by Cronan, Matt
"Sorry," the girl said. "I'm so sorry." She released Sam's mouth and picked up a piece of gauze lying between Sam's legs. She positioned the gauze over the hole and placed two pieces of surgical tape over it.
The pain shooting through Sam's stomach abated, and she looked up to the girl. Surgery distorted her face but not to same extent as Doc's. Her lips were two sizes too big and her forehead seemed rippled like something had been inserted underneath it. She wore silver studs in both cheeks where her dimples would be and a silver ring through her eyebrow. Her eyes were wide and an obscene purple color. They matched her tinted hair.
"What's your name?" Sam asked.
"My name is Alexandria," the girl whispered. "But you can call me Alex. What's yours?"
"Sam."
"Sam, we need to go before the doctor gets back."
She was discombobulated but still detected the urgency in the girl's voice. She rubbed her eyes trying to clear the fog away from her mind. The needle from the I.V. pulled at her skin and she winced in pain. "Why?"
"Because I think they plan to kill you. I overheard one of the soldiers say that the General was coming for you in the morning," Alex said as she helped Sam into a sitting position. "He said the General had taken a fancy to you, but they vetoed letting you live here."
"So they'll kick us out?" Sam asked. Her throat was raw from where the breathing tube had been and it hurt to speak.
Alex shook her head. "They won't let you leave."
"Then why wouldn't they just let me die in my sleep?" Sam asked. "Inject me with some lethal dose of something and turn off the machines?"
"Because the General will want to have his fun first." Her words were ice-cold and brought a chill to Sam's flesh. "We need to get out of here before that happens."
Sam, with Alex's aid, twisted her legs over the bed and looked down at the floor. She regretted the decision at once. The checkered tiles spun and her stomach lurched.
"Do you need my help with that?" Alex asked. She pointed to the tube disappearing under the hem of Sam's hospital gown.
Sam shook her head. She wrapped a fist around the rubber tubing and pulled. Tears filled her vision. She had to tug hard and grunted as it tore from her body. Her muscles trembled and stars formed in front of her eyes. She handed the tube to Alex and tried to steady herself.
"Are you okay?" Alex asked.
"I'm going to puke," Sam managed.
The sentence had barely left her lips when Sam was no longer looking at the floor but rather the inside of a trash can. The muscles contracted in her stomach with each wretch. Each time she heaved, it felt like she was being cut open and ripped apart.
"Kill me," Sam cried out in-between vomiting and trying to catch a breath.
Alex pulled Sam's long brown hair away from the mess and held it behind her back. "If we don't hurry, they will kill you," the tiny voice whispered. "But they'll do things to you first. Horrible things."
The nausea subsided after a moment and Alex removed the bucket. She came back with a moist towel and wiped Sam's mouth. Then she removed the tape from her arm and pulled out the I.V. needle.
Sam's head pounded and her body ached with a blinding ferocity. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to move. It hurt to blink. Every movement was the most challenging of her entire life. She wished that she would have died in the wreckage. Anything would be better than this.
"Who is Jordan?" Alex asked.
Sam's jaw fell open. "How do you—?"
"You said his name a lot in your sleep."
The sound of his name brought another round of tears to her eyes. The painful throbbing of her heart returned. It hurt because it was as broken as her body. The bullet that pierced his heart had also shattered hers.
"It doesn't matter," Sam whispered. She stared down at her bare legs sticking out from the paper nightgown. They dangled over a white and black checkered floor. Beside her, the machines that had been keeping her alive hummed and beeped. "He's gone now. He's safe from this place."
"That's good," Alex said. Sam shot her a look and the girl's purple eyes grew wide. "Not good that he's dead, but good he's not in this place. This is not a good place."
"Where are we?" Sam asked.
"An underground city called Lost Angel," Alex said. "Before he died, my dad told me that there's a sign right above us and that's where they got the name. But we can't go up-top to see it because of all the," she dropped her voice to a whisper and said, "halfways."
"Halfways?"
"The dead people that aren't really dead."
"The infected."
"Is that what you call them where you're from?" Alex asked, her eyes wide with excitement. "Where are you from? People are saying you and the other must have come from a bunker like this one, because people can't survive out in the world by themselves. Where is your bunker at? And what's the rest of the world like? I bet it's bad." The more the girl talked the faster the words spilled from her mouth and the more prevalent the nausea became.
Sam held up a feeble hand. "One question at a time."
"Sorry." The girl's alabaster skin turned rosy. "It's been a long time since I've talked to anyone other than the President. They don't let us talk to anyone. Well, besides for who picks us. But mine only wants to talk about boring stuff. And gross stuff. Sorry. I'm talking too much again."
"It's okay," Sam assured her and attempted to slide out of the bed. Alex came to her side and slipped an arm around her. Sam hesitated and then shifted her weight to her feet. The room faded and turned a vacant shade of white. Sam grabbed ahold of Alex's shoulder and squeezed with all her might. After a moment, the feeling passed, and the world came back into view.
"Where are you from?" Alex asked.
"New Hope."
"How far is that from here?"
"I don't know." Sam winced as she took a shaky first step. "Not far, I think."
"President Gates says there's nothing left of the old world."
Sam thought of those same words come from Prime Minister Troy's mouth and how the citizens of New Hope had believed that lie. The Ministry convinced them to live in fear of the unknown because of the infected. She thought of Concordia. The queasiness turned bitter. "There's more out there. Much more than this."
She took another step and stumbled. Her knee slammed onto the hard tile and Sam cried out in pain. Alex caught her before she went down and lifted her back to her feet. She was weak. So much weaker than she had ever felt. The wreck had ravaged her body. It scared her to be this weak.
"Where are we going?" Sam asked. She gritted her teeth together as she took another step.
"The chair by the door."
Ten feet from her, a chair leaned against the far wall of the room. It looked to be miles in the distance. Sam groaned. Alex patted her on her bare back and nudged her forward.
The touch on her bare skin made Sam realize that the paper thin night gown was leaving her backside exposed. She tried to grab one of the rear flaps, but the pain in her shoulder stopped her. Her cheeks turned red hot.
They shuffled across the room at a snail's pace. Each step was a challenge, but each successful inch forward was a tiny victory. Every time she could place one foot in front of the other, she was that much closer to reuniting with her friend. She had to go faster. Eric and Doc's conversation echoed through her mind. The thought of him being utilized made her skin crawl.
"Where do you think Cole is?" Sam asked.
"I'm not sure. They moved him a week ago."
"A week?"
"You've been out for a long time."
Sam's blood ran cold. "If you had to guess where he was?"
"One of the surgical wings."
"Why there?"
There was a long pause and then Alex said, "They do experiments here. Bad ones."
They reached the chair and Sam collapsed into it. Alex crossed the room to the wardrobe next to the bed. For the first time, Sam caught a glimpse of Alex as a whole. The young girl's face was not the only t
hing that had been operated on.
The girl's breasts spilled from a tight t-shirt with a low-cut neck. They were much larger than a budding teenager's should be and accentuated by her freakishly thin torso. The girl's rear was proportionate to her breasts, but judging by the size of the stick-thin thighs poking out of the short skirt, they had manipulated that as well.
In the faint illumination of the overhead fluorescents, Sam could see tiny scars running up the girl's bare white legs. Her pallid skin was fair. Not like the doctor's translucent skin but rather a child who had grown up sheltered from the sun.
Alex turned and caught Sam staring at her. Her big lips curled downward in an almost-frown and her brow furrowed.
"You know far too much about operating rooms," Sam said. "Don't you?"
Alex blinked and her eyes gleamed. She took a breath, blinked again and thick streams of mascara ran down her face.
"It starts after we're picked," Alex said. Her voice quivered when she spoke. "They want us to look like the girls from the magazines. The girls from the old days."
The words caught Sam off-guard. "What does that mean?" she asked. "What does it mean to be picked?"
Alex shook her head and buried her face in her hands. Sam wanted to go to the girl, to comfort her, but knew that without help, she wouldn't make it two feet across the room.
"On our twelfth birthday," the girl began, her hands still pressed against her eyes, "they give all the girls a choice. We can continue to work the mines down below, or come up here and…" The girl's voice trailed off.
Alex let out a loud sob and shook her head. After a moment, she straightened and wiped her eyes with her bare arms. The dark mascara smeared across her cheeks.
"And what, Alex?" She had forgotten about escaping and about Cole. Her blood simmered and somewhere, deep inside of her, a fire ignited. She already knew the answer. She could see it written all over the girl's face. But she braced herself anyway.
Alex removed Sam's sneakers from the bottom drawer, set them on the ground and straightened.
"We do a different kind of work up here," she said. "But they don't tell you that when you're 12 years old. They don't tell you about all the surgeries you have to go through or how you'll never see your family again."
Alex pulled Sam's blue coveralls from the closet and turned toward her.
"They don't tell you that your new job will be permanent baby-maker and that you have to pretend like you like it when some old man pushes his stuff inside of you every night."
Sam's mind spun like the wheels of a car stuck in snow, desperately trying to gain traction. The thought of this happening to anyone was blood-curdling. Her thoughts drifted to the baby factories in New Hope. At least the Ministry gave them a choice. Here there were no choices, and they were doing it to children. It was reprehensible. Unforgivable.
"All you know when you're 12 is that you don't want to work in the mines anymore. Anything is better than working 18 hours a day in the pitch-black until every muscle in your body turns to jelly and soot covers every inch of your body. You do that for the first seven years of your life and by the time you're of age, coming to the upper levels is the greatest thing you've ever heard of."
Alex crossed the room with the clothes and helped Sam to her feet. She pulled the paper gown over her head and Sam fought the instinct to cover herself. If this teenager had to be subjected to the horrors she spoke of then she could withstand a few seconds of humility without complaining.
"I'm sorry," Sam said. The pathetic apology was all she could manage. She wanted to tell the girl that everything would be alright. But she wouldn't do that. Sam had first-hand experience that sometimes things didn't work out that way. Sometimes things would never be okay again.
A feeble smile appeared on the young girl's face and she held out the sleeve of the coveralls. Sam turned her body as far as she could and forced a trembling arm into the sleeve.
"Will you take me with you?" Alex asked.
"What?" Sam asked. She barely remembered where she was heading to begin with. The original quest seemed so far removed and the loss of Jordan had buried almost every intention of completing it.
"If I help you escape, you and your friend, will you take me with you?"
"You don't even know where we're going," Sam said as she slipped her other arm through. "Hell, I don't even know where we're going. Plus, it's dangerous out there. There's more than the infec—halfways we're running from. Worse things."
"There can't be anything worse."
"You'd be surprised."
"Please," the girl pleaded, "I won't slow you down."
Alex's voice was thick with desperation. Images surfaced of Prime Minister Troy trying to force himself on her, shoving his repulsive tongue down her throat, and pressing his ancient boner against her. Even now, miles away from New Hope, she could still smell his rotten breath. And then she thought of Alex and how she dealt with worse every day. Some old man having his way with her. Raping her. The words forced Sam back to the present.
"Okay," Sam said.
"Really?" Alex asked.
"Really."
"What about my brother?" Alex asked.
"You didn't say anything about a brother."
"I'm saying it now."
"Alex—"
"He's 18 and strong and smart. He'll be useful."
Sam's face screwed up as if this request was more torturous than the pain wreaking havoc with her body.
"Please," Alex said.
Sam sighed but her lips curled upward. "Anyone else?"
The girl shook her head from side to side.
"Fine."
Alex's cheeks reddened and her eyes darted to the floor. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Sam said. "We're not out of here yet."
Alex nodded and knelt down. Sam placed her weight on Alex's back and lifted her bruised leg. Tears gathered in her eyes and her muscles trembled as she slipped her leg through the cuff of the coverall. Alex guided Sam's foot back to the ground, and the tears spilled down her cheeks.
"One more, okay?" Alex asked.
Sam nodded but didn't answer. It hurt too much.
She zipped up the coveralls by herself and then slumped back into the seat. She had no idea how they would escape this place, when the simple action of getting dressed had exhausted nearly all of her energy.
"You are very beautiful," Alex whispered as she placed the old sneaker on Sam's foot.
Sam's cheeks flushed at the offhanded compliment.
"I used to be beautiful once…before the surgeries," Alex continued. "There aren't any women you're age that haven't been altered."
"You are beautiful." Another wave of tears threatened, and she cursed herself for being so emotional. This was something new to her. She had grown used to Jordan's criticisms that she wasn't emotional enough. Silently, she blamed the morphine.
"I will be," Alex said and slipped on Sam's other shoe. "One day, I will be beautiful again. Somewhere out there, out in the up-top, I'll find someone to reverse what they've done to me." The young girl paused for a long moment while she finished tying Sam's shoes. When she pulled the knot tight, she looked up at Sam and asked, "Do you think there's a doctor out there? Someone who can make me beautiful again?"
Sam nodded. Holden had mentioned multiple cities operating through the United States. At least one of them had to possess some sane, upstanding citizens. The answer brought a coy smile to Alex's face and her puffy lips curled upward as far as they could.
"Are you ready?" Alex asked.
Sam nodded.
Alex stood and helped Sam out of her chair.
"I can't go fast," Sam said.
"Don't worry." Alex took her place in the crux of Sam's arm. "I know all the secret hiding places. I can keep us from us being seen."
"Okay." Sam took a deep, painful breath. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be."
"Good," Alex said, and twisted the doorknob. "Everyone should be asleep. We'll find your frie
nd first, and—"
Alex pulled the door open and took a quick step back. A man stood in the doorway, towering over the girls. He wore an olive-green military uniform that sported dozens of medals and ribbons. Sam's breath caught in her throat as the tall man flashed a set of pearly whites and took a step into the room. She didn't need Alex to tell her that this was the General.
"Ladies," the General said, "where might you be going at this time of night?" His features weren't deformed like Doc's or Alex's. But his olive skin didn't have a single wrinkle or blemish either. He lifted the military cover revealing a thick mane of perfectly styled jet-black hair. It matched the neatly trimmed mustache and bushy eyebrows.
Sam didn't care about the man's flawless skin or perfect hair. The dread filling Alex's eyes told her everything she needed to care about. The General was bad news. She wanted to run, but the pain prevented her from even moving. Panicked, she did the only thing she could think of and screamed as loud as she could, "Cole!"
The General's smile screwed into a frown. "That's a poor way to introduce yourself."
Sam opened her mouth to scream again but the General, with his perfect hair and perfect skin, threw a perfect jab and caught her right between the eyes. Sam's knees turned to rubber. A sharp pain rocketed through her as the back of her skull bounced off of the tile floor.
Far away, Alex's helpless screams grew fuzzy and distorted. The fluorescent light flickered and faded. Sam closed her eyes, but this time the dark nightmares didn't find her. This time, she didn't dream at all.
4
Sam woke from the dreamless slumber, not in the hospital bed, but rather one of incredible extravagance. A four poster bed draped in a sheer white canopy, the posts made of a rich, dark wood, each engraved in complicated patterns of shapes and lines. The mattress was soft and conformed to her body. It was a definite upgrade from the flimsy cot that she had slept on for so many years in New Hope.
White satin sheets, the kind reserved for government officials in New Hope, covered her naked body. The thought of the creepy doctor or the General undressing her made her skin crawl.