Generation annihilation, p.15
Generation Annihilation, page 15
“Yes?” Her voice is loud, authoritative.
“Dr. Esther?” Gibbon appears in the doorway. “You wanted to see me.”
She smiles to herself, relishing the feel of control.
“I did, Gibbon.” She waves to a chair. “Sit.”
He lumbers into the room and does just that.
“As you know, the procedure is near perfection.”
He doesn’t respond.
She swallows her irritation. Speaking with someone so far below her IQ level is draining, to say the least.
“But the last specimen perished before I even finished the procedure. He was not as strong as I thought he was.” She crosses her legs and leans forward, placing her elbows on the desk. Her grandfather stares encouragingly at her from the picture. “I need a new specimen.”
“But I haven’t disposed of the last one.” His voice is whiny like a toddler’s.
“Where is the body?”
“Lying in the storage room.”
“What?”
“That room with the big refrigerator.”
“Do you mean the kitchen?”
“Yeah, he’s in the fridge.”
“Why haven’t you buried him?” She adjusts her headband.
“Cyrus needed my help with his roses.”
“You can bury that body and the new body at the same time.”
“Cyrus told me not to bury more than one at a time.”
She bristles at the insubordination and glares at him. Gibbon is coming dangerously close to chastising her, and that she cannot stand. Her skin crawls with irritation, already prickly from her earlier visitor, and she knows she is losing control of her emotions. She can’t bring herself to care, though. She wants to hurt. To control. To force submission.
She thinks back to the bullying in medical school. There was one guy in particular who seemed intent on sabotaging her studies, her labs, anything and everything she tried to achieve. He would contradict her. Snicker at her. Roll his eyes. She even suspected he was the one responsible for stealing her items.
A coldness oozes through her body, and she can feel herself harden.
“Bury the last body, then bring me Trevor.” She takes satisfaction in the expression that flashes across his face.
“Not Trevor. Someone else.”
“Trevor.” She clamps her lips together.
“You told me he was going to be a Redeemable.”
She waves her hand dismissively. “He was on the list as a possible Redeemable, but I would like a brain less impacted by the lengthy exposure to medication. I think a fresher specimen might be just what I need.”
She studies his face. He isn’t saying anything, but his expression says it all.
“Is there a problem?” She fights the urge to taunt him. She can hear her grandfather’s encouragement as clearly as if he was standing by her side. She envisions the face of that med school guy, sees his horror instead of Gibbon’s.
Finally, Gibbon responds. “No, Doctor. There is no problem.”
“It’s not like you were ever a father to him. Or ever in his life until he came to the asylum. It shouldn’t be too much of a loss. Not after all things considered.” Her eyes narrow as she watches him.
He shakes his head side-to-side.
She feels empowered with her control. “Good. Bury the last specimen at nightfall. I expect the new specimen—Trevor—in the chair by eight tomorrow morning.”
Gibbon rises to his full, impressive height. He carries enormous weight around his midsection, and his head is shaped like a bowling ball. He is loyal, though his loyalty is forced.
“Yes, Dr. Esther.” His massive shoulders slump, and he lumbers out of the room.
She smiles, satisfied.
The fiery burn of dehydration returns like a punch. If the doctor and Gibbon don’t kill us, the medication might. We will dry up like little prunes until there is nothing left of us but leathered skin.
“Water.” I choke out the word into the stillness.
Several minutes pass before Emily croaks out, “Why don’t they give us water?”
The quiet is heavy. I wonder if I even woke up. Is this just a nightmare? I’m still sitting at this table, folded into a perfect mockery of the wooden chair beneath me, whether this be a dream or not. Ryan and Renee haven’t moved. Their skin looks paler than it did the last time we woke up, as if the buildup of medicine is slowing down blood flow. Emily looks paler as well.
The kid on the end has a healthier pallor to his face than the rest of us, and he’s sitting slightly hunched, which looks odd considering all the other ramrod straight backs that line the table.
I don’t know how much time passes before I hear Ryan’s barely audible voice say, “They’re killing…us.”
Emily makes a choking sound.
“Escape… We have to…” I am so consumed by my need for water that I lose precious minutes of alertness for planning our escape. Images of oceans, waterfalls, and raging rivers fill my brain, overwhelming me. I can’t force my mind to focus.
“You can’t escape,” says a childlike voice, loud and clear. This voice distinctly does not sound dried-up like a desert.
The muscles behind my eyes finally work as the medicine weakens in my system, and I urge them toward where I think the sound came from—somewhere to my right.
“Who?” I say.
“Me.” Suddenly, the guy on the other side of Emily leans forward. He glances at Ryan, Renee, and Emily before planting his eyes on me.
If I could show my surprise, I would. The boy who’s been sitting comatose at Emily’s side since I arrived suddenly seems completely unfazed by the medication we have all been given.
“You?” I ask. “How?”
“How am I talking?” the boy asks.
I grunt in response.
My brain still swirls with fog, so I wonder if I’m hallucinating. I force myself to blink to clear the sandpaper from my eyeballs. This guy looks young, maybe thirteen years old. Even though he is sitting, I can still tell he’s short. His unshed baby fat makes his face look like a ball. He seems more alert and alive than the rest of us, as if he’s just popped in for a chat.
“Why…aren’t you like…us?” My words come out in stunted bursts of dust.
His shrug is executed with far too much ease. “I didn’t get the medication the last time you all did. Sometimes I don’t so it’s not built up in my system like it is yours.”
“Why not?” I struggle to move my fingers, joint by joint, and am dismally aware of how miniscule the movement is. I can already tell that the medicine is making it harder to wake up both mentally and physically.
I try to swing my legs back and forth to get the blood flowing. The movement is pitifully small.
The boy shrugs again.
“Why would you stay in here if you aren’t medicated like the rest of us?” I demand, though my voice’s strength doesn’t reflect my anger.
“Fool.” Emily’s head can’t make the full rotation to the side to look at the boy, so it seems like she’s addressing someone in the corner.
“How would you propose I leave?” the boy asks. His nonchalance is pissing me off somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain where emotion still exists.
I manage to curl my hand into a lax fist.
“Why would…put you here…not medicate you?” I’m pretty sure, despite my inability to vocalize every word, that he gets the gist of what I’m saying.
“Are you a spy?” Emily whispers.
“Who are you?” Ryan says quietly.
“My name is Trevor.”
“Do you know what’s going on here?” I ask.
Trevor looks at us, studying us one at a time. For the first time since he revealed his conscious state, he seems sad. “I know there is no escape.”
“How could you know that?” I croak.
He looks down at his steepled fingertips before glancing over his shoulder and around the room. Finally, he plants his gaze back on me. His expression is a mix of resignation and despair.
“Gibbon is my dad. He told me there is no help. No escape. You’ll all die here. I will die here too.”
Six months ago—hell, six days ago—I would’ve slammed this kid against the wall and beaten the information out of him. Now, I can barely work my eye muscles to glare at him.
“What are you doing in here then?” The energy it takes to talk leaves me exhausted.
I hear the click of a door closing somewhere in the distance.
“Be quiet,” Emily hisses. “Someone is coming. Almost time for a new dose.” That teardrop tattoo looks far too real.
“Tell your dad to get us out of here,” I say.
“Don’t be stupid,” Trevor says derisively.
I envision my fist slamming into his face. I can barely curl my fingers.
“Water,” Renee whispers.
“Yes, please.” Emily gasps for air. “Get water. You can move.”
“I can’t leave this room. I’m as much a prisoner as you all are.”
“Why aren’t you drugged, then?” I demand.
Trevor shrugs. “He doesn’t drug me every time. He doesn’t need to. Where am I going to go? I can’t get out of this asylum any easier than”—he glances at the wall of teens surrounding us—“them.” His eyes swing back to those of us around the table. “You.”
I dig my fingers into the wood as hard as I can manage. I think back to how Gibbon had tried to give me a chance to escape. “Will your dad help us?”
“Dad won’t help. He can’t.”
“Will he stop us if we try to walk out?”
No one laughs at the stupidity of the notion. We can barely move our mouths enough to speak, much less move our legs to escape.
“If you want to escape, you have to have a plan. Others have gotten out, but it doesn’t happen often.”
“Were you here when they escaped?”
He easily shakes his head, but his shoulders slump under the weight of his words. “I wasn’t. I haven’t been here that long. My dad told me about it.”
“What did you learn that can help us?”
“You need a plan.”
I study him. “What kind of plan?”
“You can’t just walk out of here.”
“How do you know?”
“Again, my dad tells me these things.”
“Why are you in here anyway?” Emily’s eyes are focused on the balcony. I listen for footsteps, but, thankfully, I don’t hear any right now.
“I’m in here for the same reasons all of you are—I got in trouble. My dad just happens to work here.”
I study him for any sign of lying or manipulation. If he’s a spy, he could report back the extent to which we’re waking up. We could very well end up comatose like the others behind that crystal clear glass barrier.
“I have an anger management problem,” Trevor continues.
“Don’t we all,” croaks Ryan.
“What did you do?” Emily asks.
“I punched a teacher, then landed one on the principal’s face. Then, because I wasn’t done, I took a baseball bat to the kneecap of the school counselor.” Trevor speaks with such nonchalance, it leaves me stunned. “We’re all in here for some reason. It’s not like any of us are innocent.”
“Do you have braces?” Renee blurts out. Her voice sounds rough as if her tongue is coated with sand.
“Braces?” Ryan demands in a whisper. “Who cares if he has braces?”
“If he was sent here to die, why would he have braces on?” Renee asks.
“Maybe his dad is going to save him.” I stare hard at the young boy.
“Braces seem so normal,” Renee says with tears in her eyes.
“There’s no way his dad is going to let him be killed,” I say. “Does he have a plan to rescue you or something?”
“What’s it to you?” Trevor asks.
“We want him to rescue us too.”
Trevor studies us. “He won’t rescue you. I told you already—he can’t.”
“Why not? Why won’t he rescue us if he’s already planning to help you? Besides, he’s already tried to help me escape once. He loosened my restraints. Why wouldn’t he help you escape, and us?”
Anger flashes behind Trevor’s eyes. “He tried to help you escape?”
I watch him cautiously, trying to get a read on the reason behind his reaction. “He did.”
Trevor inhales loudly through his nostrils, reminding me of a bull. He cracks his knuckles. Rolls his head. I watch his lips flatten together and assume he’s clenching his teeth.
“What?” I demand.
“He tries to save you, but doesn’t bother trying to save his own kid?”
Regret courses through me at the sight of pain on his face.
“Do you know that he hasn’t tried to help you escape?”
Trevor snorts. “Of course. He’s told me he can’t help me.”
“But why not? Why help me and not you?”
Trevor stares at the table so intently I can almost feel the thoughts churning in his mind. Instead of answering, though, his head drops into his hands, anger morphing to sorrow as he starts to cry. His shoulders shake and he sniffs several times. I see tears drop onto the table.
“Are you okay?” Emily asks as gently as her coarse voice allows.
With a violent shudder, a deep inhale and exhale, Trevor collects himself. He lifts his head, wipes tears and snot off his face, then looks at me.
“The doctor here gives him certain…allowances…and his need for that is far greater than his need to protect me.”
“Allowances?” I ask.
I follow Trevor’s gaze as it flips toward the guy behind the glass wall, the guy Gibbon felt up that one time he was in the room.
A knot coils in my stomach. Oh my God.
“I don’t understand,” Emily says. “Allowances?”
Trevor doesn’t answer her, his eyes now focused on mine again.
“So he won’t rescue you,” I state.
“No. He won’t. He won’t rescue me just like he didn’t rescue Owen, my brother.”
“Owen… My friend Cass mentioned something about a kid named Owen who died. She asked if I was looking for clues about his death.”
Trevor stares blankly at his hands, any sign of earlier anger long gone.
“Did your dad kill him?” Emily asks.
“Dad didn’t keep him from being killed. That much I know.”
Emily manages to turn her head fully toward him. “Why wouldn’t he save his own sons?”
Trevor says, “I already told you.”
“But why not?” Ryan presses, wiggling his fingers, probably trying to regain the feeling in them.
“He gets access to the teens. I’m not painting you a picture of what that means. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. But he’s traded Owen’s life, and will mine too, to keep that access. Besides, he says he got in trouble, and the work he does here keeps him out of prison. Those two reasons are reason enough.”
“Why did he put you in here?” I ask.
“He didn’t. I used to live with Dad’s cousin, and he’s the one who sent me here. Dad didn’t know until we showed up. Owen and I were sent here together.”
“And now he’s dead,” I say.
Trevor nods. “And now he’s—” His lips clamp shut.
The room is quiet for a moment before Ryan speaks. “So, how do we escape? You said it’s happened before.”
“There is an office on the top floor. You go upstairs, out the door, and head to the right. The staff office is on the left-hand side of the hall. I forget how many doors down. The exit is at the end of the hall past the office. There is a key in the desk—at least that’s where Dad said the doctor used to keep it—but I don’t know if they moved it after the last teens escaped. You can’t get out the exit door without the key—that much I do know. That’s why you can’t just make a run for it. You have to have a plan.” He glances at us in turn. “You would never make it if you just ran—not that you can run with this medication in your system. Though you guys might get enough movement back since you’re relatively new here.”
“You mean we might have a chance because the medicine hasn’t had time to make us comatose,” I say.
“Right.”
“Do we need to worry about anyone in the office?” I ask. “Are we mostly left alone here in this room?”
“I don’t really know. I think they rely on the medication. You gotta admit, it’s effective.”
“None of this makes any sense,” Emily mutters, looking toward the balcony.
“Where are you going to go anyway?” Trevor asks plainly. “Are you not wanted for arson? Murder? Assault? You all have police after you for one reason or another. You have nowhere to go, and no one you can trust. If you’re caught, you’ll be sent right back here or tried as adults and sent to prison.”
“Have you ever tried to escape?” Emily asks.
“Once I tried. I didn’t make it further than the entrance to the asylum.”
“What happened?” Ryan asks.
“Cyrus Rutherford, that asshat stick figure that roams around here, caught me. Beat the shit out of me, then made me watch while he beat my dad. I haven’t tried again.”
“To protect your dad?” Emily asks, sympathy in her eyes.
“That and there’s nowhere for me to go. This place is so rural, you can escape and die in the forest. You can’t hop on a bus out of town. Hail a cab. Nothing. You’re stuck, so you better have a damned good plan. And if you are lucky enough to get to another town, like I said—you’re all wanted for some reason or other. If you’re caught, they’ll just bring you back here.”
Silence plummets over us. “How do you know so much about us?” I ask.
“My dad and I talk when he has time. Maybe he gets bored or has a guilty conscience. I don’t know. But he tells me what he knows. Not that it matters. It didn’t save my brother, and it won’t save me.”
His resignation feels as hopeless as the final nail in a coffin.
“Does the doctor know Gibbon is your dad?” Emily asks.
“Yeah, she knows.”
“You both are probably watched more than any of us then,” Emily reasons.
