When she first heard the scratching of metal against metal, Paige sat huddled beneath a blanket, knees curled to her chest, staring as mindlessly as she could straight ahead.
She had this half of the ward and all of her misery to herself. Louise, who had recognized and respected Paige’s mood, was in the middle kitchen area, helping to prepare vegetables for lunch. The other women, who never spoke to her anyway, were on the opposite side of the ward, past the kitchen area, tending to the children.
The scratching returned. It irritated Paige, took her away from her blankness. She turned her head to locate the source of the sound.
It came from the door handle.
A sliding scratch. Almost as if someone were searching for the right key to open the door.
The scratching quit.
She was just turning her head away from the door when she caught movement. Very slight movement. The door was opening, but slowly and cautiously.
The crack widened.
Paige lost some of her apathy and frowned in concentration. Was this another cruel game from the prison keepers?
Without warning, a hand and finger appeared. The Finger beckoned her to the door, then quickly withdrew.
Paige almost laughed.
The finger appeared, beckoned her again, and disappeared again.
Paige furtively checked around her – which added to the comedy. For that reason, she felt the hint of a smile on her face as she set the blanket down and stepped into her slippers on the floor.
At the door, she heard a whispered voice.
“If it’s clear, step outside.”
The whisper gave her no clue to the speaker’s identity. That, however, didn’t matter. Her prison keepers would not stoop to these games, and the hallway was one step closer to freedom.
Her back to the door, Paige checked to make sure she wasn’t observed. Still facing the ward, she pulled the door open and stepped backward into the hallway. Only when she was completely in the hallway with the door closed did she turn to the mystery person.
“Slater!”
Her low, startled cry was involuntary for two reasons. First, she hadn’t expected to see Slater again, not when her last view of him had been in handcuffs with the steel noose around his neck.
Her second reason was the damage to his face. His nose was twisted and smeared with blood. His cheekbone dark and swollen.
Slater tried an awkward grin. “Usually I dress up for a date.”
“What? How?” Paige stopped herself. She glanced up and down the hallway. “Will they find –”
“I think we’re safe,” Slater said. “For now. I haven’t seen anyone in the hallways. At the other end is a laboratory, but if we stay away from it, we should be all right.”
Paige let out a deep breath. Still, she couldn’t Fight the urge to look for a closet, anywhere to talk where they wouldn’t be seen.
“The big one?” she asked. “He’s not looking for you?”
With his sleeve, Slater wiped at a small line of blood running down his cheek. Paige noticed the entire sleeve was soaked dark red.
“No,” he said. He grimaced. “I left him in another room. Hands and feet wired together. We should be fine.”
“But how did you manage to take him?”
He shook his head. “Let me explain later, all right?”
She nodded.
“I want out of here,” he said, “and I think I know how.”
Slater pulled a small gadget from his pocket. It resembled a television remote control. “I took it from Zwaan’s pocket. I’m pretty sure this will bring the elevator down to us.”
“We can’t go yet,” Paige said. She pointed at the door to the ward. “We need to take another woman from in there. Her husband is the –”
“County sheriff,” Slater finished.
“You spoke to her?”
“No. To the sheriff. I found him in another room. Long story, but we found out we were on the same side. He also asked about her, said he knew she’d been taken.”
“He’s here?”
Slater nodded.
“Louise didn’t know,” Paige said. “She kept praying he’d find us.
“He’s here,” Slater repeated. “Along with the professor.” He took a hesitant half step.
“Will you come with me?” he asked. “I could use your help.”
She appreciated that he hadn’t taken her by the elbow to lead her. And she appreciated that he hadn’t told her to follow.
She moved to his side. He clutched at her shoulder as he took his next step.
“Sorry,” he said. “My foot’s had better days.”
That’s when she saw his foot was bare, the toes bloody and swollen like obscene sausages. She glanced into his eyes to see if he would explain, and she saw his forehead, untouched by ugly bruises, was bone white and popping with sweat.
He didn’t explain.
It made her want to trust him, but she couldn’t shake what she knew about the attempted murder and his leaving his wife.
They moved down the hallway in tandem, with him leaning on her as he hobbled.
“I was looking for you,” he explained, “when I found the professor and the sheriff. They’re chained to the wall. We need to find something to bust them loose. Once we get them and the sheriff’s wife and the boys...”
“The boys are in a ward,” Paige said.
“Other boys too?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. One place for babies. One for children.”
“Guards inside?”
“No,” Paige said.
“Good,” he grunted as they made slow progress. She couldn’t tell if it was a grunt of pain or of satisfaction. “Let’s check some more rooms. To free Austad and the sheriff we need pliers, an ax Anything to remove bolts or cut through steel wire.”
“You’re not afraid we’ll get caught?”
“Definitely. I keep expecting soldiers behind every door I open. But this floor is a ghost town.” He managed a chuckle. “Plus I took my gun back from the big –”
He stumbled and she had to take his full weight to keep him from falling.
“Put your arm over my shoulder,” she said.
“Notice I kept the beat-up side of my face away from you,” Slater said. “This way you can admire my better profile.”
“With lines like that, I imagine you’re fighting off women all the time.”
“How do you think my face got hurt in the first place?”
It took another twenty slow, halting steps to reach the next door.
Slater fumbled with the keys in his right hand. “Another donation from the pockets of the big guy,” he explained. “Only he wasn’t awake to accept my thanks.”
Paige wondered exactly what had happened but didn’t ask.
Slater was already cautiously trying a key in the lock. It took four or five tries until he finally unlocked the door.
He opened this one the same manner as he’d opened the door to the ward. No light greeted them as the crack between door and door frame widened.
“No people,” he whispered. “I keep hoping I’ll run into a janitor’s closet or something like that. Maybe we’ll get lucky with this one.”
He reached inside the door and felt around for a light switch.
Paige tensed. People or no, she didn’t feel comfortable with this search of the unknown.
With a click, light flooded the room.
It took her several moments to absorb what she saw.
“The jars!” she gasped and turned her head away from Slater and retched.
The clear glass jars were arranged in ascending size on dozens of shelves. The smallest were labeled vials; the largest, at the far end of the room, were too large for shelves. Almost as big as water barrels, more than a dozen jars rested on the floor, the mouths of the jars almost as wide as the jars themselves.
Each was made of clear glass and filled with clear liquid. The effect, especially with the light passing through the cur
ves of the larger jars, was to magnify the contents of each jar, much as thick lenses in a pair of glasses will present bulging eyes to the world.
And it was such eyes in each jar that drew Slater.
For a moment, he was oblivious to the throbbing pain of his toes, to the feeling of cold floor beneath his bare foot. He forgot the grating pain of a cheekbone probably broken, forgot the urgency to escape. Because the eyes drew him in the same way as the cold, winding slither of a snake draws a chill of total, fascinated attention.
The eyes belonged to agonized faces that screamed silently from the liquid that preserved the motionless, suspended bodies.
“My dear God,” Paige whispered. She said it as a beseeching prayer. For her. For the children in each of the jars. Children, stooped so that their knees pushed against their chests, large enough to fill the huge barrel jars with their contorted limbs. Children no more than toddlers in medium jars. Babies in smaller jars. Children in various stages of fetal development in the tiny jars closest to the door.
Slater became aware of her hold on his arm. “Step outside,” he said. “Step outside and wait. If you see anyone, knock twice.”
She didn’t move, frozen by horror. He gently pushed her toward the open door. Slater did not want to remain in the room, but he needed to understand its purpose, if only to comprehend what might be at the root of this demented evil.
She was beginning to shake as he left her.
Slater fought nausea and forced himself to walk to the far end of the room. He breathed shallowly and rapidly, trying to maintain his composure.
In a college biology laboratory, he’d seen jars of preserved specimens. Mice, cats, monkeys. The animals, fur matted and eyes squinted shut, appeared oblivious to death. In a suspended peace. Dead to injected poison before reaching their transparent tombs.
These faces had mouths open, expressions contorted as if they hadn’t been granted the mercy of quick death. He told himself it was an illusion that they appeared to be trying to claw their way out of their eternal prisons. Only because these were human specimens, he forcefully resolved, was he letting his imagination run wild.
Ignore them, he commanded himself. Check the labels. What did the labels read?
He kneeled to examine the sparse, typewritten notations on the square white label of the jar in front of him. There were only two lines, centered neatly. The top line gave a number. The bottom line a date.
On one knee, and against his will, he raised his eyes to the boy within.
Slater heard a cry of surprise. Brief, high, keening. His.
The boy’s face, his hair floating upward, was identical to the triplets. And a tattoo was plain across this boy’s forehead.
Number 73. Matches the number on the label.
Slater bit his knuckle to regain his composure. He stood, walked down the line of jars on the shelf, hardly daring to look. Each brief glance confirmed the worst.
As the jars grew smaller, and so the boys inside, the face of each boy became a miniaturized version of the boy before him.
Numbered boys, identical to each other, killed at different stages of growth.
In silence, Slater began to cry when he reached the toddlers. Perfectly formed. Tiny fingernails on hands curled in futility. Ears and noses delicately sculpted to perfection. The open screaming mouths showed first teeth jutting through small gums. Each jar with a cold, heartless label.
Slater would have stopped there; he could not stomach an examination of the series of fetuses that progressed to a newborn baby, his umbilical cord still in place. But something about one fetus caught his eye.
Number 27. Slater was far from expert on the subject, but could guess this fetus to be halfway through its term. What caught his eye was the hands of the fetus. All three of them. The left arm completely normal. The right arm’s wrist ended in two hands.
Slater was too stunned to react. He stared at the fetus, trying to accept what he saw. He could not.
He scanned the jars.
Number 25 – and he hated himself for thinking of them as numbers – had a noseless face. Another had legs webbed together.
Slater tore his gaze away from the jars. His tears had stopped now. Cold, implacable rage filled him.
Slater began to think with his head instead of with his heart.
He moved in awkward hops to return to the barrel-sized jars. He needed a label but could not bear to take one from a smaller jar. If this was part of science, the label would correspond to notes somewhere. Whoever carried those notes would answer for this. On earth and in hell.
Slater kept his weight off his broken toes and kneeled again. He began to peel a corner of the label and noticed a streak of dullness on the side of the jar. He shifted to examine the streak at a different angle. With the new perspective, he saw the streak to be the residue of dried liquid.
It puzzled him.
He noticed several other streaks, as if tears had run down the jar the same way tears had run unchecked down his face.
Slater couldn’t help his nature. Curiosity always made him question cause-and-effect, What could have led to the rivulets?
The boy’s eyes gazed sightlessly at Slater.
Then Slater understood.
Overflow. The liquid inside had overflown the jar.
But why would someone so neat and precise as to order the jars in ascending size be so sloppy in adding the preservative liquid inside the jars?
Slater’s rage grew with his horror.
The open eyes, the faces contorted by screams, the clawing hands. They weren’t illusion.
Slater buried his face in his hands as the horror of each boy's death washed over him. When he raised his head again, he felt the strength of the rage within him overcome his pain.
These boys, forever blind in the clarity of their prisons, couldn’t see him now. The last sight each boy had registered would have been the face of whoever forced them inside. He vowed the killer would be brought to light for other eyes, living eyes, to bear witness to the punishment paid for these dead boys.
For the liquid had not been added to the jars after the boys. No. The jars had already been filled, then the boys pushed inside. Alive. Head pushed under, liquid gushing over, and the lid of the jar screwed into place.
***
“We leave all of this the way we found it,” Slater told Paige. He hadn’t winced during his hobbled walk to meet her in the hallway. She knew the pain should have staggered him. It hadn’t. “We break out quietly. Then send the television crews back. Today. Government or not, this will end.”
His face blazed with determined anger. Paige was glad it wasn’t directed at her.
She also noticed he didn’t need her for support as they moved down the hallway. Nor did he cautiously open each new door. Almost as if he welcomed the possibility of a fight.
They tried five more doors. Ironically, when they found what they needed, it wasn’t locked inside a room. It hung near the end of the hallway behind a sheet of glass, partially hidden by a coiled length of fire hose. A fire ax.
Slater grabbed the ax.
“Come meet Del,” he said. He saw the puzzlement on her face. “Louise’s husband. You’ll be glad he’s on our side.”
***
All four of them were going back to the ward when Zwaan surprised them. He stepped from a doorway and grinned at them. The massive scar on his face twisted the grin horribly.
Paige and Slater stopped midstep. Behind them, Ben Austad and Del Silverton weren’t completely free of the steel cable that had bound them to their beds. With massive swings of the ax, Slater had only been able to sever the centers of their hobbles. Pieces of cable, ends glinting silver from the ax cuts, still dangled from their wrists and ankles.
Del, carrying the fire ax, reacted instantly. He pushed between Paige and Slater.
“Drop the ax,” Zwaan rasped. His horrible grin remained in place.
“Drop dead,” Del told him. “And if you need help, I’ll be g
lad to assist.”
Del hefted the ax and shifted forward only a couple of inches. Armed or not, he knew he needed to respect Zwaan’s capabilities.
“You will do as he says,” a voice with a curious lilt said from behind the group. “Drop the ax, or I shoot the woman.”
Del didn’t take his eyes off Zwaan. “Slater?” Del asked.
“It’s not a bluff,” Slater replied. “She’s got a gun.”
Del dropped the ax at his own feet.
“She’s from the ward,” Paige added bitterly. “Her name is Velma. She must have noticed I was gone.”
“Of course,” Velma said. “It’s so much easier to watch the prisoners when they do not realize the jailer is among them. Or when they think the jailer is stupid, nice. It gave me great joy to release my friend from his bonds.”
Slater had turned his back on Del and Zwaan and, facing Velma, moved between her and Paige. Velma brought her gun up and pointed it steadily at Slater’s forehead.
“It matters little to me whether I shoot you or the woman,” Velma said.
“I’d rather it was me,” Slater said as he backed into Paige’s stomach, keeping his hands high. Paige couldn’t believe Slater. Was he making a move on her, pressing against her so firmly?
“Just you and me,” Del was saying to Zwaan at the other end of the group. “How about it, freak?”
“I’d like that, even with only one hand,” Zwaan said. “You are just big enough to make it satisfying.”
Slater continued to press back against Paige. Then she felt it. A hard lump against her stomach. It finally clicked. He’d tucked the pistol in the back of his pants.
Velma’s gun hadn’t wavered.
“However,” Zwaan said to Del. “I’ll take my satisfaction by watching the doctor remove your organs. Lie on the floor and put your hands behind your back.”
Zwaan raised his voice, “Professor, find the gun in Slater’s pockets. Then remove it slowly. Velma, if either man makes a false move, shoot.”
He focused on Del. “Lie down. If you don’t, Velma pulls the trigger.”
Austad stepped with reluctance toward Slater. He reached out to pat his front pockets.
Paige, hardly believing this was happening, moved her hand in front of her and furtively plucked the pistol from Slater’s belt. The grip was in her palm and she was asking herself how she could actually shoot another human being, when Zwaan noticed the movement of her arm.
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