Heartless Read online

  There is, and always will be, a fine balance between being a free-thinking individual, and being a mindless soldier.

  That lesson can be seen clearly in Iteration 6.

  When allowing subjects to maintain full control of their unmodified brains, we have witnessed erratic behavior upon reanimation. One subject awoke early, escaped, and has proven difficult to capture. Said reanimation was premature and unexpected, and subject was alone upon arising.

  Subject has proven herself resourceful and intelligent beyond all expectation. When we control the reanimation process, including indoctrination into the cause, subjects with unmodified brains may become our most powerful resources, as we have seen before.

  However, as subjects retaining semi-normal brain wave activity require much more care, maintenance and control, we are now experimenting with cerebral modifications, the likes of which have never been seen in our experiments before. The results of Iteration 7, however, were not quite what we expected.

  Instead of being innocent, childlike, thanks to their modifications, the girls (who reanimated much more easily and predictably and on command than their full-brain cousins) awoke in a vicious state. They were feral.

  Insatiable. Led entirely by the id. Similar to zombies of the old horror movies.

  While our ultimate goal will be to find a middle ground, Iteration 7 was not a total failure. Those feral creatures will have a prominent place in our army. Their hunger, their lack of regard for their own safety, and their potential to do damage combine to make these subjects exceptional foot soldiers. We will maintain the brain scans from these Subjects (all of whom have, by now, been terminated) and plan to recreate subjects such as these at a later date.

  In the meantime, for Iteration 8, the plan will be amended to include suppression of the amygdala and the hypothalamus, in an effort to stem their impulses.

  “Oh, hell no,” I yelled.

  The door was locked. I heard the mechanical click. I felt electricity in the air.

  But I still held the knob, had never allowed it to turn to closed. They were too fast in their trap. The door pushed open as easily as it had moments earlier.

  The scene before me was chaotic. Naked, partially dead girls swarmed around Lucy. There had to be two dozen of them, and I wondered from where they all came. Behind them walked three large, masked men in protective suits, carrying sticks that crackled and sparked at one end. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to clear a path to Lucy to save her, or if they were simply prodding the girls forward. It didn’t matter—they weren’t going to get to Lucy either way.

  Lucy backed herself against the wall, about twenty feet from the door. She wielded a pair of scissors taken from the desk, slashing and stabbing at any of the girls who got too close. She stabbed one in the arm; the girl didn’t flinch.

  “No!” I shouted.

  Lucy looked up at the sound of my voice. “Jo?” she said.

  The girls turned, too, and I got my first good look at them. Their eyes were vacant and their jaws hung slack. They were all born today, I thought, feeling heartbroken and wanting to protect them. I shoved the thought back. They were all…fresher…than me, more meaty, less sinewy, but their wounds poured forth the same greenish-brown ooze I knew filled my own veins.

  Lucy had done some damage in those brief first seconds. The girls closest to her were marred with slices across their chests and abdomens, arms and legs. The jaw of one girl barely hung by a thread. She didn’t notice, pushing forward despite her injury. She looked broken, inhuman.

  But not altogether unlike me.

  It doesn’t matter what they are or I am, I thought. I need to save Lucy.

  The shouts of men filled the room.

  “Move!”

  “Now!”

  “Get her!”

  Prodded by the men, the girls charged me, too. But I was ready for them. I reached out and grabbed the desk chair beside me. As the girls began to charge, I threw it, hard, into the parade of monsters. They fell back, crashing into each other and the men behind them.

  Like dominos again, I thought. They have issues with balance. I wonder if it’s an inner ear problem.

  As the men fell, too, the girls turned on them, crawling over their prone bodies. The men were stronger, and well-armed, but not entirely invulnerable. Sparks filled the air from their electric sticks, and the girls turned, as one, to face their own captors.

  “Lucy! Now!” I shouted. While the girls were distracted, Lucy darted away from the wall, heavily favoring her hurt ankle. She stumbled, she weaved. When a girl got too close, Lucy stabbed her in the eye, leaving the scissors there. The girl fell.

  Go for the brain, I thought. I felt like I was in a zombie movie. But these girls weren’t fiction—they were real, man-made monsters.

  Lucy arrived at my side and we turned to the door. The voice over the speakers screeched. “No! They’re getting away! Girls, boys! Get them! Lovelies, my lovelies, don’t turn on each other! Get them!”

  Lucky for us, no one was free to get us.

  Lucy and I crossed the threshold, together this time, and I let the door slam behind us. I only hoped it would stay locked.

  Together, we collapsed on the floor. She was panting, breathing so heavily I thought her lungs might explode.

  “I thought,” she said, gasping for air. “I thought you left me. I thought you left me to die.”

  I pulled her to me. “I’m so sorry, Luce. So sorry. I just thought…it doesn’t matter what I thought. I’ll never leave you again, I promise.”

  She pulled me to her in a bear hug, and held me there, until she started to gag.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t be that close to you right now.”

  “I know,” I said

  I stood, and pulled Lucy to her feet. She wheezed, still out of breath, her hand over her mouth and nose, but we began to run, searching for a way out.

  At the far end of the room stood a man, pressed flat against the wall. I skidded to a stop when I saw him, and Lucy crashed into me from behind. We faced each other, the man and I, staring, gauging, thinking. The man was small and bald. His eyes were tiny behind thick-rimmed glasses. Horn-rimmed glasses, I thought, remembering a pair my father wore when I was very small. He wore a long white coat, splattered with blood and other fluids. In his hand, he held a scalpel, pointed at Lucy and me.

  I started to speak, but the words caught in my throat. Behind me, Lucy’s hand balled into a fist and pressed into my back. She was ready to come out swinging, but I pressed her arm back to her side.

  I stepped closer to the man and reached out my hand. Something about his face was familiar to me. I’d seen it before, staring down over me with a loving smile, brushing hair back from my forehead, caressing my cheek. Like a parent, or…a creator.

  “You,” I said. “You did this to me.” It wasn’t a question.

  His eyes burned white, glowing in the strange, underground light. He froze, a rabbit in a hunter’s sights, knowing he was about to die. But this man was no rabbit. He dropped the scalpel and turned. With a flick of his wrist, he pressed an unseen button. A panel slid back and he disappeared through a hole in the wall. Down the rabbit hole, I thought.

  In an instant, he was gone, as if he’d never been there in the first place. I wondered if I’d dreamed him.

  The voice from above pressed in on us again. “You shouldn’t have done that, Jolene, dear. Any of that. I hope you realize how much trouble you are in.”

  I raised my hand, all my fingers clenched into a fist but for my middle.

  Sadly, the middle finger on that hand was long since gone, so the effect was ruined.

  But Lucy helped. She flipped off any and all cameras that watched us, and then she nodded. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said. Pushing herself from the wall, she hobbled across the room.

  “Oh, dears, you don’t really think there’s a way out down here. There’s not. The only way out is up.” The voice sounded agitated, th
ough. A little uncertain, perhaps.

  “I think we pissed them off,” I whispered.

  Lucy’s jaw was set. “Don’t care.” Her forehead creased in pain and concentration. “Keep moving.”

  We reached a new door and opened it, passing into yet another strange and mysterious room. This one was darker than the one we’d just left, and the door slammed shut behind us.

  “Ladies, I think you’ll like this room,” the voice hissed. We couldn’t escape the voice. It followed us everywhere we went. “You should turn on your light, take a moment to look around.”

  Lucy pulled out her phone, and then bent over and retched.

  We stood in a surgical room. On two tables lay two naked girls, each cut open from neck to pelvis. Their organs lay atop trays on several rolling tables. While Lucy backed away, I stood and stared with a clinical curiosity. I counted four lungs, two hearts, two livers, and various other organs that I didn’t remember from high school biology.

  The floor and walls were a Jackson Pollock painting, splattered with red and black blood and other brightly colored fluids. Over each girl hung bags of green and clear solutions that dripped into IVs placed throughout her body. I imagined the stench was terrible, over and above anything to which I’d already subjected my poor, battered roommate.

  Sure enough, Lucy stopped heaving and lifted her head from between her knees. “What the hell,” she gasped. “I can’t breathe in here.”

  The voice answered, cold and seething. “You see,” it said, “you interrupted our dear friend, the scientist, mid-procedure, when there was no one else around to handle you two troublemakers. But now that you’re here, we’ll have to destroy you both. I’m not sure he’ll get these two closed back up in time. We will add them to the list of girls you destroyed tonight, including yourselves. Just four more mistakes. Four more X’s on the wall.”

  I looked past the horror show on the tables before us. There was a door at the other end of the room.

  “Come on, Luce,” I said, taking her arm in mine. “Keep moving.”

  “We can’t just leave them,” Lucy said, still gasping. “They’re desecrating the dead.”

  “Good point,” I said. I stared at the bodies. “Got a light? My guess is those chemicals are flammable.”

  A lifelong pyromaniac, Lucy always carried matches. She tossed me a half-full pack. “Do it.”

  “We don’t know if there’s a way out,” I said.

  “I don’t care. Destroy it all. End this.”

  “What about all the evidence on your phone? The photos?”

  Lucy’s mouth was set in a grim line, her jaw clenched and hard. “What’s more important? Notifying those parents, or stopping these people from ever doing this again?”

  “You’re right.” We spoke quietly, our voices heavy with grief.

  Above and around us, the voice roared. “What are you talking about? I can’t hear you. What are you saying?”

  I struck a match and I smiled. This was right. This was what we had to do. I was only sorry I wouldn’t be able to save Lucy. Or to say goodbye to my parents and Eli.

  The match’s flame was small, but sometimes, big things come from small beginnings. I touched the flame to a girl’s toe. She sputtered to light immediately, and then she burned bright green. I knocked an IV pole to the ground, allowing the chemicals to spill and ignite around the room.

  “No! Stop it! Don’t burn my beautiful girls!” The voice howled as if in pain.

  The other girl caught fire, and Lucy pulled me away. “Come on, come on! You have to come now! We have to try to keep going.”

  A little piece of me wanted to stay, to end things there, on my terms. A spark alighted on my parka, and I watched with detached amazement as it began to smolder, working its way down toward my brittle, paper skin. Once it reached there, I knew, it would all be over in an instant.

  From another room, pops sounded, like fireworks. The flames had spread rapidly as burning chemicals leaked beneath the door.

  Meanwhile, the spark on my arm continued to burn, and I let it.

  But then I turned and saw Lucy’s face, flushed and sweating in the light. She was so alive, so vibrant. I couldn’t let things end there. Not if there was any chance of saving her. And not while she still wanted to live.

  I held out my arm and she patted out the tiny flame on the parka sleeve. We turned and ran for it.

  We ran through door after door, room after room, but the fire kept coming. It roared as it consumed everything in its path. The voice over the speakers continued to yell things at us, but we couldn’t hear over the constant thunder of the flames and small explosions. We passed through more surgical rooms, rooms filled with jarred organs, a room dedicated to brains. Whoever ran this outfit had been doing it for years. It was massive, it was organized, and it was all burning.

  And still we ran, down, down, down.

  Beside me, Lucy began to cough. Thick smoke surrounded us, and I knew it had to be burning her lungs.

  I ripped the scarf from my neck and shoved it into her hands. “Breathe through this!”

  She did, but her footsteps became more erratic. She leaned on me even more for support, until I was all but carrying her.

  We’re not going to make it, I thought, staring at Lucy while I pulled her forward. This is the end.

  Her eyes pleaded with me to keep going. I tugged and pulled, holding her up by the back of the pants. I didn’t stop. We came to another door. It looked exactly like all the others.

  I ran into it, full force, yanking Lucy along beside me. It burst open, and my nonexistent heart soared with relief. We tumbled back into the outside world, our bodies spilling out to a shallow path on the side of a mountain, surrounded by a raging blizzard. We were free, but the flames followed us through the door, so I kept on running until my feet found ice and slipped, and we began to fall.

  Lucy and I flew off the path and slid down through the snow, down the side of the mountain like children on a sled in the winter’s first snowfall. We rolled and tumbled, and when we finally came to a stop, I didn’t think we’d gone any less than two hundred feet. Up above, I could barely make out the flames and smoke pouring from the open door.

  Relieved laughter bubbled out of me as I lay back in the billowy snow. I turned to Lucy, smiling, but then I saw her lying there, motionless. Face down in the snow.

  I couldn’t tell if she was alive.

  Hi Jo,

  Look, we need to talk. I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier; I just don’t want you taking stupid chances at this point, you know? I don’t want to see you get hurt.

  I tried to call you and Lucy. Neither of you answered. I guess you’re probably pretty pissed. I get it.

  Just…don’t do anything stupid, ok?

  Love,

  Eli

  Baby,

  Where are you? I tried calling you a few times this afternoon, but you didn’t answer. You’ve seemed a little off lately. I know you have mid-terms and that you had that fight with your boyfriend, but please. My mom-alarm is ringing. Something’s wrong. I know it.

  If I don’t hear back from you soon, I’m getting on the next plane to New Hampshire. Daddy too. We’re concerned, and you know how he feels about your safety. AND you know how I feel about the dry New England winters. Please, call me. Email me. I’m here.

  Love,

  Mom

  “Lucy? Lucy? Are you dead? Oh my God, Lucy! Luce! Wake up!”

  She lay in the snow, immobile. I leaned in close to her mouth to try to feel her breath on my face, but with my own diminished nerve endings and the blizzard raging around us, it was impossible. We’d fallen so far, and I was terrified of hurting her neck, but since she was unresponsive, I took a chance. I rolled her over and shook her. Hard.

  “Are you alive?” I shouted over the noise of the wind.

  Nothing. She was still. So I shook again.

  Her eyes fluttered, then flew open. “Ow, ow, Jo, stop!” I could barely hear her.
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br />   “Are you alive?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said as she struggled to sit up. “I think so.” She looked around her and shuddered. “I’m so cold.”

  We were in the middle of nowhere, far from the car, far from any place we recognized. There was no going up, back to the laboratory, where fire and death awaited us. But I didn’t think we were safe where we were, either. In the middle of the blizzard, in the middle of winter in the mountains, wearing only a coat, her only hat blown away into the abyss, Lucy was a sure goner. If we sat there and waited for someone to find us, she’d freeze to death in a matter of hours.

  “We need to walk,” I said. “Down, I guess.”

  “But my car?” Lucy looked up, where the flames from the lab were the only real source of light in the snowstorm.

  “Later. We need to get you safe first. Can you walk?”

  I pulled myself to my feet, struggling with every movement. Balance, coordination—they were no longer my strong suits. Then I leaned over and offered Lucy a hand. She groaned as she put weight on her bad foot. “I don’t know how far I can go.”

  “Do you have service on your phone?”

  She pulled it out. “No, and my battery’s almost dead. I need to turn it off. Where’s yours?”

  “In the car.”

  “Oh.”

  We were still shouting to be heard over the wail of the wind, and I looked down the mountain. Thin trees were blown nearly in half, flinging massive gobs of snow through the air. “Damn. Should we build a little snow fort? Isn’t that what you do in a survival situation like this?”

  “We can’t! We can’t stay here! Someone might come for us!” Panic filled her eyes as I fought to quash my own.

  I shook her again. “Luce! I’m not gonna let anything happen to you! I’m here!”

  Her eyes were wild, terrified. “You’re not going to leave me again?”