Heartless (20 page)

“Well, then,” said the voice. “That’s more like it. I’m so glad you’re home, Jolene, dear. Now it’s time to say goodbye to Lucy, isn’t it?”

Lucy began to cry, heaving great, angry sobs beside me. I reached out to calm her but she pulled away.

She didn’t realize I had a plan. It was the only way to save her. I let my arm drop, and I looked back up to the ceiling, still trying and failing to find the source of the voice. I spoke again. “Peacefully, of course, with one condition. I’ll go with you, quietly, calmly, right now. But only if you let Lucy go.” I hoped my voice sounded as firm as I intended it.

“Of course, Jolene,” said the voice after a pause. “Whatever you say. Just say your goodbye and it’s time to go.”

A voice in my head said
no, no, no.
I did it anyway. As though I was dreaming, I felt myself open my arms to Lucy.

She held back. “No,” she said, tears ruining the way her pale skin glowed in the darkness. “No, Jo. Have you not seen this place? How can you trust them?”

I pulled her to me anyway, moving through fog. I buried my face in her hair. I wished so hard I could smell her, then. Her shampoo, her perfume, her lotion. The smells of my life since our first day in the dorm.

She sobbed and clutched at my arms, my shoulders, her fingers digging into my ailing flesh. “Don’t go,” she cried. “Please, don’t do this. I’ll never see you again. Don’t give up.”

“It’s the only way to save the both of us,” I said.
I hope it’s true, I hope it’s true.
“You’re going to be safe. You heard him. Safe. And they’re going to fix me.”

Hope rose in my chest, my throat.
It could happen. Our happy ending could really happen.

I peeled Lucy off me. “I’m going to see you again,” I said. “Soon. But just in case, I love you.”

She fell to her knees. “They’re lying,” she sobbed. “How can you not see that? They want me, too, and they’re going to kill you.”

I had to let her go. I had to try. I lifted my head high and walked to the door. It opened easily in my hand. The sounds of Lucy’s cries filled my ears as I stepped across the threshold. I let the door close. There was a click as the door locked behind me, and lights surged on.

Then the sound of moans, insistent and hungry, filled the room where Lucy stayed, as the other door had opened and the monster-girls came pouring in.

Lucy screamed. “No! Jo! No!”

Design Doc 36-J

Iteration 7

There is, and always will be, a fine balance between being a free-thinking individual, and being a mindless soldier.

That lesson can be seen clearly in Iteration 6.

When allowing subjects to maintain full control of their unmodified brains, we have witnessed erratic behavior upon reanimation. One subject awoke early, escaped, and has proven difficult to capture. Said reanimation was premature and unexpected, and subject was alone upon arising.

Subject has proven herself resourceful and intelligent beyond all expectation. When we control the reanimation process, including indoctrination into the cause, subjects with unmodified brains may become our most powerful resources, as we have seen before.

However, as subjects retaining semi-normal brain wave activity require much more care, maintenance and control, we are now experimenting with cerebral modifications, the likes of which have never been seen in our experiments before. The results of Iteration 7, however, were not quite what we expected.

Instead of being innocent, childlike, thanks to their modifications, the girls (who reanimated much more easily and predictably and on command than their full-brain cousins) awoke in a vicious state. They were feral.

Insatiable. Led entirely by the id. Similar to zombies of the old horror movies.

While our ultimate goal will be to find a middle ground, Iteration 7 was not a total failure. Those feral creatures will have a prominent place in our army. Their hunger, their lack of regard for their own safety, and their potential to do damage combine to make these subjects exceptional foot soldiers. We will maintain the brain scans from these Subjects (all of whom have, by now, been terminated) and plan to recreate subjects such as these at a later date.

In the meantime, for Iteration 8, the plan will be amended to include suppression of the amygdala and the hypothalamus, in an effort to stem their impulses.

“O
h, hell no,” I yelled.

The door was locked. I heard the mechanical click. I felt electricity in the air.

But I still held the knob, had never allowed it to turn to closed. They were too fast in their trap. The door pushed open as easily as it had moments earlier.

The scene before me was chaotic. Naked, partially dead girls swarmed around Lucy. There had to be two dozen of them, and I wondered from where they all came. Behind them walked three large, masked men in protective suits, carrying sticks that crackled and sparked at one end. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to clear a path to Lucy to save her, or if they were simply prodding the girls forward. It didn’t matter—they weren’t going to get to Lucy either way.

Lucy backed herself against the wall, about twenty feet from the door. She wielded a pair of scissors taken from the desk, slashing and stabbing at any of the girls who got too close. She stabbed one in the arm; the girl didn’t flinch.

“No!” I shouted.

Lucy looked up at the sound of my voice. “Jo?” she said.

The girls turned, too, and I got my first good look at them. Their eyes were vacant and their jaws hung slack.
They were all born today
, I thought, feeling heartbroken and wanting to protect them. I shoved the thought back. They were all…fresher…than me, more meaty, less sinewy, but their wounds poured forth the same greenish-brown ooze I knew filled my own veins.

Lucy had done some damage in those brief first seconds. The girls closest to her were marred with slices across their chests and abdomens, arms and legs. The jaw of one girl barely hung by a thread. She didn’t notice, pushing forward despite her injury. She looked broken, inhuman.

But not altogether unlike me.

It doesn’t matter what they are or I am
, I thought.
I need to save Lucy.

The shouts of men filled the room.

“Move!”

“Now!”

“Get her!”

Prodded by the men, the girls charged me, too. But I was ready for them. I reached out and grabbed the desk chair beside me. As the girls began to charge, I threw it, hard, into the parade of monsters. They fell back, crashing into each other and the men behind them.

Like dominos again,
I thought.
They have issues with balance. I wonder if it’s an inner ear problem.

As the men fell, too, the girls turned on them, crawling over their prone bodies. The men were stronger, and well-armed, but not entirely invulnerable. Sparks filled the air from their electric sticks, and the girls turned, as one, to face their own captors.

“Lucy! Now!” I shouted. While the girls were distracted, Lucy darted away from the wall, heavily favoring her hurt ankle. She stumbled, she weaved. When a girl got too close, Lucy stabbed her in the eye, leaving the scissors there. The girl fell.

Go for the brain,
I thought. I felt like I was in a zombie movie. But these girls weren’t fiction—they were real, man-made monsters.

Lucy arrived at my side and we turned to the door. The voice over the speakers screeched. “No! They’re getting away! Girls, boys! Get them! Lovelies, my lovelies, don’t turn on each other! Get them!”

Lucky for us, no one was free to get us.

Lucy and I crossed the threshold, together this time, and I let the door slam behind us. I only hoped it would stay locked.

T
ogether, we collapsed on the floor. She was panting, breathing so heavily I thought her lungs might explode.

“I thought,” she said, gasping for air. “I thought you left me. I thought you left me to
die.
”

I pulled her to me. “I’m so sorry, Luce. So sorry. I just thought…it doesn’t matter what I thought. I’ll never leave you again, I promise.”

She pulled me to her in a bear hug, and held me there, until she started to gag.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t be that close to you right now.”

“I know,” I said

I stood, and pulled Lucy to her feet. She wheezed, still out of breath, her hand over her mouth and nose, but we began to run, searching for a way out.

A
t the far end of the room stood a man, pressed flat against the wall. I skidded to a stop when I saw him, and Lucy crashed into me from behind. We faced each other, the man and I, staring, gauging, thinking. The man was small and bald. His eyes were tiny behind thick-rimmed glasses.
Horn-rimmed glasses
, I thought, remembering a pair my father wore when I was very small. He wore a long white coat, splattered with blood and other fluids. In his hand, he held a scalpel, pointed at Lucy and me.

I started to speak, but the words caught in my throat. Behind me, Lucy’s hand balled into a fist and pressed into my back. She was ready to come out swinging, but I pressed her arm back to her side.

I stepped closer to the man and reached out my hand. Something about his face was familiar to me. I’d seen it before, staring down over me with a loving smile, brushing hair back from my forehead, caressing my cheek. Like a parent, or…a creator.

“You,” I said. “You did this to me.” It wasn’t a question.

His eyes burned white, glowing in the strange, underground light. He froze, a rabbit in a hunter’s sights, knowing he was about to die. But this man was no rabbit. He dropped the scalpel and turned. With a flick of his wrist, he pressed an unseen button. A panel slid back and he disappeared through a hole in the wall.
Down the rabbit hole,
I thought.

In an instant, he was gone, as if he’d never been there in the first place. I wondered if I’d dreamed him.

The voice from above pressed in on us again. “You shouldn’t have done that, Jolene,
dear
. Any of that. I hope you realize how much trouble you are in.”

I raised my hand, all my fingers clenched into a fist but for my middle.

Sadly, the middle finger on that hand was long since gone, so the effect was ruined.

But Lucy helped. She flipped off any and all cameras that watched us, and then she nodded. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said. Pushing herself from the wall, she hobbled across the room.

“Oh,
dears
, you don’t really think there’s a way out down here. There’s not. The only way out is up.” The voice sounded agitated, though. A little uncertain, perhaps.

“I think we pissed them off,” I whispered.

Lucy’s jaw was set. “Don’t care.” Her forehead creased in pain and concentration. “Keep moving.”

We reached a new door and opened it, passing into yet another strange and mysterious room. This one was darker than the one we’d just left, and the door slammed shut behind us.

“Ladies, I think you’ll like this room,” the voice hissed. We couldn’t escape the voice. It followed us everywhere we went. “You should turn on your light, take a moment to look around.”

Lucy pulled out her phone, and then bent over and retched.

We stood in a surgical room. On two tables lay two naked girls, each cut open from neck to pelvis. Their organs lay atop trays on several rolling tables. While Lucy backed away, I stood and stared with a clinical curiosity. I counted four lungs, two hearts, two livers, and various other organs that I didn’t remember from high school biology.

The floor and walls were a Jackson Pollock painting, splattered with red and black blood and other brightly colored fluids. Over each girl hung bags of green and clear solutions that dripped into IVs placed throughout her body. I imagined the stench was terrible, over and above anything to which I’d already subjected my poor, battered roommate.