by Holly Hook
My second cousin wasn't making much noise. Either he was sullen in captivity or they had him drugged. The werewolf wing was too far away for me to hear everything clear. I could detect Mom's sleep cycles while I was just outside my apartment, but my hearing wasn't so good I could hear George's—or anyone else's.
Doctors and nurses opened doors and greeted other patients. I listened and made a list in my head. Trish. A man named Pierre who begged for any good blood. Unnamed others. I guessed that they must have two dozen vampires here and three werewolves. The werewolves, I knew, were the best bet for helping all of us escape. If George could shift, he could withstand electrical shots and even gunshots.
The trick was getting to him and the others.
And I was already making a plan.
I had already mapped out how I could break out of this wheelchair, run around the cameras' views, and sneak past the guards on their coffee break when someone stepped up to my door and took the paper chart out of the flap. I tensed.
This might be my first treatment.
And then the door opened.
Two orderlies who smelled like morning doughnuts walked inside. They were both well-built young men who might have gone to college a few years ago. Neither wore a name tag. The first guy smiled at me. "How are you doing today?"
"Fine. This isn't comfortable, and soap operas suck." I had an attached remote on the wheelchair, held on with some crappy Velcro. One of the guards had stuck it on there before leaving.
The orderly took the remote off the chair and set it on the windowsill. "I agree with you on that," he said. The guy seemed friendly enough, and he didn't smell like nerves. He had been here long enough to get used to being around Abnormals, then. That meant he knew the place. "All of this is procedure. Keeping you in the chair, I mean. I wish they'd come up with something better, but the alternative would involve shocking patients with tasers every time we entered a room. That's dangerous for you and the agents both."
"I wouldn't like that, either," I said. The guy seemed sympathetic. "Is it lunchtime yet? There's a cafeteria, right?"
"True," he said. "We'll feed you. But before that you need to go to your first treatment. It only lasts a few minutes and happens twice per day."
"Treatment?"
"You'll see," the guy said.
I wouldn't like it. It was there in his voice.
The second orderly stood guard and smelled like metal. He must be new. The friendly one wheeled me out of the room and down the hall, towards the double doors that Trish had come out of earlier. More soap operas played and the doggy smell strengthened. The guards had even left some patients' doors open so that I could see inside. The female agent and Mark were in the coffee room now, leaving George's wing unguarded by anything but the cameras.
"You'll have your treatment at the same time each day," the orderly explained. "There will be one in the morning, and one in the evening. They should get easier the more you do them."
I would have my treatment at the same time as the guards' coffee break. Great. I hadn't thought the schedule would get that strict. It was worse than school. At least in school, I could take a pass if I needed.
It also made plans more complicated.
The orderlies wheeled me through the door, and I found myself in a new wing that had no other patients in it right now. It was just some treatment rooms, beeping equipment, and a nurses' station that had no one.
The nurses were on break, and I spotted no cameras in here. That was both good and bad. It was great because it would make breaking for it easier, but it was bad because that told me that the ATC didn't want these treatments recorded.
The orderlies took me through a door on the left, which led to a carpeted room that had pretty flowers on a nearby table. They rolled my chair up to the table. Again, there was no camera in here and the walls were solid and decorated with painted flowers and fields, as if this were a place meant for children. The decorations must serve to put people at ease.
One thing did not do that.
I faced a thick, black curtain that hung over a huge window. The fabric held out most of the sun, but tiny pinpricks of it came through. The clouds had thinned since that morning.
Trish's screams exploded in my head.
They would expose me to direct sunlight. Weren't they supposed to wait until they fed us a new diet for a while?
My horror blocked out the orderly's words for a moment. "This treatment won't take place every day," he said. "The weather is a factor so you will get breaks during some periods. It will also vary. But I've had people tell me it gets a little easier after the first dozen times. Your tolerance should improve."
"Do you have any idea what this feels like?" I asked.
The orderly gulped. "People have told me it's not fun, but it won't last long."
I gripped the chair and wanted to break those shackles with every ounce of my being. I could make a break for it now, but the female guard was already heading back into the hallway to patrol. Her taser would stop me, no matter how strong I was. Though I could move fast, I didn't think I could deal with a guard and the cameras at once. That was just inside the building. I still hadn't figured out the rest.
And more people were entering the building.
The front doors opened and a bunch of Normals walked inside with their heavy footsteps. Suits brushed against skin. Officials. More guards had come with them. They were two hallways away.
Richard Grimes and the top officials in the ATC came here.
From the sounds of it, they were here for a meeting.
The orderlies stepped out of my room, leaving me to wait. I let out a breath, trying to steel myself for what was to come.
"Sir."
"Welcome to the facility. We were not expecting you."
"I need to call a meeting," Grimes said. "I have some very serious things to discuss. No, it's not a surprise performance review nor any criticism of staff. Don't worry." Grimes had a younger voice than I expected. Though he sounded mature, he might have just walked out of college.
"We only have one meeting room available, and it's the conference room. The security walls haven't been constructed there yet. If we were to suffer an attack--"
"It's unlikely she will come during fair weather," Grimes said. "I have known of Bathory for a long time. I know she is becoming more active and attempting to grow her forces. This is partly what this meeting is about."
So Grimes knew more than I thought. The man was smart. How much did he know?
Had he fought against her this whole time?
More footsteps followed. They were heading away. I feared they'd get out of earshot.
The door opened again and the female doctor with no sense of humor stepped inside. My mood plummeted. She said nothing and strode over to the window. This was routine for her and she did it dozens of times per day.
I closed my eyes as she pulled the curtains open and the light of agony spilled into the room.
The morning clouds had cleared, and I glimpsed forest. A roar of pain filled my head and blocked out the footfalls. I couldn't hear what Grimes was saying over the wave of searing anguish. A headache like no other exploded between my temples. My skin felt as if someone had plunged it into boiling water. I tried to tuck my head into my gown, but it was useless. The thin fabric would do nothing to protect me.
I was yellow, flaring pain.
"Stop!" I screamed. My body wanted nothing more than to vomit. The light continued. My muscles seized, and I convulsed. A high shriek filled the air.
It was me. Screaming.
At long last, darkness swept over me, but it didn't feel like it at first. The doctor told me, in a harsh voice, that I could knock it off now. I groaned, staring at the yellow flashes and afterimages behind my eyelids. My head pounded, but each throb dulled. My stomach heaved and my entire body trembled. It felt no better than the time I'd fallen outside the bunker and Bathory allowed the clouds to clear.
"I'll scream all I want!"
I shouted.
The doctor wasn't having it. "You're going to do more of these treatments. Your next one is late this afternoon, at four-thirty. You will get used to it."
I wouldn't open my eyes. In the last minute I'd grown a phobia of that. "You think this will cure me?" My act flew out the window, but wouldn't anyone react like this? "Pain will make me better?"
"If you didn't want to get treated, then you shouldn't have chosen to Turn."
Oh. She was one of those people. "It's not a choice," I snapped.
"It's a choice," she said. "Now you need to do what you need to do."
I silenced.
During the torture, I had forgotten.
Listening to Grimes was important. Not only would I figure out if Bathory had tried anything, I could learn more about the security.
But the conference room seemed to be on the other side of the building. Grimes's voice floated through the walls, but by now it sounded muffled. Even my hearing had its limits.
There was more to the guy than I thought. He and Bathory might have even met before. There was a reason she wanted to kill him.
* * * * *
Grimes left an hour later, saying nothing to anyone. I got wheeled back to my room before that happened and left there to deal with the fading headache and the burning sensation across my exposed skin. Even though the symptoms from sun exposure were dull, I still felt like crap. Alyssa used to tell me how she'd have to run into her house and hide whenever I drove her home from school on sunny days before I knew what she was. Alyssa used to have a Migraine Blanket for that. She couldn't do soccer practice unless there were enough clouds in the sky? Easy excuse.
The orderlies turned on the soap opera again. The nice one apologized and told me they'd be back to take me to lunch once I recovered. My stomach growled worse than ever. My body hadn't liked the abuse.
Maybe George would be at lunch.
He'd be mad that I was here, and I hated that thought of doing that to him, but he had to know. I needed to see his condition.
After about fifteen minutes, when most of the nausea and the ache in my head had vanished, the orderly came back in. "Lunch has started," he said. "I'll wheel you down to the cafeteria. We take patients to lunch in shifts due to having so many of them right now. How was your treatment?"
"Want me to describe to you what sun exposure feels like when you can't stand it?" I asked. Even though I meant to be here, the pain, and the torture was bringing out a monster in me. Something inside me had changed since Turning whether I liked it.
And it scared me. I felt...monstrous.
"People have given me many descriptions," he said. "I know it's not pleasant."
"How do you work here every day?" I asked. "Don't you go to bed at night, thinking of the people you wheeled to torture? I signed up for treatment, not this."
The guy cleared his throat. "It's part of the treatment. A lot of medicine even for Normals is unpleasant. I've been through it myself. I had a surgery as a kid--"
"Did you do it twice a day?"
"Well, no," he said. He wheeled me down the werewolf hall. I watched the cameras do their rotation. They faced the wall for a precious two seconds, came around, faced the other wall, and repeated their motion. I sniffed.
The werewolves weren't down here right now. Three doors sat open, revealing rooms that looked just like mine. One had a vulgar talk show playing. The doggy smell hung in the air but it was faint. George was at lunch, then.
Or getting some kind of treatment.
I hoped that werewolves didn't get stabbed with silver every day. The silver thing was no myth. George could deal with guns and tasers but not that one metal.
The cafeteria reminded me of those places in nursing homes. Everyone sat at tables in wheelchairs and I counted only fifteen other vampires in here, and Trish wasn't one of them. The staff had scattered everyone around the room so that no one could talk to each other. They had also made sure that not everyone came to lunch at the same time. The ATC wanted to keep us away from each other in case we started trouble. The orderly rolled me up to a corner table and left me there. How was I supposed to have lunch with my arms bound?
I eyed the rest of the room. There were doors leading to a kitchen. Four ATC agents stood in the room, one in each corner.
And the three werewolves sat on the far end of the room, away from the vampires. I saw no other types of Abnormals in here.
George had silver chains wrapped around him, just as I expected. They held him to his wheelchair and hugged his torso. More of the chains bound his wrists and ankles. He sat along with two women on either side of him. His dreadlocks hung in his face as a woman dressed in scrubs - puppy scrubs, no less - spoon fed him salad. He tried to pull out of the wheelchair in frustration, but his chains held him back. Two more women spoon fed the other two werewolves, who I'd never seen before.
My cousin needed meat. They weren't just forcing George to starve. They were humiliating him and treating him like a baby. What was next? Baby food?
Rage boiled inside me. I pulled against the shackles on my wheelchair.
One squeaked as the metal threatened to rip out of the handle. I wanted to attack the woman feeding him and making him less of a person. To the ATC, we weren't people. We were ones who made bad choices and brought this on ourselves.
Then I remembered the guards standing around the perimeter and stopped. None of them seemed to have heard the sound. I couldn't pull this now. There were too many of them. I'd have to wait until they least expected me to move.
I wouldn't make it over to George without them shooting me first. If there was one guard or if they were all together, I might risk it. But I didn't know how weak George had gotten since getting here. At least he was still fighting. The two women were listless as if they had given up.
But with a diet like that, he'd weaken fast. I wondered if werewolves could lose the ability to shift. If George couldn't do that when I broke his chains, we might not get out of here. The ATC was counting on him not being able to shift.
Lunch turned out to be cold blood in a reused glass pop bottle complete with a straw. Kitchen personnel rolled carts out and placed one on each table. It wasn't as humiliating as getting spoon fed but it was still embarrassing to have to lean over the table to drink it. At least no one attended me and nobody else in the cafeteria cared that I was there. Everybody sat slumped as if the treatments had taken the strength out of them. People were losing hope, and the ATC hadn't even switched us to any regular food yet. Wasn't that supposed to come later as we became more Normal? The brochure said something about changing patients' diets.
George still didn't look up. He hadn't noticed me. His sense of smell couldn't detect me anymore. I finished the contents of the bottle, which did almost nothing to calm my hunger, and watched as the woman in scrubs wheeled him out of the cafeteria. He had just finished lunch as I'd started mine. Not everyone ate at once, then.
The orderly wheeled me back to my room after only fifteen minutes. I listened as the guards returned to patrolling around the hallways. The female guard took another coffee break. She must have a severe caffeine addiction. I'd thought Xavier ran on the stuff.
And her breaks weren't long or frequent enough. I needed her out of the hallway and gone if I would make a break for it.
But at least I knew I could tear out the shackles on my wheelchair. Part One of the plan was a go.
The second sun exposure treatment happened at four thirty, just as the orderly promised. I said nothing to the guy as he wheeled me to the room with the curtain. The same mean doctor stood there with a stopwatch in hand and her other on the shade. "We will do an extra second this time," she said.
"No, we're not," I said.
"We need to rid you of your disease," she snapped. "If you don't cooperate, you won't be getting out of here for a long time."
"I can't believe you think this is going to w--"
The doctor opened the curtain to expose the evening sun. T
he clouds had cleared enough to let it shine through full force. Lucky me.
I screamed again as the pain exploded. There was nothing to focus on other than the agony. At last, the stopwatch beeped, and just as I convulsed, she let the curtain fall back over the glass.
Blissful darkness fell over the room. "Was I your last one before you punch out?" I asked through the fading thunder in my skull.
The doctor said nothing. She wrote something in my chart.
"It must be hard to pull a curtain back," I said. "You must have gone to university for eight years to learn how to do that."
She drew a breath. "You're getting an attitude," she said. "Your chart said you were ready to cooperate with treatment. You came here for help, and now you're giving lip to those who are trying to cure you."
"That's because I wanted treatment. Not torture!" Even though nausea was king, and I feared I'd throw up, I was still hungry. The blood at lunch had been flavorless except for a bit of salad. The donor must have been a strict vegetarian. This was a place of slow torment and starvation. The doctor smelled like Italian food complete with buttery breadsticks. I dared her to come near me. I wanted nothing more than to attack.
My sense of humor was already gone.
But she didn't. The doctor nodded to the orderly who stood in the doorway behind me. He took me back to my room in silence.
Even though my room had a bed, no one came to take me out of the chair. My muscles were cramping. I realized with horror they expected me to sleep like this. Since that would take an hour or two at the most, I'd have to sit here all night with nothing to do.
And more guards came into the building at night. The shift changed and the number of them doubled. They greeted the last shift and said goodbye to each other. The doctors all left. Only two new orderlies remained. The place took a military air and the smell of coffee. Somebody brought in pizza. Typical night shift workers. Guards checked their weapons after punching in. Night was the most dangerous time. I wondered if Richard Grimes had ordered this. When Bathory attacked, it would most likely happen in the dark.
