Strangers in the Night (27 page)

As if—
finally
—he was getting some truth about the situation.

All it had taken was the death of everybody he had known and loved . . .

When Samantha called out for the person at the door to come in, one of the escorts was there, bearing a pair of plastic trays this time.

A dollop of steaming white rice. A chicken leg alongside it.

Mitts thought to himself that this might be the perfect time to take the escort off guard.

His hands were full.

He wouldn’t be able to easily grab his semi-automatic.

The escort snapped around.

He
glared
at Mitts.

And Mitts saw the wire which snaked up to his ear.

Someone had tipped him off.

Someone had read Mitts’s mind.

Before Mitts could react, the escort dropped the tray.

Food splattered all across the floor.

Samantha screamed.

The escort shoved Mitts onto his back. Onto the bed.

He shoved his rifle into the underside of Mitts’s chin.

Every muscle in Mitts’s body drew tight.

He gritted his teeth.

Before Mitts had really got his head around what’d gone on, the escort backed off.

For a few seconds, Mitts’s heart beat loudly in his ears.

His whole body numbed.

When he reached up to his mouth, his fingertips came away with a thin layer of blood.

He glanced up.

His vision blurred.

He saw the escort.

Samantha . . . she was gripping the escort’s arm.

Yanking him away from Mitts.

The escort’s eyes never left Mitts.

His hold on his rifle never let up.

Not for a second.

Mitts realised the escort now pointed his rifle to the ceiling. That Samantha was talking sense into him. Mitts propped himself up onto his side, using his elbow.

He made the conscious decision not to think about anything.

He fixed his thoughts on the white-washed walls.

That seemed to do the trick.

Finally, Samantha managed to cajole the escort into leaving the room. She told him that she would clean up the mess on the floor. She told him to go and fetch a second helping.

Truth be told, Mitts had lost his appetite.

When the escort was gone, Samantha used wadded-up toilet paper to clean the mess.

Mitts felt himself shaking.

He was still in shock.

“What the
hell
just happened?” he said.

Samantha paused her cleaning. She gripped the fistful of soiled toilet paper tightly.

Fixed Mitts with a glare.

“What do you
think
happened?”

“They’re monitoring my thoughts, aren’t they?” Mitts felt a lump form in his throat. “There’re no cameras in here, the place isn’t even wired for sound, is it? All they need to do is
see
what I’m thinking . . . that’s the greatest surveillance they could ever ask for.”

Samantha didn’t respond.

Anger flashed through him.

“That’s it,
isn’t it
?”

Samantha held his gaze.

“That’s why they brought you here, Mitts,” Samantha replied. “I thought it had been made clear that your
mind
is what they’re after. They’re not going to risk losing you—not going to risk any damage coming to you.”

“Funny, I’m pretty convinced that a guy just shoved a gun in my face. Seems a strange place to want to shoot someone whose brain is so important, huh?”

Samantha stared back at him. Stone-faced.

Then she gave a smirk.

She turned her attention back downward. To the clean-up job.

“Glad you’ve still got your sense of humour,” she said.

“Yeah,” Mitts said, staring out the window to the approaching night. “I guess I still have
something
.”

* * *

Their second dinner arrived. Mitts ate nothing.

He pushed his rice and chicken about his plate with his plastic fork.

This situation reminded him of those Sunday evenings in the Restricted Area. He would lose his appetite then, too. It was the knowledge that, later, Heinmein would put each of them through their check-up. That he would have to submit to the
scientist’s
will.

There was no table in the room, so they ate their dinner perched on the edge of the bed.

When Mitts glanced up, he saw Samantha had almost finished her dinner.

She only had a few scraps of rice left.

She had no reason
not
to have an appetite.

This was just a normal day at the office for her.

The Facility was her
home
now, after all.

Samantha looked to him, then to his plate.

With a slight smile twisting her lips, she rose up off the edge of the bed.

She took his plate off him—still more than three-quarters full.

She left the plates by the door.

Then she returned to the bed.

The two of them sat on the edge of the mattress.

“So,” she said. “Want to hear the end of the story?”

Mitts felt a resistance grow within him.

More than anything else, he wanted to tell her no.

He wanted to see the look on her face when he told her that he
didn’t
want to hear what had happened to her.

How she had come to arrive at the Village.

But then curiosity got the better of him.

He told her to continue.

And she did.

She told him how they travelled through the night in the back of the truck.

How movement had been more or less constant.

Several of Samantha’s fellow passengers had suffered from travel sickness. No matter how hard they bashed their fists up against the cab, there was no reaction from either of the drivers.

With a shake of her head, she told Mitts how they had arrived at the tiny village.

At what would be their home for the foreseeable future.

There were animals running free about the place.

It seemed there had been a farm there once.

They set about
making
the place their home.

Bringing
life
to the Village.

It was there that Samantha stopped.

Mitts felt his whole body surging with adrenalin—hunger too?—wanting to hear what was coming next. “You didn’t tell me how you got the scars,” he said.

Samantha met his eyes, unsmiling. “The other man—the one who travelled with Dag,” she said, her voice catching in her throat.

For a long second, Mitts was certain Samantha would burst into tears.

Mitts planned on being cold.

If she wanted a shoulder to cry on she could go fetch one of those escorts.

Samantha held herself back.

Just like she
always
did.

“His name was Jake, but everyone used to call him ‘Jay’,” she said, “and, well, as time went on, there was a
thing
between us.”

“A ‘thing’?” Mitts repeated back at her, more struck by the descent into schoolyard language than the implied meaning.

Samantha just nodded. “Yes, we got close.” She drew in a deep breath. Her chest puffed out. She gripped the edge of the mattress so tightly that her knuckles turned white. “He and Dag, they were the only ones—the only ones who knew where we were . . . they’d . . . they’d brought us to the Village.” She sniffed a laugh through her nose. “For some reason, at the beginning, I thought I’d get close to Jake. See if I couldn’t get some more information on our situation out of him. But he gave nothing away. He seemed to be wary of tricks. And I ended up
loving
him.”

Mitts felt his gut turn in a knot.

He tasted the little of the chicken and rice he had forced down.

He felt obscenely hot for a moment, and then cold.

Feeling a pounding sensation at his temples, he reached up.

As if some invisible force was attempting to rap its knuckles against his skull.

Samantha went on. “There were power games between Jake and Dag—there always were. It was inevitable that things would come to blows eventually.” She shook her head, apparently out of disbelief. “It was out there, at the water’s edge.” She gave a slight smile. “Strange how everything always seemed to happen out there . . . the two of them just started laying into one another; exchanging blows. Only when I got in the middle of them did I realise Dag had a knife.”

She turned full on to Mitts.

Drew so close that he could feel the warmth from her breath.

Mitts stared at the red-raw, half-healed trio of scars.

In the too-bright light of the room, the skin gave off a greyish reflection.

He thought about reaching out to touch the scars.

Was that what she wanted?

On impulse, he twisted his neck around. To get a look at Samantha’s ears.

Nothing.

No earbud.

When he turned his attention back onto Samantha’s blue, blue eyes, she was smiling again.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I like life’s mysteries—I don’t need to see your brain.”

He held her gaze. Their lips were only centimetres apart. “What do they want from me?”

“Just your cooperation,” Samantha said, leaning in closer still.

“My ‘cooperation’?”

Her mouth moved onto his.

Mitts felt as though his blood had caught fire.

His heart beat harder and harder.

They kissed.

When Samantha drew back, her eyes still on his, she said, “Is that too much to ask?”

The red-haired scientist—
CARLA
—holds her hand to the creature’s chest.

Her pale, white fingers fan out.

She waits for a pulse.

Any sign of life.

But the eyes remain black.

No sign of consciousness.

Not yet.

But the scientist remains unperturbed. Her hand remains on the chest. Insistent that she shall get what she wishes for. That much is certain.

When she leans back again—takes in the creature once more—a tiny, little light appears within those black eyes.

The scientist takes a couple of steps back.

Smiles.

ANOTHER LIFE, ANOTHER START

M
itts sat on a carved stone seat
in the garden which stood at the front of the Facility.

He listened to the gargle of the water through guttering.

One of the escorts had just been by to water the plants. And the gutters were carrying the excess away.

When Mitts breathed in, all he could smell was soil.

A rich, full taste.

It reminded him of the Village.

He could never quite get over the scents of nature.

He could never quite forget those seven long years of sensory deprivation down in the Restricted Area. And what had happened after . . .

Life was good at the Facility. Or as good as it ever had been.

They took good care of him.

He had given them his full cooperation.

The Facility had assigned him a therapist:

A woman in her fifties called Lilly.

At first Mitts was extremely wary about telling Lilly
anything
. He had to admit he feared the therapy sessions were some sort of elaborate device—a device for the Facility administration to check just how honest he was being.

But the truth was, Mitts had no energy left to resist.

He had nowhere to go.

The warm sunshine beamed down upon him. He thought about all that had happened since he had ‘cooperated’. Those in charge had explained things to him. They had informed him that the ‘Village’ had always been intended as a sort of proving ground. A means for the Facility to release its stock of creatures upon a human population.

And examine the results.

Dag and Jake had been lower-level employees.

Charged with the task of recruiting as many desperate—
fleeing
—human beings as they could.

To begin with, the Facility had merely observed the creatures’ reaction to humans.

But, as Carla—the red-haired scientist—had confided in him, it had become clear that the more interesting branch of the experiment had turned out to be the humans’ reaction to the creatures.

Carla informed Mitts that, most nights, they would release their stock of creatures upon the Village. Then sit back and watch the results.

When the rains had first started to fall, the creatures had appeared.

Roaming all over the planet. Morbidly obese. Human-sized slugs.

At least that was how Carla had described them . . .

Indeed, their colloquial name around the Facility was ‘Slugs’.

In more polite company, their name shifted to ‘Strangers’.

The Facility had got hold of a specimen early on. And they had cloned the creature.

Carla told Mitts all the observations they’d made of the Strangers.

How they appeared to have an aversion to dry land.

And a love of water.

It was believed, Carla told him, that the creatures were directly linked to the apocalypse.

They had materialised with the falling rain.

With the surging floods.

The water which’d consumed the larger part of the world.

Although there was no evidence, it was supposed that the creatures had brought these waters along with them. From
wherever
they had come from:

Another dimension?

It was a lot of information for Mitts to absorb.

Mitts grew to despair Carla’s smirks.

As if she revelled in his confusion.

In him getting to grips with such basics.

The Facility had contact with several other research centres scattered about the globe.