Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (26 page)

I stare at her for a long minute. “He was identified by name officially, but not released to us? Why not?”

“Your father, unlike ninety percent of the rest of the Contaminated, proved … useful.” Dr. Donna gives me a grimacing grin. “He showed all signs of advanced Contamination, which progressed more rapidly even than in others. But there was a difference with him, something only few of the other test subjects experienced, so few, I think I could count them all on two hands. Your father, as rageful and aggressive as he was, as prone to violence, did regain his … sense of self, shall we say. After the initial confusion, your father was able to recall basic information about himself, as well as respond to simple tasks. He was able to use tools in order to complete tasks, and follow instructions to achieve rewards. When he wanted to, that is.”

“You make him sound like a monkey.” I push away the tray, not sure which is worse—the thought of my dad as a raging, murderous, and destructive Connie who didn’t know how to stop himself, or one who did as he was told to get a banana.

“In many ways, yes, the training exercises we put your father through were based on previous experiments that had been completed, with varying levels of success, using primates. I myself ran one of those studies for many years before the Contamination, and let me say, Velvet, the results we were able to achieve with your dad were extraordinary. Beyond what we ever could’ve accomplished with apes, and so far above even the other human test subjects.”

“What happened to them?” There’s a buzzing in my brain I am sure is my imagination, but I try to make myself calm.

Dr. Donna doesn’t seem worried. If my collar’s blinking, she doesn’t notice or care. She shrugs. “Oh. All of them experienced a brief period of cognizance, but it didn’t last. They all died.”

I swallow the bitter residue of the juice that had seemed so sweet when I drank it before. “How?”

For the first time today, she looks shifty. “That’s really not …”

“How?” I demand. “How did they die? Was it something like a fever? Did they have seizures? What?”

“One committed suicide by strangling herself with her
own hair,” Dr. Donna said bluntly. “One jumped into a stairwell while being transported from his room to the testing area. He fell eight flights. One gouged out his eyes with the end of his toothbrush and when that didn’t finish him, he drowned himself in the shower. The two others both went into a catatonic state and couldn’t be roused. Both died in their sleep.”

A low, soft, and painful sound leaks from my lips. “But not my dad. He’s okay? He’s alive?”

“Well, he’s alive,” Dr. Donna says. “And we intend to keep him that way until we can figure out how the Contamination worked in him. It gave him superior strength and agility, the ability to withstand abnormal amounts of pain and still function, as well as a marked decrease in social and moral reasoning.”

“And you act like that’s a good thing?” I want to spit at her, but I keep myself from getting out of the chair. The collar beeps. Warmth floods me, and I smell that burning stink again, but this time it’s undercut with the noxious smell of rotting flowers.

Dr. Donna’s eyes narrow, her gaze going to the collar at my throat. “It has its practical uses, yes. I mean, think of it. If you could have someone with the ability to run for miles without tiring, withstand great physical distress and pain, and also not balk at being ordered to carry out tasks that most people would falter at … I’m sure you can understand why your father created such a great interest.”

“You wanted to make him some sort of supersoldier? Something like that?”

Dr. Donna’s grin is full of teeth. If she knew how ugly she looks when she grins that way, she’d spend the rest of her life frowning.

“Your dad, despite his amazing and interesting reactions to the Contamination, is far too volatile to be of any real use. And your mother, who is one of the only victims I’ve seen who was able to recover enough to speak, to comprehend, and at the same time somehow regain her former personality … well. As wonderful as all that is, she’s weak and not at all capable of the same kinds of physical strength as your father experiences. But you, Velvet,” she says, and I swear she swipes her tongue over her lips like she’s getting ready to eat me, “you are something very special indeed. The best of both of them, aren’t you?”

I’m shaking, my muscles tensing and releasing. The collar beeps again. My eyelids flutter against my will, making her look as she comes closer like one of those freaky ghosts from an Asian horror movie, the ones with all the hair and that jittering, scuttling walk.

“Dr. Billings’s tests have confirmed what we thought might be true, and the results are honestly beyond anything we might’ve dreamed.”

“Golden. Goose.” My mouth pools with saliva I have to swallow hard. She’s close enough again to my face for me to count her eyelashes and the wrinkles at the corners of
her eyes. She needs to pluck her eyebrows and use moisturizer.

“Yes. Have you finished your juice, Velvet?”

“Not thirsty.”

She presses the glass closer to me. “You need to drink all of it. It’s important. Lots of good stuff in there. Vitamins. Minerals. It’s no ThinPro, but it’s as close as we could get. Do you know what they will pay when I can figure out exactly how to re-create what happened to you?” Dr. Donna breathes against my face. “You’re my million-dollar baby.”

And that’s when I headbutt her nose.

SCREAMING, BLOOD OOZING FROM THE GIANT
mess I made of her nose, Dr. Donna tries to punch me in the face. But I’m faster than she is, and I duck out of the way. I stumble forward.

She snags my hair, yanking my head back. I reach behind me to grab her wrists, twisting my body to break her grip. Her eyes are very wide, her mouth pulled back in a snarl.

Her face doubles in front of me. Triples. The entire room shifts out of focus, and I can’t blink away the blur. Faintly, like it’s very far away, the collar is beeping. My hands go to it, even though I know there’s no way I can pull it off. It feels hot against my palms. I stagger and go to one knee, with a hand on the edge of the chair.

“Oh, no, no, you don’t, you little brat. No Mercy Mode for you! Cody! Arnaldo! Get in here! I need a thousand milligrams of Rylaxin, IM, stat!” To me, Dr. Donna says,
“I’ve wasted too much time on you, Velvet. You’re not going to check out so easily.”

I can’t concentrate. My muscles have gone tense and tight. I can’t get up. I watch my fingers curl into my palm, the nails suddenly digging hard enough to cut my skin.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe
.

I get on my feet. Dr. Donna looks surprised. The door opens, and it’s Arnaldo with a tray of syringes, followed by Cody with what I realize is a straitjacket, just like the kind you see in the movies.

She gapes, gesturing wildly at Arnaldo, who looks at me with less surprise than I’d expect. He nods, just barely.

“Arnaldo! Now!”

He has to move, but his hesitation gives me just enough time. I’m at the door with Dr. Donna’s fingers snagging the back of my shirt, but Arnaldo and Cody block me. They pin my arms, but they forget about my feet. I kick Cody in the nose, breaking it. Blood sprays. Arnaldo dives for me then, but I’m fast. And strong.

All the running, jumping, leaping. All the climbing. All these weeks, they’ve done as much to train me for this as if they’d planned it all along.

I don’t stop when I push past Dr. Donna; in fact, I keep going and make sure to shove her as hard as I can. She spins on those ridiculous shoes, teeters, and falls. Then I’m out the door and between the soldiers who have guns pointing at me, but I don’t stop to think about if they’re going to
shoot or not, because behind me, Dr. Donna’s screaming my name.

And also: “Stop her, but don’t hurt her!”

The only reason I can outrun them is because I head for the stairs instead of the elevator, and I leap the railing. I hit the landing and slam through a door before anyone has time to get into the stairwell.

The hall’s almost identical to mine, but the doors here are almost all open. I run past them, barely glancing inside. The rooms seem empty, beds and dressers the same as mine. Bricked-up windows. I reach the end of the hall, another set of stairs. They’ll expect me to go down.

So I go up.

I take the stairs two at a time, hand on the railing to pull me along. The collar is hot on my throat, and every so often the pulsing bands of color flicker across my vision, but I ignore them. I push through the door at the top of the stairs and end up in a ward similar to the one I saw that first day they took me to testing.

This one’s worse, though. No beds here. There are a couple of battered couches, some recliners. A TV playing old game shows on the wall. The room is full of collared Connies, all of them wearing soft tracksuits like the one Jenny gave me. Some of them shuffle around, some stand or sit motionless and staring. Most of them are slack-jawed, if not drooling. One, a girl of about my age, with pretty blond hair that’s pulled back from her face with a harsh rubber
band, stands facing the wall next to the door I just came through. She bangs her head against it, not hard enough to break the skin, but constant, monotonous, endless.
Bang, bang, bang
. Nobody stops her.

Some of them turn to look at me as I come skidding through the door, but most pay no more attention to me than if I were invisible. I should run, but facing these people, all ages, men and women and teens—though no kids younger than maybe thirteen—I can’t move. Is this what I will become? I can’t stay here. They’re coming for me.

I walk quickly through the ward, not convinced that running won’t trigger them somehow, even though I know the collars will keep them from doing anything to me. I slip through the door and into another hallway, this one L shaped. Dark, with flickering overhead lights, many of the bulbs burned out overhead. From the end of the hall, I hear murmuring voices, so I turn in the other direction. I pass open doors, rooms laid out like mine but with windows of glass. I guess they figure collared Connies wouldn’t bother to jump out.

I pass another room, this one without a bed and dresser but instead with a set of big metal tubs covered with canvas laced up the middle with a space for someone’s head to stick out. There are puddles of water on the floor and more dripping from an overhead pipe, and I’m so totally creeped out, I have to look behind me after I pass it, convinced there will be some gaunt and spindly thing coming out of that room
after me. Another room, with a closed door and an observation window crisscrossed with metal mesh, has a stretcher and a series of machines with dials and wires and leather cuffs.… I’m running now, past these rooms of torture and pain. I’m heading for the stairs at the short end of the L, but before I can decide to take them or not, a door several feet away from me opens and a man in a wheelchair is pushed out by a white-suited orderly.

They don’t see me when I duck behind an empty nursing station desk. But I see them as the orderly pushes the man past me. He’s slumped over, wrists shackled to the arms of the wheelchair. Feet, the same.

But I know that halo of red hair, and even that haggard face. Those blue eyes. Even with the lines of age and rage and time etched into his face, I know him. It’s the man who came into our backyard. It’s my dad.

And I can see by the look in his eyes that he knows me.

HIS HEAD TURNS, BUT THE ORDERLY PUSHES
him away so fast, there’s no chance for him to say anything. The pounding of soldiers’ feet comes next, and I press myself under the desk. The hallway is filled with the sudden shuffling of slippered feet, and when I peek out, I see the Connies being herded by the orderlies and nurses into their rooms. But the crowd keeps the soldiers from running down the hall, and I say a prayer to whoever’s watching out for me—thank you for the delay.

I slip my fingers between the collar and my neck, feeling the heat of it. I never knew the collar burned. Now I feel even worse about all the times my mom’s had gone off. I wait for it to send me to my knees again, but though I can still smell that faint burning and I hear a low, constant hum that comes from inside my skull, I’m no longer staggering. No more double vision. I breathe. In, out. Breathe and concentrate on being calm.

I hear Dr. Donna’s voice barking out orders, but I don’t dare peek around the desk.

“She can’t have run very far. You, check the stairs. You, the elevator; she might’ve been stupid enough to try that. And you and you, start checking each and every one of these rooms! Get these people out of my way! Move it!”

They’re going to catch me, and when they do, I’m sure that their starving me will be the least of my worries. At the thought of all the other things they might do to me, the hum in my head gets louder. I close my eyes against a sudden surge of red haze. Once, in gym class, I’d run too fast in heat without drinking enough and passed out in the locker room. This is the same red haze that overtook me right before I went down, and I can’t afford to be unconscious now.

My hands run along the bottom of the desk, looking for a drawer. There must be one, where they keep the pencils and pens and paper clips. I find it, pulling quickly, no time for quiet. They’re coming.

The drawer comes out too fast, spilling everything. I fumble, clumsy, trying to keep my eyes focused on the junk strewn all over the floor. I find a paper clip and straighten it, even though my fingers don’t want to work. I drop it. Can’t find it.

Breathe, Velvet
, I hear my mother say.
Breathe, honey. You can do this
.

I find the slim piece of metal and slide my fingers along the collar, searching for that tiny, nearly invisible hole, but
it refuses my touch. Desperate, the sound of pounding boots coming closer, I slip the paper clip in the laces of my sneaker and bend the wire just enough to keep it there.

Then I run.

I don’t overthink it—I head for the room across the hall and directly for the window, where I slip behind the curtains. I unlatch the window, which opens out to a parking lot. This building is massive and I’m ten stories up. Surrounding the parking lot are the familiar green fields that dot most every place around Lebanon.