by Brian Olsen
He ended the call and walked back to the control console for the cabinet. He picked up a pair of safety goggles that were draped over the back of a chair and put them on.
“Sorry,” he said, “I should have left a pair of these in there for you. Try not to look directly at the light.” He sat down in front of a computer, the one with the cables leading to the base of the cabinet, and began typing.
Deshawn’s heart was pounding. He kicked at the door again, harder and harder. He threw his whole body against it. It rattled, but stayed obstinately locked tight.
“Try to hold still,” Cheek said without looking at him. “It seemed to go easier on previous subjects if they didn’t move around as much.”
Deshawn glared at the back of the man’s head, then threw himself into the door again.
“Suit yourself,” the scientist said. “If you want to get hurt, that’s your prerogative.”
Deshawn took a deep breath. He was trying hard not to panic. He couldn’t bust the door open, that was becoming clear. The doctor had said not to look at the light – he must mean the lenses. Were they important? Every other surface inside the cabinet was smooth glass or metal, the lenses were the only parts he might be able to damage. He looked up. Through the circular gaps, behind the lenses that were swiveled horizontally, he could see a network of circuitry and wiring.
Deshawn reached up as high as he could, but couldn’t reach. He jumped, but even then he could only just barely brush the lenses with his fingertips. They were so small he couldn’t get a grip on one. Maybe he could smash them with something?
He took off his sneaker and started jumping up and down, smacking the lenses with it. On his third jump he heard a satisfying crack.
“That’s quite enough of that!” Cheek shouted.
Deshawn looked over at the scientist, who was glowering angrily at the boy. Deshawn spat at him. The wad of saliva hit the door and dribbled down the glass. He jumped and hit the lenses again. Nothing shattered, but he could feel them shifting into different positions. Maybe that would slow Cheek down. Maybe he’d have to come inside to fix them.
“Right!” Cheek shouted. “Transmitting now. Good riddance, brat.”
He flicked the touchscreen.
With a series of loud, rapid clicks, all of the lenses suddenly shifted at once, all pointing directly at Deshawn. They shone with a blinding intensity, and Deshawn was forced to cover his eyes with his arm. He dropped the sneaker and it fell to the ground. The hum of the machinery grew louder, drowning out the boy’s fearful cries.
Then the pain began.
At first Deshawn thought an insect was stinging him. He swatted at one hand with the other. He kept his eyes shut tight but the searing light was pushing in through his eyelids. The stinging sensation got worse. It spread quickly to cover his whole body. He fell to his knees.
The stinging sensation turned to burning. He pressed his face into his hands and screamed. He collapsed completely to the ground, rolling into a ball, trying futilely to shut out the light, the noise, and the pain. He wanted to pass out, or even to die, whatever would end this. But he didn’t.
The pain grew to encompass every cell in his body, penetrating down to his core. He felt something inside him twist, and then the pain was gone. The light was gone as well, and he was plunged into darkness. The sound receded to a low hum once again.
He felt strange. Heavy. His face in particular felt stiff and pulled, like he had made a funny face and it had gotten stuck. Pain returned, but a different pain. His muscles ached.
He dragged himself to his knees, but the movement nauseated him and he vomited onto the floor of the cabinet. The smell of the remains of the paltry dinner his mother had served him the night before was overpowering, and he skittered away from it, pressing his back against the rear of the cabinet.
There was something on the floor. Something else with a strong smell. He still couldn’t see, but he reached out, groping blindly. His hands encountered something thick, wet and hot – it felt like a chunk of raw meat. The chunk was covered in patches of fur.
Horrified, he hurled the meat away and heard it splat against the glass of the cabinet. He cried out in anguish, but his voice sounded strange to him, rough and low.
“Oh, no! Oh, no, what did he do?”
The voice from outside the cabinet sounded muffled – everything sounded muffled, he realized. He snapped his head around towards the source of the sound, but he still couldn’t see. It had to be the doctor. Deshawn panicked. Would the man hurt him again? He had to get away.
With a growl, he leaped to his feet and threw himself against the glass of the cabinet. The door resisted, but he didn’t stop. The pain and desperation made him stronger, and he hurled himself against his means of escape, again and again, howling incoherently. On the fourth attempt he felt the lock start to give. On the fifth, the door burst open. His momentum carried him out and into the room.
His vision was blurry but he was beginning to be able to make out the lab. Everything looked dim and colorless. In his anger at what had been done to him he overturned a piece of furniture. He thought it should be the desk holding the cabinet’s controlling computer, but he must have been wrong – it overturned without the satisfying smash of equipment.
There was a flash of movement to his right. The old man. With lightning speed Deshawn leaped at him, grabbing him by his coat.
The doctor gave a high-pitched scream. Deshawn threw him to the ground and stood over him. He reared up, preparing to bash the evil man’s head in with his bare hands.
There was movement again, across the room. It looked like a door had swung open. It had to be the door to the lab, although Deshawn remembered that being on a different wall.
Escape was more tempting than vengeance. Deshawn ran past the prone doctor. He shoved whoever was standing in his way aside and bolted out the open door.
He immediately came to the bottom of a flight of steps. When had they come down steps? This must be an exit he hadn’t noticed before, he thought. He ran up the stairs and smashed open the door at the top.
He expected to be in a hallway, or maybe the roof, but he came out into an empty room. His vision was still weak but he could make out a sitting area of pale chairs and a couch. There was light shining through a large window. Blurry figures passed by, and a door next to the window led outside. Was that the street? He had gone up one flight, from the fifth floor – how had he gotten down to the first floor?
Voices came from behind him. Not from the door to downstairs, but from a curtained-off hallway next to it. He heard people talking, many people. A wave of pain rolled through his intestines. He had to get out, away from this place, away from these people who had hurt him. Nothing made sense, he just knew he had to run.
In a haze of agony and fear, Deshawn headed for the door in front of him and made his way out onto the street.
Chapter Two
Caitlin hurrying
Caitlin Ross lost her balance when the A train she was on stopped short in a tunnel somewhere between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. She had been forced to stand because the train was packed full, and her grip on the pole she was holding on to was tenuous because of all the other passengers standing in her way, and perhaps also because of the adorable but mostly frictionless mittens she had chosen to wear that day.
She fell into the burly man pressed against her. He was reaching up to grab hold of the bar above the seats. His extended arm caused his leather jacket to gape open, revealing the tank top he was wearing underneath. Caitlin landed face first in the man’s armpit. Sweat smeared across her rosy cheek and she got a mouthful of wiry hairs.
She recoiled in disgust, falling backwards into a gray-haired woman with a cane. The old woman started to topple over. Caitlin, still off-balance herself, reached out to catch her but only succeeded in tearing the cane out of the woman’s grasp. The old woman grabbed desperately at the cane as she fell, pulling Caitlin down with her. The two women collapsed together
onto a seat that was occupied by a young bicyclist in a helmet and spandex shorts, who shoved his precious bicycle out of the way of the falling women in a panic.
The bicycle rolled handlebars-first into Alan, Caitlin’s roommate, who had been reaching out to catch Caitlin. Alan fell to the ground, the bicycle landing on top of him with a crash. Commuters parted to make room, pushing themselves even tighter together to avoid the mayhem.
Before Caitlin could right herself from the tangled mass of limbs, the bicyclist pushed her and the old lady off of his lap with a cry of, “My bike! What the fuck?” He jumped to his feet and elbowed his way to his expensive bicycle, pulling it off of the prone Alan, who yelped in pain as the bike chain caught on his hand.
Caitlin managed to keep her balance and somehow kept the old lady from being thrown to the ground, catching her and righting both of them with the help of the cane. She was about to ask the grandmotherly woman if she was all right when the woman pushed Caitlin roughly aside, snatched the cane from her hand and dove for the seat the bicyclist had abandoned, beating a surly teenage girl to the punch with a self-satisfied smirk.
Caitlin lost her balance yet again, but she was caught by the same burly leather-clad man she had initially recoiled from. He clasped her by the shoulders until her relationship with gravity was clarified. She was opening her mouth to thank him when he sneezed directly into her face.
“Sorry,” he said, wiping his nose with the bottom of his tank top. “’Tis the season, right?”
“Right,” she said with a forced smile. As he turned away, she opened up her shoulder bag and dug around for the packet of tissues she was sure she had thrown in there at some point.
“Are you okay?” Alan asked her. He had made his way back towards her before the crowd could fill the empty space and part them again.
She found a tissue and started wiping her face. “Covered in snot and sweat and hatred for humanity, but otherwise fine, thanks. You?”
“That bike left skid marks on my private parts,” he replied. “So nothing new there. I was afraid you were going to use your mad ninja skills on somebody.”
Caitlin had recently discovered that she had a surprising aptitude for violence. The previous summer, she and her roommates had found themselves under attack by the employees of a sentient, psychopathic corporation called Amalgamated Synergy, and Caitlin had managed to hold her own while fighting for her life against a horde of the brainwashed corporate drones. The friends defeated and ultimately destroyed the strange new life form, freeing those under its control, but the experience left the usually confident Caitlin uncharacteristically shaken.
Feeling a need to protect herself should more insanity come her way, Caitlin started taking a variety of self-defense and martial arts classes. Back in college, while studying theater, she had taken a stage combat class, but she had never been called upon to use her meager faux-fighting skills. Caitlin was an actor, and she almost always got cast as the young ingénue, which didn’t usually call for a lot of brawling. As a reviewer from Time Out New York once put it after seeing her as Laura in a horrible adaptation of The Glass Menagerie inexplicably set in outer space, Caitlin’s “golden hair, piercing blue eyes, alabaster skin, slight frame and ethereal loveliness bring the only touch of pathos to this monstrosity of a production, when her mother Amanda eats her daughter’s face in order to absorb her youth and beauty.”
When Caitlin first began training in earnest, she had been worried that her instructors might not take her seriously because of her appearance, but she had quickly proved herself an apt and dedicated pupil. She had a long way to go, she knew, and she wouldn’t be breaking any cinder blocks with her head any time soon, but she had a new-found confidence in herself that went a long way towards quelling the trauma and anxiety caused by the horrible events she and her friends had experienced the previous June.
“That old lady’s lucky this train is so crowded,” she said. “If I had more room, she might have gotten a roundhouse kick to the head.”
“You’re such a bad-ass now,” he said.
“I’m a real life action hero, baby.”
“I wish I could do that kind of stuff.”
Caitlin bit her tongue. She had invited Alan to take a class with her the first time he had expressed admiration for her burgeoning skills, but he had declined. She loved Alan, but he was kind of a couch potato, content spending his free time, of which he had much, plopped down in front of a video game.
During that period of June madness, Alan had fallen in love-at-first-sight with a crusading lawyer named Pete, who was subsequently murdered by Amalgamated Synergy. Alan had been devastated, but claimed to have found a new purpose in life, vowing to dedicate himself to helping others just as Pete had. All through the summer, fall, and beginning of winter he had said he was working on figuring out how exactly he was going to accomplish that, but to Caitlin it looked like nothing much in his life had changed. He still spent all his time temping, playing games, drinking, and picking up guys in bars. The only real improvement she saw was that he complained about his life a lot less often.
He was lucky he was cute, she thought. She had had a huge crush on him when they were freshmen, before he came out. He later suggested she only liked him because his sheer averageness made him a safe bet for a first college crush – dull black hair, dull blue eyes, average height, average weight, nothing remotely threatening.
Alan didn’t have the highest self-esteem.
She had protested that he was pretty, like a member of a boy band. He hadn’t appreciated the comparison.
“Knowing ten ways to kill a man with just your little finger,” Alan continued, jolting her back to the present. “Must come in useful keeping your hot Australian boyfriend in line.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Caitlin said instantly. “I mean, we’re not calling ourselves that. Yet.”
Alan rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh.”
Caitlin had been dating, on and off for a few weeks, an extremely attractive Australian named Lachlan. She had met him at a party during the horrific events of the previous summer, events he was still mostly unaware of. Lachlan and Caitlin had hit it off instantly and had been well on their way to an evening of carnal enjoyment when Lachlan had unwittingly insulted Caitlin’s career, telling her that acting wasn’t a real job and that she needed something else to fall back on. The evening only got worse from there.
Some time later, Lachlan had called and apologized. Caitlin had accepted his apology and the two became Facebook friends. After a few months of casual online flirting he had asked for a second chance. They had been going out ever since.
“I mean, it’s fine,” she said. “We’re good. He really made an effort to understand the acting thing, and the sex is indescribable.”
“But...” Alan prompted.
Caitlin stared down the bicyclist, whose ears had perked up at the mention of sex, until he looked away. “But...” she said. “I don’t know. Something’s missing. Maybe it’s me. He’s such a man. I need that.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I just mean I need someone who can keep up with me.”
“With your action hero lifestyle.”
“Exactly. He’s nice, he’s financially secure, he’s handsome, the sex...everything’s great, I guess. I don’t know. It’s just the-grass-is-always-greener syndrome, probably.”
The train suddenly started moving and Caitlin grabbed for the pole. After a few feet, the train lurched to a stop again. After a moment, it started up yet again, slowly, crawling forward at a snail’s pace.
“Oh my god,” Caitlin said. “This is unreal. It isn’t even rush hour yet.”
An announcement from the conductor came through over the train’s PA system. What little could be heard over the dull roar of the packed-in commuters was too filled with static to be intelligible.
“Did you get any of that?” Caitlin asked.
“I think he was playing the trumpet,” Alan replied. “And then h
e might have said, ‘We should be moving shortly,’ at the end. Maybe.”
“Great. Where are the jetpacks? Didn’t science promise us jetpacks? I want a jetpack.”
“Flying cars,” Alan countered. “That’s what I want. We could share a flying taxi into the city every day.”
The train shuddered again and picked up speed.
“Finally!” Caitlin said. “I’m going to be late as it is.”
“How’s the show going?” Alan asked her.
“Good. I think it’ll be funny. Run lines with me?”
“Sure.”
Caitlin dug her worn script out of her bag and handed it to Alan. “Right here,” she said, indicating the start of a scene she’d been having particular difficulties with.
Caitlin was in rehearsal for an off-off-Broadway production of The Wrong Tart, which was an American adaptation of a British translation of a French farce originally titled Zut! Les Tartes! She was playing Ginny, one half of a pair of identical twin sisters who get mistaken for each other in a series of increasingly complicated and unlikely scenarios involving lots of slamming doors and scantily clad sexy good times. It was her first show in quite a while, and she was loving it.
“Jeannie, did you bake these tarts? They look delicious,” Alan read woodenly. He looked up from the script. “Is it Jeannie or Ginny?”
“Jeannie is my identical twin sister,” she said. “He thinks I’m her, but I don’t hear the difference in the names so I don’t know that he thinks that.”
“Why did your parents give identical twins such similar sounding names? Seems like poor planning on their part. Did they want their daughters’ lives to turn into French farce?”
“Save the reviews for opening night and just read the script, okay?”
They continued through the scene, Alan’s stilted delivery torturing the dialogue almost beyond recognition, as the train arrived and departed at the stops along its route through lower Manhattan. They moved closer to the pole to avoid getting pushed and pulled by the departing and arriving passengers.
