“No. You were right. Someone was simply sloppy.” The guard was still alive. I didn’t want to touch him, but the Institute had prepared me for that too. I’d seen human bodies in worse condition. To cause death, Jericho thought we needed to be acquainted with all aspects of death—from freshly killed to the next best thing to King Tut. I ignored Stefan’s “Misha, don’t you fucking dare,” and touched the unconscious guard’s face with three fingertips. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t wrong with him, nothing that wasn’t dying in him . . . every single cell. It was difficult to trace back to where it all started. I closed my eyes and mentally sludged my way through a swamp of putrid decay.
There.
There it was.
I opened my eyes and wiped my fingers on my jeans. “Aneurysm in his brain, but they didn’t quite finish the job. Shoddy work or in a hurry. He’s been alive this whole time, but too brain damaged to do anything about it. Dying by inches. Then, without the ability to know he needed food or water and with his brain slowly disintegrating, he went into multiorgan failure. His body went into crisis mode and started feeding blood only to the organs that keep it alive—brain, heart, kidneys and liver. Muscles and skin didn’t get their share anymore. Then the kidneys and liver failed.” I stood from where I’d been kneeling beside him. “Which is why he’s like this. Living people can rot too and it looks just the same as a corpse.” I righted, then sat back in the chair Stefan had tackled me from. “I suppose . . .” I trailed off, hesitating, then pushed on. “I guess maybe you should shoot him to put him out of his misery.” Because he was in misery—profound, agonizing misery.
And that had me asking my brother to do what I refused to do myself. Possibly I wasn’t good, like Stefan said. Possibly I was only a hypocrite.
“After what this asshole has done?” Stefan shook his head. “He deserves every ounce of misery he can get and then some. Let him rot until his last damn breath. Nothing but justice in my book.” My genetic code had been manipulated to allow me to kill as easily as breathing, but my brother knew a real monster when he saw one—a destroyer of children’s lives. For him, the subject was over. “Now bring up the video.”
I did. There were banks of video monitors and each one split into four pictures. In every one, all looked normal: students in the classrooms, hands locked before them on their desks; students in the cafeteria; students in the media room watching carefully selected movies and TV shows or reading books that would help them fit in with the outside world if they were ever called on to enter a conversation before assassinating their target. Thirty seconds later, the time stamp at the bottom of the screen hit three p.m. On the video you could hear the low-toned ring that meant time to change classes or report to one. Classes lasted until seven every day.
Every day except this one.
This time, at the very first ring, school was out.
On every monitor, students lunged at the nearest instructor, guard, screaming cafeteria server, and people began to die. Guards tried to shoot and some students they did hit, as they were trained—a bullet in the head. It was the only way to be sure, as quickly as we healed. According to legend, zombies were here after all. They were us. But the guards hadn’t faced anything remotely like this before. One student going berserk, the mind shattering under the stress, was one thing. All the students in a coordinated attack—it had not been conceived. That meant the guards died. The instructors died, too, much more quickly. They were armed with Tasers and had one guard in each room, but they were complacent. Years of utterly obedient killer human robots had made them that way. They were slow to fumble for their weapons. Jericho’s children, however, weren’t. They were never slow, never unsure.
No weakness. No limitations. No mercy.
The Institute had taught us that, and now we—they showed them how well they’d learned that.
They ran—everybody but the guards, who had their guns and their surety that things rarely went wrong. None of them noticed, not in any video screen, how close a student had managed to position himself to them. Yes, some students did die, but not all; nowhere near all. The teachers and researchers were the ones who ran, not the students; to the students, it was nothing but a good time—not to every student, but to some. Could you blame them when that was what they were raised, taught, created to do? Could you blame them for learning too well?
When all the dead were on the floor, unmoving, and the screaming was over, the students gathered in the media room. It was a small metaphorical window to the outside world . . . a world that belonged to them now. That was when I saw him, the one who’d organized it all; the one who’d risen above training and brainwashing and blind obedience to make this revolution happen.
Peter.
As I’d been called simply Michael as I was the first Michael, Peter was called simply Peter, not Peter One. He was about the same age as me, close as I could guess, since he hadn’t “graduated,” so he was maybe a year or so younger. He had black hair, wavy and short, slightly darker skin, and the same bicolored eyes we all had. He looked more like Stefan’s brother than I did. Funny that. Or maybe not so much. Peter was one of the eager ones. He liked to kill. Not as much as Wendy, but no one liked killing quite as much as Wendy. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Stalin; they all paled before Wendy.
And there she was. . . . Wendy Five, but like Peter and me, no one called her anything but Wendy. Not because she was the first, but because all the other Wendys were only shadows of her. There were only twenty students left now, the rest shot by the guards. I could hear Peter’s voice, determined, but pleased too—and too damn happy for what was coming. “Wendy.” It was all he said. It was all that needed to be said.
Seven students dropped instantly and simultaneously, the angel wings of blood I’d seen earlier erupting from their eyes, their ears, noses, mouths . . . and from every pore. Ten-year-old Wendy moved closer to the bodies, putting a fingertip in her mouth and tilting her head to better judge her work. She smiled. The video was crisp and clear. I could see the healthy whiteness of her teeth, the pink of her lips, the faint outline of freckles across her nose. Her hair was as silver blond as it had been three years ago and fell like a mist of cool spring rain to her shoulders. She was a beautiful little girl; beautiful and happy. “Am I a good girl, Peter? I am, aren’t I? Like a little sister should be. I’m so good.” She tilted her head the other way. “They look like birds, don’t they? Birds with bright red wings. Fly away birds. Fly away no more.”
“You did well, Wendy, and you are a good girl. Like I always say. The best we have.” Peter bent to give her a brotherly kiss on top of her head. After that, he looked up directly into the camera in the media room, speaking to me across two weeks’ time. “Hello, Michael. We’ve missed you. Mr. Raynor told Bellucci that he’d found you in someplace called Cascade Falls.” Bellucci would’ve shared that information all too quickly if asked in the right way, and every student left standing knew how to ask. “It sounds intriguing, but then everything on the outside sounds intriguing. He also said he’d be bringing you back soon, but we couldn’t wait. We have too much to do.” He smiled and his smile was almost as cheerful as Wendy’s. “But I think we’ll be seeing you anyway. Family should stay in touch.”
Family? We had never been taught to think that way. It was highly discouraged. Bonding with fellow students could lead to . . . well . . . something like this. I hadn’t thought of it once during my time there. Since I was barely obedient and unenthusiastic, it had taken Stefan to teach me something I thought a fantasy of the outer world. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, family—all were a daydream even out there. Something like that? It couldn’t be real.
Somehow Peter had outstripped me easily and done what I couldn’t. He’d seen the value in the concept, taught it to himself, realized what I couldn’t without Stefan’s help, and learned it well enough to spread it to the other students. Some might have embraced it and some might have seen him as only better than being sold to the highest bidder by
the new Jericho, Marcus Bellucci. Whichever it had been, Peter had shown intelligence beyond my own and an overwhelming charisma with the other students that he must have kept hidden from the Instructors. And he had used all that to make himself a leader. He’d taught; they’d listened. Every student had transferred his submission to him and not to his new maker.
Peter was obviously smarter than I was, and Wendy, his “little sister,” could kill in ways I didn’t want to think about. We were in serious shit. And I hadn’t thought it could get more difficult than only trying to rescue them.
My skills at seeing all the possibilities, every potential outcome had faded since I’d left the Institute—badly.
The video continued to show the rest. In an instant they filed out of the room. We could watch their progress as they went down the hall, upstairs, and out to the exercise yard. We had always had one bus, for field trips—to malls usually—to see if we could function, although heavily drugged just in case, in the real world among real people. Peter put his lost boys and girls on that bus and the last video shot was of it disappearing down a dirt road toward Barstow. I thought I saw Wendy waving enthusiastically from the back window.
“That was the little girl I saw when I rescued you, isn’t it?” Stefan said. He’d seen Wendy face-to-face then and was more than lucky he was around to tell that story. Wendy must have been just curious enough to let him live, to see what would happen.
Wendy became bored easily. Many graves could attest to that.
I nodded and rubbed my eyes with two fingers. “Wendy. Jericho’s pride and joy. Although sometimes I think he was afraid of her as well.”
“Why did he do it?” Stefan asked quietly. “Why did that guy—Peter?—why did he have her kill the other kids? They were in on it. Not that I blame them. Getting out of this hellhole, I’d have done anything too. But why did that one, Peter, the kid in charge, have Wendy kill the other ones?”
“Peter’s not a kid. He’s about my age,” I said, thinking to myself that meant he was all the more deadly for it. “And there’s a difference between obedience and enthusiasm,” I said grimly, slumping in the chair. “The birds with the red wings,” as Wendy called them, “were the difference. They did what they were told, but they didn’t like it or dislike it. It was just something they had to do, like brushing their teeth. Apparently obedience isn’t enough for Peter. He wants the varsity team.” I used a sports term. Stefan had taught me a lot of those. Now I had to teach him. He thought he knew it all, what had been done to me, the life I’d come from, but I’d painted him a blurry picture. It was time to sharpen it. It was time for what I’d hoped I wouldn’t ever have to do.
It was time to tell him about the Basement.
I was leading Stefan down the hall when he asked, “Where are we going? It stinks to holy hell in here and I’d think you’d have had your fill of seeing dead bodies today. I know I have.”
“I’ve seen dead bodies all my life,” I replied, then added for him, “All of my life I can remember, I mean.”
I moved around one as I said that and opened the door that led to a set of stairs. Stefan balked. “This doesn’t go to another medical lab, does it?” He remembered the layout of the old Institute almost as well as I did. There would be nothing like the memory of getting your ten-year-lost brother back to etch a floor plan into a person’s mind. “Because I’ve seen only one of those and I don’t want to see another. I don’t want you to see another either.” Stefan had seen where they took samples of our blood and tissue, scanned us, where they implanted the tracking chips over the base of our spines, and where they took apart their failures—failures with names and lives, storing their organs in a large medical refrigerator. Luckily they kept that locked and Stefan hadn’t seen the contents. The Basement was enough. I was glad he hadn’t seen where I would’ve ended up—not obedient enough, not enthusiastic enough. It was common knowledge among the students what that refrigerator held.
Why wouldn’t it be? Jericho told us.
It didn’t mean I wanted Stefan to know, which made me the overprotective one this time. Taking turns was what we did. It was what real family did and what Peter’s “family” had no interest in at all.
“No, it’s not the med lab,” I answered as I started down the stairs. “It’s a lab, though, and I think you need to see it. The researchers called it the Basement. Some students”—Wendy, first and foremost, I thought to myself—“called it the Playground.”
Stefan followed me, but the trudge of his feet on the stairs told me he wasn’t happy about it. “I don’t have a whole lot of desire to see someplace that girl called the Playground.”
“You aren’t . . . weren’t the only one who thought that.” I reached the bottom and opened the door. It was already unlocked and bore the thumbprint of a guard’s hand, which was now lying on the floor. The guard was superfluous, heavy, and unnecessary. Only the hand had been needed. I stepped around it and into the lab to turn on the lights inside. Two weeks—that one guard upstairs had been an exception. I didn’t think we’d find any pseudo zombies down here.
I ignored the room. I remembered its double in Florida, although I’d seen it only once. Large with five cells, the room held video cameras to record the “play” and computers to type in reports for Jericho—or for Bellucci after Jericho’s death. Bellucci was here now, right here. I couldn’t recognize his face through the rot, not from the other four researchers dead on the floor, but his once-starched and immaculate lab coat had his name stitched over his chest. It was easily readable through the stains. He had less confidence or more false pride than Jericho. Jericho wore a suit. He didn’t need his name out there like a billboard. We knew who he was—the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega of our lives. That didn’t need a name tag. It would be the same as marking the Apocalypse on a puppies and kittens wall calendar.
Pointless.
I took what I was searching for from the flop and stink of Marcus Bellucci’s hand. An eight-by-ten rectangle—I could picture him holding it between him and Wendy or Peter as the most useless of shields. It was only a clipboard, made to hang on a hook beside the door. It wasn’t high-tech like most things in the Institute, but it was as informative.
Stefan, I saw from the corner of my eye, had walked forward to examine the cells. They were the same as jail cells basically: a toilet and a bunk. You couldn’t be sure how long it was until someone earned their playtime. You had to keep the prisoners from stinking up the place. For hygiene, there was a hose and a floor that slanted down to a drain to let the soapy water pour away.
“What the hell is this?” Stefan moved from cell to cell and finally I let myself see. Two cells were empty and three others had a dead man in each. Unlike the “red birds” upstairs, they weren’t ready to fly, fly away; they had virtually exploded. Torn apart, they covered the floor of the six-by-six cells in pieces. Did you ever wonder what would happen should every vessel in your body burst under enormous pressure, each one, down to the tiniest vein? Probably not. Why would you wonder something like that?
But if you did . . . Wendy was the answer, and now Peter, unfathomably, had her on a false familial leash.
I looked away from the human version of raw hamburger. “In the Everglades, they brought us the homeless from Miami. Here, I’m guessing they went all the way to Las Vegas. Barstow is too small. The disappearances would be noticed.” I handed Stefan the clipboard. He read it aloud.
“Wendy, Peter, Peter, Peter, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, Michael Three, Wendy, Wendy, Lily Four, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Belle Three, Peter. What is this?” He dropped it on the floor. I didn’t blame him. The paper was as stained as what was left of Marcus Bellucci.
“This is the Playground. This is where you got to go if you’d done especially well, scored very high on a particular test,” most often of the killing sort, “and deserved to be rewarded. You were brought down here to pick a prisoner and play as long or as quickly as you wanted. As messy or neat. Down h
ere was the only free-for-all in the Institute. And there should be two names that stood out on the list. Every time you saw their name, someone down here died.” I bent down and picked the clipboard up to hand it back to Stefan. “Maybe you should count.” I’d scanned the date at the top of the page, which looked to be the first of about fifteen pages in all. “And the clipboard covers only three months. You need to know, Stefan, who spent most of their time down here. I said some of the students wouldn’t want to be cured. Peter and Wendy would sooner die than be cured.”
“But they’d much rather we die than try to cure them,” he said as he shuffled through the pages, either counting or seeing what he’d rather not know the exact numbers on. “Did they ever bring you down here, Misha?” His eyes were on mine. “Not because you were the killer they wanted you to be, but for accidentally doing too well at some other test.”
Everyone was brought down here. Ninety percent of the time it was a reward; ten percent of the time it was a test in itself. “I never killed anyone down here,” I replied. And I hadn’t. I’d been brought down in the evening of the same day Stefan had rescued me, four hours before he’d shown up in the doorway of my room.
I’d made my stand in the mirror of this place. Obedient, but not obedient enough. Genetically altered to be a killer, but refusing to fulfill my scientific destiny. I knew what it meant, that disobedience, but I didn’t care. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about surviving anymore . . . not in this life. I was taken back to my room where I knew they would come for me. They always came for the failures in the middle of the night. It was less of a disruption. We all knew what happened to those who flunked out of the Institute, but telling us and showing us were different. It led to more students losing it and killing everyone around them in a psychotic fit.
Good discipline, but in the end not profitable, Jericho had eventually decided.