jail cells basically: a toilet and a bunk. You couldn’t be sure how long it was until someone earned their playtime. You had to keep the prisoners from stinking up the place. For hygiene, there was a hose and a floor that slanted down to a drain to let the soapy water pour away.
“What the hell is this?” Stefan moved from cell to cell and finally I let myself see. Two cells were empty and three others had a dead man in each. Unlike the “red birds” upstairs, they weren’t ready to fly, fly away; they had virtually exploded. Torn apart, they covered the floor of the six-by-six cells in pieces. Did you ever wonder what would happen should every vessel in your body burst under enormous pressure, each one, down to the tiniest vein? Probably not. Why would you wonder something like that?
But if you did . . . Wendy was the answer, and now Peter, unfathomably, had her on a false familial leash.
I looked away from the human version of raw hamburger. “In the Everglades, they brought us the homeless from Miami. Here, I’m guessing they went all the way to Las Vegas. Barstow is too small. The disappearances would be noticed.” I handed Stefan the clipboard. He read it aloud.
“Wendy, Peter, Peter, Peter, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, Michael Three, Wendy, Wendy, Lily Four, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Belle Three, Peter. What is this?” He dropped it on the floor. I didn’t blame him. The paper was as stained as what was left of Marcus Bellucci.
“This is the Playground. This is where you got to go if you’d done especially well, scored very high on a particular test,” most often of the killing sort, “and deserved to be rewarded. You were brought down here to pick a prisoner and play as long or as quickly as you wanted. As messy or neat. Down here was the only free-for-all in the Institute. And there should be two names that stood out on the list. Every time you saw their name, someone down here died.” I bent down and picked the clipboard up to hand it back to Stefan. “Maybe you should count.” I’d scanned the date at the top of the page, which looked to be the first of about fifteen pages in all. “And the clipboard covers only three months. You need to know, Stefan, who spent most of their time down here. I said some of the students wouldn’t want to be cured. Peter and Wendy would sooner die than be cured.”
“But they’d much rather we die than try to cure them,” he said as he shuffled through the pages, either counting or seeing what he’d rather not know the exact numbers on. “Did they ever bring you down here, Misha?” His eyes were on mine. “Not because you were the killer they wanted you to be, but for accidentally doing too well at some other test.”
Everyone was brought down here. Ninety percent of the time it was a reward; ten percent of the time it was a test in itself. “I never killed anyone down here,” I replied. And I hadn’t. I’d been brought down in the evening of the same day Stefan had rescued me, four hours before he’d shown up in the doorway of my room.
I’d made my stand in the mirror of this place. Obedient, but not obedient enough. Genetically altered to be a killer, but refusing to fulfill my scientific destiny. I knew what it meant, that disobedience, but I didn’t care. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about surviving anymore . . . not in this life. I was taken back to my room where I knew they would come for me. They always came for the failures in the middle of the night. It was less of a disruption. We all knew what happened to those who flunked out of the Institute, but telling us and showing us were different. It led to more students losing it and killing everyone around them in a psychotic fit.
Good discipline, but in the end not profitable, Jericho had eventually decided.
That was why, when Stefan had come for me and had opened the door to my room, I’d been sitting on the bed, waiting, but not for him. I hadn’t known he’d existed or that rescue was possible. I’d been ready for them to come and take me to the other lab . . . where failures were taken apart, studied, and then tucked away in specimen jars. Stefan didn’t know that. He didn’t know that had he been a day or a few hours later, I would’ve been scraps on an autopsy table.
And he wasn’t going to know. That was a “what if” no brother could live with.
“I never killed anyone in the Basement,” I repeated. Unless you counted almost killing myself by breaking Institute rules.
“Never thought differently, kiddo,” Stefan assured me, tossing the clipboard forcefully across the room and slinging the M249 across his back. Putting both hands on my shoulders, he steered me back toward the door. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here, call Saul, and abort the mission. It’s not as if we need an army now. We have no idea where these kids are.”
I countered, “You have to stop thinking of them as kids. Whether they’re nineteen or ten, Stoipah, they can kill you, and you won’t be able to do a thing to stop them with that attitude. All right? Nothing. Think of them as what they are—killers. Killers who, unlike some of the others, love to kill. Live to kill. You have to be ready and never,
Salvageable. Needing only my cure. Teenagers, kids, children.
He was dead if he continued thinking that way. I had to figure out a way to send home the fact that killers were killers, children or adults, and if seeing all he had in this place hadn’t done that . . . hell. I didn’t bother to marvel anymore at how easily the curse words came. “Cancel the army, but your friend Saul—he might be able to help. Have him come. And we do know where the students are, or did you forget the tracking chips?” I’d had one in my back until Stefan had had a very shady doctor remove it. All my former classmates would have the same. “I’ll grab one of the Institute’s GPS trackers upstairs.”
“Tell me what it looks like and I’ll get it. You’ll be better off down here doing your computer thing. They might have information that’ll help. You keep saying your cure is almost ready or should work . . . theoretically.” He mimicked the last. “It’s been almost three years. Who knows what these shitheads have come up with. They might have something to help us.”
He was right. They might, but not in the way he thought. The Institute wasn’t interested in cures, but they could have come up with a way to disable chimeras for a time. Wendy’s abilities to kill with only a thought had always been a worry for them, although seeing what had happened upstairs and down here, I rather doubted they’d accomplished anything. It wouldn’t hurt to check, however. Before I could start toward the bank of computers, Stefan handed me a gun. It was his backup—one of his many backups, rather, a small revolver. A .38? Guns didn’t much interest me. I knew the types Stefan favored above all, the same way you know someone’s favorite color, but that was it. Other than when I had been shot that time, guns were pointless in my life. I had the ability to perform better than any handgun. Now, a pipe bomb . . . that was a different matter. I respected my limitations.
“It’s a thirty-eight Special,” Stefan said. I’d been right as I usually was. But today wasn’t a day for being proud of that. “It’s light, not much recoil, no safety, and it’s double action. All of that means you just have to point and pull the trigger over and over until you run out of ammo. Hopefully by that time you won’t need any more ammo.”
I held it and it was heavier than it looked. “Stefan, everyone down here is dead.”
“That’s what we thought about Zombie Bob upstairs. Since you’ve not shot a gun before, stubborn bastard, aim for their torso. It’s your best bet of hitting them.” Stefan had tried to get me to learn to shoot for the past two years. It wasn’t that he wanted me to have to shoot someone. It was the last thing he wanted for me and told me so, but he was also a strong believer in better safe with the other guy dead than sorry with you dead.
I’d refused. I’d made it clear time and time again I wasn’t going to kill anyone. I simply wasn’t. That was the choice I’d made and I was comfortable with it. Stefan pointed out I could limit myself to shooting people in the legs, and he was right, but it was one more layer of lethalness to me I didn’t want to add. I was all the lethal my psyche could deal with. The pipe bombs were for killing SUVs and other vehicles, not people. They were also an interesting experiment and I was a sucker for interesting. “No.” I gave him back the gun. “You know I’m not going to do it. And if there is a Zombie Bob down here, I’ll touch him and cut off blood flow to his brain long enough to knock him out.”
“Stubborn. Goddamn stubborn.” But he took back the gun, muttering under his breath that he’d rather shoot one of these rotting monsters than touch one any day.
As I’d said before, it was anatomy class all over again. Bodies were bodies; nothing new or unusual. I didn’t spare them another glance, stepped over one on my way to the computers, and went to work. I didn’t find anything especially helpful, but I did find one thing I’d suspected for a while. Life: Expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. My life in the past day: Expect the worst and find out how lacking in imagination you really are.
I bowed my head, exhaled, and closed my eyes for a moment. Then I straightened, retrieved several travel
