Heartless Page 3

I should have expected that, I thought as I headed to the bathroom. After catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I realized I’d faint too, if faced with a walking corpse.

  From the OoA files, dated February 8:

  Memorandum re: sequence of events during the escape of Subject 632G-J

  1400 h: Agent DG leaves laboratory. Four (4) subjects accounted for on main floor. All comatose. Brain waves minimal. All hooked up and charging.

  1500 h: Agent DG returns to lab from scouting mission with two (2) new subjects in van. Three (3) subjects remain accounted for. All comatose. Brain waves minimal. All hooked up and charging. However, Subject

  632G-J missing. Pieces of electrical cording remain attached to socket. Internal fluids puddled on table and on ground. Front door closed. No other sign of struggle.

  15:03 h: Agent DG raises alarm. All agents report to lab. Search begins, agents fan out in the mountains. However, cold temperatures and sustained winds render tracking near impossible. All tracks hidden by additional snow drifts.

  15:45: HQ notified of missing subject.

  16:30: Search called off in mountains on account of darkness. To recommence at 0700 the following morning.

  18:00: Agents notified. Failure to return Subject 632G-J is not an option. Project security is of utmost priority. All agents must report to HQ for further instruction and/or punishment no later than 19:30.

  19:45: Agent DG eliminated.

  My image in the bathroom mirror stopped me cold.

  Dead, I thought. I’m definitely dead.

  I certainly looked it. My skin was pale and chalky, eyes hollow and dark. White lips curled downward beneath a bloodless gash on my cheek, which hung open to reveal dry, dehydrated flesh. My hair was filthy, tangled with leaves and branches and hanging down in thick, matted ropes.

  But that stuff? That was a piece of cake compared to the lower majority of me.

  Below my neck, I was a science experiment gone wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong. So wrong, in fact, I closed my eyes and reopened them five times, hoping against hope that maybe I’d see something different the next time I checked. Something better.

  It didn’t get better.

  From my neck to my pelvis stretched a long, ragged incision, held together by rusted silver staples. The skin puckered and tore around each staple, so some holes gaped wide. Tiny metal bumps poked out at regular intervals on either side of the incision, as if the Tin Man’s nipples had been transplanted onto my tattered body.

  The skin on my legs and feet was scratched and torn, no doubt from my trek through the forest. Like the cut on my face, though, all the lacerations were bloodless. Empty.

  I stood at the full-length mirror for a long time, forcing myself to take it all in. My body shook, but my heart neither raced nor even beat.

  Maybe I’d never appreciated my body enough in my lifetime. Maybe my tummy always bulged too much over the top of bathing suit bottoms. Maybe my breasts had never been big enough, my abs never tight enough. But it had never, not ever in my lifetime, been painful to look at myself in a mirror. Until that moment. Suddenly the sight of my body in the full-length mirror burned. It hurt. I could have been stabbed a thousand times in those moments, it hurt so bad. I stood frozen in a state of voyeuristic horror; I couldn’t look away, could only stare in paralyzed, shocked silence.

  Moments passed. Breathless, silent moments. Finally, I shook my head in an attempt to force myself away, but something else caught my eye. A black something danced behind me as I moved. I reached around to find it. In the center of the small of my back, my hand touched cold, brittle plastic and thick, sticky goo. I jerked it away. My hand came forward covered in a green and viscous substance. Gross.

  I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream, to cry, to wail, to have some kind of normal physical reaction to the sight of something so terrible as my own mutilated body, but nothing came.

  I turned from the mirror and stared at the toilet. Come on, I told myself. Puke! Do it. You know you should! This is disgusting. But my stomach didn’t spasm. Didn’t roil. Didn’t clench or spin or do any of the things I wanted it to do. Screw you, stomach.

  I pulled myself back to the mirror, stepping so close to it my nose touched the glass. Come on, I thought. Cry! Just a single tear. You can do it!

  No tears appeared. Just a whole lot more nothing.

  All I could do, it seemed, was shake my head, letting it hang heavy on my neck. My shoulders slumped. My knees buckled. But those were the things I could control, and they only did it because I could move them. My auto-responses, any sort of fight-or-flight adrenaline reaction, were shut down. I’d never in my life been so entirely, utterly empty.

  I left the bathroom and sat on the shaggy rug in the center of my bedroom floor.

  What’s my next step? Should I run some more? Away from here? Away from that terrible reflection that can’t possibly be me, but somehow is?

  That didn’t feel right. Neither did hauling myself to a hospital. I couldn’t bear the idea of an ER doctor, fresh out of med school, probably not all that much older than Eli, pulling a drab blue curtain closed behind him, and then running back out through it at the first sight of my battered incision. No. I wouldn’t come out of a hospital alive.

  Should I wake up Lucy? Go to Eli’s?

  Eli and I were still in a fight. I didn’t want to scare Lucy further.

  Maybe I’ll try to patch myself up. At least I can do that much alone.

  First things first, I thought as I wandered around my room. Cover myself up. Then fix my face.

  Covering up was easy. I grabbed a thick, fluffy robe, a remnant of life back home, from its hook in the closet. Green goo smeared the back of it as I slipped it around my shoulders, and fibers from the fabric tangled in the little nodes on my abdomen. I cringed, but pulled the robe tight around me, hiding the evidence of destruction.

  My face wasn’t hidden so easily.

  Although it didn’t hurt—really, nothing on my body hurt, not even that long, gaping incision across my entire torso—the flap of skin hanging from my cheek looked awful, all white and tattered. When I looked closer, cheekbone was obvious and visible, killing a long-standing family theory that my face, in fact, lacked cheekbones entirely. Mom would be proud, I thought, and I almost smiled for a millisecond. Almost. The sight of the skin flap curbed it fast. I couldn’t let my skin hang like that. I had to fix it.

  Thus began a search for supplies. My desk yielded some basic office materials—Scotch tape and staples—but neither seemed a good candidate for a permanent fix for my cheek. Staples would be shiny and obvious against my pale skin, and I shuddered at the memory of the nasty, rusty ones on my abdomen. Scotch tape would be better, transparent at the very least, but was far from permanent. It would peel as soon as I got into the shower, something I needed to consider doing soon. The dirt beneath my finger- and toenails was enough to set my OCD on fire, not to mention the sticks in my hair.

  I left my desk behind, heading for the closet. Maybe some hanger wire or something? I slid open the closet door. There, in the corner, exactly where my mother left it on the day we arrived in Smytheville, sat a small red sewing kit. “Just in case,” she’d said.

  “In case I decide to make my own clothes?” I’d answered with a laugh, and she’d shoved my shoulder and rolled her eyes.

  This probably wasn’t what she had in mind either, I thought. I pulled the kit from the closet and unzipped it for the first time. It was sparse, just some needles and thread and a measuring tape, but somehow I knew it was the best solution to my problem.

  I pulled out a needle, and stared at my thread choices. After a few moments of careful consideration I vetoed a sassy shade of pink in favor of basic white. Subtlety, I thought. Subtlety will be best here.

  Once the needle was threaded and the knot set, I sat down at my small vanity. I had an expensive magnifying mirror which was suddenly much more helpful than it had ever been for lining my eyes or applying mascara. Turning on the
light as bright as it could go, I glared at my cheek.

  The skin flap was triangular, and the way it hung left an ugly hole in my face. I reached up and slid it back into place. It was a little tacky, and it stayed put for a second when I let go of it, but then it quickly fell back open.

  That won’t do, I thought. I wanted to start sewing at the bottom, but I needed a third hand to hold the skin up while my other two were busy fumbling with the needle and thread. I looked back to my kit and saw a few straight pins sticking out of the tomato-shaped pincushion. Those’ll work.

  A few test pricks of my fingertips confirmed I didn’t feel any pain, but the thought of jabbing a pin through my cheek wasn’t exactly pleasant. It reminded me too much of Pinhead, a bad guy from an almost-forgotten horror movie from my childhood. Yet I had no choice. I held the flap in place with one hand while I readied the pin with the other. Biting down on my lip, I wanted so badly to close my eyes while I stuck myself, but I was afraid I’d wind up stabbing through my eyelid. I’d always been a bit of a klutz. I bit down a little harder, tried not to move, and slowly slid the pin through my skin.

  I…felt nothing. I exhaled some stale air from my useless lungs, holding fast to the habits of the living, and began sewing in earnest, turning my face this way and that to ensure the best light for the smallest, most accurate stitches. The sensation of having no sensation as I pushed a needle through my own skin should have turned my stomach, but didn’t, and after a few minutes of careful stitching I found I could ignore the facts of the situation and simply sew.

  In and out, up and down, I sewed, until at last the skin flap stayed attached to my cheek with no noticeable gaps when I pulled my hand away. I squinted at my face in the mirror, turning my cheek, tilting my chin to ensure my sewing was as good as I could get it. Once I was convinced, I leaned in closer and snipped the end of the string off with a tiny pair of sewing scissors.

  “So I wasn’t dreaming then, was I?”

  I jumped. Lucy stood in the doorway, her hand against the frame, propping herself up. Her eyes were still full of sleep, but her glasses were on, and she stared at me so hard I could feel it.

  “You’re awake.”

  “Yes. What are you doing?” Her voice was flat, absent all emotion.

  “Sewing my face back together. Why aren’t you fainting anymore?”

  “Once I realized I hadn’t dreamed it, and since I just watched you sew your face back together, I figured panic was no longer an option.” She sat down by my feet, crossing her long legs and pulling them up to her chest. “So, how do we fix this?”

  “Thank you,” I said, relief flowing through me. “I love you. I knew I could count on you for help.”

  Lucy sighed. “I love you too. You’re my best friend. But do you really think you’re dead? I mean, couldn’t this be some kind of freaky drug thing?”

  I looked away, back at my face in the mirror. At the white skin and dull eyes. At the white thread that held my cheek skin in place. “No. Not drugs. I think I really am dead. Sort of, anyway. Mostly, maybe. I can just…still think, I guess. And move. And, I don’t know. I know I don’t have to breathe.”

  “Jo, what the hell happened?” Lucy started to cry, and I wanted to cry with her but couldn’t. So I handed her a tissue from my nightstand.

  “Here. And…I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t even know what day it is. Last thing I remember was leaving Eli’s Wednesday night.”

  She sniffled. “It’s Sunday. You’ve been missing for three days.”

  I nodded. That explained the stark, empty campus that morning.

  Lucy continued, wiping at her eyes. “Eli came by Friday and said he couldn’t get in touch with you, but that you and he had a fight. I guess I just assumed you were staying somewhere else while that blew over. Maybe you’d found a new guy or something. Not that you’ve ever done anything like that before, but it seemed like something I’d do, just to have a little fun, right? I thought you deserved some fun.” She took a shaky, watery breath. “Anyway, I didn’t worry until yesterday, when I realized you hadn’t returned a single one of my texts. And your Facebook page had all these messages from people asking where the hell you were. But still. I figured you were somewhere safe, you know? Not turning into some creepy dead zombie girl.” Lucy dissolved into the choking kind of sobs, but managed to say in between them, “This is my fault! I should have called someone! With my mom’s contacts….”

  Three days. Three days! How could I have been gone three days? It was hard to believe, but so was everything else. I shrugged, my shoulders creaking.

  “It’s better you didn’t call anyone,” I said. “Can you imagine the headlines? Especially if I’d turned up fine? Ambassador’s Daughter Sets Off World War Three When Roommate Finds New Man, news at eleven…Anyway, I’m not a zombie, and this is not your fault. This is someone else’s fault entirely. Have you even seen the stuff on my stomach?”

  Lucy nodded, her tears slowed, and the corners of her mouth turned upward. Slightly. “Yeah. I saw you naked before. In my room.”

  As if I could have forgotten.

  I would have blushed if I was able. “Sorry about that. The parka was loose.”

  Her smile broadened, and her voice was soft but amused. “I never saw you naked before, not in all this time together. We’ve shared this bathroom for months. And yet it takes you dying or something like it to have the ultimate roommate experience.”

  I giggled a little, happy to see a little spark of life, of normalcy, from her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize all this time you wanted to see me naked. I’d have taken my clothes off for you ages ago, Luce.”

  But then Lucy darkened again. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  I frowned, nodded. “Yeah.”

  “What is all that stuff under there, anyway?” She gestured vaguely in my direction.

  I kept the robe pulled tight, but I felt the pieces of metal through the thick cloth when I ran my hand over my stomach. “I don’t know,” I said. “There are staples holding me together, and the metal things kind of remind me of the tips of batteries. And there’s something on my back, but I haven’t quite been able to see it. I’m a little stiff, and I can’t turn all the way.”

  “Well, then, let’s see it. We need to know what we’re dealing with here.” Lucy wiped her eyes, stood up, and squared her shoulders, although I noticed she still kept a hand on the doorframe.

  I stood, too. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Bring it on.”

  I dropped my robe and turned, watching her face in the mirror.

  Poor Lucy. She staggered backwards, crashing into the door and knocking it into the wall. Her hand flew to her nose as her mouth clamped shut and her face paled. I thought she might pass out again, but as soon as I thought that she pulled herself back together and stepped forward again.

  “Oh God,” she said, gagging even through her pinched nose. “You smell terrible.” But she took another step forward, her hand outstretched.

  I was almost aware of her touching my back, in the way that you can almost feel someone looking at you. She gasped. “Jo. It’s a wire, like a jack in a wall, with a wire sticking out! Almost like an electrical plug. But it’s all messed up and hanging off.”

  “What? A plug?” I tried to turn, to see my own back or at least its reflection in the mirror, but the placement was such that I couldn’t get there. “I don’t understand.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Hang on.” She ran through the bathroom and came back with her cell phone. “Turn around and show me your stuff!” The phone made a little electronic click as she snapped a photo.

  She handed me the phone and I stared at the picture. There was a piece of plastic hanging loosely from my back, held on by several wires. Inside the plastic was a torn electrical cord. I was wired for electricity. The phone fell to the floor with a crash.

  “Hey,” she said. “I just got that for Christmas. Don’t break it.”

&
nbsp; “Sorry,” I said, leaning against the sink with my head in my hands. “But do you think you could not fuss at me for a second? Seeing as how, oh, I’m suddenly electric?”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry.” She reached out and patted my shoulder, then started to pull me into a hug, but she gagged again, a little stronger this time. “Girl, we gotta get you into the shower quick, before I puke.”

  I nodded, and Lucy walked to the shower. Seconds later the bathroom was filled with steam. I stood there, letting the fog hide my nakedness for a moment, but then I realized: nudity no longer mattered. I was dead.

  So I hauled myself toward the shower and pulled back the curtain. Lucy stood there, leaning against the sink. I paused. “Get out,” I said.

  “Why? I want to be here for you.”

  “But I’m electric. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I touch the water. I don’t want to electrocute you.”

  “You won’t…will you?” She sounded frightened.

  I stuck my tongue out and crossed my eyes. “Not on purpose, of course,” I said.

  “Don’t make that face. It might get stuck that way. For real, now, since you’re dead and all.”

  I stifled a laugh. “Would you please just step back? I really don’t know what’s going to happen here.”

  She nodded, and then retreated behind the heavy bathroom door. Once again, I took one of those unnecessary deep breaths. Then I reached my hand out to touch the water.

  Nothing. I saw the water touch my hand, saw it cascade over my fingers and my arm, but I could feel nothing, even though I knew it was scalding hot. I bit my lip to stave off any tears that couldn’t have escaped my eyes anyway, but this discovery stung. I always relied on the comfort of a hot shower to clear my head, and it seemed like whatever was going on, suddenly that one comfort was stolen from me as well. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I knew, but it did.

  I glanced back at Lucy, peeking around the door, and then stepped into the full force of the shower.