by Leah Rhyne
We stood in near pitch-darkness, with only the faint light of a computer screen illuminating the room at all. In the disorienting mix of darkness and green-tinted light, it was harder to match the room to the foggy memory of my awakening, but I knew I was in the right place. Microscopic hairs on the back of my neck jerked to attention.
Lucy took a few steps forward. “Maybe there’s a light.”
“Wait, no,” I started to say, but had barely formed the “w” with my dry, brittle lips before I heard a crash. The faint shadow of Lucy, outlined against the computer screen, tumbled head over heels to the ground.
Her scream built slowly at first, but once begun it rose steadily into a shrill, panicky shriek. I ran with my hand trailing down the wall, fumbling and stumbling, searching for a light switch. I found one and flipped it up.
Light flooded the room from circular, stainless steel fixtures hanging on the ceiling. It reflected off metal tables, bouncing off cabinets lining the far wall. Bu the light was cruel, forming multiple spotlights that rained down upon bodies, prostrate on the tabletops. They were girls. Dead-looking girls, each in their late teens, early twenties. Each wore like a badge of honor a mangled, stapled incision running down her entire abdomen. Each looked exactly like I must have looked when I awakened on the lone, empty table.
Lucy lay on the ground beside an upturned table, struggling beneath the weight of another girl’s body. It was supple, arms and legs bending and wrapping around Lucy’s inert figure as she fought and cried and wailed in terror. The table, heavy and metal, pinned them both to the ground.
“Jo! Help me! Please, Jo, get it off! Get it off!”
I rushed to her, but my knees gave way beneath me and I fell to the floor beside them. Lucy stared at me, tears in her eyes. “Please, help.” She sounded meek, defeated. I didn’t blame her. She’d just lost a wrestling match with a cadaver. “Please. I think she’s dead.”
Grunting with effort, I pulled myself back to my feet and grasped Lucy’s arms. I pulled, and I tugged, but she was stuck. My mind raced, and my eyes darkened with fear. The light in the room faded. I couldn’t see. My hands found the table’s leg, and my fingers closed around the smooth, cold, metal. I pulled. The table moved, ever so slightly. I pulled again.
The table and I tumbled back, crashing into the wall, where I landed in a heap of arms and legs bent at impossible angles. I sat in silence as the room came back into focus. Two feet away from me sat Lucy. She was free.
“Thanks,” she said, panting heavily. She disentangled herself from the dead girl’s limbs.
“Any time.”
“You okay?”
I nodded, and then leaned forward to lay my cracked cheek against her sweat-damped hair. “Yeah. Are you?”
“Uh-huh. I might have broken my ankle, though. I’m not sure. The table landed on it.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah. Sucks.”
“Well, the good news is,” I said, shrugging, “we know nobody’s here. We made enough noise to even wake the dead, if they were ready to be awoken.”
Lucy eyed the body beside here. “That’s not funny, Jo.”
“Yeah. I know.”
We sat in silence for another minute. Lucy pulled herself out of my grasp to lean against the wall beside me instead. She looked around the room, taking her time to linger over each table and the body atop it. One hand slid up to cover her mouth. Finally, she turned to me with tears in her eyes. “You know, you told me. You told me about this place, but I didn’t believe you. How could I? This is…unbelievable.”
I nodded again. “I know.”
“Who are they all? Where are they from?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? College girls, like me? Townies? No way are they all local though. We’d have heard if this many local girls were missing.”
“What if no one knows they’re missing? I didn’t know you were missing.” She took my hand in hers. “I’m still so sorry about that.”
“Quit apologizing.” I glanced around me, and quickly counted the cabinets against the wall. “There are twenty-four drawers. We should see if they’re full.”
Lucy struggled upright, balancing against the wall and favoring her right foot. I reached out an arm and pulled her to me. Leaning against each other we hobbled to the cabinets, taking care not to bump any of the bodies on the metal beds. Each was plugged into a socket in the floor, and their cords threatened to trip us up with every step. With time and extra care, we made it to the wall of cabinets unscathed.
The wall itself was intimidating. Twenty-four bodies might lie in these drawers, I thought. Twenty-four more girls. Lucy gave me a look, and I lifted an arm. I yanked on a cabinet handle, but it resisted. It was locked. Lucy tried a different one. Locked.
“I want to know what’s in there.”
“More bodies, I’m sure,” said Lucy. Then, as if having an epiphany, her eyes lit up. “This is bad,” she said. “No one here is going to help you.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I think I agree now. We should leave.”
The wind howled outside the cabin, and then, within, we heard a loud, echoing click. The hair on my arms rose as a surge of electricity crackled around me. I rushed to the door on unstable legs and reached out for the doorknob. Sparks crackled as my fingertips approached the metal knob. I ignored them, and grasped and turned.
For the first time in our surprisingly odd relationship, the doorknob was locked. I tried again, twisting, rattling, pulling, and shaking it in desperation. It wouldn’t budge.
I turned to Lucy. “We…can’t…”
To my surprise, she only shrugged. “We couldn’t leave yet anyway,” she said. She pulled out her cell phone. “We need evidence. We need Ad…Officer Strong.”
“Yes, but now we really can’t leave. Like, physically cannot leave.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find a way. We’re the good guys, and the good guys always win in the end.”
I wasn’t so sure, but I had no choice. I tried to believe.
“Do you have a signal?” I asked, pointing at her phone.
“No, but I’m a good photographer, aren’t I?” Lucy walked to the body on the ground and knelt beside it. She reached out a hand and touched the girl’s chin, pointing the face toward her. “She’s warm,” she said. “Not cold like you.” As I watched from my place against the cabinets, she snapped a picture with her phone.
Then she walked to the next girl, still on the table, and snapped another picture. Then to the next girl, and the next.
“Brilliant,” I said.
“I can send these to Adam when we get out of here. I mean…Officer Strong. Whatever. Maybe it’ll help let these girls’ families know what happened to them. I don’t think they’re going to make it home.”
I nodded, and didn’t point out: I probably wasn’t going to make it home, either. No one was going to save me, at least not in this godforsaken laboratory. My quest for self-preservation was falling apart around my ears…and including my ears. I reached up and sure enough, one was gone.
Oh well. Just one more thing to fix.
But maybe, just maybe, I could help make things right before it was my time to go. “Yes. Let’s help them.”
We walked from girl to girl. I adjusted the stainless steel lamps hanging over each body while Lucy took their pictures. There were twelve girls in all, including the one who’d fallen. All were silent, immobile, and all were plugged into the electrical sockets in the floor beneath them. We had no way of knowing if any of them would wake up like I did, but it didn’t look likely. According to Lucy, the smell in the room was overwhelmingly of death and decay, and more than once she dry-heaved over a rusted trashcan.
I, of course, couldn’t smell a thing.
Each girl was lovely in her immobility, like Snow White in her glass coffin, awaiting her prince. There was a brunette with pale skin, dots of pink just barely marking her cheek with a slight sign of life. A redhead with freckles covering the whole of her fa
ce. Several blondes with orange-tan skin. Not one was overweight, not one was anything less than beautiful.
I thought of myself prior to my own transformation into a half-dead monster-robot-cyborg-thing, and I realized exactly how beautiful I had once been. Young, vibrant, imperfect for sure, but maybe all the more beautiful for my imperfections. It takes dying, or something close to it, to get a teenage girl to realize her own beauty, I guess. At least, it did for me.
I turned to Lucy, so focused on getting the pictures of the girls just right, and took note of how beautiful she was, as well. We’d often been stopped while walking on campus by boys who would stare into her blue-green eyes and say nothing more than a vague hello.
“You’re not safe here,” I said, looking around the room. “You’re a target.”
“I know.”
“Let’s go! Find some other way out.”
“Not yet. I’m not finished.”
“Lucy,” I said, forcing a useless sigh. “It’s too late for me now. Seeing all this? It lets me know that. So now I have one job.” I glanced around the room, at the lifeless girls on the tables. “I have to save you. But I can’t do that while we’re here.”
“You know…” Lucy said.
I never got a chance to find out what I probably didn’t know, though, because right at that moment, a bigger, more tremendous power surge ripped through the room. Light bulbs burst in their stainless steel cylinders. The computer in the corner buzzed and beeped in an alarming way. I was almost blinded by the light that flooded the room, and Lucy dropped to the floor, shielding her eyes and covering her head. Then once again static crackled around us, as loud as any thunder in a summer storm.
Too bad this thunder came in the dead of winter.
It ended almost as soon as it started, and we lifted our heads.
“Goddammit!” Lucy said. “This place is a funhouse of terror, isn’t it?” She pulled herself to her feet, slowly and carefully, gripping the nearest table for leverage, her phone still clutched tightly in her other hand.
“What’s next?” I asked, my voice shaky and weak.
As if in answer to my question, the lights went out, and Lucy and I were once again plunged into pitch-black. This time, even the computer screen went dark. We screamed again.
We couldn’t help it. In the darkness, surrounded by death, we screamed like helpless, little girls. I hated it.
Beside me, something moved. “That you, Luce?” I spoke into the darkness, loud enough that she heard me and ceased shrieking.
Her voice came from afar. Neither of us had kept still during our screaming; we’d fumbled around, trying to find each other, but failed. “No, I’m over here, next to the wall.” There was a dull thud. “What was that?”
I knew. I hated that I knew, but I did. “The girls. They’re waking up. The power surge woke them.” I sounded freakishly calm, even to myself. But I was surrounded by girls like me, and they were waking up. I could help them.
“Jo! Something’s touching me! Jo! It’s cold!”
“It’s okay, Luce. It’s just the girls.” I looked around me, and even in the darkness I could see their unsteady shapes, rising from their tables. My eyes were adjusting rapidly to the lack of light, and I found if I squinted just so, I could see pretty well. “Girls, it’s okay. Lucy, it’s okay. Everyone, we’re going to be okay.” I remembered how scared I’d been when I’d awoken. “I’m here. I’m Jo. I’m just like you, and I can help you.”
From around me came the rustling and banging of stiff, uncoordinated bodies sitting up and sliding off tables. There were crashes as some rolled and fell to the floor. Just like I had. And still I stood, motionless, speaking, watching. “I’m here to help. You’re going to be fine.” I spoke with a confidence I didn’t know I possessed.
I felt a hand on my arm. A girl stood beside me, unsteady and unsure. She was one of the blondes, and even in the pallor of her partial death, even in the darkness, she was beautiful. Her skin was supple, where mine was taut and gray. She reached with her other hand and held my arm in both of hers.
“Lucy,” I whispered. “Luce, come over here.”
“I can’t,” she whispered loudly. “I think I’m stuck. I can’t see you. Where are you?” She’d moved further down the wall, toward a corner, clearly not feeling the kinship that I felt with the girls. There were five of them between us.
I covered the hands on my arm with my own, and squeezed. “I know you’re scared,” I said to the girl attached to the hands. “But I’m here. It’s okay.”
Around us, the girls stumbled as they walked. They seemed to be targeting Lucy and me, which made sense. They were scared. They needed comfort. Then one let out a moan, and I smiled, remembering my own experiences in relearning speech.
“It’s okay,” I said to her. “Go ahead and moan if you need to. You’ll figure out how to make words again in a minute. Keep practicing.”
Around me, other girls took up the moaning. The sounds were guttural, primitive, and I wondered: Did I sound that bad?
“Jo?” Lucy’s voice cut through the moans, though it was meek, shaking. She was terrified.
“Calm down, Lucy. We’re going to help these girls, aren’t we?” I squeezed the hands on my arm again, patting them as comfortingly as I could.
The hands on my arm began to squeeze. The blonde girl attached to them began to moan, quietly at first, and then louder, her voice blending with those already filling the room. She squeezed harder.
With horror, but without pain, I felt the fingers penetrate the flesh on my arm, reaching through until they hit bone. I felt the brittle bone break.
“Stop,” I said. “Don’t do that!” I tried then to pull her hands from my arm. I couldn’t. The girl moaned again.
It sounded different, though, than I remembered my own voice sounding when I first tried to speak. These moans were more animal, less human. Feral. Vicious.
And suddenly, I was scared. Really, truly, indescribably terrified.
Goo oozed from the new lacerations in my arm, clinging to the fingers of the girl who held me in her vise-like grip. I was surprised; really, I thought I was all dried out by then. Fluid exiting my wounds was as baffling as the fact that the girl was trying to hurt me. My mouth opened, forming a silent O as I stared at her.
The other girls took up the moans. Animalistic, sub-human moans. The guttural sounds told me these girls weren’t waking up like I did. They were waking up as something else.
Lucy screamed. Louder than before, and more shrill. It cut through me like a warm knife through butter.
She lingered in the corner, surrounded by four girls, each shuffling toward her. She stood propped against the wall, holding out one hand like a football player stiff-arming an opponent.
A girl leaned in toward Lucy, her mouth open wide. In the dark, her teeth glistened. They looked sharp. Did they sharpen her teeth? To points?
They did. Lucy screamed again.
The girl gripping my arm leaned toward me in the same way. Mouth open, ready to bite.
“Oh, hell no,” I said. “I’m nobody’s breakfast.”
I reached up and shoved my free hand into her gaping mouth, as far back as I could push it. She clamped down on my wrist, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t feel anything. So I kept on pushing my arm into her mouth until my fist reached the back of her throat.
I had no idea if the girl could feel anything, but she had a gag reflex.
She yanked her head away and let go of my arm, reeling back until she stumbled, cracked her head against one of the tables, and fell to the ground. She didn’t get up. I was free.
“I’m coming, Luce!” I shouted.
I ran, as best as my battered legs could, to my best friend. The girls between us were all focused on Lucy, readying themselves for an attack. They sniffed, they leaned in, they moaned, and she screamed.
I dropped one shoulder and slammed into the first girl. Domino-style, she fell into another, who took out another, unti
l there was just one girl in my way. She was the closest. She moaned, and lunged.
Lucy dropped to the ground, and the girl crashed into the wall. I slammed into her from behind, and we both fell to the side. She tried to bite me, but I shoved her aside, pushing her halfway across the room as if she weighed nothing more than a notebook.
“You all right, Luce?” I said. She lay on the ground beside me, trembling and coughing.
“Yeah,” she said. “How’d you do that?”
“Don’t know.”
Adrenaline? I thought, forgetting that I probably had none. I shrugged, then pulled myself to standing and helped Lucy up. Around us, the girls regrouped for another attack. “We need to get out of here.”
“You think?”
I slid an arm under hers, and she leaned on me. Together, we walked about as well as the freshly awoken monster girls. Which is to say, we were clumsy. At best.
But we had a bit more determination than the others as they continued their pursuit. I’d knocked many to the ground, and some were still too clumsy and disoriented to get up. They created numerous speed bumps, tripping up those girls who remained on their feet.
We also had a head start, heading away from the locked front door toward another door in the back of the room. We had no idea where it would lead, but I hoped it would be better than facing more robot-monster-girls.
Together, Lucy and I half-hopped, half-limped to the other door. We reached it with barely any wiggle room between us and the slobbering, drooling group of hungry girls.
The steps behind the door went down. Way down. They were steep, and lit by fluorescent lights on the slanted ceiling. But those lights flickered dangerously, as if they wouldn’t remain lit for long.
Every so often, the single, solitary door standing between us and the girls upstairs rattled and shook. They were coming for us, and there was no lock. The door never opened, though.
