That confused me. “I get why they were after me. But if the father of your kid wasn’t one of them—“
“Beats me,” she admitted. “They’ve been doing weird shit here. Weird shit besides being utter fucktards. Jordan wasn’t one of their initial super soldiers, but I think they shot him up with something else. And then they sent him out there to knock up as many women as possible so they could check if it stuck, or some shit.” She paused, her hands splayed across her stomach. “They stick needles into me every few days. You know, that amnio thing? I’m so scared they’ll kill my baby. But he’s the only reason I’m still alive.”
One more thing to look forward to witnessing. Now it made sense why they kept one of those horrible, old-fashioned stirrup chairs in the room.
Silence fell, and I half hoped that she’d fallen asleep, but a few minutes later she spoke up once more. “You know that you’re next, right? Gina’s been catatonic for a week and Lucy’s too far along that they seem to still get a kick out of it when she pukes all the time.” Her eyes skipped from the two cells on my other side to the one on the right. “They banged up Shawna pretty good yesterday so they’ll give her a few days to recover. And if there’s one single thing to be said for ‘em, they’ve left the girl alone for now. That’s pretty much the only thing they shy away from. If not today, it’ll be soon. Taggard always does it like that. He lures ‘em into a false sense of complacency, until they let their guard down. Probably makes the punch just that much harder when it finally comes. I don’t think he has any illusions about you backing down, so why wait?”
There wasn’t a hint of scorn or jeering in her voice, at least not directed at me. She was just stating the obvious. I couldn’t quite make myself nod, but I didn’t have to. We both knew that she was right.
“If you make it out of here, promise me one thing?” Gussy rasped when it became obvious that I wasn’t going to reply.
I felt like pointing out that things didn’t look like I’d get a chance to deliver on that, but I didn’t need to voice that, either. “Sure.”
I expected her to deliver a last message to her sisters, offer them closure or something, but that wasn’t it. “Make sure that you kill every fucking last one of them.”
Holding her gaze across the room, I inclined my head once. “I will.”
Her shoulders sagged as she exhaled, as if a heavy weight had been lifted off her chest. “Good. I’ll hold you to it.” She started coughing again, and for a moment I tensed, afraid what that might mean, but she just spit up some blood before she went slack once more.
“I’m not gonna last much longer. I know that. They know that. But I’ll fight as long as I still got some strength in me,” she promised. It didn’t look like that was going to last for more than a day or two.
Silence fell, this time for good. I sipped some more water, debating with myself whether I should try to get some sleep. My mind kept skipping between moments of high alertness and plain white noise. I must have been more or less awake for over two days now, I figured. Long enough that in moments of boredom I couldn’t be sure that I didn’t just black out for a few minutes at a time. I’d spent enough weeks doing time-course experiments in the lab that required sample taking every hour, with no exceptions. I knew that feeling. And I didn’t need Gussy’s warning to know that things could only go downhill from here on out. That in turn posed the question just how lucid I wanted to be a few hours from now. Or tomorrow. Or the week after.
And while realistic, that kind of fatalistic thinking was not going to get me out of here.
I still hadn’t reached a conclusion when it was time for the next food distribution cycle. I had some water left from the last bottle but made a grab for the new one immediately. No food, though. Taggard was with the guards again, immediately making me flip back into a state of high alertness. I couldn’t remember if blood sample time had been the last cycle or the one before that. Shit. My brain dearly needed some sugar to keep working. My eyes fell on the oatmeal again, and I felt saliva pool in my mouth. Not exactly impulse-driven, but some urges apparently didn’t need a direct trigger.
While I was still debating with myself, the nurses took their time with Gussy. I had to admit, I admired that even now she tried to bat them away, for all the good it did her. Her response time was abysmal, as was her coordination. She looked like she was barely hanging on by a thread, as if our conversation had leeched the very life out of her. Maybe she’d only been holding out long enough to pass the baton on to someone she thought worthy—or capable of delivering. Or maybe I was so full of shit that the only thing I felt was revulsion and disgust, directed at myself.
Once they were done with Gussy, the nurses started debating with Taggard, their discussion briefly becoming heated before it died down again. They kept gesticulating to the other cells but ignored me and the one across from me with the girl, as Gussy had confirmed my guess. Nothing good could come of that, I decided. No good for me. They then resumed their rounds but spent a lot of time with the other three women, while Taggard kept glancing my way every once in a while. I stared back, waiting. Dreading.
More debating followed. Whatever was happening, they weren’t happy about it. My eyes kept snagging over to Gussy. She’d stopped moving a while ago, her face pressed against the glass again. It was then that I realized that she wasn’t just quiet. No. She was dead, or very close to it, unless they’d shot her up with a sedative. That sounded very unlike them, considering what else they’d done to her. Why take the pain away that they’d inflicted just hours ago? Thinking along those lines, I had an idea.
“Taggard? Hey, asshole!” I called out, and when he kept ignoring me, I got up to slap my palm against the glass. That got his attention all right, although I wasn’t exactly comfortable with that. He seemed mostly annoyed at getting interrupted.
“All of a sudden you want something? Don’t get cute,” he advised, and there was that slimy grin again. “Don’t worry. We haven’t forgotten about you.”
I didn’t need to feign irritation, and it was a lot easier to concentrate on that over the fright that wanted to close down my throat.
“You should go check on her again. Something’s wrong,” I said, nodding toward Gussy’s cell.
Taggard glanced over his shoulder but that was it. “We just took her vitals. Bitch is still hanging in. Almost a miracle, if you consider it,” he mused, again taunting me.
“But maybe you should check again. She was frothing at the mouth and nose just now. Like she had trouble breathing?” I lied. Heck, if I bit it here, I wanted to make sure to take someone down with me, too. The least I owed her was to give her that chance.
As if on cue, Gussy’s shoulders gave a heave before she sagged back against the glass, her face turned conveniently toward her chest. Taggard hesitated, but then turned from me back to his people. “Go check on her again. If she’s actually biting it, I want that kid out of her before she expires. Can’t use the samples if they’re contaminated.”
That must have been the most fucked-up reasoning ever, and either he said that entirely for my benefit, to further freak me out—or it was fresh on his mind because they’d just been debating that point. Could they really be that inhumanely cruel? But why else keep pregnant women here and treat them in a way that ensured that none of them would carry to term? Because I’d needed one more reason to want to hurl.
No one looked particularly alarmed as they approached Gussy’s cell, likely because it had only been twenty minutes since they’d been in there—and what was more likely, that I offered up something useful, or tried to make a nuisance out of myself?
The glass wasn’t even halfway up yet when Gussy exploded toward the nurses, grabbing the closer one's shoulder and going straight for his neck. Her motions were disjoined and uncoordinated compared to before, but what she was lacking there she obviously made up for in strength. I’d seen that too many times not to expect it, but it still kicked my heart rate up into uncomfortable levels.
The nurse started to scream as blood spurted everywhere, a chunk from his throat missing where teeth had shredded skin, muscles, and viscera alike. The other guy tried grabbing Gussy to get her off his colleague, but that only got him a good chunk of his forearm torn out. He staggered back, clutching his injured arm to himself, finally making way for someone competent to take care of the problem, while the second nurse was busy bleeding out on the floor. I expected someone to pull a gun and shoot the zombie straight between the eyes, but instead they gave what used to be Gussy a good shove that sent the body staggering back into the cell, so that when the glass came down again, it was locked in.
“She bit me! She fucking bit me!” the injured guy was screaming, his shouts easily drowning out the hissing and grunting coming from inside the cell. Everyone seemed to be alarmed, and finally someone had the common sense to drop down next to the other nurse and press a hand onto the gaping wound, but he had already stopped kicking. Taggard was the only one not ready to take off running in circles like a headless chicken, which made me guess that he really was one of the old guard—but shit like that wasn’t what they were all used to dealing with. Too bad.
“Don’t you just hate it when that happens?” I asked, forcing levity into my voice that I absolutely didn’t feel. Taggard shot me a bemused look, but the still screaming nurse drew his attention. The guy kept staggering around, looking at his savaged arm as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “Don’t worry, you’ll stop feeling anything in a minute from now,” I called out to him, guessing that he would have remained somewhat more composed if he’d known that he couldn’t get infected.
The nurse stopped to stare at me, wide-eyed, before he came toward me, slamming both blood-stained hands against the glass right in front of my face. “You fucking cunt! This is all your fault!”
I blinked innocently at him but made no move to back away.
“So I’m the one who locked her in here and then raped her to within an inch of her life? I think not. But I’d be happy to put you out of your misery. Just open that door and consider it done. I don’t even need a weapon for someone puny like you.” Pausing, I let my grin widen. “Otherwise, settle back for the most excruciatingly painful two days of your life. Been there, done that, can’t really recommend it. Of course I had the advantage of getting up from my deathbed once more. How do you think you will do?”
Sadly, I got no response because two of the guards grabbed the nurse and pulled him away, toward where they all stayed when they weren’t harassing us. Taggard had followed our exchange with a bemused look on his face that was still there when he turned back to me.
“That was downright cruel,” he observed. “You sure you want to keep insisting that you have the moral high ground?”
Leaning close enough that my breath fogged up the glass between us, I let all emotion drain from my face until I was sure that it was just a hard, lifeless mask. “I don’t give a shit about morals.”
Taggard took it with a smile. “We’ll see about that,” he promised me before he turned back to his men. “Take that out back and burn it,” he said, nodding at the dead body on the floor. “And then prep the sample containers. It’s time we harvest them and close up this cycle.”
The guards filed out of the room, with Taggard following them. My stomach sank as I realized what his instructions must have meant. I expected some kind of reaction from the women still alive in the other cells, but deathly quiet settled over the room, only disrupted from time to time when the Gussy zombie pounded against the glass or hissed and gurgled along.
It was only when they returned, wheeling in carts holding surgical tools and shit when something occurred to me. Why had Gussy turned and not just stayed dead? And, even more importantly, why had she known that she would?
Chapter 23
I retreated back to my spot and did my very best to ignore what was going on in the room without appearing like I was fighting hard not to curl in on myself. They didn’t use any anesthetics. Why waste precious medicine? Two of the women weren’t along far enough to more than slightly show so they did the whole thing trans-vaginally. The third they cut open and didn’t bother sewing her up when they were done. She was barely twitching as they dragged her back into her cell, making me pray that she’d already died on that chair and her body hadn’t quite accepted it yet. There were no high-pitched screams, and no one took care cleaning anything. They continued to cut up their “samples” right there on one of the stainless steel carts, dumping small plastic containers into prepped boxes brimming with dry ice.
Not-watching the proceedings made an emotion well up inside of me that I’d never expected to feel, not in my entire life—gratitude. Gratitude that my child had died in what must have been a more humane way when my body had given out. And as much as all the similarities were choking me up, those ill-placed words that Sunny had offered suddenly brought me peace. My child might have ended up in a biohazard waste bag, incinerated until nothing was left rather than getting a real burial, but in the end it amounted to the same—closure. For me, for Nate, and also for that tiny soul that had never had a chance to flare. I doubted that something like this would happen to what ended up embedded in the dry ice. Conservation in formaldehyde it was, if I knew anything about scientists and coroners. To be studied, forever, by generations of curious, misguided minds, for the sake of “science.”
If I’d still been lacking any conviction that I needed to put an end to this, and if it was the last thing I ever did—this did the trick. Not that I was exactly lacking motivation, as such.
It took them forever to be done and clear out of the room, only a few blood stains remaining behind. At least one of the women turned as well, adding to the sounds already coming from across the room. It set my teeth on edge, but in many ways it was a welcome distraction. A real, visceral threat that I could focus on, that I could prepare to fend off. Something to keep my mind from skipping to other things.
There were no patrols, no guards passing through. Whether it was a trick of my mind or it actually took Taggard a small eternity—much longer than the intervals before—to return I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t have minded at all if he’d taken more time. Of course he wasn’t alone, and they didn’t even bother with the tray this time. So all I had going for me where two empty plastic bottles and what little reserves my starved body still harbored. Just perfect. The only thing I could do was try to find weaknesses where there likely weren’t any. Gussy had mentioned that the father of her child had been acting weird. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I’d singled him out from the pack. He never said anything, never reacted to stimuli, and only did what someone told him to. That still left him capable of doing massive damage to me, but it was my best bet.
Taggard stepped up to my cell while the others remained milling in the background. I debated staying where I was but then came to my feet, doing my very best to face him with ease that I really didn’t feel.
“You know why I’m here?” he asked, very calm, almost jovial.
I gave a shrug, pretending like we were just making pleasant conversation. “Thanks to you giving me ample opportunity to observe, I think I can make an educated guess.”
He nodded, pursing his lips for a second, before a chuckle broke through the facade. “Damn, but you really got a pair of massive balls. Have to hand that to you, cunt.”
I shrugged again. “So I have been told.”
A bemused look crossed his face, but there was too much taunting in his eyes to make it work. “Almost seems like you’re not even afraid. Almost. But not quite.”
I couldn’t hold back a derisive laugh. “Of course I’m afraid. I’m not stupid, just recalcitrant, stubborn, and plain ignorant enough to let me push through that paralyzing dread.” I paused, then crossed my arms over my chest, mimicking his stance. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Fear is a good thing. It keeps me alert. It keeps me ready. Did I almost shit myself right as I drove my car down into the flood plains around Har
ristown that were teeming with zombies? You bet. But that kept me focused and got me out of there alive, in one piece. Or when I was running through the dark forest at night, climbing icy cliffs, jumping from rooftops. Fear has been a constant in my life since the shit hit the fan, and it has always helped me pull through, whatever happened. And you know what? Today won’t be an exception.”
I would have gotten so disappointed had I told him that to impress him, but thankfully, I was beyond giving a shit about that.
“Big words for such a small, fragile little girl,” he jeered at me, half turning around.
“That the best you can do?” I called out, making him glance back at me. “Seriously. You’re such a one-trick pony, it’s laughable. How is raping me going to give you any power over me? Real power would be getting me to give you, freely, what you’d otherwise just tear from me that which I can’t prevent. Getting raped doesn’t make me weak. But raping me sure makes you look like a dickless, impotent little boy.” I almost laughed at how Nate’s words, spoken to me all those months ago, rolled off my tongue. I was sure that he didn’t mind me stealing from him. He might even have approved.
Something crossed Taggard’s face—could it be a hint of surprise?—and he turned to fully face me once more, making me momentarily ease up.
“My, my, you really have come a long way from being that scared, stumbling little nerd,” he said, making me guess that he’d been with Bucky Hamilton that day when Nate had brought down the building on us all. At least I really hoped that he hadn’t been on what I’d long ago come to see as “our” side. “But brave as those words may sound, they make it plain as day that you’re not speaking from experience.”
He didn’t exactly call my bluff, so I decided to try lying outright. “You so sure about that?” I asked, raising my brows at him. “If you were there that day in Lexington, maybe you remember the bruises on my cheek and those nice strangulation marks around my neck? Have you ever stopped to consider for a second why I chose to go with the people who locked me up and put me through hell that day, as the only scientist not to join you?”
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 26
