Rouge (12 page)

“What?”

“Nothing,” she muttered.
I
just can’t picture you cracking open a can and talking football with Barry
Sanders.

“You might want to go up to
your room Hunter, we’re going to be fairly busy here,” said Joshua.

“Got much work at that old
restaurant, Hunter?” asked Barry. He was a plump guy with rat-colored hair and
a toothy smile. Always the joker, as Joshua would say. Hunter couldn’t imagine
how Joshua ever became friends with someone so jolly, because Joshua didn’t
have
any
friends. She often wondered if Barry just felt sorry for him.
He was always trying to bring Joshua out to a game or a bar. Joshua almost
always declined. He said Barry did too much ‘talking’.

“Couple of shifts a week,”
she said. “I’ll leave you to your… guy thing.”

“Catch
ya
,”
Barry waved.

“Yeah…” Hunter chuckled to
herself as she passed the stairs and locked herself in her bedroom. She ran to
her bedside table and checked her phone; still no message from Eli.

Hunter busied herself with
college research – which quickly turned into browsing used car websites for any
sign of the classic car she wanted – and waited for Eli to call. As she moved
on to cleaning up her room, she turned up the music to drown out the sound of a
drill in the kitchen and wondered when she’d become this sappy teenager waiting
by the phone for a guy to call.

As she threw her work jeans
across the room towards the closet, her half-empty pack of cigarettes spilled
out onto the floor.
That’s what I need. A little pick me up.

Stooping for the box, Hunter
took a lighter out of her school bag and ran over to her window. Joshua didn’t
know about her nasty habit, but she had no idea what his reaction would be if
he did.

Hunter started smoking after
the rumor. She couldn’t remember how it happened, but the cigarettes had a
strangely soothing effect on her. The feel of the smoke as it blew through her
lungs never made her cough. Leaning out of her eight-story window, listening to
the city sounds, Hunter inhaled the cigarette and felt herself become warm
inside, her nervousness floating away in the pale puff of smoke.

Hours later when the apartment was quiet
again, Hunter went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. The house was
dark. She groped around for the light when she stubbed her toe hard on
something leaning against the island in the middle.

“Shit!” she hissed, turning
on the electricity, hopping on one foot and glaring at Barry’s toolbox in the
middle of the floor. “What the hell is that doing there?”

Her throbbing toe wouldn’t
calm down, so she limped to the fridge and bent before the freezer. All of
Joshua’s frozen goods were in boxes, and to get to the frozen peas or anything
else that might diminish the pain, she had to rummage right down the bottom.
Cold air blew up in her face and her hands were already stiffening.

It wasn’t until she lifted a
tray of fish sticks that she found something strange buried beneath a blanket
of icicles. She pried the file wrapped in a plastic sheet from the very bottom
of the freezer and moved into the light so she could see. Brushing away the
icicles, she stared at the thick folder packed with papers and labeled with one
simple word written across the lip in bold black:

Feucotetanus.

What the hell is this
doing in the freezer?

Hunter pulled up a stool
over the kitchen bench and opened the file. It was filled with Joshua’s reports
and calculations, most of which looked like gibberish to her. One word,
however, stood out like a hobo in a Tiffany store:

Fire.

Connected to a string of
mathematical numbers and symbols by an equals sign, the word was scribbled down
the bottom of one page with question marks all around it.

Hunter peered upstairs at
the dark corridor to Joshua’s room and prayed he was asleep, or maybe out with
Barry.
I knew he was lying to me,
she fumed, ignoring her throbbing toe
.
He’s been researching that freak fire on the stove.

Hunter scanned more of the
papers, occasionally recognizing words and equations, only to find herself even
more confused as to what it all meant. Words like ‘disease’ and ‘immune’ and
‘tetrahedron’ were easily comprehendible, but Joshua’s handwriting was so
jumbled that she would have to study the work for hours before she could piece
it together.

Frustration filled Hunter as
she flicked through the file, so much so that she became hot. Beads of sweat
began to drip down her face and she wiped them away, determined to stay
focused. She had to know what Joshua was hiding, and what it had to do with
her.

This is bullshit, none of
this makes sense!
 

Hunter snapped the file shut
and something silver slipped out of it. She bent and retrieved a frozen
metallic key card from her cold kitchen floor. Only it wasn’t for their
apartment.

A shiny number 57 gleamed in
the top right corner of the key card.

Hunter suddenly found
herself grinning.
Oh, this is just too easy.
Her throbbing toe
forgotten, Hunter scooped the file up in her arms and slipped out the apartment
door.

Hunter felt as if her entire life were leading
up to this moment. She knew there was something amiss. Joshua’s secret file and
mysterious room key proved that theory. As she left the apartment and took the
stairs down to level five, she felt jittery all over.

What if something awful lay
in wait? What if she wasn’t ready to know the truth? Or worse, what if it
changed nothing? What if the room belonged to someone Joshua was seeing and she
made everything awkward by walking into a stranger’s apartment? What if it was
a room for Joshua’s pleasure, something twisted like-?

Hunter bent over the last
few stairs and gagged. The thought was too disgusting to process.
Oh God,
please don’t let it be a Red Room of Pain!

The feeling of dreaming hit
Hunter as she stared at the fifth corridor. Soon, she found herself standing
before room 57 and could hardly contain her beating heart. Inside this room was
either the answer to all her questions or a truth she’d rather not uncover.
Perhaps it was both.

Regardless, Hunter couldn’t
go back to the vast emptiness of her life. She would hate herself for not
finding the answer, even if it tipped her whole world upside down.

With shaky hands, Hunter
slid the key card into the lock and opened the apartment door.

She found herself inside a
regular apartment. A couch here and a coffee table there. Completely boring and
lifeless. It was obvious no one lived there, even if it was filled with
furniture. Was this where Joshua came to meet mysterious women? Hunter strolled
across the room and checked the bedroom. This, too, was empty and smelled of
rotting carpet. She sat down on the bed and a cloud of dust leapt into the air.
Nope, definitely an empty apartment. No one’s used this bed in years.
She
choked a little and went back into the living room. There was nothing inside
the refrigerator. The television wouldn’t even turn on. What was the point in a
completely useless apartment with no working appliances?

Before Hunter gave up, she
caught sight of a few photo frames on the fireplace mantel. She gently touched
a photo of her mother on a beach, probably in Cuba where Joshua owned a shack.
She’d never seen this photo before. Her heart thumping, Hunter lifted the photo
and wished she could remember her mother. Her stomach was quite large; she
would have been pregnant. Hunter went to put the photo back when she spotted a
small lever where the frame had been.

Frowning, she closed her
hands around it and pulled. A loud and startling creak caused her to lose her
grip on the frame. As she fumbled with it, the fireplace swung mechanically
inwards, revealing a steel door behind it lit by a fluorescent tube above. To
the left, a bright coded keypad blinked ‘Alarm Activated’.

“Okay,” she muttered aloud.
“Shit just got technical.”

Hunter liked to think she
knew Joshua better than anyone in the entire world. After finding this secret
lab he’d hidden from her for God only knows how long, she began to feel doubt
squirm inside her. But aside from his brilliant mind and vast knowledge of
science, Joshua wasn’t as complicated as many would think. In fact, when it
came down to the personal, Joshua was an open book.

She approached the keypad
and thought hard.
Dates… it’s
gotta
be a date.
Joshua wouldn’t use anything random, he’s not that smart.

Hunter typed in Joshua’s
birthday. She jumped when it beeped in a dull tone and the blue screen read
‘Access Denied’.
Too obvious Hunter.
Swallowing hard, she tried her
birthday. Again, she was wrong.

“Come on. What is the most
important thing in Joshua’s life?”

It came to her suddenly when
the light flashed across the photo still standing on the mantle over the
fireplace that protected this room. Her mother’s smiling face still stared at
her.
Not what is, what was. Mom.

Hunter typed in Liz’s
birthday. Instantly there was a chirpy beep and the alarm deactivated. The
steel wall grinded like a sliding door to the left with a gentle hiss and a
dark space stretched before her.

Her mind felt blank as she
held the chilly file close to her chest and edged inside the room. She fumbled
along the wall for the light switch and her hands came upon a cold panel. When
the electricity blinked on, Hunter gazed upon what could only be described as a
laboratory, and not at all like the kind in her chemistry class at school. This
lab was high-tech, X-men-style. Silver metal tables lined the walls and the
neon lights shone down on medical equipment more modern than anything Hunter
had ever seen in her life. On her left beside the desks was a giant glass tank
filled with familiar-looking plants and rocks. As she gazed open-mouthed at the
lab, a giant filing cabinet on the far wall caught her eye. Ignoring everything
else, she crossed to the other side, her breath coming out in wisps of air. The
lab was colder than Joshua’s bedroom.

This is definitely his
place
, she thought with
a shiver.

But alas, the filing cabinet
was locked. Hunter groaned in frustration, spinning and scanning the desks for
a set of keys. She opened cupboards to reveal more experimental equipment and
supplies and things you would likely find in a doctor’s office. The desks were
covered in papers packed with the same jumble as the file she’d found in the
freezer. Hunter turned and leant against the desk, raking her fingers through
her hair. How was she supposed to understand any of this?

That’s when her eyes caught
sight of what was on the opposite wall. A corkboard hung between two tables,
decked out with maps of mountain ranges, photographs, scribbles and equations
all crisscrossing like the pieces of a murder. Except it wasn’t a dead body she
was looking at; it was her mother.

“Oh my God.”

She slowly approached the
wall. Her trembling fingers traced the line of her mother’s face. Beneath these
were pictures of Hunter, from as young as a baby all the way up to her
eighteenth birthday four months ago. The same chaotic equations were tacked
around them: geological terms with arrows connecting images of rock formations
and volcanic eruptions were striking and bold against the calm glossy photos.
Hunter’s scientific mind recognized some words –
Cryonics, where have I seen
that word before? –
but even she couldn’t decipher her connection to any of
it.

Confused and splitting with
rage, Hunter hated herself for not being able to understand what was right in
front of her. She hated Joshua too, for lying to her. Worst of all, she hated
herself for being so stupid.

Several newspaper articles
were tacked in the top left corner. She strained to read the title of a fire in
an apartment downtown. When the names of her parents leapt out of the paper,
Hunter found herself becoming instantly hot. The date was January the 26
^th
,
1994.
Wait… that’s eight months before my birthday.
Another title caught
her attention, blaring the words ‘
SWEDISH LABORATORY DESTROYED:
FEUCOTETANUS NO MORE’
.

Tearing the paper from the
board, Hunter scanned through the article and gazed at the image of a dark
building with charcoal smoke rising high into the air. Snow layered the ground
around it. ‘
A Swedish Government laboratory was frozen and destroyed… all
data lost… Feucotetanus was to be used in conjunction with American Special
Forces…
’
Hunter shook her head and pinned the article back on the
board, her frustration mounting.
What does all this mean?

There was a creak behind her
and Hunter whirled to see Joshua, his slick hair askew and reeking of beer. He
didn’t seem surprised to see her, but there was guilt clouding his eyes.

Hunter brushed away a tear
on her cheek and glared. “What is this?”