by Ana Calin
As I found refuge by the wall, I realized my hand was cramped, clutching hard to a thick handle – the screwdriver. Air, I had to let air in.
I reached the window, the one closest to the stove, gripping to the handles and trying to jerk the frame open when my eyes struck against the black pane. I let out a startled cry.
There they were again, those eyes, now clear and perfectly defined. Like the glare of an animal caught by camera flash, they glowed bright, only that the color was clear – blue. The pane broke instantly with a splintering sound, followed by a sharp pain in my knuckles. Without realizing, I’d punched the window. The fog of shock dissipated, stripping the truth.
Mine. Those were my own eyes. I squeezed my hand above the cuts to numb the pain, while automatic connections built in my head. Luminous eyes – was it an effect of the gas?
The next thing I knew, a groan cracked in my ears. George gripped the pointy shard that hung from the frame like a lonely fang, and stabbed his opponent in the throat with it. I screamed as thick, dark red blood poured from under the hand the Wretch took to his wound, between his fingers and down his wrist. He opened his mouth in distorted awareness that life drained out of him, the nerves in his eyeballs exploding like red lightning while blood gurgled in his mouth. He was dying.
Maybe there was still time. I flung the coat off and jolted to him, intent to press it on his wound and stop the bleeding, but bumped into George’s arm that punched into my stomach like a barrier of bone. Struggling for breath, I managed to pull myself up. It was too late. The Wretch crouched on the floor like a squirming pretzel, coughing out blood. The sound drilled into my brain.
Time lost meaning. I stood there, watching transfixed how this young man died. Every second of his suffering imprinted in my adrenaline-fueled heart as everywhere around fists punched, windows broke, men and women growled like beasts.
Exposure. It was a long shot. But it was the only shot. Enough planning.
I turned on my heels and sprinted to the main door, grabbing coats, jackets and arms in my way, pulling hair, bumping into brawling bodies, as many of them as I could in order to draw attention. I don’t know by what miracle fists hit only the air behind me, by what newly surfaced instinct I ducked down before anybody could grab me. Maybe fear had really kicked my adrenaline level so high that my feet moved like propellers and my reflexes sharpened of their own accord.
I threw the main door open and cast myself into the raging blizzard that felt like needles on my skin. Sight instantly blurred, visibility reduced to inches, but my legs kept running as if a whole murderous army chased me.
I hoped it did. I hoped they’d gotten out of that slaughterhouse disguised as a lonely cottage, a wooden ghost in the Carpathians. I hoped I’d angered them enough to have them rush after me, screeching their teeth, thirsty to see blood drain from my body like it had from the poor Wretch. Thirsty to see me squirm in dying pain. But I also hoped that, by the time they caught me, they’d be themselves again. This wasn’t supposed to be a suicide mission, but a wake-up action.
The snow was quicksand to my legs, sucking me down, but despair fueled my muscles and propelled me forward. Every glance I threw behind revealed nothing, the storm a wall both in front as well as behind me. It roared, swallowing all other sound. There might have been wolves just meters away, I wouldn’t have known, I wouldn’t have heard them howl or growl.
Suddenly, something heavy and metallic closed around my ankle like an iron fist, and jerked my leg from my hip, causing such pain that my heart stuttered out of rhythm. I fell flat on my face. Before I could spit out the snow in my mouth, a force yanked me in a pull. I snaked backwards, dead trees, roots and stones rushing by, while I desperately tried to hook my fingers in the ground.
Snow was scraping glass to my palms, and I knew exactly when a couple of fingernails sprang off. The pain was there, but just so severely unimportant that it didn’t stop me from grabbing on to every dead branch, from hooking my fingers into the frozen ground again and again. Still, I let go quickly of anything stable, or the pull would’ve ripped the leg from the rest of my body. The ride was dizzying and my screaming automatic. My reason shut down, and autopilot kicked in.
Only moments after I came to a brusque stop. I waited a few moments for the pull to start again and, when it didn’t, I rolled on my back. My flesh was stiff. I couldn’t flex my muscles to get up, I only managed to lift my head. Torn clothes, the skin on my stomach and breasts looking like beaten meat. I cried before I touched myself, expecting pain. But there was nothing, my entire body was numb.
Whimpering, I put snow on the reddest places with a stiff hand, but even that small amount of wit fled off when a pair of legs in earth-gray pants and rubber boots emerged from the white storm. The face cleared only when it was close above mine. A face withered by many winters, with ashen stubble and a rotten grin. A face that might once have been peasant’s, but belonged to a bloodthirsty animal now. Not for a second did I have hope. I knew he was there to hurt me, I saw it in his eyes.
He said something, but I didn’t hear it. The storm’s roar covered the sound. He pressed his fingers on my stomach, grinning with expectation, hungry for the pain. But, when nothing came, he tightened his lips in anger and threw himself over me. With sadistic appetite, he crushed my face with his fist.
The blow felt like lightning in the most literal sense. Then it all went black for moments, until the next one came. Then the next one, until I tasted blood in my mouth. He wasn’t going to stop. He’d beat me to death, leaving my corpse disfigured.
In a surge of despair sight returned, bringing the madman’s face into focus. That ugly face with a bad, stinking grin. The face of an evil maggot who didn’t deserve to live. Who thrust himself at a helpless woman, taking her for an easy prey, for a chunk of meat on which to unleash his killer instincts.
Anger pumped frantically in my veins, making me feel as strong as a machine gun. I let out a cry of rage and sank my fingers in his eye sockets, pushing my thumbs hard in the jelly of his eyeballs and wishing for the rusty screwdriver I’d dropped at the cottage. He grabbed my wrists and tried to pull away, but I didn’t let him. I wound my legs around his waist, sticking to him like a leech.
“Oh, no, we’re going all the way, asshole!” I could only hope he heard me. I wanted him to feel the fear. To be in the victim’s skin. I could not let him live. I would not let him live.
“I’ll fucking suck the life out of you!” I screamed.
He fell to the ground with me, wriggling like a stabbed snake, but went smart enough to move his hands from my wrists and grab my shoulders. He rolled over me. Applying more strength, I pierced his eyeballs with my fingernails, but just a moment later something made of fur knocked him hard from my hands. He flew to the side, followed by more stripes of fur that leaped after him. I got up on my buttocks and squinted through the blizzard. Though I didn’t see anything, I did hear his cries and faint animal growling. Wolves, those strings of fur were wolves.
For some reason fangs felt more threatening than the rusty chain that still coiled around my ankle, more threatening than the man’s sadistic glare, than his blows. I got up to my feet, slowly walking backwards, careful not to make any sudden moves. The wolves could still have been very close. I bled, which placed me far down the food chain and would make them put up a fight for my flesh.
I dragged my leg with the heavy chain until one wrong step sent me stumbling backwards. My body smashed against rocks. I fell down an endless slope, blow after blow hard in my ribs and crack after crack loud in my ears. I didn’t even get to feel any pain. It all stopped with a knock to the back of my head, and light began to close in on a small moon. That face again. Those eyes. The brightness fizzed in them like flickering neon, and I was sure this was it. My muscles relaxed and my lungs gave out one last, resigned breath as those words filled my head – “You need me.”
Chapter Six
Whispering somewhere close. If I was dead, I wasn’t a
lone. I felt warm and so very comfortable, all that whispering, as if somebody were careful not to disturb.
Then I must’ve fallen asleep and dreamt, even in death, and it felt anything but nice. I was small, so small, a bee in a jar. And I tried to get out, but the glass was slippery, with nothing I could grab. Every time I tried to reach up, my palms would leave traces of blood down the jar. Instead of fingernails, I had pus. I screamed a sharp scream like a train whistle, then pushed hard on my hands. And then my eyes were open, though heavy, so very heavy.
I sat up, sweat trickling down my forehead and neck. The room seemed warped, like in a dream, my skull burdensome as if it contained rocks. I dropped back on pillows that smelled of disease, and something stung my arms. My body grew heavier and heavier, sinking in the mattress like a pile of steel. I realized I wouldn’t be able to lift myself again, it had been only a rush that my body wouldn’t sustain again anytime soon.
A sweet, pained voice spoke close to my ear. “Alice, baby, you’re awake. Thank God, you’re awake.”
English. I now knew Mom leaned over me, her lips pressing on my temple and forehead. I tried to open my eyes again, but I didn’t find the strength, my lids swollen.
She held my hand, I now felt it, aware again of the life that flowed feebly through me. A slow pulse in my chest, like a lazy clock. Tick – pause – tock. Tick – pause – tock.
Among sobs, Mom began telling me the story of the Sleeping Beauty. It had been one of my favorites as a kid, and her voice brought back the oldest and sweetest memories of pink pajamas and Judy the Monkey. Memories as distant as how and why I’d ended up feeling as beaten and finished as I did. My mind filled with only the image of a prince with beautiful, sculpted face and long raven hair, the girl slumbering in a high, ivory tower, and the taste of cotton candy mingling with that of blood.
The story came to a forced end when two men walked in – I could tell they were men by the deep voices that didn’t manage to keep their conversation to the mere level of whispers.
“I won’t leave her under your wing alone.” The man’s identity flashed in my head – Dad.
“You’re being unreasonable, Tiberius,” the other man warned in a commanding voice. Probably as commanding as his person, since he called my dad by his first name – very few called the great Dr., PhD., a-pile-of-titles-in-biochemistry-I-can’t-even-read Tiberius Preda by his first name.
Images of a rusty chain and strings of fur crossed my mind’s eye like sharp lashes. Then the fall, the knocking and cracking of bones.
“I can take care of her at home,” Dad said.
“That’s not a good idea.”
Among wretched sobs Mom whispered, “She has woken up, Tiberius. She was up on her hands, she opened her eyes.”
The shuffle of fabric told me Dad hurried to my side. Hands checked the catheter. Hospital, doctor, IV lines . . . reality caught outline. How on earth could I have survived? The leaden sensation all through my body prevented me from moving or making a sound, and a ton of sedatives and painkillers must’ve been keeping me numb to pain, but my brain activity took off like a rocket.
“She’s regaining her strength fast,” Dad said, and bent close to my ear. “Alice, do you hear me? Are you awake, sweetheart?”
Regaining my strength felt far from the truth, since I didn’t find enough to moan, let alone answer.
“She fell asleep again,” Mom lamented, as if I were more dead than alive. “She fell asleep, my poor girl.” She caressed my hair, tickling my temple.
“You should get some fresh air, Jen. You look and sound scared, and that’s the last thing she needs.”
Mom took offense, it was obvious in her higher-than-usual pitch. “I’m not going anywhere. This is my baby, barely out of a cold ditch.”
“Go, Jenna.”
“No way.”
“You’re an emotional wreck. I promise, I won’t stand in your way when you come back, but go come to grips first.” Dad sounded severe – that kind of severe that used to sew my lips together years ago.
I sensed Mom linger in the doorstep before her steps faded down an echoing hallway. I still couldn’t understand why she put up with Dad’s brashness. Once she’d said it was for my sake, but that hadn’t kept him under the same roof with us anyway.
“I’ll leave you with her,” the other man – probably my doctor – said calmly.
“No, don’t. Close the door, we need to finish our talk.”
“Not here. Not now.”
“I won’t abandon her with you, lad, and I don’t want you doing anything behind my back to force my hand.”
He can force Tiberius Preda’s hand?
“I won’t take action without your knowledge”, the doctor said. “But I won’t back off either.”
“I won’t have her in your custody. That’s my final word.”
“Let’s talk about it later, some other place.”
“Some things can’t wait. Have you seen her blood count? It’s so good it’s frightening. After hours in the cold and everything she’s been through, not even a bladder infection. She fell down a precipice and not a broken bone. This is not normal. Besides, she’s always been a fragile kid.”
There was a trace of discontent in Dad’s voice that baffled me to the marrow. If I was doing so well, what was there to be urgent about? And why was I hooked to IV? And why ask my own doctor if he’d seen my blood count?
“She won’t remain this strong. But either way, she remains in danger,” the doctor said.
“What if she doesn’t come back to normal at all? Leona Ignat, her blood count looks just as staggering, there’s still no change ...”
Leona. Flashes of the last moments at the cottage came at me.
“BioDhrome’s our priority now, Tiberius. They won’t stop here.”
They know about BioDhrome?
“No, BioDhrome won’t stop here. Especially if Alice’s blood count doesn’t come back to normal,” Dad said.
“It will. The gas effects always fade. It causes the body to regulate its chemistry so that it can become a fighting machine, the best version of itself, this is no secret to you. But the effects are temporary. Alice will be the fragile kid you know again, but they’ll still hunt her. They took special interest in her.”
“The effects of the gas might wear off after a while, but the experience will never go away. The experience is powerful and, combined with the gas, it can make the effects permanent. I don’t want her . . . forgive me, but I don’t want her ending up like you. I don’t want her to become an Upgrade, Damian.”
Damian! Excitement pulsed through me, but outside I remained still as a corpse. For whatever reason, my body wouldn’t respond. What the heck am I on?
“BioDhrome did much more with me than they did with Alice, Tiberius, you know this. She’s far from an Upgrade. Her values will normalize. You’ve seen George Voinescu’s results—his liver’s already a mess again from all that drinking. The healing wasn’t permanent.”
Hold on. How come Dad and Damian know each other?
“Alice might be soft and frail,” Dad said. “Not naturally violent, like you, but she is in a difficult place. She could get permanent effects from the gas.”
“You have only yourself to blame for her being in a difficult place,” Damian said. I felt my veins frost. “She ran away from everything you represented, she was desperate enough to want and marry some loser just to be rid of your name.”
Pause. Both in Dad’s breathing and mine.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it, Tiberius? With all due respect, you can’t help your daughter.”
“How deeply did you two bond, boy, that she told you all of this?” Dad hissed. It was easy to imagine him pointing a rifle at my handsome barbarian.
“She talked. I listened.”
“Did all that listening get her in bed with you?”
Oh, no, no, no, Dad, please don’t!
“Have I not proven my loyalty?” Damian’s voice went a fr
equency lower, full of reproof. “I wouldn’t disrespect you like that. I only got close to Alice in order to protect her, like you requested.”
Requested?
“So can I rest assured that you haven’t taken a special liking to my daughter, Damian?”
Another pause, this time in Damian’s response and in my breathing again. He hesitated. Good God, he hesitated . . . Was it a good sign? Was he reluctant to admit that he liked me? Damian’s reply lagged for seconds, but when it came, it was velvety and clear. “Alice is a gem, I must admit. Sweet in appearance, sharp in wit and loving as an angel. But she’s your daughter.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, lad. It’s just . . .” Awkward pause. “You’re not good for her. It’s not your fault that they did this to you, yet . . .”
“I get it,” Damian cut him off.
The air was so laden that I could almost hear Dad nod. “I can’t risk you and Alice getting this close again.”
“We won’t get close again. But she’s in great danger, Tiberius, and I’m the only one capable of protecting her.”
“Thank you for watching over her, but you can’t help her anymore.”
“This is irresponsible of you, Tiberius.”
“Respect and loyalty, Damian, if I may remind you,” Dad retorted. “Do not go behind my back.”
“No. Not behind your back.” With that, Damian closed the door behind him.
A chair raked the floor as Dad pulled it close to the bed and sat down. I opened my eyes, and Dad’s face appeared through the blurry shield my eyelashes made. I couldn’t help myself.
“What did BioDhrome do to Damian Novac?” I demanded.
Chapter Seven
I paused and swallowed painfully. My throat felt dry. “How do you know Damian?”