited range of motion in my arms, I can still kick my feet and roll my neck around. “I already told you.”
“No. Really.” She takes a step closer, peering over my body. “Tell me exactly what you’re feeling. Don’t spare any details.”
She looks as excited as a kid on Christmas. Now that I’m incapacitated, her fear is gone and replaced with glee over something. I’m not sure what, but I’m not giving her anything until I get what I want first.
“I’ll tell you everything you want to know—” I pause, bracing myself for the worst. “—if you tell me what happened to the girl I was brought here with.”
Even through the face shield, I clearly make out several emotions flickering across her face—confusion, anger, and worst of all, sympathy. Sympathy on the face of your enemy is the last thing you want to see. It means the worst must have happened.
“I don’t know.” Even her voice sounds genuinely sorry. “I’m sorry. People come and go in this facility, and I’m not sure who you came in with.”
“You’re lying.” I’m only half sure; she clearly knows more than she’s letting on. After all, Bryant and Aaron were fairly confident about the increasing rarity of the hazmats taking in live subjects. I think this woman probably knows exactly who I was captured with.
“It says you were brought in a week ago.” She’s flipping through a chart, the same one she nearly dropped when she walked in. Her giant suited fingers clumsily grab the corners.
My stomach has already dropped before she continues. A week? I thought maybe a few days.
“I know there was one other brought in that day, but she’s gone already.”
My world starts to crash, but I simply deny it, even as tears fill my eyes and my heart drops to the size of a crushed stone, shattered like glass. “No. No, there were two others. Both girls, one my age.”
“I’m sorry. I only know one. The infection killed her shortly after arrival.” Her voice is neutral. It makes me want to tear her eyes out, rip right through the plastic and skin. Good thing for her I’m restrained presently.
“No. There were two.” Poppy was infected; Poppy was dying. I knew that, but hearing the words She’s gone from a complete, apathetic stranger makes it harder to acknowledge. She must be referring to Poppy. So I focus on Raven. There will always be hope in Raven.
“Sorry.” Her shrug is barely distinguishable in the suit. “Maybe one died on the way, or before they could move out. Sometimes vans get stuck out on the roads for a while before they come in.”
Clearly her patience has worn thin; collecting her supplies from the same metal cart I’ve seen before, she pushes something into my ear. I turn to shy away, but she grabs the side of my head and holds me still. Frowning, she begins scribbling notes. Once again, I am the lab rat.
“Your temperature is normal,” she mumbles. “Any headaches? Chills? Muscle spasms? How are you sleeping?”
“I need you to find her.”
“Who?” she asks like she’s already forgotten our conversation. Maybe she has.
“Her name is Raven. She’s my age, dark-skinned, about five foot five, hazel eyes.” Wild looking. Beautiful. Dangerous. How else can I describe her?
“I don’t have to do anything.” Velcro rips apart. At least I recognize the cuff to measure blood pressure.
“But—” I fumble. I’m desperate. Because Raven is hope; if I know for certain Raven’s gone, then I’ve lost everything. “I’ll cooperate and answer all your questions if you just tell me where she might be.”
“You really have no choice in the matter, and I told you, she’s almost certainly dead.”
Apparently I had previously startled compassion in her, for now all she radiates is the same coldness that man did the other day. The chill in the room pushes my heart back where it belongs—locked away for the moment.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be worrying about anyone else right now,” she says, bored. I’m struggling to push everything down and away; I just want to ignore her until she goes away. I focus on breathing evenly and try to imagine there’s a clock hanging above the door. Ticktock, ticktock.
Instead my heart goes boom boom, boom boom. So determinedly not paying her any attention, I don’t notice her removing her gloves. I don’t see the sickly pale-looking fingers reaching for mine. The distinctly naked skin. I just feel the butterfly pressure of skin on mine.
Jumping, my wrist is stuck under her hand; the cuffs won’t let me pull away. Part of me doesn’t want to; in this alien place with plastic men, human touch seems a foreign notion, and this strange connection can’t be ignored now. This is a place of sanitation, of separation, and of life and death. Yet a scientist has removed herself from safety to touch me, an infected, a carrier, the death part of the equation. It’s the most alarming thing that’s yet happened to me.
“This will change everything,” she says, but not to me.
AFTER THIS, things change. For one, I can now promptly and precisely always tell the time despite my lack of a clock in the room. I know because every hour on the hour, a hazmat enters my room to do checks. Checks consist of heart rate, blood pressure, sometimes weighing, sometimes reflex tests. They measure everything—the curvature of my back and legs, the reaction times to stimuli such as light and sound. There are more tests and less rest and certainly more drugs.
They never tell me what the injections are. Are they antibodies? Rumors were that these facilities are testing possible vaccines, and my redheaded friend pretty much confirmed that. It’s the only explanation.
I see her sometimes. There are so many of them now, mostly male, but other women too. She is the hardest to look at. She reminds me too much of Poppy with her wild hair, but this woman is short and slightly plump, which is a nearly ridiculous notion. They must be very well fed in this building; I am certainly eating better than I was. After being approved for solid food, they’ve started bringing me real meat and vegetables. Fruit even, sometimes. Hard, never ripe fruit, but fruit not from a packaged cup.
It’s difficult to eat.
No one answers any of my questions. They might as well sew my mouth shut, and judging by the looks some of them give me, they’ve certainly considered it. Sometimes I hear them gathered down the hallway, talking loud enough I can hear the clear excitement in their voice, but not the content which brings them joy. There’s something going on, which I am the center of.
Every time I hear one of them happy, I want to hurt them worse than I’ve wanted anything else.
They keep my feet and hands restrained, usually, but they haven’t bothered with the full jacket since my first awakening. I have to give up keeping track of the time, because they come so frequently I find it hard to sleep; it’s been at least three days of constant supervision until I finally can almost sleep through an entire check. There’s not much point in staying conscious through my time as a lab rat, not when I have no chance of escaping with constant visitors.
I still sometimes pipe up with a question. “What day is it?” I ha
ve only a rough guess of what day it was when I was taken, but a rough guess is better than nothing, and it’s important to remind them I’m still here. They never humor me. I wonder what happened to our things when they found us; most of all I wish I had Bryant’s leather bracelet. It was the most innocent of the items, but it was an item on a carrier, which made it dangerous enough to burn, probably. Did I lose it? If it was the hazmats who set the trap and riffled through our things that day, surely they didn’t take it. Is it buried out in the woods somewhere? Part of me is glad. It belongs there more than it does here.
Once I can sleep again, I find it hard to care or hope. There comes a time when hope is too painful—the most painful thing of all. The injections and the poking don’t even register, and I find there are no reasons to cry anymore. I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever cared about, and I am most likely next to go. It’s harder still to let go of the little things, like my right to count the days and save my mind.
The more time goes by, the more useless I become at tracking it. It was a week in—now it’s at least two weeks. I think. It feels longer, but realistically I doubt it’s been more than a week since continuous checks began. I don’t know. Sleep comes and goes, and with it the hallucinations. Sometimes I see my mother sitting in the corner, Indian-style, quietly watching over me. More rarely I hear my father calling for me, but never see him. Strangely enough, no matter how much they occupy my thoughts, I never so much as glimpse Poppy’s red hair or catch a whiff of Raven’s earthy scent.
There’s a push and pull; sometimes, if I sleep, I get angry again, and with anger I can make mock plans for escape. The names of some hazmats are becoming known to me through snippets of conversation, and those I don’t know, I nickname. I know the redheaded woman goes by Barlett and her male co-part who is often with her is Ringley. The two of them seem to have as close a friendship as any of them, preferring to do checks together whereas the others usually come alone. There are three other routine checkers—Jackson, a tall black man who looks through me more than at me. He looks so completely miserable, I wonder why he hasn’t removed his suit and let me cough on him.