The Terminals (33 page)

“They had her body sent here,” Cam said, tracing a finger up to the label above the drawer. It read 9E. He glanced about. The other drawers were also labeled—9A, 9B, 9C, 9D … all the way through 9K. He gasped. “It's us!”

Siena shut Calliope's drawer and walked down the row. “8F. That's me.” She yanked it open. Thankfully, it was vacant.

Cam couldn't do it, so Siena opened the next two, 9I and 9J.

“That's my friend Ari, and this one is Gwen,” Cam said, tight-lipped. Then she reached drawer 9K. She slid it open and Cam stuck his head into the empty space. He wondered if the dead felt claustrophobia. “I'm looking into my own tomb,” he said.

“Cam…”

“Yeah?”

“I need you to see something here. I don't want you to, but you
need
to.”

Cam turned. Siena had drawer 9H slightly open. “I'm so sorry,” she said, and she pulled it wider so that he could see inside.

Cam staggered backward. “No. Nuh-nuh-no! That's not fair!”

Jules was more recognizable than Calliope without her hair. Her oversized eyes and smallish chin were distinctive. She too wore a cap over her shaved head. Worse, there was a clear incision where they'd removed a portion of her skull, presumably to study the effects of TS on her brain.

Cam didn't even realize Siena was hugging him until she caressed his hair. She pulled him gently away and pushed all the drawers shut with her foot, seemingly out of respect for the privacy of the dead. Then they stood together, and she shared her warmth in the cold room.

After a while, she whispered to him, “Your teammate Owen isn't here yet. Even if they're not looking for us here, they'll be bringing his body soon. They won't want him to rot. We should prepare for company.”

“I need to sit for a minute,” Cam said, and he hoisted himself up onto the gurney. She nodded and stepped away.

The rows of drawers didn't end with the 9 series. Just like the vials of blood, there were 8s and 7s and 6s too.
It's a morgue
, Cam thought.
We're all in the morgue. We're just too naïve to know we're already dead.

The scream was faint through two heavy doors and around two corners, but they heard it.

“That's Wally,” Cam said, jumping up. “Something's wrong.”

 

CAM'S PLAYLIST

38. LET YOU GO
  

by Raven Dark

39. ANGRY YOUNG WOMAN

by Calli

40. ME ON STEROIDS

by Addictionopolis

“Let me let you go.”

Cam knew it was bad, because Donnie was in the room and had the doctor pinned against the wall by the neck. Wally paced, unable to say anything comprehensible through his profanity and the blows he dealt his own head with his open hand.

“What's going on here?”

“He's killing her, Cam,” Donnie said.

“I didn't know!” Wally yelled.

“Wally killed who…?”

“No. The doc! This doc. He took three pints of blood out of her.”

“What?!”

“I didn't know how much was too much!” Wally wailed.

The doctor gargled through Donnie's choke hold.

“No!” Donnie growled. “Don't even try to speak. I will rip your throat out.”

Cam turned to Zara. She was as pale as Calliope. He leaped to her side, grabbing her arm. She was barely able to turn her head.

Donnie rammed the man against the wall by the neck, so strong that the doctor's entire body rattled with the impact.

“Wait! I need to talk to that man,” Cam said.

“Cam, it's too late to talk,” Zara whispered. “Just do…” She couldn't finish. She was fading.

“We might save her,” Cam said. But the look in the doctor's eyes told him he was wrong. “What happened?”

“A bad reaction to the procedure,” the man said. “Allergic reaction maybe.”

“You took three pints?”

“A medically safe amount if—”

“Put it back!” Cam said ridiculously.

“I cannot do that. They would both die.”

“I don't give a shit about him! Save her!”

Cam glanced at the guard. His tongue lolled from his mouth. He didn't look any better than Zara. Cam shot an accusing glare back at the doc. But he only stared at his own feet. It was clear he wouldn't be saving anybody.

Cam knelt beside her. Her chest stopped moving up and down. No breath whooshed from her lips.
An absence of life.
Her year was over. No more extreme experiences. No more kicking ass. She lay still. Except for her slightly open eyes, she might have simply been asleep.
A normal girl dreaming of getting married and picking out dishes
, Cam thought.
A girl who wanted to kiss me.
But there would be no more kissing. She was dead. Cam kissed her anyway, lightly on the mouth, like a gentleman, but long enough to mean something—a wedding kiss. Nobody protested. Indeed, nobody said a word. Afterward, he reached out and shut her eyes for her, and she looked peaceful.

Someone was kneeling beside him. Siena. “Cam, he killed her on purpose.”

“I did not,” the doctor insisted.

“He did, Cam. You know he did.”

Cam hesitated. “I need to think about this.” But he couldn't think. The idea that Zara was gone was scrambling his thoughts.

“I need time. I just need to…”

“That's right,” the doctor said. “We need to talk this through. I can explain. You see, the procedure was compromised when…”

Cam felt the anger rising inside him, like bile about to erupt from his throat. “It's too late to talk,” he growled. He motioned to Donnie.

Donnie's arm lashed out quicker than Cam could follow, and when it recoiled it held a pink, bleeding object. The man's tongue. Siena quickly stuck him with a dart to cut off his horrible gargling scream.

Cam turned in place, lost. “We were saving a life. Why would a doctor do that?” It was an absent question perhaps directed at his teammates, perhaps himself, or at the god he'd abandoned, or at nobody.

Donnie wiped his bloody hands on a towel. “We try to do something good and a doctor screws us over? Sound familiar?”

“And I recommended she do it,” Cam groaned. “I served her up.”

“I didn't see this one coming either, Cam,” Siena said, looking through the man's pockets. “None of us did.”

“I had the gun on him the whole time,” Wally groaned.

“If you didn't, he would have killed you too and then ambushed the rest of us.” She held up four syringes the doctor had filled with inky fluid. “Look familiar?”

“He knew we were trained not to kill,” Donnie growled. “But that's going to change.”

“I've failed you all as leader,” Cam said, remembering something that Ari had told him. “I need to be brilliant
before
half the team is dead.” He might have slumped onto the floor then in despair, but Donnie grabbed him by the arms.

“We're still onboard, Cam.”

Wally nodded. “You got us all the way to here. Otherwise, we'd all be dead on the beach with Owen.”

Cam turned to Siena for support.

“You need to stay sharp,” she said. “Don't puss out on me.”

Cam didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She could have said a million things, he thought, but that was the one that reached him.

“We need to round up the other staff,” he said.

The others were in an observation room, where Donnie had locked them, a doc and the supervisor. Cam got his first look at them through the one-way mirror. They knew they were being watched, and so they sat, behaving themselves. The underling doc was one of the men he'd seen when he'd stumbled into the lab during his medical visit. The supervisor was Indian—India Indian, not Native American.

Cam entered.

The supervisor stood and smiled. His teeth were very white. “Hello, Cameron.”

Cam did not smile. “Hello, Dr. Singh.”

 

CAM'S PLAYLIST

39. ANGRY YOUNG WOMAN
  

by Calli

40. ME ON STEROIDS

by Addictionopolis

41. INCONTINENTAL

by The Steam Punks

“Like the day I watched them put my dog down.”

“I know that's not your real name,” Cam said.

“Names are unimportant. But so long as we are using them for reference, where is Dr. Talis?”

“Unconscious.”

“And my guard?”

“Dead.”

“We need to talk, you and I. This treatment of my staff will not do at all.”

“You're killing us. We know you are.”

Dr. Singh shook his head as though Cam didn't understand. “Some few subjects die in the process. But we are changing life for all of humanity, Cameron. Our species is about to evolve dramatically through science, through medicine. And we are so very close. Any group could be the breakthrough. It might have been yours. We had great hope for you, but then the big boy began to get the headaches.”

“Those ‘subjects' were
people
—Jules, Ari, Owen, Calliope, Tegan, Zara.”

“A privileged few. You were told you would sacrifice. You agreed.”

“We were told we were dying.”

“Everyone is dying. Most live long and ordinary lives of nothingness in debilitating fear of it. We give our subjects a year to be exceptional with little fear of death. We free them. It is a gift.”

Suddenly, Cam realized why Dr. Singh smiled when he spoke to patients about their deaths. They were curiosities to him, a hill of ants to a schoolyard boy with a magnifying glass, perhaps a dissected frog. He'd heard of doctors who began to feel omniscient when they presided over mortality. “God complex,” they called it.

Cam shook his head. “There's a flaw in your logic, doc. I'm not enhanced. I didn't get my gift. And now I'm pissed.” He motioned Donnie and Wally forward to tie them up.

They began to bind their captives to two examination tables.

“I have a personal question,” Cam said. “And it's going to bug me forever if I don't ask. Why did you pick me?”

Dr. Singh spoke clinically, as though dictating an autopsy. “You seemed a team player. You were not supposed to lead. Donald was chosen for his loyalty. He is supposed to lead.” Singh turned to Donnie. “Donald, would you like to resume your rightful position?”

Donnie stopped tying him, and, for a moment, Cam wondered whether he might take Dr. Singh up on it. Then he spoke.

“Do you want me to kill him, Cam?”

For the first time, Dr. Singh's smile disappeared. Cam let the question hang, purposefully not answering.

“I don't think you're even curing sick people,” Cam said. “Siena, what are the best-selling drugs in the world?”

Siena gave a halfhearted chuckle. “Viagra? Botox? Rogaine?”

“Vanity drugs. You're not developing treatments, you want
enhancement
.”

“That's why they sought healthy subjects,” Siena said, seeing where Cam was going.

“Right. They researched us. They chose us. Two geniuses, three superior athletes, a huge strong guy, a musical prodigy, and a couple perfectly healthy college kids.”

“And me,” Wally said.

Cam smiled. “Yeah, well, I've got no explanation for you, buddy.”

Siena glared at Dr. Singh. “I'll bet when they sell it at ten grand a pill, the rich will not only be financially superior…”

“… they'll be physically superior too,” Cam finished.

Singh protested. “No. Untrue. It would be available at a price any median-income family could afford as soon as the patent expired and generics were made.”

Donnie fidgeted. “My question still stands,” he reminded Cam.

Cam pointed at Dr. Singh. “He's killed innocent people. There's an entire refrigerated room full of them in back. He's a serial killer.”

“That carries the death penalty where I come from,” Donnie said.