He doesn’t go limp. He scratches and digs his fingers into my arm. He reaches around grabbing at me, but I lean back. My boney arm is perfect for making the sound that comes next. It's a crunching sound in his throat. It turns to a snapping noise and I feel him leave his body. I let him go. My arm is cramping up. It hurts to straighten. It's bleeding and scraped up.
I take my first, big breath since he came back into the room. My heart monitor is going wild. I pull the tabs off my chest, making the beeps turn into a constant hum. I untie my other arm and push myself to sit up. Something instantly pulls between my legs. Terrified of what I'll find, I slowly put my fingers between my legs where the nightgown I'm wearing is open. I don’t have any underwear on, they must have taken them off. Fear and disgust start taking turns at being bigger in my heart, as I feel the tube that's running in me down there. My fingers shake. My arm, where he put the needle is going numb. I gag and feel woozy when I feel the whole apparatus. The tube hurts when I move it. I pull slowly and try not to let my hands shake. It doesn’t hurt to take out, but it scares me, more than killing the man by crushing his windpipe. I pee all over the bed and floor when the tube is out completely. The warm urine is running between my legs. I look at the door and pray this isn’t the moment that she comes back.
I untie my feet and swing my legs to the edge of the bed. My pee drips from the bed onto the floor. The single splashes and the constant sound of the heart monitor, make the room smaller. I'm panicking. It stings between my legs. I don’t want to know what that was, or what they've done to me.
I push myself off the bed, but my arm is weak and fuzzy. My vision is getting hazy. The floor is cold against my toes. My legs feel weak like a baby deer's. My first steps are awkward and uncoordinated.
I lick my lips and whisper, "Anna." Warmth washes over me and I shudder, staring at the door weakly.
I stumble to the wall and bend to unplug the heart monitor. I have to slide down the wall to get the cord. I jerk it and the sound stops. I want to cry, but I can't. I can't stand up again. Whatever he shot into my arm, is making me feel sick. I crawl along the wall to the tray of things. I pull out some alcohol and pour it over my arm. I wince and almost cry out. It stings. The scrapes are red and angry. I wrap a long, thin, white bandage around my arm and tape it there.
Then I drag myself to where his dead body lies. I slide my smelly nightgown off and tug off his pants and his coat. I dress myself painfully and slowly. I tuck my hair into the back of the lab coat. His shoes are ridiculous on me, like the clown at the circus I saw once with Granny.
I put on his socks. He lies there in his underwear and undershirt. He is pudgy. I look at his meaty body. Compared to the skin and bone I am used to seeing, he is huge.
I crawl to the door and prepare myself for the effort, I am about to use.
"Anna," I whisper again. She doesn’t come back. Did she not hear the commotion? Is she okay? Was she taken captive too? I don’t have time to ponder. I need to run, but like the feeling I had earlier, I fear I won't live through it. I'm too tired and too sick.
I use the handle of the door to pull myself up to my feet. Exhaustion is not the right word.
I stand and steady myself. I feel inside of his coat pockets. I need an inventory of what he has and what I need. The sliding card in his right pocket looks exactly like the one from the farm.
I wish Anna and, even Will, would come. I feel sick and my arm probably needs stitches. I can feel it's still bleeding, soaking the bandage. I look around the tiny room and try to fight the feeling that everything is hopeless before it's even started. Maybe she wasn’t real.
"She was there, Em. Get a grip. Anna was here. The doctor is dead." I whisper to myself. "You did one thing today." The words make a tiny smile cross my lips.
Granny always had lists. She would check things off all the time.
I glance back at him and see the check mark in my mind. Sometimes she would put 'Watch Days of our Lives' on the list. We would watch it and eat popcorn or chips. Everyday was Days. My favorite character was Sami. When I turned eight, I was allowed to start watching it with her.
I hold the cold, metal handle and force my mind back around to my own list. Die free with the wind on my face, is pretty high on it. I need to be more positive.
"Try not to die…not yet," I say hoarsely and turn the knob of the door. As I hear the handle hit the end of its rotation, I stop.
I should have waited an extra second. The drugs are making me crazy. I'm talking to myself and making mistakes.
I look around. Memories and skills are flooding my mind as I try to formulate a plan.
Do I stay in the room and wait for Anna to come back? I need weapons. I glance back at the dead doctor and turn the knob closed again. I stumble over to where his tools are splayed across the floor. I bend as best as I can and pick up a couple of the silver knives from the floor. The cold metal in my fingers feels just as amazing, as I imagined it would. There are bags of water and other things. I grab them and stuff a couple in my pockets and stagger back to the door. I put my hand back on the door and grip the cold knife with the other. I take a breath and imagine how the forest is going feel when I'm in it again. His fur and the cold air of the woods, my daydreams consist of so little.
The cold metal and stark white of the room make me feel exposed and naked. The door handle turns again with ease. I open it a crack and peak out. The hallway doesn’t look the way I thought it would. Anna is nowhere to be found, no one is. It isn’t like the breeder farms.
The lights are muted and flicker. They make me painfully aware of the fact that she probably wasn't real. She wasn't really there. I am still alone.The old fluorescents flicker like they're running on something unstable. Brian's generator was like that. The lights would flicker. Granny's generator was too. I never ran it much, but when I did, it freaked me out the way the power felt half on.
The light in the hallway looks the same.
But the hallway itself isn’t immaculate and stark like the room I'm in. It's dingy and empty of life. I look down one end of the hallway. Nothing stirs. I can see papers on the floor and closed doors. It looks like people fled in a panic, like all the other buildings I've seen. I look down the other side of the hallway to find it looks the same. Nothing is the way I think it will be. It's not clean like the breeder farms or organized. Where am I? How could this be the place Marshall would bring me?
I have a bad feeling. What if Anna was real? Is she safe? Is she alone? I gag as my vision blurs. I don't have the strength to help her.
I whistle softly in case he's with her. Nothing moves or makes a sound. I look up to see if there are cameras or anything. Dad always hated the video cameras that recorded everywhere you went and what you bought. He hated being recorded. He had weird theories about the cameras and the information they gathered. I smile faintly when I think about how crazy I thought he was. He would have loved this place. It would have confirmed so many things for him.
My first steps feel forced, like I'm wading through water. I can't listen to the nothingness surrounding me. I don’t know if I hear everything correctly. The flickering lights are working against me. They're trying to drive me crazy. I twitch and shiver and know it's too late; I already am crazy.
There is too much suspense and empty space in the hallway. Sweat is trickling down the sides of my face, making me twitch and wipe it away. The flickering lights make it impossible to get a good view of everything. I see nothing but me, the papers, and doorways, but the flashes won't guarantee I am alone.
I try every doorknob along the hall, but they're locked. The cold of the metal against my fingers is shocking. I think I have a fever. He has injected me with poison and now I'm dying.
I put a hand on the bumpy wall to steady myself. I lick my lips. Everything feels slow and pronounced.
The lights flash at the same rate my heart beats.
I peek around the corner at the end of the hall. Again, I find myself alone in a long corridor with papers and debris on the floor.
A sharp pain hits me in the stomach. I break a rule, not that it matters—I think I've broken them all at this point.
I bend and cry out. I can't stop myself. The pain is agonizing. It feels as if my insides move. I drop to my knees and slide myself along the floor. I ride a piece of paper like it's a magic carpet and grip my stomach with my left hand.
The flashing lights are inside my eyes now. When I close them, I can see the flashing and the hallway. Even in my mind, nothing about this hallway makes sense. Except maybe, the flashing lights. The uneven power supply makes sense.
I move forward on my knees, until I feel like I can stand again. I grip a door handle and pull myself up. My legs shake and attempt to buckle. I refuse to fall.
The wall is holding me up completely.
"Leo," I whisper his name. I need his fur in my fingers. I always imagined it would be the last thing I touched. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I'm going to die alone in a hallway with nothing in my fingers and no wind on my face.
The pain is unbearable.
I lean on a doorknob for a breath, but instead I fall inside. The handle was unlocked. I hit the floor and cry out again. I wait for the room's occupants to attack me. I wait for the sound of my own tearing.
Nothing happens.
I look up and in the flashes of light from the hallway, I see something I never expected. Jesus is looking down on me with huge wide-open arms. He is smiling and telling me that everything is going to be okay. I drag myself into the room and kick the door shut. As the door closes, the light leaves us. Me and Jesus, perfect strangers, sit alone in the dark. I don’t introduce myself. He will know me soon enough.
Chapter Two
In the darkness of the closed up room, flashes of images pass in front of my eyes—memories of the beginning.
In the flashes and fever, I see the TV at Brian's. It's old and small. When we got there, I didn’t even know how to turn it on. I hadn't seen a TV like it before. Gramps had a huge flat screen. I miss Gramps and Granny.