Chapter 16
Rachel groggily opened her eyes. She was still in a white cell. She tried to move her arms and legs. She was still tied down. Her eyes began to focus and she realized she was in a completely different cell. Big enough to stand in. White padded walls and floor. She was tied to a gurney or bed that seemed to be attached to the wall.
She propped herself up on her elbows. She was in a hospital gown. She had a few small round burn marks on her arms. They looked recent. She saw a camera on the ceiling in the far corner of the room. She lay back down and waited. She wondered when this reprogramming would begin and what it would involve, and how on Earth she could escape these people.
Just then the heavy white metal door was unlocked with a loud clink that made her jump. She looked toward the door, past the foot of her bed and saw a pleasant looking nurse coming in. Fifty-something, plump, short brown hair. She was smiling.
"Quite a night you've had," the nurse said as she came to undo the ties on her arms and legs.
"Where am I?" Rachel asked.
"In the hospital, dear," she said. "I'm going to have you come with me, so we can get you back into your clothes and released."
Rachel was amazed. The nurse helped her off the bed. Her legs were a bit wobbly, possibly from a sedative. Who knew? She let the nurse lead her down a tiled green hallway to a cheery looking exam room. It had upbeat posters on the walls that said things like "shoot for your dreams" and had pictures of flowers and butterflies and things.
"Here you go," the nurse said, pointing to a neatly folded pile of clothes on a chair. "Put these on and the doctor will be in to talk to you shortly." She left and closed the door behind herself. She didn't even lock it.
This was bizarre. Rachel took the gown off and put her clothes on, which were not her clothes but fit her perfectly, jeans and a T-shirt. Then she slipped into shoes next to the chair that were just her size. Some sort of slip-on loafers.
For some reason she felt no need to run. She felt lulled into peaceful submission somehow. She casually walked around the room looking at jars with tongue depressors and ear flashlights and a stethoscope. Why was she not running? Had they already done something to her to make her not run?
The door clicked open behind her as she was staring at a butterfly poster on the wall, and she jumped. She turned around and an older gray haired man in a lab coat came in, holding a clipboard.
"Rachel," he said cheerily. "Why don't you have a seat." She sat in the chair her clothes had been on and he wheeled over a chair from a corner and sat in it facing her. He pulled reading glasses out of his coat pocket and put them on and read papers on the clipboard.
"Do you know why you're here?" he asked casually.
"No," Rachel said.
"Good," he said cheerfully.
What? she thought.
"I'm just here to tell you the rules," he said. "You've been separated from your other selves and are never to talk to them again. We left your memory intact. Because how can you ever learn if you can't remember? We know you know what we can do to you if you misbehave." He was speaking to her kindly like she was a child.
She had started to cry silently. This was so creepy.
"Do you understand, Rachel?" he asked.
"Yes," she said through her tears.
"Now we've put even more safeguards in place, more programming, so if you disobey us, there will be grave consequences. Okay?"
She just cried quietly.
He raised his eyebrows at her.
"Okay," she said tearily.
"Okay." He stood up and held his hand out to her to shake.
She warily took his hand. He smiled at her and shook her hand. "Nice seeing you, Rachel. A driver will be in in a minute to take you home. Take care."
He left the room.
She put her head down and let tears fall onto her arms.
Where had those burn marks come from? Why didn't she remember getting them? How much time had gone by?
The door clicked open again and she dried her eyes, and looked up. A young man in a suit was standing there.
"Are you ready to go?" he asked politely.
"Yes," she said, getting up. Were they really letting her go home?
He motioned for her to follow him and she did. Down the tiled hallway, through a door which he unlocked, down another hallway. Through two sets of bars he had to buzz for a guard to open. No wonder they had left her alone in an unlocked room. They were obviously in a fortress.
Finally they walked through a lobby with beautiful glass walls on one side, and out into what seemed to be a summer afternoon.
She followed him to a big black SUV. Typical, she thought. He actually opened the door for her. She got in and buckled her seat belt.
He got in, started it up and drove for what seemed like forever. Through heavy traffic, then residential streets, then downtown, then more houses. It started to look familiar to her. They really were taking her home.
Finally he drove up in front of her house and stopped. The house looked the same. He turned off the car.
"Do you have any questions?" he asked her.
She hesitated to ask, not sure she wanted to know. "What year is it?" she said finally.
"2019," he said. He got out of the car to go around to get her door.
2019, she thought. Two years have gone by. The quiet tears started to roll down her face again. How had two years gone by in the blink of an eye?
He opened her door. She let him help her out and lead her to her front door. He unlocked it and opened it for her, then handed her the key.
He held the screen door open and said, "Just be happy, Rachel. Just enjoy your life. Don't worry about what the other parts of you are up to."
She just stared at him. He had said that as casually as a bellboy saying, "Enjoy your stay."
"Take care," he said and let the screen door close. She was starting to hate that phrase. She watched him walk to the SUV, get in and drive away. She looked down at the key in her hand. It wasn't really hers, was it?
She looked around. Everything was pretty much how she had left it. Except it was all a little neater, cleaned up. Staged.
She quickly walked through the house, making sure no other creepy cheerful people were there. She was alone. She went to the fridge and opened it up. They had stocked it with her favorite foods. Creepy.
She suddenly wondered what had happened to Tom. She panicked when she realized she didn't know his last name. Or his phone number. She had left her phone in an abandoned lot. Otherwise she could call him with that. And she couldn't talk to Kayla anymore, or even find her in her head. She felt alone.
She went into the living room and sat down and stared into space. She was trying to process what had happened to her. None of it made sense or felt right, or even felt real. What "safeguards" were in place in her own mind?
The sky grew dark and she leaped out of her chair when she realized she could just walk to Tom's house. It was five blocks away. She wouldn't drive. She wanted to check out the situation first. Approach quietly.
What if he didn't live there anymore? What if he wasn't alive? 'God, don't think like that,' she thought. She grabbed her house key and locked the front door and started to walk. The air had grown slightly cooler, but not bad. She walked quickly, past quiet houses with people watching TV and having late dinners.
She was a block away from his house and could see his lights were on. She got closer and could see his truck in the driveway. ‘Thank God,’ she thought. She ran the rest of the way there. She stood across the street and could see him in the kitchen, standing at the counter, probably making dinner.
She was so happy to see him alive. She almost started walking across the street when he laughed and seemed to say something to someone behind him.
Suddenly a woman appeared next to him in the window. She set a bowl down on the counter and playfully slapped his hand, and laughed. She was pretty, had short brown hair.
Rachel froze in h
er tracks. He was with someone new. How could she not think of that? Two years had gone by. They probably told him she was dead. God, she had nothing left.
"They took my life away," she said to herself in the quiet street. She was shocked. How had they so thoroughly ruined her life? It was like they had gutted it and left her with the shell of it to do what she wanted with.
In a daze she slowly walked back home, opened her door, and sat down on the couch in the dark. She flipped on the TV to drown out her thoughts. She watched an annoying infomercial. And old movies. And the news. She didn't even care.
She picked up the pad of paper near the phone and began to doodle on it with a black pen. She drew tiny stars, filling the little page and starting another. She drew eyes. She drew flowers with sharp edges. Eventually she just scribbled one whole page black, then started another. Where else could rage go in this stifled shell of a life they'd left her?
Eventually she grew so tired she wandered back to bed. She was a little afraid to go to sleep. Afraid she'd wake up tied to some table three years in the future. But she did eventually drift off to sleep.
She woke with a start hours later with morning light seeping through her window. It was early. She hadn't dreamed. Was that one of the things they had changed?
She groggily got up and wandered to the kitchen. She had put on Kayla's favorite pajamas because she missed her. She was hungry, so she grabbed a yogurt from the fridge and took it to the living room.
She sat down and looked at the pages of scribble she'd left lying around. Flowers, stars, eyes, black nothing. Then she glanced at a piece of paper on the table next to her. She slammed the yogurt onto the table, the spoon fell to the floor. She picked the paper up. She couldn't believe it.
At the bottom of a page of stars and eyes were written the words, "They'll never separate us for good, Rach. Zane."
"Oh, my God," Rachel said aloud and started to cry. She stared at the paper, then she held it to her chest. She looked down at the paper again as she lowered it to her lap. She stared at it to make sure it was real. It was.
"Thank you..." she whispered, to who she didn't know. "Thank you..."
###
Other novels by Chris Slusser:
Mandra
(romance)
Paranormal Activities Unit
(sci-fi)
Black Ribbons
(paranormal romance)
www.chrisslusser.com
Fugue Page 8