I touched his shoulder. He quickly snapped out of his daze and focused on the hand resting on his shoulder.
“Loosen up. We can do this.” I flashed him a friendly smile.
His smile was more forced than mine. He still wouldn’t look directly at me. “Sorry, guess I’m freaked about this whole thing. I mean, what if something goes wrong?”
“Don’t talk like that. We’re going to get these kids out of here, no matter what.”
He looked away and muttered, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I glared at him in exasperation. Why did he have to be so pessimistic?
Dustin met my agitated gaze. Suddenly my eyes were unable to move. Seriously. My eyes were locked into place. We stared at each other for a very long time. Well, at least it felt that way. His beautiful chestnut eyes bored into mine. I tried to find something in those eyes, like in the books, but it was like he was blocking me out or something. There was nothing. Just a sea of brown. All I noticed were the creases and shadows under them, indicating that he hadn’t been sleeping very well. His eyebrows were smooth and shiny. A stray lock of hair spiraled down just over his eyelid, threatening to get caught in his long eyelashes. I fought the urge to reach up and put the lock back in its place.
This I took in without moving or blinking. I started to wonder if he was going over my face like I was going over his. The thought made me a little self-conscious. Of all the things to be worried about, I was worried about how I looked to him. Was my hair a mess? Were my clothes wrinkled? Dear Lord, were there zits on my face that I hadn’t seen before? My eyebrows furrowed. As if he had been worrying about the same thing, Dustin’s did too. We grinned at each other. This time both smiles were genuine.
Then the elevator door opened. I had to rip my gaze away from him to see what lay ahead of us. It was another long hallway, which looked even more menacing than the first one. Something was different about this hallway. I could feel it. Carefully and slowly, I stepped out with my tranquilizer gun raised. The others followed.
Just like before, we split up in pairs for each side. Me with True and Dustin with Marcus. The first door was locked. It didn’t have a scanner either, just a lock. I had taken a pin out of my hair and was just about to put it in the keyhole when there was a click and suddenly the knob began to turn. Both True and I jumped back, pointing the tranqs at the door. A man and a woman walked out, both wearing starch-white coats.
The man was saying something to the woman. Something about running more tests. Then they noticed us. Surprise flashed on both of their faces. The man held his hands up. The woman reached for something. Before I could so much as flex my forefinger, True had gotten them both. They sank to the floor, fast asleep.
Dustin and Marcus ran out of their room, saying that they had heard voices. Then they saw the two people on the floor, little needles sticking out of their necks.
“Did you do that?” Dustin asked, looking over at me.
I shook my head. “Nope. That was all True. She has some seriously fast reflexes.”
Marcus gave her a friendly slap on the back, nearly sending her sprawling onto the floor, but she kept her balance. “Nice.”
She blushed. “Thanks.”
After we had dragged the two unconscious scientists into a closet, we went our separate ways again. Since the door had so nicely been opened for us, we strode right in. We gasped when we saw what was inside. Shelves full of chemical and medical bottles surrounded us. There were syringes in a big bin on the far side of the room. While I stayed where I was, True roamed the room. She examined the petri dishes that had been placed on the long table taking up the middle of the room. Her expression became confused and horrified at the same time. I came over to see what was wrong.
The petri dishes contained oddly colored liquids. Each one had been labeled with words that I couldn’t even pronounce. True took some gloves out of a container by the syringes and snapped them on. She ignored my stare and tossed me a pair. Then she picked up some dishes and brought them closer to her face. She sniffed one that had a lime green liquid in it. She hurriedly put it down, gagging.
“Don’t smell them!” I hissed in alarm. “You could seriously hurt yourself.”
My curious friend wasn’t listening. She was already picking up a different, even brighter colored one. I rolled my eyes in exasperation and started rummaging through the papers laid out on the table. They seemed to be some kind of charts, each one headed with a person’s name. Under each name was their age, weight, height, gender, and blood type.
Then there were spaces for notes. The scribbles that I could read mostly talked about how much medicine was given to them and how they had reacted. Then there were hypotheses on what would happen if they were given a higher dose. After this came the observations and conclusions. A lot of them didn’t sound too great. The reactions could be really repulsive. One note said that the child became covered in swollen red blisters. Another one said that a girl’s skin began to peel right off the bone. Some were so horribly disgusting, I’m not even going to repeat them. I eventually put the charts down, holding my stomach.
True looked up from her petri dishes. “You OK, Lily? You look like you’re going to be sick.”
I turned away from her. “I’m fine. Let’s please just get out of here and move on. We’ve been in this room for too long.”
The boys stuck their heads inside, wondering why we were taking so long . When they saw the shelves of chemicals, their jaws dropped.
“What is this?” Dustin asked, eyes sweeping over the room.
“I don’t really know.” I replied. “On the table there are lists of names with, like, information about stuff. They…they said what happened to them after they got certain doses of drugs.”
Everyone looked at me closely, expecting me to go on. I didn’t go on. There was nothing to say. The look on my face told it all.
Dustin’s jaw clenched. “We have to hurry.”
The next door had a scanner. We had all decided to go in together just in case there were people in there. Dustin took the keycard from around his neck and waved it around in front of the scanner. There was a beep. Then the door swung open.
Inside there was a huge window. Behind it was a big room that looked a little bit like a skating rink. Only there wasn’t any railing, or ice for that matter. The walls were starch-white like the coats on those sorry excuses for scientists. Even the floors were strangely blank. It was a bigger version of the glass cubicle we had seen in the warehouse room.
Marcus muttered, “What the heck?”
There were some kind of controls and buttons by the window. Keypads. Different words were on the buttons:
Strong Winds, Crushed Cars, Gunfire, Earthquakes, Flood.
The buttons had been grouped under headings like
Speed, Strength,
and
Agility.
Gently touching the pads with my still-gloved fingers, I answered, “This is one of those simulators the scientists use to run the experiments.”
On the left side of the keypads were what looked like video game controllers. Curious, I moved them around. With a sharp ping, machinery began to come out of the white room’s walls. It moved in whatever direction I moved the controls.
“Cool,” I heard True say. She reached over to push a button. Before she could touch one, Dustin’s hand shot out to stop her. She looked up at him, startled.
“Don’t touch a thing,” he warned, fiercely glaring at her.
Scared now, True removed her arm from Dustin’s grasp and backed away.
Through clenched teeth I suggested that we leave. So we all left the room, careful not to make a sound.
Out in the hallway, Dustin signed to us to split up again, in different teams this time. While True and Marcus went down the hall ahead of us, Dustin and I followed a little ways behind. This gave me opportunity to be mad at him. I flicked him in the head. His hand flew up to his head.
“Hey, what was that for?!” he exclaimed in surprise, struggling to keep his voice low.
“What do you think?” I shot back. “Look, I know this is stressful and all, but that doesn’t mean you can take it out on True.”
His excuse was that she could have compromised everything by touching a button. People could have heard something or detected it and then we would have been done for. I reminded him that I had touched the controls and nothing bad had happened. True had been a big help so far and was risking her very life by being on this mission with us.
Dustin didn’t say anything. He just turned his back on me to open the next door on the left, while Marcus and True were opening the one on the right. He seemed to be having trouble picking the lock, so I gave him a gentle (OK, maybe not so gentle) push so that I could pick it myself. I had it open in about ten seconds. Enough said.
A whole variety of rooms greeted us from behind the door. In one room, there was a big desk with family pictures and the kind of office phone that has a bunch of different buttons. The other rooms resembled hospital rooms. They even had that unnaturally clean hospital smell.
The first room was empty. In the second room, however, lay a little girl. Closer up, I saw that it was the same girl I had seen being wheeled into the building. Her hair was cut shorter and she appeared to have aged somehow. Her eyes were ringed with purple, like she hadn’t slept in ages. There were yellow spots all over her transparent skin. She moaned in her sleep, calling for her mother.
I lightly touched her forehead to wake her up. Her eyes flew open instantly. Her hands shot out to form an iron grip around my wrist.
“What do you want from me?” she asked in a frightened tone.
“To get you out of here,” I answered simply.
She gazed up at me, eyes wide. “I can go home?”
I nodded. The girl stared at my outstretched hand for a minute. Then, after some coaxing, she let me lead her out of the room.
Dustin was waiting for us. When he saw that I had a companion, he smiled. He knelt down to the little girl’s height and introduced himself. Honey practically dripped from every word and she ate it right up. Dustin gave the girl a small rubber ball he pulled out of his pocket.
“What’s your name, cutie?” he asked her gently.
“Brianna,” she replied in a shy voice.
“Brianna,” he echoed. “That’s a pretty name.”
She just blushed, casting her eyes down. Honestly, I felt like barfing a little bit. Just a little. I mean, he was going a bit over the top.
I knelt down beside Dustin. “Brianna, can you tell me if there’s anyone else here?” My voice wasn’t quite as sugary sweet as Dustin’s, but it was gentle.
She pointed to the room across from hers. “There’s a boy in there. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
Dustin went in while I stayed with Brianna. In a minute he came out with a boy around the age of ten. The boy’s hair was a coppery red with streaks of dark brown. He wore the same white sweats as the girl. He stared sheepishly at the both of us through his purple-lined eyes. As he came closer, I noticed that there was something wrong with his arms. They were oddly deformed and hung limply at his sides.
The boy saw me staring and sighed. “The bones in my arms have turned to mush, so they’re useless.” Then he heaved an even heavier sigh so full of despair it was heartbreaking.
“Do you know how that happened?” I asked.
He shook his head, explaining that all he remembered was being led into a dark room and forced onto a gurney. The rest was a blur.
I had more questions, but Dustin cut me off. “We really need to move on. Is there anyone else here?”
The boy said that he wasn’t sure. We searched the other rooms and found three more children: two boys and one girl. One of the boys, Brandon, had horrible red warts all over his body. Lucas’s hair was the brightest white I had ever seen. It fell in thick locks down his back. Unfortunately, it wasn’t only sprouting from his head. The weird-shaded hair grew out in patches on his arms, legs, knuckles, and eyelids. Seriously. His lashes were mad long. The girl, however, was worse off than all of them. Her skin looked like it was sliding right off of her. For some unknown reason, it held on. Her eyeballs were nearly popping right out of their sockets.
The girl stared at me, her face permanently droopy. The only way I knew that she was a girl was because of her long wavy hair. It was too pretty to be a boy’s. Her eyes were a deep, calming blue. Whenever one of us tried to speak to her, she’d just stare at us with those sad eyes.
Once we had found everyone, Dustin and I briefly explained our plan. They listened intently with solemn expressions. Surprisingly, the children didn’t have any questions, ready to follow any orders given.
We cautiously stepped back out into the hallway. True and Marcus stood right outside the door along with four other people. One of them looked to be about a year older than us. Another was quite small. Too small. The older one’s skin glowed a sickly green. I tried very hard not to stare.
True smiled at our little group and greeted them cheerfully. Marcus eyed them with uncertainty. I couldn’t blame him. They were quite a sight. Besides True’s greetings, nothing was said. The others stayed eerily quiet as we led them down the hallway. They spoke only when spoken to, as if this was the olden days or something.
While going from room to room, the group of children increased. By the next elevator, we had a group of fifteen. Each one had a terrible deformity of some kind. Was it me, or did the injuries get worse as we went on?
On the elevator ride, I once again took the time to study Dustin’s facial expressions. He appeared to be both sad and angry as he scanned every face. Without warning, his jaw dropped in horror. His eyes widened. Before I could follow his gaze, he had flicked his eyes down with a guilty expression.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He didn’t look up. “I think I know some of them.” His voice was the saddest I had ever heard it.