A tingling sensation moves through my body, starting in my feet and ending at my head. That’s when I notice the chill atop my head. They’ve shaven off my ratty hair. But why? Have they already performed some kind of surgery, or did my dirty hair disgust them?
The tingling becomes pins and needles. I wiggle a toe beneath the blankets. Mobility is returning.
The man, who is apparently quite observant, takes note. “He’s coming out of it.”
With the ruse up, I open my eyes. It’s harder than I expected, like fighting against the effects of too much alcohol. But the heavy feeling fades fast. A few blinks later, my eyes are open. The room looks pretty much like I expected it to. Mostly white, hard surfaces.
Allenby leans into view, her lion’s mane of gray hair swaying like great pine trees in a strong wind. “How are you feeling?”
I glance toward the man. He’s older than I thought. Perhaps in his seventies, with bright white hair, an equally white beard, and spectacles over his blue eyes. He’s overweight and slightly hunched but carries himself in a way that says, I’m in charge.
I look back to Allenby. “Betrayed.” While she’s focused on my serious gaze, I slowly clench my fists and bend my wrists in, pressing them against the restraints.
“I’m sorry about this,” she says. “I really am.”
“Uh-huh.” I turn to the old man, who’s still watching me. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Hitchcock.”
“Hitchcock?” Allenby asks, looking back at the man.
The man stares at me in a way I can’t read. Is he amused or about to torture me? I can’t tell. “Because I’m old and fat and up to no good, is that it?”
I nod.
He dips his head to me in greeting. “My name is Doctor Stephen Lyons. I’m the head of Neuro Inc. You’re currently in our headquarters.”
“I didn’t see a sign,” I say.
“And you won’t. We’re not a public corporation.”
“A black organization funded by the government, then,” I say, watching his eyebrows rise, “which would explain why some of your employees have military histories, though if Blair is military, he needs a refresher.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Lyons says. “But not everyone has your special set of skills.”
“Unless a dangerous lack of fear and amnesia have become desirable traits, I’d say he’s better off than me.”
Lyons points a finger at me and winks. “A debate for another time, I’m afraid.” He steps toward the door. “I’m retiring for the evening.”
“What time is it?” I ask.
“Midnight,” he says. “You’ve been asleep for eight hours.”
“And you expect me to sleep now?” I lift my arms. The restraints snap taut. “In these?”
Allenby looks at my hands and gasps. The purple mottled skin caused by my cutting off the circulation looks horrible and has the desired effect. She takes one of the restraints in her hands and looks at Lyons, who nods. She looks at me. “Please don’t try anything. There’s a guard right outside.”
“I saved your life today,” I tell her. “We fought side by side. For now, we’re comrades. You’d rather that not change.”
She nods slowly and loosens the strap, not enough to free me, but enough to ease my phony discomfort. “Can’t argue with that.”
I make a fist as she refastens the buckle. The flexed muscles and swelling caused by the buildup of blood increase the thickness of my arm by a few millimeters, but that should be enough.
She moves to the other side and repeats the process.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she whispers, leaning in close. Her voice seems loud enough that Lyons should be able to hear, but he shows no indication of having heard her warning.
Allenby makes unflinching eye contact while she works the second strap. Is she trying to tell me something beyond, don’t be stupid, or am I being played? They knew I’d go for the sweets. Maybe she knows what I intend to do next? Could I really be that predictable? Up until this moment, I’ve always seen myself as unpredictable. Not even I know what I might do or say, moment to moment.
Finished, she stands back.
“Now sedate him,” Lyons says.
I lift the leather manacles holding me in place. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Do it,” he says. Despite his elderly appearance, he’s not senile enough to underestimate me.
Allenby opens one of the white cupboards and retrieves a preloaded syringe of who knows what. She jabs my shoulder and shoves the plunger down. As my consciousness begins drifting back toward darkness, I watch Allenby and Lyons leave. She gives me an apologetic glance and then switches off the lights.
Lyons speaks before the door closes fully. “I want him prepped in the morning. I don’t see the point in waiting any longer.”
“I’m not sure he’s ready,” Allenby says.
The man sighs. “I’m not interested in giving him a choice.”
The door clicks shut.
9.
Despite the all-encompassing darkness, my return to wakefulness is sudden. There’s no tingling. No pins and needles. Whatever Allenby gave me, it wasn’t the same substance they put in the food.
Other than the distant hum of the building’s air-conditioning, the room is silent. Even the heart monitor has gone mute. Or has it been turned off? I lay still for a moment, gathering my thoughts.
I’m held captive—restrained and sedated—in a secret facility. The doctor, Lyons, intends to perform some kind of test, or surgery, on me in the morning. For all I know, the sun has already risen. Everyone here is lying to me. Playing me. Controlling me. And because of that, I can’t believe a single thing I’m told. Two courses of action emerge. I can escape, plain and simple. Or I can find out who these people are, what Neuro Inc. is after, and possibly get some answers about myself, since it seems I’ve been here before.
The second option is clearly the riskier of the two, but since I don’t worry about risk, it’s also the only acceptable option.
I lift my arms up, fold my thumbs down and pull hard on the restraints. They’re still fairly tight, but there is just enough wiggle room to pull my hands free. It’s an uncomfortable process, but within three minutes of squirming, I’m free.
Cool air raises goose bumps all over my body as I pull the blankets away. As I thought, I’m dressed in boxers. I feel the elastic waist. It’s tight. New. Someone undressed me. My hand goes to my chest next, feeling that the pendant is still there, somehow keeping me grounded.
With my hands outstretched, I step toward where I remember the door being. I find it in five strides. After gently running my fingers over the door’s surface to confirm there is no window, I feel for the light switch. I squint at the bright light but notice a second door just to the left of the bed. Without a thought, I open the door and find a small bathroom. New toilet paper is on the roll, its band of glue still intact. The whole space is so pristine I’d guess it’s never been used. But the strangest aspect of the bathroom is the clothing that’s folded up atop the closed toilet.
An olive-drab T-shirt. Blue jeans. Black ankle socks. Brown sneakers. All brand new. All my size. Even the extrawide 4E shoe size. I take the apparel as a positive sign that Neuro Inc. expects me to live long enough to need clothing.
I break in the toilet and get dressed. After splashing some water on my face and toweling off, I step back into the mock hospital room and freeze.
“Mrs. Winters,” I say to the blond woman who freed me from SafeHaven by giving me a knife, knowing I’d use it. She’s seated on the far side of the small room.
“Ms.” She stands. “Going somewhere?”
“Yes.”
She crosses her arms, drawing my attention lower. She’s dressed in a black power suit that makes her blond hair appear brighter. “That’s probably not a good idea.”
“Coming here wasn’t a good idea.”
“You don’t know that yet,” she says.
“I�
��ll know, one way or the other, soon enough.”
She smiles. “That confidence of yours … I wish I knew if it was real or just the lack of fear talking. Maybe we could find out?” She doesn’t quite lick her lips, but I see seductive possibilities in her eyes.
I grin, not because the suggested invitation intrigues me—though it does—but because I know she’s trying to distract me from noticing her left hand, folded under her right arm, sliding beneath the jacket of her suit. She’s after something. Pepper spray. A Taser. Maybe even a gun.
“We can do this two ways,” I tell her. “You can draw whatever weapon you’ve got and I can knock you unconscious—”
The hand beneath her jacket stops moving.
“—or you can get in bed, let me sedate you, and you wake up feeling refreshed.”
She’s thinking about it. Not a good sign.
“You’ve read my file,” I tell her. “You know I’m willing and capable.”
“But you don’t know anything about me, do you?” Her expectant eyes irritate me. She’s digging for an answer, maybe even hoping for one, but I have nothing to offer.
She makes her move, kicking suddenly so I have to lean away from the tip of her solid-looking shoe. By the time I’ve righted myself, I hear the telltale crackling of a Taser. She thrusts the bright-blue arc of electricity at my midsection. Fear or not, if she connects, I’m done.
But I react quickly, or rather my body does. Acting on some kind of body memory, using techniques I have no memory of learning, I catch her wrist with my right hand, squeezing a pressure point. A painful, cold sensation is rushing up her arm. She hisses in pain and drops the Taser, but I’m not done.
With my left hand, I squeeze a second pressure point at her elbow joint. It’s like completing a circuit, doubling the pain and eliciting a shout. But her voice is cut off a moment later, when I release her wrist and give her a backhand slap behind her right ear, striking a third pressure point and once again completing the circuit, overloading her neurology. She drops into my arms, unconscious, just as the door swings open.
“What’s going—”
I lift Winters and shove her toward the security guard. He instinctively moves to catch the woman. As his arms wrap around her, I punch the defenseless man in the temple. The pair drops together, limbs tangled.
It takes three minutes to lift Winters and the guard into the bed, gag them, and shackle them with the restraints, which they’ll be able to remove once the sedatives I’ve given them wear off. I check them for cell phones but find nothing. No IDs, either. Winters has a blank, red keycard around her neck, which I transfer to mine. I take a set of car keys from her pants pocket and recover the Taser from the floor. The security guard carries a pair of plastic zip cuffs, a stun gun, and a radio. I pillage the nonlethal armaments, clip the radio to my belt (after turning it off), and pocket the cuffs.
I take one last look at the unconscious pair and slip out the door into an empty hallway. I’m at the end of a hundred-foot-long, straight-as-an-arrow corridor. The floor is checkered linoleum, a far cry from the oriental rug on the living-quarters level. The tan walls are barren save for the occasional room label and utilitarian sconce. An EXIT sign glows red from the far end of the hallway.
Stun gun in hand, I stalk down the corridor. The first three doors I try are locked. The fourth opens smoothly. I flick on the light. The room is identical to mine with two exceptions: there is a vase of roses decorating a countertop, filling the air with their scent, and a woman asleep in bed. She’s not restrained, but she’s not waking from the light, either, so she must be sedated.
I step inside and close the door behind me.
A heart monitor beeps slowly and steadily. An IV hangs by her bed, the needle strapped to her wrist. She’s thin. Gaunt. Hasn’t eaten anything substantial in a very long time. But I can see her beauty beyond the malnourishment. I lean in close to her face, inspecting the details. “Who are you?” I whisper.
A splotch of purple on her arms draws my eyes away from her face. I turn the limb over and find it pocked with deep purple bruising and long, thin scars, some of them blazing with red freshness. What the hell are they doing to this woman? A chart hanging from the end of her bed catches my attention. I read the name. “M. Shiloh.”
Muffled voices, just outside the door, spin me around. The door handle turns. I’m in motion before I can develop a course of action, but my body moves like fluid, bending around obstacles as they emerge and striking with force. The first man, dressed in a long white doctor’s coat, is on the floor by the time my consciousness catches up. Clear fluid from a burst IV bag pools around him. The second, a security guard, twitches madly as the two metal prongs buried in his chest deliver a hundred thousand volts into his nervous system. Before he falls to the ground, I drop him with a punch. It’s a low blow, hitting a guy who’s being shocked, but I need him unconscious, and the stun gun won’t do that.
His twitching body slides along the wall and collapses. Moving quickly, I drag both men inside the room and shove them in the bathroom. I don’t find any sedatives in the cupboards, so I bind and gag them with spare sheets, take the guard’s radio, and wedge a chair beneath the bathroom door’s handle.
With so many people around, it must be morning, which means my time is short. I leave the room and move quickly down the hallway. Assuming all the unlabeled doors lead to more examination rooms, I jog down the hall, reading labels as I go. None sound interesting until I get to a set of double doors labeled DOCUMENTUM.
It’s Latin.
What the hell? I know Latin?
Documentum means “proof” or, more loosely, “evidence,” which is the same word etched on my plastic pendant; I don’t think they’re related, but it sounds like what I’m looking for.
I shove the doors and find them locked. I swipe Winters’s keycard across the panel next to the door. It turns green, and I hear the lock click back. I shove the doors open, rush into the space beyond, and stop in my tracks.
For the first time in my one-year memory, I’m shocked into silence.
10.
Dead eyes stare at me. Hundreds of them.
The vast room is split in two. Both sides contain large numbers of ten-foot-tall, four-foot-diameter glass tubes full of green fluid. The tubes are lit from above and below, exposing the contents while leaving the rest of the room, which is black from floor to ceiling, in darkness. Serial numbers and bar codes are etched into the glass of each tube.
I step inside the macabre space and let the doors swing shut behind me. On the right side of the room, the hundred or so specimen tubes are empty. But on the left … The remains of tortured men, women, and children are suspended in the green liquid. While I know they feel no shame in death, their naked display is repulsive. But their nudity isn’t the worst of it. Each and every person met with a violent and untimely end. Some have multiple stab wounds. Others were shot. A few were eviscerated. I see broken bones, some protruding from the skin, and caved-in skulls. It’s a menagerie of violent ends.
That woman I found. Shiloh. Will she end up here, too?
Will I?
I shake my head. Not likely.
The sound of voices pulls me deeper into the room. A rectangle of white light glows, revealing a door on the back wall. Lit by lime-green gore, I walk toward the door, Taser in hand.
I look at the dead faces as I pass, my anger growing like a supervolcano. Who were these people? Mothers. Fathers. Innocent children with long lives ahead of them. I see different ages, from babies to gray-haired grandmothers. A variety of nationalities are represented. It seems like a perfect sampling of the entire human race, and since we’re in New Hampshire, where only 7 percent of the population isn’t gleaming white, many of these people must have been collected from around the country, if not the world.
While in SafeHaven, I heard stories from some of the older, higher-functioning patients who’d spent time at the New Hampshire State Hospital, which was basically an asylum
for the “insane and feeble-minded”—like SafeHaven, but with a deplorable moral fiber. One of my many counselors, a young woman with high hopes, told me the lurid details, which was against all sorts of rules, but she, like most people there, could see I was “normal,” aside from a complete lack of fear.
Hundreds of “patients” were sterilized as part of a statewide eugenics program. The hospital carried out lobotomies, electroshock, and insulin-shock therapies. A horror show, it was closed in 1983. Rampant abuse left patients worse off than when they entered. Those who died as a result of their abuse were buried in the hospital’s cemetery and forgotten.
This … is worse.
Not only were these people likely tortured and brutally slain, their corpses are on display. Objects of necro-admiration. At least the patients at the state hospital were put in the ground. Even if these bodies are still being studied, I don’t see why they should be staged in a gallery.
I turn my eyes to the right. Given the number of empty chambers, Neuro Inc.’s collection still has room to grow.
The bright glow of the small door’s window beckons me. The voices grow louder. Sliding up beside the door, I peek through the window. The room is some kind of large laboratory. Where Documentum is black and green, the space on the other side of the door is almost pure white, save for the table and countertops, which are black. Cabinets and refrigeration units, all with glass fronts, line the walls. Inside each is a collection of liquids and powders kept in vials, test tubes, beakers, and vessels for which I have no name. I see petri dishes, computer stations, and various scientific equipment. The only one of which I recognize is a centrifuge. At the far end is an operating table and a collection of surgical tools.
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