by Holly Hook
The ride took about thirty minutes. The driver had skill, and I couldn't see them. This ATC van didn't have a window that let me see up front. They had me in a box. Even criminals riding in the back of police cars didn't get treated like this. The ATC was still sticking with some of its old ways.
The sounds of the traffic were my only companions. The two agents up front didn't speak to each other. Maybe that was procedure. We got in the expressway and sped up. Then we drove out of the city and into thinning traffic. The facility was north of the city on the map. We were heading in that direction, then. At last, when I was getting uncomfortable with my hands behind my back, we got off on an exit. Outside, birds chirped. The country.
The van made a right at the end of the ramp, drove down three more country roads, and slowed. By then, I smelled nothing but forest and knew we were close. Wind blew through trees. More birds squawked at each other. Some took off into flight as the van approached.
Outside, faint electricity hummed. It was the fence or the motion detectors. The sound came from all directions as we drove through thick trees and closer to where the gate must be. Faint voices of guards came next as the humming got louder. Normals were lucky they didn't have to hear the annoying sound all day long.
Footsteps followed as guards parted for the van. The humming reminded me of the electrified gate in the bunker we'd escaped. It must be the same type.
"State your business," a guard said to the driver.
Now he spoke. "We have a new patient."
"ID, please."
The driver and the passenger both shuffled through their pockets. The other guards—there were a dozen of them after all—positioned themselves around the van with guns or tasers drawn. They took no chances. I imagined they searched the trunks of anyone wanting to come in and visit imprisoned family members and did background checks, too.
I listened to the ID checking. The wind blew through what sounded like a tall fence, one that must tower at least fifteen feet. My mind was getting better at putting sounds together and painting pictures. It was almost like having sonar. I even heard the air blowing over a low, long building. I'd come to the right place.
Or the wrong place.
After the guards were satisfied, they opened the gate by pressing buttons. I couldn't tell which combination they used or whether it was even a number pad--my senses weren't that good—but I could tell they used four different buttons. The van lurched forward, and we left the electrified fence behind.
Instead of stopping at the front entrance, the driver took me around to the back. I could tell by the way the van turned. They must unload new patients there. That was the word, right?
For the first time, real terror gripped me. Anything could happen in there. Anything.
The van backed up to what must be doors. The area outside was concrete. It gave off a distinctive faint crunch as tires rolled over it. A fence in the back also hummed. It surrounded the facility. That just made sense.
The van backed into some open double doors with precision. The agents must have trained for this, too. Once the beeping stopped, I listened as the motor cut off.
The place had hospital sounds. I hated hospitals. Machines beeped and hissed. People wrote on clipboards and typed. There was actual medical stuff going on here. Richard Grimes had brought his medical experience to the table and turned this place into a real clinic. I wasn't sure how to feel about that. What if these people could remove my abilities and make me weaker? I hadn't thought of that until now.
Somewhere deep within the building, somebody screamed in pain.
And over that, a harsh woman told the victim to just breathe. It would be over soon. The screams continued and then a curtain drew shut. Silence. Then a cart rolled down a hallway, wheels squeaking.
The news wasn't good so far.
The driver radioed for more guards. More radios went off inside the building. Feet trampled towards me. I counted five sets of legs, all strong and moving with precision. They were human. The smell of crappy cafeteria food wafted into the van right before both double doors came open.
I snapped my gaze from the floor and to the guards. There were four men and one woman, and two of them aimed tasers at me.
"Please rise," the woman said. "Welcome to the Richard Grimes Abnormal Treatment Center. We will attempt to make you more Normal so you can one day re-join society and live a Normal life. Follow us and we'll get you settled in."
I waited for the scream to return, but it didn't. What were they doing that made people do that? Who, and what, was the screamer?
Standing, I tried to see what was beyond the guards. Normal reaction, right? The woman waved me out of the van and I hesitated, and not just because I didn't want to look too eager. Then I lowered my head and jumped off the van. "Can you fix me?" I asked. "Is it going to hurt?"
The woman hesitated in a way I didn't like. "We will try, hon."
Two of the guards took my arms. These were more gentle than the others. They were letting their guard down. Good. That gave me a chance. I tried to match up this long, plain hallway with the map I'd seen, but it hadn't included the loading area. There was supposed to be a cafeteria like in a hospital and some small visiting rooms. Visitors weren't allowed to see patients anywhere other than those, according to the brochure.
Sounds came from everywhere. Beeps, shuffles, squeaks, and all other noises that had to do with scary medical stuff. It would take time for me to sort everything out and get a good sense of the place. I smelled food getting cooked from the cafeteria which wafted from a narrow corridor on my left. A kitchen. Ahead, some hospital-like double doors waited. Beyond them would be the horror show.
The female guard pressed a button on the wall which opened them. The hallway continued, but this one was lined with rooms that all had steel doors. Patient rooms. Each one had a number hanging above. I counted a dozen doors in this hallway alone, with even more carts between them. A few Normal doctors leaned over charts and discussed a patient's levels of the lycanthropy virus.
"...levels haven't yet declined after Week One of the diet," one said.
"It might take time and decline after the full moon if we hold the shift back."
"Then let's test again after that and decide on further treatment."
My thoughts turned to George, but he hadn't been here for a week. That didn't make me feel any better though. George would get subjected to this diet that wouldn't work. The guy would go nuts eating nothing but salads each time. It would make his condition worse.
And I'd seen him during the full moon, his shift suppressed by silver chains. It hadn't been a pleasant experience for him. I had the sense that the ATC used them, too.
I sniffed, keeping it quiet. I couldn't smell any vampires as they had no scent, but I smelled a few werewolves. The doggy smell hung in the air, mixing in with that of the Normals. There didn't seem to be that many of them, and I didn't smell any Mages, who were humans who carried exotic scents. The haul seemed to be the vampires Bathory had outed to this place.
A groan came from inside one room. It was full of weakness and despair.
The ATC was sucking the life out of the patients. They'd be easy for Bathory to deal with once she hatched her plan to take this over. The agents must not understand they were playing into her hands.
But one thing was unanswered. How had Bathory stolen the blood from the Underground with no one noticing? She had snatched some vampires, too, and sold them out to the ATC. There was no way they'd all be careless enough to get caught on their own.
Maybe I could uncover that if I could talk to other patients.
I studied the doors and turned my attention to my hearing since all werewolves smelled the same. I guessed that three inhabited this place. The ATC hadn't had time to round too many people up yet. But I could hear patients shifting behind steel doors and the groans of a man—vampire—behind another. Televisions droned out boring talk shows and soap operas in some rooms.
Richard Gr
imes was trying to make us Normal.
Why did he think he would succeed?
I searched for the guy just to make sure he wasn't here. I doubted he'd step into this place. He kept his risks minimal. Good. If he recognized me, the whole plan was out of the water.
"Keep walking," an agent ordered.
More hallways branched off from this one, all filled with doors. The doggy smell wafted from one on the left. A sign above the corridor read LYCANTHROPY WING and had an arrow telling people where to go, along with room numbers. Even from the corner of my vision, I could read them. ROOMS 100-125.
And three of the doors had sleeves with paper charts inside.
I knew where George was. I had accomplished the first task.
And I also knew where all the captured vampires were. They were all around me, scattered in these rooms and behind steel doors.
Cameras hummed as we passed under them. I counted four black orbs that hung from the ceiling in this corridor. The orbs kept the cameras from view, but I could see the devices rotating inside of them, taking in the entire hallway.
All the cameras' movements matched up.
If I needed to run, I might dodge the camera views if I timed it right. I still moved faster than anyone here. Right?
It looked as if they were taking me past all these rooms and to another set of double doors at the end of the hall. I didn't like that because the screams had come from there.
I tensed and tried to slow my feet. "What will happen?" I asked.
"Evaluation," the woman said. "All patients get one when they get here. Have you ever gone to the hospital? This is similar."
"I got my tonsils out when I was five," I lied. That was common enough, wasn't it? I'd had them removed at seven. Turning hadn't brought them back.
The woman pushed open the second set of doors. It was quieter here except for a pair of large wheels squeaking. I imagined a wheelchair.
And I wasn't wrong about that, either. A large metal door slid open ahead, and a doctor in a white coat—a stern woman with a tight braid—wheeled her patient through it.
My eyes must have popped open all the way, because it was Trish, the Victorian era physician who had Turned over a hundred years ago and lived in the Underground ever since. Instead of her white lab coat, she wore a crappy hospital johnny and had a bracelet strapped onto her wrist. Bags hung under her reddish eyes which betrayed her hunger. Thick cuffs kept her wrists bound to the handles of the wheelchair. My stomach turned for her.
Trish looked up and met my gaze.
"Ja--" she started.
I shook my head. Trish was still sharp, even in her weakened state, because she went quiet for a moment before asking the guards, "Just where are you thinking of taking that girl?"
"Patricia," the female guard said as if addressing a child. "You know all of you are here for your own good."
Trish was a tough as I remembered. "If your boss thinks so, fine." The doctor wheeled her past. "I can't believe you think these treatments will work without clinical trials. And the patient privacy violations around here!"
I didn't dare look back at Trish as the doctor wheeled her away. At least she was alive and Bathory hadn't attacked yet. With no more access to dragon blood, she wouldn't be able to control the weather. That meant she wouldn't attack until nighttime, right? And it might not be tonight. She would have to plan. Maybe, if we got lucky, losing her supply of dragon blood had stopped her.
Yeah, right.
I hadn't Turned long ago, but spending time around Alyssa and Xavier told me that things didn't work out too often.
I could hear Trish's wheelchair take the right hallway behind me. The doctor rolled her halfway down that hall and unlocked a door. The doctor wheeled her inside, turned on the TV to another soap opera, exited (leaving Trish strapped into the chair) and closed the door.
Normals didn't want to risk getting attacked by starving vampires.
The guards led me into a room with steel double doors. Inside was something that looked like a dentist's chair with metal shackles for ankles and wrists. It took everything I had to let them strap me into that thing. I had turned myself in. That was what I was supposed to do. Seeking a cure meant dealing with whatever treatment they threw at me.
A part of me wanted it. At least then, I wouldn't have to worry about hiding from my mom anymore.
"Is this going to hurt?" I asked, sounding timid. I had always hated medical settings, which was the reason I didn't want to be a pharmacist or go anywhere near anything related. Not only did it make me think of how Mom spent most of her life at work, it made me think of her expectations for me. And something about the plain walls and the harsh lights reminded me of a horror movie. The decor was never pleasant.
"Only a little," the female guard told me. "The doctors will be in soon. Sit tight."
I tensed as the guards left me in that room, strapped to the chair. I clawed at the leather of the seat (or whatever material it was) as I waited. A bigger part of me wanted to test whether I could break the metal shackles that kept my arms and legs on the chair. Why did they have to make this look like a dentist chair? That alone ratcheted up the tension level. The light hanging right above my head hurt.
I waited for a full thirty minutes, dwelling on what the doctors would do to test me. That made it worse. The door opened and two doctors stepped in, both dressed in lab coats. There was one man and one woman, and both were around middle-age and carried a smug look of someone who thought they knew everything. The ATC wouldn't hire doctors who tried to use logic. They wanted people who shared the vision they could cure Abnormals.
Neither of them said hello either. Rotten bedside manner.
"Hey," I said. "I don't bite."
The woman circled around the room and opened a drawer. The man clicked a switch on the other side of the room and grabbed a paper chart. They didn't have a sense of humor, either. That wouldn't work for me.
"You know, talking to patients helps to put them at ease," I said. "Isn't that what doctors and nurses do? You guys look like you have major burnout. Maybe going on vacation would do you some good?"
"Maybe someday," the man said. "I'd like to go to Tahiti. Wouldn't you like to go there someday?"
It was a start. "Sure," I said.
"But before that happens, we need to fix you," the man said. He had no name tag. "Tahiti is a sunny place."
"I would like that," I said.
"Now, what is your name?"
I'd thought about this better this time and come prepared. Before coming, I had combed the Internet for missing persons reports in Cumberland. I'd found that one girl named Desirae Flowers had gone missing two months ago in Cumberland, and she fit my description. She had also been living with an aunt and her parents worked overseas. I gave the doctors that name.
The man nodded and wrote it down in the chart. They'd background check it. I hoped that the police had no DNA of Desirae Flowers the ATC could check against mine.
Then they asked me how I'd Turned and why I'd given myself up to them. I gave the doctors the same story as the guards. I'd rehearsed that this morning, too. All the time, I imagined Xavier or Bathory descending on the facility. Both would be bad. Innocent people would die either way.
"Desirae," the male doctor said. "We will do our best to help you."
"What's your cure rate?" I asked. "How long does it take?"
"Well, every case is different," he said.
Behind me, the female doctor prepared a syringe, uncapping it. The latex of her gloves crinkled. I tensed. Though I'd jumped from a third story window, the thought of a shot terrified me. What was with that?
She took a blood sample while the man tried to talk about how the ATC was still figuring out the cure thing, and would try their hardest to make me Normal enough to go back into society. Translation: nothing worked yet. It was just as I thought. This place was here to keep us out of society forever whether the doctors wanted to face that thought.
The doct
ors moved on to X-rays. They shined flashlights into my eyes and examined my teeth with metal instruments I remembered from the dentist. Meanwhile, I tried to listen to the happenings outside, but nothing new came. I was getting an idea of the facility's layout, though. Guards patrolled the halls. There seemed to be one ATC agent for each wing, armed with tasers and real guns. Them and the cameras. I imagined there was a security room, too, where someone watched the cameras.
The agents patrolling the halls were the ones who had escorted me inside. I recognized their footsteps. When they brought in a new patient, all the guards left their posts to deal with it. It was something else I'd remember. I'd been in here for less than an hour and had already found two loopholes.
The next would be the schedule. There would have to be holes in that.
After several scans, the doctors announced they were done taking my information. One slapped a paper bracelet on my arm. It hadn't been as bad as I feared, but the screams kept coming back to me.
They'd come from Trish. A tough woman like her wouldn't scream for anything less than horrific.
Chapter Ten
I hated soap operas. The remote on my chair was very tempting.
But I kept my TV on in my room to make anyone outside the room more at ease. If I kept it off, they'd think I was up to something. It was best to make it look like I was passing the time.
I was going on Hour Two of this. Like Trish, the guards had returned to help strap me into a wheelchair. They kept those shock guns aimed at me the whole time. Welcoming. The discomfort of not moving was getting to me, and so was the thin hospital gown. The guards had made me change in front of them while pointing those shock guns at me. The only dignity was that I got to keep on my undergarments. Trish was right. Privacy was not something they cared about here.
If we were Normals, we could sue this place.
My thoughts kept shifting back to Brendan, and I had to keep pulling them back to staking out the area. I had memorized the guards' routes, at least for this shift. The nicer woman guard paced around the werewolf wing while the men took the other halls. The woman liked to talk to a guy named Mark during her breaks. They had a coffee room close to the cafeteria, and she frequented it often, leaving George's hallway empty.
