All the Devils Here by Astor Penn

Author:Astor Penn [Penn, Astor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2014-09-19T23:00:00+00:00

AFTER THIS, things change. For one, I can now promptly and precisely always tell the time despite my lack of a clock in the room. I know because every hour on the hour, a hazmat enters my room to do checks. Checks consist of heart rate, blood pressure, sometimes weighing, sometimes reflex tests. They measure everything—the curvature of my back and legs, the reaction times to stimuli such as light and sound. There are more tests and less rest and certainly more drugs.

They never tell me what the injections are. Are they antibodies? Rumors were that these facilities are testing possible vaccines, and my redheaded friend pretty much confirmed that. It’s the only explanation.

I see her sometimes. There are so many of them now, mostly male, but other women too. She is the hardest to look at. She reminds me too much of Poppy with her wild hair, but this woman is short and slightly plump, which is a nearly ridiculous notion. They must be very well fed in this building; I am certainly eating better than I was. After being approved for solid food, they’ve started bringing me real meat and vegetables. Fruit even, sometimes. Hard, never ripe fruit, but fruit not from a packaged cup.

It’s difficult to eat.

No one answers any of my questions. They might as well sew my mouth shut, and judging by the looks some of them give me, they’ve certainly considered it. Sometimes I hear them gathered down the hallway, talking loud enough I can hear the clear excitement in their voice, but not the content which brings them joy. There’s something going on, which I am the center of.

Every time I hear one of them happy, I want to hurt them worse than I’ve wanted anything else.

They keep my feet and hands restrained, usually, but they haven’t bothered with the full jacket since my first awakening. I have to give up keeping track of the time, because they come so frequently I find it hard to sleep; it’s been at least three days of constant supervision until I finally can almost sleep through an entire check. There’s not much point in staying conscious through my time as a lab rat, not when I have no chance of escaping with constant visitors.

I still sometimes pipe up with a question. “What day is it?” I have only a rough guess of what day it was when I was taken, but a rough guess is better than nothing, and it’s important to remind them I’m still here. They never humor me. I wonder what happened to our things when they found us; most of all I wish I had Bryant’s leather bracelet. It was the most innocent of the items, but it was an item on a carrier, which made it dangerous enough to burn, probably. Did I lose it? If it was the hazmats who set the trap and riffled through our things that day, surely they didn’t take it. Is it buried out in the woods somewhere? Part of me is glad.

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