She grew faint.
Closing her eyes, she slowed her breath. It came back to her now—where they were, where they’d been.
This is real.
“Danny?” she whispered. “Wake up, Danny.”
His lips were parted; his breath shallow and warm. She pressed her ear to his chest.
Another computer beeped.
It was against the wall. Each step burned; the muscles and tendons contracted. Danny’s photo was in the corner. The status flashed below it.
WAKING.
The cardiac monitor began to spike.
She stumbled back to his side and clawed at his shoulders, held his cheeks. His eyes moved beneath the eyelids.
“Come on, Danny.” She looked around, hoping no one would hear her, no idea if someone was just beyond the curtains. She just knew they needed to get out. “Wake up.”
If she pulled the needle too soon, would he be trapped in Foreverland? His eyes continued dancing. She squeezed his hand, fingers weaving together.
His eyes opened and stared into nothing.
“Danny?”
Tears welled up. She hovered over his face, stroking his cheeks. He blinked several times. Cyn pinched the needle and waited.
Waited for focus to return.
Waited for him to see her.
And when he did, when he blinked, when a tiny smile bent the corners of his mouth—
She yanked it out.
He bolted upright and couldn’t catch his breath, huffing like he was dumped into a bucket of icy water.
“Danny.” She rubbed his arm. “We’ve got to go, Danny.”
He looked around, the pieces of reality falling in place too slowly. She pushed him up and pulled his legs over the edge.
“Easy.”
She held him while he slid his weight onto his feet. He stared down and looked at his hands, turning them over like she’d seen him do before, his barometers of reality.
“We’re back, Danny. This is the skin.”
He was nodding, but still turning, needing to believe it, not just hear it. She retrieved the boxes of clothing while he sorted out this layer of reality. Is he wondering the same thing I am, wondering if this is the last layer?
She was only wearing panties beneath the gown. Danny grabbed a sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants, tenderly walking around the curtain. She quickly pulled on a pair of pants, tucking the gown inside them and throwing the hoodie over it. Danny was still dressing.
Cyn peeked around the opposite curtain. Patricia lay still on a bed. She didn’t appear to be breathing. The other bed was empty.
The building was silent.
“Danny?” she whispered. “You all right?”
His bare feet weren’t beneath the curtain. A dreaded wave settled in her chest. Cyn shuffled around the tables.
“Danny?” She tugged the plastic curtain.
Several curtains were pulled back. Danny was ten tables back, still dressed in the gown, clothes in hand. He stared at an older man, his beard shaggy, hair wild. There was a hole in his forehead, but no needle.
“It’s him,” Danny said hollowly. “It’s Reed.”
She thought Reed would be younger, then remembered that wasn’t his original body. Reed migrated into Harold Ballard’s body when they overthrew Foreverland and escaped the island.
Reed’s original body was dead. So is that one.
“I thought he sent us the letters,” Cyn said.
“It was him. It had to be. It just...”
He started to sway, reality confusion tilting the floor. She let him take his time, but more computers were beginning to beep. They needed to go. They could figure this out later. Besides, it didn’t matter who sent the letters.
“Danny, no. This way.”
He slid his bare feet over the floor, went to the other side of Reed and pulled back the curtain. An overhead light flickered to life.
Another bed, another body.
“Oh, man, no,” he moaned. “No, no, no...not you, Zin.”
Cyn read the name on the computer. Eric Zinder.
He’d escaped the island with them. Now he was there, in the Institute, a hole in his head but no needle. He wasn’t breathing.
There were more curtains.
Danny rushed through them, tearing them off their hooks, dropping them on the floor. The lights turned on one after another, bed after bed.
Body after body.
The first three were boys. She wasn’t sure he recognized them all. The fourth one, though, was a dark-skinned woman.
Macy. She was helping them. She was working for the Ballards.
This time the floor tipped beneath Cyn’s feet.
“They were searching for a host,” he said. “They were bringing us here, searching for a host.”
“She’s gone.” Cyn looked back toward the front. “Alessandra’s bed is empty.”
“Zin’s the one that saved me,” he said. “Kept me from going insane on the island.”
“We have to go.” She clutched his elbow.
He resisted. “They lured us into the Institute, somehow put us back here and then, they manipulated our memories so that we didn’t remember...we didn’t know we were...”
The room was spinning on him. He hung onto the bed.
“Danny! We have to go!”
He tried to yank away from her.
“Don’t do this. We can’t help them now. We don’t know what’s happening, someone might come back, we’re not supposed to be awake, they’ll put us back in...we have to go now!”
Danny was shaking his head. He went back to Zin, took the boy’s hand, and continued shaking his head as if he just couldn’t take it anymore. No more layers.
No more lies.
Cyn gently wrapped her hand around his. Danny remained unfocused as she took the clothes wedged under his arm and began dressing him. She put her hands on his cheeks.
“We’re alive, Danny. And we need to leave. Do you understand?”
She pressed her lips against his, her body against his body.
“We have to go.”
He nodded.
There wasn’t time to lament, no time to understand where they were or why. There was only time to escape. She pulled him away, but Danny paused at Reed’s body, his head cocked to the side. His thoughts, like hers, were obscured in the fog of waking.
He clutched Reed’s gown and shook it. It was red.
“Come on.”
They made it past the beds where they woke, past Patricia Ballard. The last time Cyn saw her was in a small cabin hidden in the woods. There was a monitor with Patricia’s picture in the upper left-hand corner. DECEASED.
Danny was in front of another computer, this one near the empty bed. The cabinets below it were open. There was an image of an attractive Hispanic woman. AWAKE.
She made it out.
They passed through the animal lab and paused at the front door. Brake lights glowed in an otherwise black and empty street. Rain drifted in tiny droplets, throwing red halos around the back end of the car. The driver stared at them through a blue cloud from an electric cigarette.
The back door was open.
Instinctively, they pulled their hoods up and walked out. It was late, the city still asleep.
“Wait.” Danny held the door. “We don’t have money.”
“Fare’s already covered,” the driver said. “Get in.”
“Who?”
“Somebody called, paid in advance. Come on, already.”
“Where we going?”
“JFK.”
Cyn and Danny traded empty stares, trying to cut through the mental fog, to calculate whether this was a good idea. Maybe they should walk until things cleared up.
Cyn saw the envelope on the backseat. She reached inside and pulled out two tickets. “Spain?”
Danny ushered her inside the cab.
44. Reed
New York City
It unfolded below.
The third-
story window was spattered with tiny droplets that, over the hours he had stood there, coalesced and eventually ran in jagged lines. The man pushed brown curly hair off his forehead and checked his wristwatch. Thirty-two minutes past four.
The taxi pulled away.
It was the second car to pull up to the Institute of Technological Research, this one instructed to take an envelope taped to the front door and wait for two people. The driver would later be interviewed by police. With their hoods up, he wouldn’t be able to help them with identifying the boy and girl other than remembering they were young.
The first car was different. That was a private driver, someone Reed paid handsomely for confidentiality. He took her to a home in the suburbs.
There would be no trace of Alessandra.
Rain continued drifting into the empty street. Occasionally, a car passed below, but no one noticed that the door to the Institute was open, that all the lights were on.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
At 4:45, he reached into the front pocket of his white lab coat and pulled out a phone. The glass was cool against his thumb. He touched several icons, then sent a message. He waited for confirmation that all relevant data had been downloaded from the Institute.
It’s done.
Even he was surprised by the weight falling off his shoulders, like a beast stepping off. It had been such a long journey, so many people had been hurt. He didn’t plan it to happen like this, but the Ballards had already been so powerful.
But it was over. It was finally over.
Reed took off the white coat and placed it on the receptionist’s counter. He punched a code into the phone and placed it on top like a paperweight as the self-destruct code erased all trace of the biomite doctor.
At the glass doors, he set the alarm and stepped out as the countdown beeped. The elevator doors squealed open. He pulled a hood over his head and stepped onto the sidewalk, drizzle beading on his hunched shoulders. The early morning chill cut through layers of clothing as delivery trucks began their morning routes.
He walked nearly two city blocks when the first police car passed him. They were heading for the Institute. The eerie news of the empty research facility would be all over the world by lunch.
By then, Reed would be far away.
45. Alessandra
Upstate New York
Alex grabbed for something, a ledge or a rope or a helping hand, but nothing, black nothing slipped through her fingers—
Asleep again. This time at the computer. Had her Madre seen her jerk her head off the desk, she would’ve fretfully wrung her hands. “¿Otra pesadilla?”
Si, Madre. Another nightmare.
It was those moments just after she woke, when she wasn’t sure if the dream had ended or was just beginning, that disturbed her most. Her forehead always reminded her. She parted her black bangs and touched the tiny hole.
This is real.
Something was dripping.
The coffee cup lay on its side, a brown stain spreading over a mess of papers. She must’ve knocked it over when she lurched into wakefulness.
“Damn!”
She pulled old papers and tissues from the trash but stood too quickly and grabbed the desk to keep from falling. That was the second time in a minute she was glad Madre wasn’t around. When the vertigo settled, she dabbed up the mess.
The doorbell rang.
She looked out the window. The lilacs had faded. Spring had passed. The neighbor was mowing his front yard. Spring blossoms had completely fallen from the cherry tree, replaced by foliage that blocked her view. The taillights of a black SUV were barely visible.
The front door opened. “Yes?” Madre said.
The voices were muffled, but Alex heard the word “agent” somewhere in the exchange.
Surprised it took so long.
She dropped the sopping papers. Coffee bled through the photo on top, the image of the white transfer van had been found in Pennsylvania, en route to New York.
The catatonic drivers made full recoveries. They were transporting one passenger to Attica Correctional Facility when they pulled into the rest area with no recollection of why or how long they’d been there.
Dr. Tyler Ballard.
It wasn’t long before a full-scale Foreverland operation was discovered at the prison. Dr. Tyler Ballard had just left. He’d arranged the transfer, but the investigation suspected he was planning to be discharged at the Institute, where a similar Foreverland was in full swing. That’s where his wife awaited him.
She was found dead, too.
Tyler Ballard was still in restraints, alone in the back of the van. The drivers claimed he was a little loco. When he wasn’t sleeping, he talked to himself. “What was really weird,” one of the drivers said, “was when he’d pause, like someone was answering him.”
No one in the prison remembered anything. They were all fully loaded with brain biomites that had been rebooted. The only exception was an inmate named Gramm Hamilton, a former chemist serving a life sentence. He claimed to have been trapped in his cell by an intruder, that he had nothing to do with Tyler Ballard’s escape and subsequent death.
The coroner couldn’t explain how Tyler Ballard died. It was eventually written up as “old age and biomite complications.”
“Right on the line,” the coroner said. “He had the most biomites allowed by law, and they were experimental, too. I suspect this had something to do with his delusions.”
The press eventually concocted an image of Dr. Tyler Ballard the mad scientist that hijacked a prison and tortured inmates with delusions of Foreverland.
Alex knew better.
In the months since she’d walked out of the Institute, no one had called or come knocking. Even when the investigation revealed a cab taking two unknown people, a young man and woman, from the Institute shortly before the alarms went off, no one ever contacted Alex.
There was no mention of a cab that picked up a middle-aged Hispanic woman.
Alex went to the top of the steps and listened.
“I’d just like to speak with her, ask a few questions,” a young man said.
“Unless you have a warrant—”
“Mrs. Diosa is not a suspect, ma’am. I just have some questions about one of her previous visits to the Institute.”
“I don’t appreciate your implications,” Madre said.
“Any information she could give me—”
“Bring a warrant.”
She’s been watching too much TV. “What’s going on?” Alex stopped on the bottom step.
“Mrs. Diosa?” he called through the screen.
“You don’t need to talk to the police,” Madre said.
“What does he want?”
“It doesn’t matter.” It would take a crane to move her.
Three months earlier, the cab had dropped Alex off at a dark and empty house. Exhausted, she fell asleep on the couch and didn’t call her parents until that afternoon. Madre shouted at her on the phone, but they drove over to the house immediately. They were both sick with grief. She’d disappeared for two weeks.
Only two weeks.
Alex later learned of the time dilation between reality and Foreverland. But an entire year?
Her parents noticed the wound on her forehead, but never said a word about it. Even when the story broke about the Institute and Tyler Ballard—the story about all those bodies, all those people networked into a computer—they pretended not to know that their daughter had gone there. And they never mentioned needles.
Madre moved into the spare bedroom. She had already lost a grandson and son-in-law, she wasn’t going to lose her daughter. Alex didn’t argue.
“I just want to talk,” the man shouted through the door.
“Madre.”
She took Alex’s hand, pressed it against her cheek and kissed it. Then she went to the kitchen to make some coffee.
——————————————
Alex le
aned closer to the mirror and pulled strands of black hair over her forehead. The hole had healed, but she preferred to keep her bangs just in case someone looked too closely.
When she came out of the bathroom, Madre was sitting at the kitchen table with her cell phone. The agent stood at the back door, admiring the garden where Alex spent most of the summer, sometimes getting lost in the weeds, expecting to find a forgotten yellow truck.
“I’m recording this.” Her mother put the cell phone down.
“That’s not necessary, Madre.”
“You never know.”
“All right, okay. You never know.”
Madre remained at the table like a mediator.
“Beautiful backyard,” the agent said. “You do it all yourself?”
Alex pulled a chair from the table. “Want to sit?”
“Okay.” He raised his cup. “Thanks for the coffee, Mrs. Diosa. Better than I deserve.”
Madre nodded once.
“So what can I do for you?” Alex asked.
“Right. You’re familiar with Foreverland?”
“Yes, of course. I’m writing a book. You know that.”
He smiled sheepishly. Let’s cut through it. “Like I said, you’re not a suspect.”
“Why would I think that?”
He eyed the phone. “If there’s any way you can help, anything you can say, we’d appreciate it. I know you’re well aware of the children involved.”
The voices.
She heard them at night sometimes, woke in a sweat to silence. Dreams, that’s all they were, memories of that dreadful event. It seemed like years ago, but the voices were nails that had scratched grooves into her memory.
“I don’t know any more than you,” she said.
“Right.”
“The Ballards started all of this, correct? You found their bodies. What else is there?”
“You were at the Institute.”
She clutched her hands. They were below the table, but the tension extended past her shoulders. “I’ve been there, yes.”
“When?”
“In the spring. A group of journalists were invited. I can get the exact date...”
He shook his head. “That’s all right. You went to a biomite doctor across the road shortly after that?”
“Some time after that, yes.”
Ashes of Foreverland Page 26