that didn’t used to be fake. If there was only the padding and the wood planks in my way, I would have been out of here a long time ago. Clearly, Bob had the interior redone in anticipation of my arrival.
Bob’s a good details man. A quick look at the outside of the second hut, which is about five feet away from mine, illustrates that point fairly well. Unlike all the others—there are four prison huts altogether, in a row, near the center of the compound—the second hut is reinforced on the inside with steel rather than cement. Whatever is inside of it is considerably stronger than I am and would probably look longingly at a cement wall the same way I look at wood planking. It’s also a whole lot stronger than Ringo, my demon guard, based on the damage it’s caused from the inside. The door and all of the walls have been pounded on mercilessly, to the point where metal can be seen bursting through the wood planks, like a balloon popping out of a papier-mâché shell. Things have been quiet in cell number two for a long time now. It’s either dead or it’s hoping somebody with a key comes to that conclusion and opens the door.
I’m pretty sure the red-haired woman is in hut number four, because I heard some very unladylike moaning coming from the third cell a couple of weeks ago. I never heard the red-haired woman speak, but I’m pretty positive she wouldn’t sound like that if enticed to moan. She seems more of the mezzo-soprano type and this was something of an alto. Being castrated, maybe. God only knows what actually made that noise.
I am trying to get used to calling her Eve. That’s what Viktor and the lab techs call her. It’s a bit hokey, and probably only given to her because I’m going by the name of Adam—I think if I’d been using Othello they’d be calling her Desdemona—but as I’d never seen fit to assign any name to her after ten millennia, it’s about time I started trying one out. Repeatedly referring to her as “the red-haired woman,” after all, is a little unwieldy, and makes me sound a bit like a
These are the things I think about when I have nothing else to do outside of staring at keyholes. And I’ve had nothing else to do for some time now. Aside from the daily trips to the lab. Those barely count.
Underneath me, between the cot mattress and the springs, is a folded up sheet of onion paper, and on the sheet of onion paper, drawn in black magic marker, is a scale map of the entire compound. I could stare at the map instead of the keyhole, except that the map is the closest thing I’ve had to reading material this whole time. I have thus committed it to memory several times over and am prepared to argue that the keyhole is more interesting.
I have by now translated the contents of the map into a mental three-dimensional construct that I think is accurate enough to bet my life on, which is exactly what I’ll be doing, provided something exciting happens involving the keyhole somewhat soon.
Just by counting paces, I could navigate the whole compound with my eyes closed. It’s exactly ninety-seven paces from the door of my cell to the door of the lab. I verify that every day. (It is also either sixty-three or sixty- five demon paces, depending on Ringo’s mood. Not relevant, but collecting useless data is a good way to pass the time, so there you go.) Knowing the paces between two points on the map, I was able to extrapolate distances to other buildings fairly easily, even though I’ve never been to any of them.
The administrative building, for example. Never been there. Hope to soon. It’s across the way from the laboratory and it is where Bob Grindel works. He’s got an office right above the central awning that covers the front door. Nice big picture window and everything. I look up every day and stare at that window, and even though nine times out of ten the sunrise makes it impossible to look through the glass—the admin building faces east and we’re in Arizona, which has so much sun I’m starting to miss New England—I’ve been able to get a couple of glimpses of him looking down at me. Even flipped him the finger once. Didn’t change my situation at all, except that it made me feel better.
I haven’t had many chances to talk to Bob. He stopped by a couple of times to lay on the bullshit about how he’s going to be setting me free just as soon as Viktor is done in the lab. On neither occasion did I have an opportunity to do much more than sneer and try out a few old insults in some dead languages. This is mainly because Bob tends to travel around with Brutus, the other demon of the inner compound. He and Ringo constitute the only security in the inner circle of buildings, which is pretty much exactly how my security force hostage described it when I first arrived. The human security—I believe there are about twenty-five of them, if Clara’s count is accurate—cover the perimeter, the demons roam the center, and ne’er the twain shall meet. That may be because Bob doesn’t want any of the guards to see a demon, and to thus declare loudly, “sweet Jesus, what is that thing?” as this can be awkward. More likely, Bob doesn’t want any humans to notice he’s keeping prisoners, as this is generally considered illegal if one is not an actual government. And sometimes not even then.
Speaking of Clara, I’m still not sure what to do about her. She did smuggle Iza into the place, for which I’m enormously grateful. That she even knew Iza existed meant she eavesdropped on me while I was on the roof of her building, but that’s a minor indiscretion, all things considered. Far more serious is the fact that I probably wouldn’t be sitting in this cell staring at a keyhole if Clara hadn’t tricked me into rescuing her in the first place. So I don’t know why she sent me Iza, or drew the map (which Iza carried in, hence the onion sheet) or gave me all the information about the size of the security force. I don’t like trusting someone only because I have nobody else around to trust.
It is only with great trepidation that I’ve been slipping back out to Clara a few of the details of my escape plan. I need her to help me secure transportation and a few other things, and while Iza can find me a Humvee, she can’t drive one. Once I’m out, speed and efficiency will be an issue, as the less time I spend out in the open, the better my chances are. Not that my chances are at all good either way.
The plan, incidentally, is incredibly stupid, and it’s very probably going to end up getting me killed. But it’s the best one I can come up with. And when I’m not kicking myself for being unable to think up a better one, I’m blaming Viktor for not listening to me.
Doctor Viktor Kopalev is hypothetically just as responsible for my situation as Bob Grindel, because the original idea was Viktor’s. All Bob knows is computers and money, and is apparently nearly as clueless as I am when it comes to biology. But he knows a good idea when he sees it. I guess a few years back he caught a whiff of some of the work Viktor had been doing in immune system research and the seemingly unrelated field of human aging. At the time, that work was ninety percent speculative, because Viktor did not yet know I existed. That, and a killer business plan, is what Bob brought to the table. So while Bob secured investors—and test subjects—Viktor put together the team and supervised the building of the laboratory. All the science, basically. And he didn’t once stop to wonder whether he should.
And then they nabbed Eve. I never asked—none of the lab boys have been willing to talk about Eve, other than to comment that she hardly speaks—but I’m guessing they were looking for both of us from the outset and found her first. I don’t know how they did that. But I stopped looking after becoming erroneously convinced she was dead. Maybe it wasn’t that hard. A good deal more difficult, I’m sure, was catching the thing in cell number two. Who knows when—or how—they did that.
At some point Viktor and his team realized they needed more than just Eve to complete the project. As they’re on something of a timetable, Bob redoubled his efforts to catch me. Ergo, bounty hunters and demons and hostages and so on.
As to the project itself, based on the amount of research that would have had to continue well after the death of Viktor Kopalev—had Eve and I never existed—I’d say it’s about a hundred years before its time. Sometimes that’s a good thing. This isn’t one of those times.
I’ve seen lots of big ideas come and go. As a rule, they tend to arrive at, or just before, the world is ready for them. Take something rather simple, like the wheel. The first version of the wheel I ever saw was a part of a child’s wooden toy, and I didn’t see another one for about fifty years when somebody got the splendid idea to put a couple of them under a wood platform and have an ox pull it. We could have probably come up with the wheel hundreds of years before then but we didn’t need to, because we had no domesticated animals, and as foragers, we didn’t have any need to transport things from place to place. We just ate whatever we could find, wherever we
