Heart Goes Last by Atwood Margaret

Author:Atwood, Margaret
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (Digital)
Published: 2015-07-08T10:31:03+00:00

VIII | ERASE ME

BINNED

When Stan wakes up, he’s no longer strapped down. He’s curled up on his side, lying on something soft. He’s dizzy, and he’s got a crashing headache, like three prime hangovers all at once.

He unglues his eyelids: several pairs of big white eyes with round black pupils are staring into his. What the shit are these? He struggles to sit up, loses his balance, flounders in a mound of small, yielding, fuzzy bodies. Enormous spiders? Caterpillars? Despite himself, he yelps.

A grip, Stan, he tells himself. Get two, they’re cheap.

Ah. He’s lying in a large bin filled with knitted blue teddy bears. Those are the white round-pupilled eyes watching him. “Fuck,” he says. Then he adds, for good measure, “Fucking hell!” At least he’s got his voice back.

He’s in a warehouse with metal rafters and a dim strip of fluorescent lighting overhead. Peering over the side of the bin, he scopes out the floor: cement. That must be why they put him on top of the teddy bears: there’s nothing else in this place that’s in any way soft. Someone’s been thoughtful.

He feels around his own body: parts all accounted for. Thank crap they got rid of the diaper or whatever that was, though it’s humiliating to visualize the removal process. They’ve even put some new clothes on him: an orange Positron boiler suit plus a fleece jacket. And thick socks, because it’s cold as a witch’s tit in here. Stands to reason: it’s February. And why heat a warehouse with nothing in it but teddy bears?

What next? Where is everyone? Not a good idea to shout. Maybe get up, find the exit? But wait: one of his legs is tethered to the side of the metal bin with, yes, a nylon cuff. That must be to keep him from wandering around, leaving this warehouse, bumping into whoever’s outside the door. Nothing to do but wait until Jocelyn comes and tells him what the fuck he’s supposed to do.

He checks over the warehouse interior once again. More bins like the one he’s lying in, arranged in a row. That’s a freaking large number of teddy bears. Also – over toward what he’s now identified as the doors, a small one for people, a big sliding one for trucks – there are some stacks of long boxes that look a lot like coffins, narrower at one end. He sure hopes he’s not shut up in here with a bunch of soon-to-be-rotting corpses.

Which is what Charmaine must think he already is himself, the sad, deluded rabbit. Her distress wasn’t faked: those tears were real. She was shaking when she felt his neck and then stuck the needle into it: she must’ve truly believed she was murdering him. She must’ve passed out right after that: in the split second before the drug hit him and he went out in a blissful swirl of coloured lights, he’d heard the impact as she did a vertical face-plant onto the floor.

If he’d had money on the proposition that Charmaine would never go through with it, he’d have lost the bet.

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