Heartless Read online

  “Let them go, you bitch!”

  And then the phone went dead.

  “Mom? Mom? Mommy?”

  My mother didn’t answer, and when I tried to call back, my call went straight to voicemail. “Hi, you’ve reached Vera Hall. I’m sorry I missed your call, but if you leave a message…”

  I hung up.

  “Dammit,” I said, before I doubled over, folding down upon myself, my shoulders shaking and heaving in a cruel mockery of true crying. I stayed that way until the driver’s side door opened and Strong loomed over me, red-faced and angry.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “They have my parents.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Strong reached in and grabbed my arm. He yanked me hard so that I tumbled out of the car. My charger burst from the dashboard and the cord dangled in the snow. I flew through the air, across Strong’s broad shoulders.

  I yelped. “What the hell?”

  From the back seat, Eli yelled and tried to open the door. His fingers squeaked against the glass as he tried to reach through to help me, but I was well beyond his reach.

  “You know what, Jo?” he said, his voice cold. “I’m so tired of smelling you. You can ride the rest of the way in the trunk.”

  “What? No! No, stop!”

  I kicked and yelled and even bit, but the mouthful of Strong’s uniform coat knocked two teeth from my mouth. I spat them in the snow. Profanity poured from my mouth as he carried me to the trunk of the squad car and dumped me in. I landed in a heap in the small, carpeted space, where I lay in sudden, stunned silence as he slammed the trunk closed. I was enveloped in complete darkness.

  Through the back seat I heard more struggling, and then silence. I didn’t know if Eli was still in the car or not, but it soon began to move.

  For once I was grateful for my lack of human senses. The motion didn’t bother me, not immediately anyway. I couldn’t smell musty carpet or exhaust. I knew carbon monoxide wouldn’t kill me.

  But. In the darkness, I was scared. More scared than I’d ever been before.

  Time passed, but I had no idea how much. The car moved forward, left, right, up and down, and I learned I wasn’t entirely immune to motion sickness. My head spun, a vortex in a car trunk. It was a strange sensation, the spinning without the stomach-churning nausea, and yet it wasn’t a new feeling to me.

  I was ten years old, on a trip to Miami for one of my father’s annual lawyer conferences. My mother and I tagged along, looking forward to our annual week of beach and pool and shopping. My parents sat on either side of me in our first class seats, and I enjoyed the doting attention of a handsome flight attendant who brought me chocolates and a shiny metal pilot pin.

  But the flight was turbulent. Extremely turbulent. The type where the pilot says, in an oppressively calm voice, to stay in your seats except in an emergency, and you somehow know the emergency is now. Where the flight attendants tour the cabin with empty smiles, securing any loose belongings before belting themselves into their own fold-down chairs.

  At first, it felt like a roller coaster ride. We went up. We went down. We hit bumps. We dropped for hundreds of feet at a time. I grinned at my parents and raised my hands over my head. “Look, Mom!” I said, laughing. “No hands!”

  But then the plane banked, turning to try to get out of the chop. As one wing dipped, my stomach dropped. I felt like the seat had dropped out from underneath me, like I was free-falling without a parachute.

  We banked the other direction, and then the other. Each time, I felt more and more out of control. The free-fall in my stomach headed toward Mach speeds. After a minute, my head began to spin, whirling with a tornado’s ferocity.

  The smile melted from my face. My arms sank to my lap. I looked at my mother, away from the window through which I had stared at the cotton ball cloudbanks. “I don’t feel so good,” I said, bile rising in the back of my throat.

  She was like lightning. Before I could blink, she’d reached into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her. She pulled out the barf bag and held it open in front of me.

  It wasn’t a second too soon. The entire contents of my stomach spewed into the bag. Out came the chocolates, the sodas, the tiny airline pretzels. It was all gone. And still the plane kept banking, so I kept vomiting.

  My father turned away, disgusted, but my mother never missed a beat. When the first bag filled, she somehow had a second one waiting. Within moments, with a free hand I never saw, she plastered a Dramamine patch behind my left ear. Soon, I felt woozy and weak, but the vomiting stopped as suddenly as it came.

  But my head didn’t stop spinning for a long time. Not until after the airplane landed and we drove away in a chauffeured limousine. Not until after we reached our resort hotel with a lagoon-shaped pool that called out to me even while I wobbled. Not until after I slept the afternoon away on the overstuffed couch in our penthouse hotel suite.

  My head spun like that as I rattled around in the trunk of Adam’s police car. I wanted so badly to throw up, even though I knew it wouldn’t stop the spins.

  Throwing up would have at least felt productive.

  But my body couldn’t do that anymore.

  My body couldn’t do anything anymore, other than wait. And wait. And wait some more.

  So that’s what I did, in the trunk, while I continued to spin.

  Eventually, my internal battery ran low. Thoughts grew thicker, harder to maintain. Even the spins slowed down. I longed, thickly, for the warm buzz of the car charger, even more for the electrical socket in my dorm room. We become so quickly addicted to the few things in life that feel good. It hurt that I’d never feel that again.

  And then, I shut down.

  I’d love to say that shutting down felt good, a relief, like how a good nap can seem such an amazing escape from a rough day.

  But instead, shutting down felt final. My eyelids fell shut, locking me into darkness more complete than the blackest night.

  I will not shut down. I will not shut down.

  As though I was a computer accessing a file, I found deep in the recesses of my mind a memory of a photograph of my mother and father when they were very young. As a little girl I’d carried the photo with me in a small, glittery-covered purse everywhere I went. It hung from a braided cord across my chest and back, sitting low on my hip. If I was apart from my parents, I’d pull it out and look at it. My small fingers would trace the curls in my mother’s hair, the slope of my father’s shoulder. They held each other in the photo, their faces close together, foreheads touching. My mother’s lips parted in a wide, laughing smile, and my father’s eyes crinkled at the corners in the way they did when he was happy. Really and truly happy.

  The photograph in my mind faded.

  With an effort worthy of Hercules, I found another. This one was much more recent. Lucy, at our winter formal, wearing a slinky black dress with her hair in a pile of red curls falling over one shoulder. Her skin pale, her eyes wide. She grinned, a devilish, curling grin, a dimple barely playing on her right cheek. The background of the photo was faded and dark, but there, clear and bright, the focal point of the photo, was Lucy’s hand, fisted but for that one, tall, manicured middle finger. She was flipping off the photographer. I was the photographer.

  Had my body listened to my brain, I’d have smiled.

  The photograph in my mind faded, faster this time.

  I will not shut down. I will not shut down.

  In the waning power I pulled up one last image. It wasn’t a photograph this time, culled from the file cabinets of my brain. This was a feeling, a smell. Cheeseburgers and ketchup, aftershave and laundry detergent. This was Eli’s bed. This was Eli. This was the feel of his arm around my shoulders, our skin bare and warm. This was what my life had been. This was what it no longer was. This was what it would never be again.

  I will not shut down. I will not shut down. I will…

  The feeling faded. The black came and took me
away.

  The next thing I knew, after the black, was white. Bright-ass, burn-your-eyes-out-because-they’ve-been-closed-for-an-eternity kind of white. I knew my eyes were open when I saw the white, but I also knew almost immediately: I couldn’t move them. I couldn’t move anything.

  I was awake, but I was paralyzed.

  Again.

  For a moment, though, in the initial surge of wakefulness, I could actually feel.

  The cold steel of the table on which I lay.

  The warm hum of the electrical current flowing through the cord in my back.

  The soft breeze blown by a fan twenty feet away.

  The cool air all around me.

  I even smelled the cold, chemical smell of bleach and formaldehyde. The warm, burning smell of decay.

  Oh, so that’s what I smell like, I thought. I’m disgusting.

  I was naked, I could tell, and back in the laboratory. Only it had to be a different laboratory, since Lucy and I had burned down the first one. The thoughts that clouded my head were muddy, murky, and I fought to forget the image of the fire chasing us down the staircase, but didn’t have the power to do it. I relived that moment over and over again, the flames cutting through the mud and making me wish I could scream.

  As that thought finally began to fade, I wondered if it had all been a dream. Maybe we had never found the lab. Maybe I’d made it all up. Maybe this was my first awakening and everything before had been a terrible nightmare.

  Maybe I wasn’t a monster after all.

  Then I heard the voices.

  “I still don’t understand why you brought the boy. You should have left him there on the side of the road. He’s nothing to us, a nobody from a nobody family. And even if you were too weak to kill him outright, exposure to the elements would have finished the job for you.” I recognized the voice, but through the haze of my barely-there brain it was going to take a while to put a name to it.

  “Yeah, and then we’d have had even more cops around here than we did after your misguided attempt at a peaceful capture. I brought a stupid little frat boy here; you got the whole stupid lab blown up.”

  The second voice I knew. I mean, I knew I knew it, but the words coming through that voice weren’t making sense.

  “Besides,” the second voice growled. “I want to kill him. Later. When the others can watch. I want to feel their fear as I take his life.” He caressed the last words, his voice soft like velvet. I thought I heard him sigh.

  Strong. The second voice is Strong. And he’s been helping us. Or at least, he said he was.

  A third voice, another female, cackled with sharp laughter. Over it soared the sound of flesh hitting flesh, a slap across the face that I could not see. “You sound like a cliché,” she said. “Need I remind you that we have a mission here? That we are working on something bigger, more important than your own sorry need to inspire fear? We are trying to change the world here. We’re close to unlimited access to all the money we need, and a soldier with an ambassador parent. You know what a gold mine that’ll be? And every step you take to endanger the mission is a step for which you will have to answer when the Master returns. And he is coming. He is coming soon, and he is not pleased with either of you.”

  I still couldn’t see anything beyond the white light of a fluorescent bulb. I couldn’t even move my eyes.

  “Is he really coming?” It was the first voice again. The first woman. She sounded scared, terrified even, and I heard a catch in her throat that I’d heard dozens of times before while I sat through countless discussions of archaic British literature.

  Her name is Sondra Lewis. She was my professor at Smytheville, and she’s one of the bad guys. She hurt me. I tried to move my eyes, to confirm what I already knew, and I failed. Flow, electricity, flow!

  “Yes,” snapped the third voice. The one I didn’t recognize. “He’s coming soon, and he’s not happy.”

  The voice was feminine, but hoarse. Throaty. Like the woman had smoked at least a pack a day for a dozen years. She paused, but then continued at a much more crisp pace. “But so much of the damage can still be undone. We can use this one for parts. Her battery, her pump—they’re still in good shape. And we have so much more research to share. Look at what the doctor’s done in his time with us. He had one lab up and running; he’ll have the new one ready soon, as long as we don’t mess things up again.” She sounded hopeful, but I could also sense fear.

  “But why are we doing this to her, if we’re just using her for parts? Why the restoration? Why won’t you let the doctor dissect her now?”

  There was another slap, a louder one, and Strong groaned in pain. “You know I won’t take that forever,” he growled.

  “Yes, you will,” the third voice said. “And you will remember who is in charge here, and who will take the biggest fall when the Master gets here and sees this mess.”

  “He wouldn’t…”

  “Hush. Yes, he would. The agent whose oversight caused this dilemma has been terminated. You know that. Now, would you like to save your own worthless lives?” She paused, and then continued even though there was no verbal response. “Yes, I thought so. So. We’re clear. And let’s be clear on this, too. We are restoring this girl simply because if her parents see her in the shape she was in prior to her arrival here, there’s no way they’ll think we can reverse the process.”

  “Why do we care?” said Sondra. “We’re just going to…”

  “Hush,” said the other woman. “We’ve said too much already. There are too many unknowns.”

  A chill went down my spine, and something inside me shuddered. They’re going to kill me.

  I’d known it, on some level, for so long, but hearing it loud and clear while trapped and paralyzed on a surgical table? That was the icing on the cake.

  I had to get out of there. Deep inside me, deep within the pit of a stomach I no longer knew for sure I possessed, a seed of fury sprouted roots. As I listened to my captors, it began to grow. And with it, I grew thirsty for revenge.

  “Now,” the angry voice continued. “Will one of you please check on her and confirm she’s still functional? We need her awake soon if we’re going to get anywhere with the parents.”

  Strong’s face appeared below the white light, close to my own. I lay still, silent, because I had to. I willed my eyes not to move, not to give away the fact that I was awake and aware. It worked.

  There was cold pressure on my bare chest. A stethoscope. I wondered what he was listening for, since I knew there was no heart beating in my chest.

  “She’s humming,” he said after a moment. “It’s faint, but it’s there. The heart pump is still operational. She looks a lot better, and smells better, too.” He smiled over me. “Good job, Jo,” he said. He patted my cheek. The touch of his hand on my face caused my skin to crawl as though with maggots.

  Kiss my ass, scumbag, I thought. If I could move, I would hurt you. Doesn’t matter how big you are.

  “Good,” said the unknown woman. “Let her charge a bit more. We want her awake, but not too strong.”

  “I don’t think she’s discovered yet how strong she actually can be.”

  “Then let’s keep it that way, Adam. We’re almost done with Jo. She has nothing left to offer us, except that one crucial connection.”

  “And the boy? What shall we do with him?” Strong’s voice rose with excitement, and I wondered if that was the only part of him that rose. My face twitched as I almost let it smile. Luckily I stopped myself in time. The paralysis neared its end. It was time to amp up my willpower and self-control.

  The woman snorted. “You’ll have your fun with him. Don’t worry. He won’t leave this place alive.”

  “Yes, Martha,” said Sondra and Strong in unison, and somehow I didn’t think they were having any fun.

  That was fine with me, though. I wasn’t, either. But I was starting to feel like maybe, just maybe, I could.

  Design Docs, Iteration 4

  Hydration
is key to maintenance. To keep subjects fresh and functional, we need to keep fluid flowing into them at all times they are not in use. Removal from hydration source causes rot-like effects as cells dry out and wither away. Dehydration can, to some extent, be reversed, but some damage is irreparable. Therefore, subjects should not be away from hydrating fluids for more than three hours at a time. Anything longer than that and they will begin to smell, attracting undue attention, and losing their glow of life.

  “Bring them over here,” the woman called Martha said.

  An hour had passed, judging by the ticking of the clock that hung somewhere in the room. I had, for a while, been able to wiggle my toes, imperceptibly I hoped, though I was somewhat sure I heard the crinkle of dry leaves every time I moved. I could no longer feel anything but the flow of electricity into my body; I was back in sensory deprivation.

  “Here,” she said, from close beside me. “Their voices will help her wake up.”

  I heard the squeak of a door opening on rusty hinges, then the clickity-clack of high heels against a hard, tile floor.

  “No. That can’t be my Jo.” That was my father. I heard him stifle a gasp, and my nonexistent heart began to break.

  “Let me go. I have to see her.” That was my mother. She sounded calmer than my father.

  More shuffling steps. Then slowly, cautiously, my mother’s face floated into my field of view. It took every ounce of self-control not to reach out to her. I wanted her so badly I could taste her perfume in my barren mouth. But I knew I had to play it cool, to keep my cards close to the chest while our captors were nearby.

  My mother’s eyes trailed across my withered body. Her hand hovered above my cheek, my forehead. She turned and looked away, I assumed at my father. “I’m afraid to touch her,” she said. “She looks so fragile. Like she could blow away.”

  “It’s not her,” my father said. I couldn’t see him, but I could picture him, standing with his legs spread and his arms crossed on his chest. It was how he always stood when stubbornly opposing an argument. Even when he knew he was beaten. “You’ve got a girl here who maybe once looked a bit like Jo, but it’s not her. Look at her! No hair, gray skin! How can you expect me to believe…”