The Seven (28 page)

Sarah was shocked. The boy smiled broadly at her and she suddenly felt less scared. The boy seemed to be unafraid and unconcerned. "What if they don't?" she asked him. "What if they don't have lunch?"

"Then I'm going to eat the tires off this bus." He grinned broadly, his round, freckled cheeks shining.

Sarah laughed. She hadn't meant to laugh, as she hadn't laughed since her parents had told her that she was going off to a special school, but she couldn't help it. Something in the way he said it, something in the way he delivered the line that tickled her.

They started to walk up the front steps to the building they would come to know as the Home. "My name is Sarah," she told the boy.

"My name is Sarah, too!" he said. "Actually, it's Andy, but wouldn't that have been weird if my name had been Sarah? What would my parents have been thinking?"

Sarah laughed again and she suddenly stopped being scared. She was apprehensive about this house, the soldiers, and the men in the coats, but she wasn't scared anymore. There was something about the big, lumpy kid that put her instantly at ease.

Throughout the first weeks at the Home, Sarah sought out Andy's company at every opportunity, and he sought her, as well. When she went through her first surgery, Andy somehow snuck into the recovery room with her favorite candy bar. When he went through his first surgery, she brought him leftover pizza.

The thing Sarah admired most about Andy was that he was everyone's friend. No one could make him angry and he never angered anyone else. Indigo used to get angry at him over the fact that he never made her angry.

From day one, Sarah and Andy were nearly inseparable. Posey would tease Sarah that she was in love with Andy, but Sarah never really considered it love. He was just Andy, her buddy. Her partner-in-crime. Her confidant.

Just...Andy.

The Present

Sarah snuck back through the halls of the hospital building and into the basement. Dr. Cormair's diversion had emptied the building and focused the search for her outdoors. She kept her head down, fluffed a few strands of hair into her eyes to conceal her face, and walked quickly and purposefully down the empty halls with her hands jammed deeply into the pockets of her scrubs top. She got to a staircase at the end of the hallway and walked down, winding her way to the bottom. She needed someplace to hide, someplace where no one would ever think to look for her.

She opened the first door she came to and peeked in. It was a small laboratory. A computer screen in one of the corners had a program still running. Someone would come back to this room, Sarah thought. She moved to the next room, an empty classroom. There was no place to hide among the skeletal desks. The next room was a bit chilly; a single shielded fluorescent light illuminated the room with a sickly, pale cast. There was a tiled floor and a table in the middle of the room with a drain at one end. One end of the room was a tall, metal wall with four thick, heavy doors arranged in a two-by-two pattern. Sarah had seen a room like this before in a movie.

It was a morgue.

She shuddered and tried to keep her jaw from chattering. She fought her revulsion and stared at the four square doors in the industrial cooler. It would be disgusting. It would be frightening. But, if she needed a place to hide where no one would look, she could do worse than to hide in a body vault. At worst, she told herself, it would only be for a few hours, just enough time to let the base calm down and stop looking for her.

Her stomach doing flips, she crossed the room and yanked open one of the bottom doors. She slid into the vault feet-first and lay on the slab, teeth chattering out of the general creepy sensation rather than the cold of the refrigeration. Her enhanced stamina kept her from being affected by the cold, but she still didn't like it. She didn't like the prickly stinging or the constant chill. She didn't like how the end of her nose felt when the temperature dipped. She closed the door at her head, easing it to point of the lock, but not letting it lock completely.

A thin beam of dull gray light slipped into the body chamber from the crack in the door. Sarah realized that she wasn't in her own, private box. The morgue cooler was a large, open square with two body shelves above, and two below. She let her eyes adjust to the dark and cast a worried glance to her right. There, on the other lower bed, lay a body.

Instantly, Sarah felt a scream well up in her chest. She fought it back down, struggling to get her fear under control. She pushed the door to her vault open slightly and let more light into the cooler. Sarah's heart jumped again.

It was the guard who had assaulted her in the truck. She recognized his fire-scarred face instantly. His body was naked and prepped for burial. He had been punished, "...most severely," as the general had told her. Sarah saw the bullet wounds in the man's chest and stomach. Three small holes dotted him.

She tried to make herself small, sliding over as far to the left as she could. She tried not to think of the corpse sixteen inches to her right. It was only for a little while, she told herself. She just had to hide for a little while. Andy needed her. She could deal with laying next to a dead man for a couple of hours if it meant freeing Andy.

The hours ticked by slowly. It seemed like forever before Sarah finally felt confident that the base had been lulled back to thinking she was gone. She threw open the door to the body vault and pulled herself out, sprawling on the floor next to the cooler. She spent a few seconds shuddering and brushing the creepy sensations of death from her arms.

Sarah slipped out of the morgue, into the basement hallway, and headed for the stairs, walking up three flights until she came to the ground floor. She walked out into the dark night and surveyed the compound.

A tin-sided warehouse with a brown tin roof near the northern edge of the compound was fully illuminated, and a steady stream of activity surrounded it. Soldiers stood on guard outside a large, brown garage door and a single jeep stood at the ready, a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the back. Sarah even spotted the sonic gun that took her down at the Home. She was willing to bet that the warehouse was where Andy was being held.

Sarah started walking directly toward the building, head down, keeping an easy, casual pace. A few soldiers noticed her, but none of them seemed to care. A couple of nurses had been milling around all day. The closer she got to the warehouse, the more apprehension built inside her. She could feel her knees quivering and the butterflies in her stomach were doing crazy loops. A horrible thought occurred to her: What if her powers kicked in involuntarily? Suddenly becoming a blur of color and motion was bound to attract attention.

She walked past a patrolling guard, keeping her face down and letting her hair hang into her eyes. Sarah tried to keep her pace from quickening. She felt like she was going to get stopped any second. Her panic instinct was screaming for her to click into speed and find someplace to hide.

She walked toward the guard post outside the warehouse. A tall, mustachioed soldier stood watch, an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He extended a hand and stopped her. "State your business."

Cold sweat exploded all over her body. Sarah cleared her throat and tried not to sound like a teenager. She reached deep into her book of movie clichés and said, "I just got sent over here to relieve the duty nurse on the experiment."

The soldier raised and eyebrow and shrugged. "She just started two hours ago."

"She was covering for another nurse. I'm the night-shift replacement." Sarah held her breath. Her heart was racing. She couldn't bring herself to look him in the eye. She felt like everything she said was a paper-thin lie that the guard was going to pick up instantly.

The guard used a small hand-scanner to check her ID card. The red light on the end of the hand-held tool went from red to green. The guard shrugged. "Whatever. Have a good night. It's been pretty quiet since this afternoon."

Relief poured through Sarah's body, it replaced her fear with a sudden, rash bravado. She chanced banter. "How is the experiment?"

"I dunno," said the guard. He spoke with the hint of an accent. French? Maybe Quebecois? "I haven't seen him. Some of the guys from inside told me he was a big, ugly bastard, though. I guess he's supposed to be like some sort of Incredible Hulk or something."

"Neat," said Sarah checking her anger. She shouldered past the guard and entered the warehouse. The door had two hallways, one to the left and one that lead straight from the door. The main body of the warehouse building was to the left, so Sarah strolled down the hall. She glimpsed a surveillance camera in the corner of the hall and made sure to keep her pace steady and her head down.

A door at the end of the hall opened into the main body of the storage area. Corrugated steel siding rose two stories to a slanted ceiling supported by thick I-beams. Around the edges of the building were cargo-netted boxes of supplies stacked on wooden pallets and a few odd vehicles, jeeps and Humvees, some in various states of disrepair. Andy was in the center of the room. Sarah hesitated at the door. She had to resist the urge to spring into speed and annihilate the first guard she saw.

Andy looked like something out of a twisted carnival. He stood atop a platform encased on four sides by Plexiglas. A plastic tube jammed into his nostrils was running to a humming oxygen machine next to his cage. He was motionless, coated in some sort of thick gel. Steam rose off the goo and every few minutes, a blast of frothy white foam would shoot out of a black, rubber nozzle hanging from the ceiling. The foam slowly turned to clear jelly and began to steam. Each blast from the foam gun sent a wave of arctic air through the room. They were freezing him to death.

Through the gunk, Sarah could see Andy's face. His eyes were closed and mouth was slightly open. Wisps of gelatinous slop dangled from his lips. His skin had a slight bluish quality about it. Across the warehouse, someone dropped something large and metallic. Andy's eyes blinked open and Sarah saw him glance across the room at the noise.

He was still awake! He was conscious! Sarah had to choke down her rage. It wouldn't do him any good if she suddenly snapped and went super-speed around the room. A patrolling guard was walking toward her with slow, measured strides. Sarah ducked her head again and forced herself to walk into the room. She spotted another nurse in a small booth with dark, tinted windows along one side of the room. She made a beeline for the booth and walked in, her heart beating wildly in her chest.

The nurse barely acknowledged her. She was middle-aged, overweight, and plain with a frog-like face. She was watching some sort of machine that was delivering lines of information onto a computer terminal. "Hey," the woman said. She didn't even look up.

"Hey," Sarah said again. "I'm...uh...new here."

"Whatever," the woman said. "You know what you're doing?"

Sarah couldn't believe the woman just bought what she said. "Sorta. I mean, they went over most of it in...uh...a briefing?"

The nurse looked up. "Briefing?" She made an odd grunt noise. "Staff meetings? Those are pretty useless."

"Uh, yeah...tell me about it," Sarah said.

"How'd you get assigned to the freak show?"

"Freak show?"

"These genetic things they're doing? The freaks? If General Tucker wasn't so committed to these stupid kids, I'd just as soon gas the lot of them. Playing with God's domain is going to get these numbskulls in trouble."

"Gas them?" Sarah's hands were trembling.

"Sure. Load 'em into a trailer and just fill it with hydrogen cyanide or something. I know I took an oath that said I wasn't supposed to do any harm and whatnot, but I figure joining this outfit caused me to renege on my military oath and commit an act of treason, so I might as well start breaking as many oaths as I can."

"Sounds...like solid logic...to me," said Sarah. She was confused. What was this woman talking about?

"I heard that those mutants broke out of Cormair's operation. Tucker's ordered the project to be terminated as soon as we recover them."

"Terminated?"

"Yep. With the five that ran last night and the fact that the one girl broke out of the brig earlier today, Tucker decided that the experiment is over. The big guy here is pretty safe, but the rest need to be recovered for final data collection."

Sarah almost vomited. "Terminate. That...sounds like a pretty good idea. Can't have those...uh...freaks...running free, right?"

"Right."

"What are you monitoring?"

"His muscle activity. Since he got drenched with the cryo-gel, his muscles have been behaving strangely. Take a look." The nurse held up a stack of paper and Sarah took it. There were a bunch of graphs and charts that made no sense to Sarah. There were even some notations near the charts, but it looked like it was written in a different language. It made no sense to her.

Sarah flipped through the pages, looking at nothing in particular, but frowning as she did so the other nurse wouldn't think she was confused. "Wow...that's...unusual. What am I looking at?"

"The cryo-gel basically made his muscles freeze out to the point where he shouldn't be able to feel them, but he seems to still be generating some muscle activity. It's pretty amazing. I guess that's the chance you take when you turn a kid into a genetically enhanced killing machine."

"You sure it's not some sort of adverse reaction to the cold?"

"Eh...pretty sure."

"Is there a way to check it? Make sure he's not in pain or something?"

"Nope. The only way to check would be to shut down the foam distributor above him. If that happens, the foam will steam away in time and he'll slowly gain feeling in his extremities. Once that happens, I'm pretty sure he'll destroy everything in this room. One of the grunts told me he can pick up a truck and throw it the length of a football field."