by Alyssa Cole
“No, it’s not like that,” the woman says, her eyes darting between me and William. “I tried my best, but there was nothing to be done.”
“Of course there was nothing to be done!” Sydney points the gun at her. “Tell me the truth. You helped cheat a sick older woman out of the home she’d poured her life into.”
“She isn’t that old,” Gianetti says. “And nothing we did was illegal. You can try finding another lawyer, but the responsibility to read the fine print and think through the sale falls onto the homeowner.”
“How could you do this to people?”
I’ve seen Sydney freak out, but right now her voice is flat. I want to reach out to her, but these people hurt her, not me. And she’s so out of it that she’s not watching their movements.
The woman doesn’t answer her and Sydney pushes. “How do you do some shit like this and think you can just get away with it? Don’t you care that you’re hurting people? Don’t you care that you’re ruining lives, taking from people when you already have enough for yourself?”
Gianetti suddenly looks annoyed when she should be frightened. “I’m tired of you people. You’re saying all this now when you weren’t even responsible enough to make your appointment on Thursday! Just like your mother, crying after the fact and expecting special treatment. If your mother wanted to keep her house she should have paid her taxes and not been so ignorant she fell for—”
The woman’s words are cut off again, but not by surprise or by a question—this time it’s by the bullet currently lodged in the area of her brain located behind her palate.
The blast of the gunshot reverberates in the vestibule and the woman keels forward onto the gurney, eyes wide.
“Christ, Sydney,” I yell, jumping back, but she ignores me, her focus laser sharp on William.
“Bill Bil.” She turns her gun toward him. Her voice is loud, like her ears are still ringing. “Got anything to say about my mother?”
“Didn’t know her, but she was a very fine woman, I’m sure.” His expression is smooth like an oil slick even though bits of his colleague’s brains have splattered on him.
“Good. Then you can answer some of the many questions we have.” Sydney’s gaze drops down to Gianetti and then moves back up to William. “What is this gurney for? Why are you talking about having dibs on Mr. Perkins’s house?”
He shrugs, glances back over his shoulder. From where I’m standing, I can follow his line of sight to the red emergency alarm lever on the wall a little more than an arm’s length away from him.
“I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.” William takes a step back and Sydney closes the space between them.
“If there was a misunderstanding, you’d be a little more concerned by the fact I just blew a hole in homegirl’s head. Talk.”
“I’m just doing my job, right? They told me I could choose from one of the houses on the street if everything went well.” His hand reaches behind him and I take aim for his shoulder.
“Stop moving,” I say.
His hand stills.
“How did you think you would get that house? Magic?” she presses. “How can you lay claim to something that belongs to somebody else?”
“I didn’t know they were hurting people,” William continues, tears springing up in his eyes. “They said they were paying people for the houses.”
“Then what’s the gurney for?” Sydney asks.
“Oh. This? Um.” His eyes dart back and forth between us. “Well . . .”
The gurney suddenly surges toward Sydney—I’ve been watching his hands, not his feet, and he’s kicked it toward her. It hits her in the thighs before rebounding off her, and she stumbles back into the door. William leans back, his fingers grasping toward the alarm.
My gun is already aimed. The element of surprise is all we have and if he alerts people to our presence we’re dead. I squeeze off one silent shot.
The reverberation of the Glock’s blast jangles through me, and William Bilford slumps forward onto the gurney over his friend, a spray of blood misting out of his chest. His chest and not his arm. There’s a gaping hole where a heart is usually located.
Shit.
“Why did you kill him?” Sydney’s eyes are wide. She wipes frantically at her cheeks, where droplets of blood spattered. “I was trying to get him to tell us what’s going on here.”
I scrunch my face contritely and exhale sharply through my nose.
“That was supposed to be an arm shot to stop him from pulling the alarm, but apparently my aim isn’t as good as yours. I’m more of a fists or knives kind of guy.”
“It’s okay. I killed one, you killed one.” She looks down at the two bodies. “All right. They’re dead. They’re dead.”
“Sydney?”
She bends and starts pushing the gurney, struggling with the weight of it. “We can’t leave them here in case someone comes through. And we don’t know if the people ahead will be armed. We can use this for cover.”
I move beside her and we push the gurney through the door.
“She’s the lawyer who said she could help me get the house back,” she says as we enter what seems to be another hallway, nodding her chin toward the woman’s body. “She strung me along for almost a year, acting so concerned and enraged on my mother’s behalf. I’m starting to wonder if all of you are evil.”
“Nothing I say right now will put you at ease about that.” I inhale and the smell of blood fills my nostrils. “I hope we make it out of here alive. Because I like you a lot. I want to spend some time with you that isn’t us actively caught up in a web of conspiracy. I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this while we’re pushing dead bodies around, but life is short.”
“Nothing wrong with shooting your shot in the middle of a bloodbath. If not now, when?” she asks sardonically, but doesn’t reciprocate the sentiment.
We reach a bend in the hallway and turn right, slowly maneuvering the gurney and its horrific payload. We move through another set of double doors—automatic ones that haven’t closed all the way.
The hallway ahead is a little dimmer, the walls painted a dull gray and many of the light sconces bulbless. We’ve passed into a different wing.
It’s the smell that hits me first. Feces. Bodily odor.
Despair.
Large windows line the walls of the corridor up ahead—not glass, something less easy to break. Something good for keeping people confined. This looks like a lockup—it shouldn’t be in the basement of an old shut-down hospital.
There’s no sound except our labored breathing and the creak of the gurney wheels. The silence around us feels heavy, foreboding.
As we approach the first window, a hand slaps against it hard, and Sydney stops short and presses into me—William Bilford’s body slides off the gurney to the floor with a heavy thud.
“Mrs. Payne?” She rushes past the body on the floor and presses her hand to the window.
“No, no, no. This is too much. This is too—”
Her words break off, and she just shakes her head, staring into the room.
When I walk up behind her, an older woman with matted hair and cheeks caved in from missing teeth is staring at Sydney through the plexiglass. The whites of her eyes are yellow and swimming with tears. I stare at those eyes for a long moment.
I recognize them.
“She’s—I found a photo album a little after I moved here. In the garbage. She’s in a lot of the pictures.”
I’d wondered why someone had tossed away such precious memories like trash. This woman hadn’t thrown it out. Whoever stole her home had taken care of that.
The woman, no longer the young bright-eyed girl or always-laughing young woman whose photo I had looked at countless times, slaps the plexiglass where Sydney’s hand is, her hand pressing hard as if she might touch Sydney through it. I recognize the expression in her eyes—it’s the same way Kavaughn looked at me.
Desperation.
A cry fo
r help.
She points at the tubes in her arms, starts making wild gestures I can’t understand.
“They said they were going to open a research center, and they have.” Sydney’s voice is quiet, but when she looks up at me her eyes are wide and terrified. “This is Doris Payne. The woman whose house you took.”
Chapter 23
Sydney
I LOOK UP AT THEO, THE HORROR I’M FEELING SO OVERWHELMING that I might black out. Doris is caged. Caged like an animal. She’s always been so prideful about her looks, and they have her in here looking like this.
“The day of the tour, your girlfriend was looking at the Payne house.” I’d registered it as I slammed my door in Theo’s face, but hadn’t remembered it and what it meant until now. “It’s like what Bill Bil said. They want a house, and they take it. Doesn’t matter if someone else lives there.”
“I had no idea about any of this.”
I’m starting to wonder how it’s possible for him not to know about any of this.
“Why did you even go on that tour?” I ask him, as my body shakes. I feel like every cell in my body wants to fly off in a different direction. “So Kim could play some fucked-up game? Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a brownstone by—by kidnapping and torturing?”
Doris looks at Theo, but she has no reaction to him. Not fear or anger or recognition. Her gaze drifts back to me, unfocused and awful and pleading.
She used to sell Avon products and had slipped me samples of Skin So Soft in the summer when the mosquitoes were biting. The gentle scent has always reminded me of her, but now the smell in this hallway makes it impossible to even recall.
Theo doesn’t touch me, but he moves closer. “Kim told me that her dad had bought us the tour tickets and that it would be a good way to check out the neighborhood, since we were looking to buy.”
I turn away from the window, away from Doris, and my gaze lands on the door beside her small room that contains only a cot and a bucket. The door has an electronic code reader on its heavy-duty lock. The chart on the wall next to the door says Test Subject 3 and nonviable is scrawled beneath it in Sharpie.
I try to collate all of these facts, make them make sense, but my brain can’t process this horror.
“Sydney.”
I ignore Theo and stalk down the hallway, weaving from one side to the other as I inspect each room and each chart.
Test Subject 1 is a dark-skinned man I don’t know who lies on his cot without moving.
Nonviable.
Test subject 2. Miss Wanda, dammit, Miss Wanda, frail and hunched over, scratching at her neck.
Nonviable.
“Sydney.” Theo’s harsh whisper is drowned out by the buzz in my mind.
Test Subjects 4 and 5 are strangers, a man and a woman. Maybe the woman is the one Amber mentioned, who supposedly got snatched down a subway grate. Or maybe that woman is already dead.
Number 6 is Abdul. His cell is a bit different—he’s on a gurney, hooked up to machines that monitor his vitals.
I run down the hall now, heart pounding in my ears, the unfamiliar and familiar faces blending together. Stranger, slapping at his own head. Jamel Jones, who I just saw a couple of days ago, knocked out and with an IV in his arm.
The corridor seems to go on forever, the rooms and their inhabitants in various states but almost every damn room occupied. They’re soundproofed, I realize at some point, so the strangled cries I hear echoing in the hallway are my own.
Test Subject 18. Mr. Perkins sits on the edge of his gurney, staring at the floor. He looks so thin compared to just a few days ago, the wrinkles on his face hanging like heavy pleats in fabric.
I tap frantically at the window and he slowly raises his head. He stares at me, no recognition on his face, but stands and shuffles toward the glass.
His movements are jerky; his head lolls to the side.
And then he lunges at me, beating his fists on the window. I can’t hear him, but his mouth stretches wide in a scream and his spit flecks the window. His eyes are full of rage—I’ve never even seen him angry before.
A siren sounds in the hallway, but I stand there frozen. Even when arms close around me and haul me back into the recessed doorway of the room across the hall, I hold Mr. Perkins’s rage-filled gaze.
The double doors that cap this wing open slowly with a prolonged whoosh, automated, and two white women rush into the hall, one brunette, one gray haired. They’re dressed in jeans and T-shirts, but wear white lab coats. The gray-haired one, who has a short pixie cut, swipes her ID against the lock to Mr. Perkins’s room, and they rush in. As they do, his wails fill the hallway, and I hate that I recognize his voice in this cry of pure pain.
Key, Theo mouths, and he slips past me, giving me a firm press back against the door that’s an order to stay there. He didn’t have to do that—I can’t move. The horror of everything has wrapped me up tightly, strapped me down like I’m on that gurney instead of Ms. Gianetti’s lifeless body.
He stalks toward the room, tucking into a crouch and then peeking around the door frame. I expect him to just burst in but he waits. And waits. Fury starts to build in me as Mr. Perkins’s howls fill the hallway, but then I remember.
“My aim isn’t as good as yours.”
He’s waiting to make a clean shot.
He doesn’t want to hurt Mr. Perkins.
The howling subsides and the first woman steps through the door and back into the hallway, and then the second. Before they let the door swing shut, Theo stands up behind them and says, “Don’t move.”
Both women freeze, but the brunette’s hand keeps going toward the bulge in her pocket. Whatever constraints were on my body immediately release as I instinctively recognize the motion—she’s reaching for a weapon.
I step out from the doorway and shoot. She grabs her stomach and falls to the floor, screaming in pain, sounding not so different from Mr. Perkins.
“Oh my goodness. Julia!” the older woman calls out, and Theo rushes up to her, stripping the ID from her and searching her for weapons.
I pat down the woman on the floor and she clasps at my hand.
“Help me,” she says as tears well from her eyes and course into her hair.
I shake her hand off and search her for weapons—I’m second-guessing myself, wondering if she’d gone for her phone and I’d just shot someone for no—no, it’s a gun.
With a silencer. Like the one Theo took from Con Dead.
“Don’t let me die here, I have a son. A husband.” She grasps at her stomach and then cries out in pain.
Pity and guilt spear me, and I remind myself that all the people locked up here have families and lives, too.
“What did you do to Mr. Perkins, Julia? To all these people?”
“Mr. Perkins?”
“Test Subject Eighteen,” I grit out.
She coughs, averts her gaze from mine. “. . . My job.”
“Which is?”
She starts crying in earnest, locking her gaze on mine. “Please help me, it hurts so much!”
I want to cry, too. I did this to her. Does she deserve it? Did Ms. Gianetti? Who was I to decide? What if I was wrong?
My vision starts to swim and I suck in a breath.
“I’ll help you when you tell me,” I say through gritted teeth. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just need to know what’s going on here. I can’t help you until you tell me.”
“We’re researching how to cure opiate addiction,” she says quickly, hope glinting in her eyes. “We needed test subjects, and federal regulations make true progress too difficult. There’s a methadone clinic near here, we picked up people there. And the others—”
“Shut up, Julia,” the older woman says, then yelps as Theo tightens his hold on her.
I tug at Julia’s collar to draw her attention back to me. “Why like this? You already won the bid for the new research center. Why do things like this?”
“New research center? Not new. You mean offici
al.” Julia’s words are sluggish, and when she smiles, her teeth are sheened with blood. “And we do it because we can.”
I back away from her, holding the gun, and she writhes on the floor and screams. “Help me, you bitch!”
“Go start unlocking the doors,” Theo says from behind me, handing me a key card. “Start at the other end of the hall.”
“But—”
He takes her gun from my hand. “Go.”
His voice is hard, but not mean.
I run to the other end of the hall, frantically swiping the card over the locks and opening every door. Most people aren’t in a state to move themselves, but some of them can start making their way out. At the very least they’re no longer locked in. We can’t call the police or an ambulance. We can’t trust anyone.
As their doors open, the cries and moans of the people VerenTech has been using as test subjects—strangers, neighbors, and friends—fill the hall.
I want to close my ears. I want to run away from all of this. But I just unlock the doors and swing them open, one by one.
By the time I make it back to Theo there are only two streaks of blood leading into an empty room next to Mr. Perkins’s.
“Do we go ahead or go back?” he asks grimly as I hand him the card.
“We can’t go back,” I say, even though my mind is screaming at me to do just that. “Moving those people ourselves could kill them. We can’t call the police. We lose the element of surprise, and these people will get away with this. I need to end this shit.”
Theo doesn’t say anything. Just checks his clip, then waves the ID card in front of the sensor next to the double doors that lead out of the wing.
I step through them as they swing open.
Chapter 24
Sydney
“YOU EVER PLAY A FIRST-PERSON-SHOOTER VIDEO GAME?” Theo asks. “War games where you move room by room, picking the enemy off to advance?”
“I hate games like that,” I say. “I can never figure out the damn controls and always freak out and get mowed down. A real gun is—”
