Just then, Goth came into the bathroom. I looked at him sheepishly and said, “I had maggots in my ear. Dr. Harry got them out.”
“Good.”
“I can’t go outside.”
“Sunlight is over-rated.” He leaned against the wall, looking cool, casual. It didn’t occur to me he might be doing it because he could barely stand up. But that was probably the reason.
“I’m gross,” I said.
“One thing CF has taught me is that life is gross.”
For a weird second, I thought I was in a romantic comedy. He liked me even though I was gross. Actually, that was cool, very cool. My heart clenched, and I thought it might stop. What if Goth died? I doubted Dr. Harry was going to add anyone else to the study. I’d be alone. Well, except for the girls. But I didn’t want the girls. And I didn’t want Dr. Harry to find some other guy for the study later on after they got things fixed. I wanted Goth.
Spending time with him was the only time I felt truly alive anymore. Most of the time, I felt like an experiment on the verge of going wrong. A thing. A monster. But then, Goth would be there, and I was an almost normal teenager falling in love.
“There’s something weird out in the trailer, isn’t there?” he asked.
“No. It’s just kind of moldy smelling.”
“You went inside the other day. When we sat on the deck. You didn’t want me to go in there. Is something in that weird refrigerator?”
“Just food.”
“No. There’s no food in there. If there was food, they’d be feeding us better than they are. What was it?”
I ignored the question and slipped my arm around his waist, tucking my head under his chin. I felt him rest his weight on me. “This is a stupid question, but my mom said I smell bad. I don’t, do I?”
I braced myself for being told I smelled. Which, in all honestly would not have been the worst thing going on in my life. I felt him shrug. “My nose doesn’t work that well. Symptom of my disease.”
“Oh. Good to know.”
“You’re too cute to smell.”
“I think that’s the nicest lie anyone’s ever told me.” Of course that made me think about the lies I was telling Goth. Or rather the things I wasn’t telling him. Which was kind of the same thing. I wasn’t answering his questions about the refrigerated room. I wasn’t telling him that I was in a constant state of dying—wow, it really was the un-sexiest phrase I’d ever heard.
“There’s something bad happening to you, isn’t there?” Goth asked quietly. “And it has something to do with whatever is in the refrigerator.”
I was quiet, listening to him wheeze. I didn’t know what to say. Telling him was just a bad idea. But I didn’t want to lie to him, couldn’t even think up a lie good enough that he’d believe it.
Finally, he said, “It’s okay. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
“If you could live forever, would you?” I asked.
Instantly, he said, “Yes, of course.”
“You don’t want to think about it?”
“Anyone who answers that question with a no is lying to you.”
“But what if there are complications?”
“Life always has complications. Mortality being kind of a big one.”
I should tell him. I should tell him everything.
“Goth. There’s stuff we should talk about.”
But I didn’t tell him. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t even know where to start. Should I start by saying that Property Five didn’t work? Except it did kind of work. I should say that Property Five kind of works. But then he’d think I was telling him he was going to get it soon. That we were working out the bugs. Literally.
Maybe I should start with the idea that I was dead. Although I shouldn’t say it like that. I really needed to figure out a way to talk about what I was.
What was I? That stopped me. I’d just been figuring out who I was and where I fit in. But now I didn’t fit in anywhere. It wasn’t like I was going to get out of the Institute someday and go to college and join the Undead Gay Student Union. I wasn’t going to be a proud Zombie-American. As far as I knew I was alone. Completely, utterly alone. Well, except for various body parts buried out back and a non-functional, partially-decayed little girl. And maybe someday, Goth.
“Hey. You’re not...talking.”
“The bad thing that’s happening to me. I can’t die. But I’m not exactly alive either. I’m caught. In between.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Tuesday morning the girls left.
About an hour after Nurse Kelly finished with the basics, she led the girls out of the building one by one to a waiting minivan that said TJ’s Medical Transport on the side. I guess that was who you called when you didn’t exactly need an ambulance. As I watched through the window, I worried they were going to come and take Goth next. I was relieved when the van drove off.
“I guess it’s just you and me now,” Goth said, panting. His face a little red. Nurse Kelly wouldn’t tell us how high his fever was, but the look on her face said it was pretty high.
We were both tired and fell back to sleep after that. We’d been up half the night, tented under Goth’s blanket. I’d told him everything. All about the visions and Dr. Harry’s boyfriends and the frog and the little girl and the terrible old men buried in pieces out in the yard. I told him about my mom, too. How she’d never really asked if I wanted to come to the institute, never really told me what Dr. Harry was studying even. That she knew what was happening to me all along.
“Are you going to be able to forgive her?”
“She’s my mom. I kind of have to.”
Goth looked thoughtful for a moment, which made me ask, “I know it all sounds crazy but— You believe me don’t you?”
“I do. I mean I wouldn’t except that you’re making sense out of things that didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that we were all sick in different ways. It didn’t make sense that Dr. Harry just let Edmond die. And it didn’t make sense that Dr. Harry is canceling everything. But now it kind of does.”
“And now that you know everything, do you still, you know, want to be like me?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to die. I won’t let you.”
And as soon as I said that, I forgave my mom. I had to. I was starting to understand how she felt.
A car door slamming woke me up, and I saw the black Heartwell van sitting in front of the Institute. It pulled away and was gone. I was still kind of sleep-drunk and wondered if I’d really seen it. I had, though. I’d seen it. Goth was asleep in the bed next to me. The Heartwell van had come to pick something up and it wasn’t me or Goth—we were right there—and it wasn’t any of the girls because they were already gone. So who was it?
Dr. Harry was closing down the study. But why would he do that? Were things really that bad with me? Something popped into my head. I left the ward, hurried through the solarium and out the back door. I dashed across the yard to the double-wide and then circled around the back so I could climb up onto the deck. The sliding glass door in the back was locked. I pulled at it a few times and gave up. I checked the window over the kitchen sink. Also locked. The door into the utility room. Locked. The window in the utility room. Open. But very, very small.
I took off my bathrobe and dumped it in a pile on the deck. Then I squeezed myself through the very small window. It was just above the washing machine so it wasn’t too difficult to pull myself in. I had to twist my hips to get them through the window. Moments later, I was crawling off the washing machine.
I stepped out into the hallway and turned toward the refrigerated room. For some reason, Dr. Harry hadn’t put a new lock on the door. That was odd. Did he really think that just locking up the trailer would keep the things inside from getting out?
Opening the door to the room, I felt a burst of chilled air wrap around me. I stepped inside and immediately saw why Dr. Harry hadn’t bothered with a new
lock. The walk-in was empty. The girl, the mice, the past experiments, they were all gone.
FORTY-EIGHT
“We have to find a way out of here,” Goth whispered to me after the Heartwell mortuary took the experiments away.
“When my mom comes back, we’ll leave with her,” I whispered.
“But she’s not coming until Friday. Can we wait that long?”
He had a point. Dr. Harry seemed to be moving quickly. The girls were gone. The experiments were gone. If he was shutting things down, the only two details left were me and Goth. “I should call her.”
I went out to the nurses’ desk and asked Nurse Kelly if I could use the phone.
“Sure,” she said without thinking. “Go ahead.”
I slid the phone toward me and dialed. Nurse Kelly was filling out some kind of form. It took a moment before I realized I’d never gotten a dial tone. “Um, I don’t think the phone is working.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. They turned it off.”
“Why did they turn the phone off?”
“Um, I don’t know.” That was an obvious lie. She knew, she just wasn’t saying. “Maybe it’ll be back on tomorrow.”
I went back into the ward and sat on the edge of my bed. Goth was almost through his Faulkner book. “They turned the phone off so I couldn’t call my mom.”
“What? They don’t want you to call your mom?”
“No, I mean, they turned off the landline. I couldn’t call my mom.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I think because they’re shutting the place down.”
“Yeah, but we’re still here.”
Goth opened the drawer of his nightstand. He pulled out his phone and clicked it on. Handing it to me, he said, “It’s half-charged. Walk out to the edge of the property until you get a signal.”
I took the phone. “Do you want to come with me?”
“I think I over did it last night,” he said with a devilish smile and a hacking cough.
I couldn’t help but smile back. Slipping the phone into my pocket, I walked out of the ward and then down the hall to the solarium. I wished I had something to put into my ears. I didn’t want the flies to get at me again. This is just going to take five minutes, I told myself. I just need to get my mom on the phone and see if she can come sooner.
I reached out to open the door to the outside and found that it was locked. Stupidly, I shook the door. I knew that wouldn’t help, so I don’t know why I did it. I took a step back. It had been open just a half an hour before. Should I try to break through the door? It was kind of flimsy. Was that really where I was? Breaking through doors?
“Jake? What are you doing?” Dr. Harry said behind me.
I spun around. “Why is the door locked?”
“Because you shouldn’t be going outside. I don’t want have to pull maggots out of your ear again.”
“Why did you turn the landline off? I need to call my mom.”
“There’s no need to worry. We’ve let your family know that you’re incommunicado for the time being. You’ll see your mother on Friday.”
“Is there a way I can talk to her now? Can you turn off the jammer so I can call her?”
“Jammer? What are you talking about, Jake?”
“You have a jammer so no one can make calls.”
“That’s ridiculous. Cell coverage in this area is terrible. On top of that, something about the way these old building were made interferes with any signal that does get through.”
“I need to call my mom. Can you help me do that?”
“But I just said you don’t need to call her. She’ll be here on Friday.”
I didn’t know what to say. He was being really reasonable, but it was so weird and so wrong at the same time. I didn’t know what else to say but “Okay, sure, I’ll just go back to the ward.”
I tried to ease around him but he grabbed me the arm. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you can’t talk to your mother.” It sounded like he was apologizing for a lot more than that.
Pulling my arm back, I mumbled “Thanks,” and hurried back to the ward. When I got there, I gave Goth his phone and told him about the locked door and running into Dr. Harry.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
We had to do something. We couldn’t wait until Friday. I needed my mom to come get us now. But how could I reach her?
FORTY-NINE
While I tried to figure out what to do next, Goth got sicker. He was on oxygen all the time. Every so often, he hacked some blood into a handkerchief. It was terrible to watch. Of course, it was probably the reason he was still there. He was too sick. There probably weren’t any hospitals nearby that could handle transporting him. Even in an ambulance with lights flashing, breaking the speed limit, he might not make it. And that might attract attention to the Institute..
I sat next to the bed holding his hand most of the afternoon. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t reach my mom and wasn’t even sure if it mattered anymore. Goth needed Property Five, or he wasn’t going to make it. Somehow, I had to get my hands on it. I knew where it was. But the door was locked. I could project myself into the room but I couldn’t unlock the cabinet. Couldn’t pick up the vial of Property Five. Couldn’t bring it downstairs.
“I’m not going to make it,” Goth whispered. “Thank you, though.”
“You’re going to be okay. I’ll figure something out.”
“It was worth coming here just to meet you. Just to cross a few things off my bucket list.”
“No, don’t give up. Do you hear me? I’m going to find a way to get you Property Five. And then, on Friday my mom will come and we’ll go to Dr. Callabray, and he’ll take care of us.”
He smiled at me weakly.
“Goth, tell me you won’t give up.”
“Bae, talking hurts.”
“Promise me you won’t give up. Just nod.”
He nodded.
I relaxed a little. But only a little. I needed to get into the lab. I needed to find the key. I wondered for a moment if there was a key in the reception desk. It would be easy enough to wait until Nurse Kelly went to the bathroom and get it then. But, I really didn’t think Dr. Harry trusted any of the nurses enough to leave the key—
Wait, Miss Haggerty had a key. Did that mean there were keys in the desk? Or did it just mean Miss Haggerty had one? From where I sat, I could see Nurse Kelly’s back. She wore teddy bear scrubs. A super-sized cola sat on the desk. She and Goth had had Mickey D’s again for lunch, though Goth had barely touched his. Too weak to eat.
With just Goth and me there, Nurse Kelly didn’t have much to do. She was reading a bestseller from the supermarket and sipping her pop every few minutes. It was just a matter of time before she had to go to the bathroom. Almost forty minutes later, she got up from the desk and walked to the back of the building to use the bathroom attached to the girl’s ward.
I was at the desk almost immediately. I opened the center drawer and found nothing. Oh my God, did she have the keys in her pocket? It flashed in my mind that I might have to try and mug Nurse Kelly but then I saw the keys sitting in a pink coffee cup that said, DON’T MESS WITH ME I GET PAID TO STICK PEOPLE WITH SHARP OBJECTS. I snatched them up.
Heart pounding in my ears. I went up the stairs to the second floor. Trying not to catch glass Jesus’s eye at the landing, I climbed up, up, until I was in the hallway. I went right to the laboratory door. I flipped through the key ring, trying to decide which key to start with. The first few didn’t work. Then, I found the one that did. I was in the laboratory.
The first thing I noticed was boxes on all the counters. Dr. Harry was leaving, too. He wasn’t just sending the subjects away, he was shutting everything down. I searched for the glass cabinet to make sure the Property Five was still there. It was.
I hurried to the filing cabinet where I’d seen Miss Haggerty get the key to the glass cabinet. The drawer was empty. I ran my hand around the bottom of the metal
drawer until I found the key. Then, I hurried back to the glass cabinet and the padlock. Lifting the padlock, I slipped the key in and turned. The lock came off and I opened the cabinet.
Before I could reach in and take out the Property Five I felt a sting on the back of my neck, like a bee or a fly. I reached back to swatch the fly away and grabbed Dr. Harry by the hand. I spun around to look at him, my knees already getting rubbery, his face sliding around—
FIFTY
My first thought when I woke up was that I was back in Niles in my own bed again. It even crossed my mind that everything had been a dream, and I’d never gone to The Godwin Institute; that my mom and I had never driven to Michigan at all. But my neck was stiff and when I moved my head to try to ease the discomfort, my nose scraped across thin, crinkly plastic.
When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but black. I reminded myself to breathe and inhaled the stuffy, acrid smell of newly-minted plastic. I raised my hands to my face and along the way found a zipper running up and down from my hips to my forehead, as though bisecting me.
I was in a body bag.
The zipper pull, of course, was on the outside of the bag. It took me a minute or so to work my index finger through the zipper so that I could force it down. It wasn’t easy, getting the right angle. Of course, the bag was not designed to be opened from the inside. Once I got the zipper open about six inches, I was able to slip my hand through and pull it down to around my hips. I sat up. Or rather, I tried to sit up. When I did, I brushed my head against what felt like heavy cardboard.
I lay back down and felt around. Yes, it was cardboard. I was in a bag, inside a box. I shook my head from side to side for a moment trying to decide whether I was dreaming. It didn’t make sense, so it had to be a dream. Except it didn’t feel like a dream at all.
I pushed on the cardboard above my head. Something held it down. I pushed harder, raising my knees and pushing with them. The box had a lid, but the lid did not want to come off. And then, the cardboard over my face began to rip. Outside the box, it was only a tiny bit brighter than the complete dark inside. I kept pulling at the rip until it was a slash, a gash, a hole, a flap. Once I’d made the opening big enough, I put both of my arms through it and raised myself to a sitting position.
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