The room was completely full of tanks—at least a hundred of them. The gurgling sound was coming from them. As for the whispers, she wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but they sounded suspiciously like the hypno-whispers she heard from her pillow each night.
But it was the tanks that drew and held her attention. There were so many of them and each of them was big enough to hold either a large child or…
“Or a NeverBreeder,” Penny whispered to herself. Because floating in the cloudy liquid in each of the hundred or so tanks was an orange body. And all of the bodies she saw were in various stages of growth.
In one tank she saw a naked, fully formed NeverBreeder who looked almost ready to come out and be a functioning member of the Compound. In others she saw smaller bodies, still obviously developing.
In the last tank she looked in, a baby, who appeared to be a newborn, was floating. The poor thing was just beginning to have an orange tinge to its delicate skin but already it was clear what it would become, because there were no genitals between its legs and no hair on its head.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Penny whispered to it. “I wonder who they took you from?”
What breeder woman here in the Compound had that little infant taken from her womb when it was only three months into its normal gestation? And would she even know her child when it emerged as a fully formed NeverBreeder and went to work in the Compound?
Penny was sure she wouldn’t.
That’s going to be me—that’s going to be my baby if V’rex and I don’t get out of here, she thought and shivered. Unless she got recycled first for not getting pregnant, that was.
The thought sent a cold shiver down Penny’s spine and she left the room with the gurgling tanks filled with cloudy liquid and orange bodies quickly.
That’s it for me—I’ve seen enough. Don’t want to see anymore! she told herself as she slipped out of the room marked Baths and quietly closed the door. I’m just going to stand here and wait for the nurse to come back and not look at anything else in this awful place!
But the very next sign she saw changed her mind. On the door opposite the room full of tanks was a sign that said, Recycling.
Sixty-Seven
Recycling?
Penny stared at the door like a rabbit hypnotized by a snake. There was a dreadful mixture of horror and curiosity swirling inside her. It was the same feeling she got when she had to kill one of the huge flying roaches that were native to her home state of Florida. Squishing one was just the worst, but even more disgusting was checking to make sure it was really dead. But you had to check—the little bastards were built like miniature tanks and they were so hard to kill. They…
I’m stalling, Penny thought to herself. Either I’m going in or I’m staying out. Which is it?
She walked forward and tried the door latch. This room, too, was open. Filled with that same squirmy mixture of disgust and dread but unable to help herself, Penny pulled open the door and slipped inside.
Inside it was a good twenty degrees cooler and much darker than it had been out in the corridor. Penny shivered and rubbed her arms briskly as she looked around. As her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, she felt her stomach drop.
The place was a morgue.
Rows of silver tables filled all available space except the far left corner, which was taken up with some kind of large, bulky machine. On every table was a body—naked and cold and—
“Oh, Mother Toone!” Penny gasped, as her eyes fell on the table closest to the door.
On it, lying stiff and cold, was the corpse of the NeverBreeder attendant. She was naked, which showed that she had nothing between her legs, like all the NeverBreeders. But even missing her silver jumpsuit, Penny still recognized her.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she whispered, taking a step towards the table. “I’m so sorry. I just…”
And then her eyes fell on the table beside her old attendant and her breath caught in her throat. The corpse on that cold silver table was human…a female.
It was Claudette.
Penny’s heart began hammering in her chest.
“No,” she whispered, as her eyes traced her friend’s cold, lifeless face. “Oh, no…oh, no!”
But there was no doubt about it—the corpse was Claudette. She was laid out like an accident victim on a slab, though there were no marks anywhere on her skin.
Hardly knowing what she was doing, Penny walked forward to stand beside her friend’s body.
“Claudette,” she whispered. “Oh God. Oh please, no…”
Her eyes blurred with tears as she looked down at her friend’s cold, still face. At least she didn’t look like she’d died in any kind of pain. Maybe they just gave a lethal injection to the people who were recycled.
But that was irrelevant as far as Penny was concerned. Her only friend in the Compound besides V’rex had been killed. Murdered because after years and years of producing fetus after fetus for the Glorious Leader, her body couldn’t produce any more. And so she was deemed no longer useful and had been “recycled.”
“It’s not recycling, it’s murder!” Penny whispered, feeling a mixture of rage and sorrow. “This place is sick—it’s sick!”
Reaching out, she stroked Claudette’s soft, black hair.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered to her friend. “So sorry we couldn’t get out of here together. I…I’ll never forget you.”
Just then a door opened right beside the huge machine that took up the far left corner of the room.
“Got a big job today,” one voice said and Penny saw that it belonged to a NeverBreeder worker, dressed in one of the ubiquitous silver jumpsuits.
“’Fraid so. They recycled an
