From the Blackwater Files: The Sick Child

A Project Blackwater Short Story

First Circle – In the Hallway

The tiled floor was a mix of brown, white and blue that formed an odd, stair-stepping pattern, and Carmen’s eyes wandered over the mix of colors, counting the alternating patterns as the doctor led them through the hallway. She took note of a laundry bin and a row of nondescript chairs, and she gazed at a large interior window as they passed (in Carmen’s experience, large windows in hospitals meant nurseries, and she loved to watch the babies who lay sleeping inside), trying to see through the curtain. The red eye of Elysium and the company tagline – WE NEVER SLEEP – marked her passage from the wall poster as Carmen touched the regrowth of lost hair at the crown of her scalp.

Doctor Robert J. Karasevdas walked beside her mother as they passed into another hallway, and Candace Ryan’s eyes never quite left the doctor’s face as they talked.  Her father walked several steps behind, and Carmen wondered if he was intimidated by the doctor’s presence – she knew from her own hospital stays that doctors were rich and powerful, and this doctor possessed the handsome face of a movie star. Carmen brought up the rear, foregoing her usual practice of holding her mother’s hand, for she disliked the doctor almost immediately.

“As I was saying, Mrs. Ryan, Project Blackwater is searching for a cure for the oldest disease known to mankind – mortality. We have been able to solve many puzzles – microsurgeries for atherosclerosis, drugs for weight loss, new gene therapies for cancer –” He gave a backward glance in Carmen’s direction – “Most cancers, at any rate. Last year, the United States set a record for the number of super-centenarians, and by 2100, we expect to have no less than five thousand people that are over a hundred and thirty years old. And still, that is not enough. That is why we requested your daughter as a test subject.”

“How does it work?” There was a faraway look in her mother’s eyes. Carmen recognized the expression, for her father wore the same face – glazed eyes and a vacant smile – when they visited the coffee shop with the pretty barista.

“In our opinion, the cure lies in our need for sleep. Every night, we close our eyes, and for the next eight hours, our minds are dead to the world. I mean that quite literally – the ordinary functions of consciousness turn themselves off even as the lower functions – heartbeat and respiration, for example – carry out their tasks with clockwork precision. At the same time, your mind enters a different state – your dreams – in which you see people who are long dead, and familiar places take on different qualities, as if reality itself were bent slightly out of shape. Sometimes – and this is very rare, but I can assure you that it happens – you dream of things that happen in the future, and they come about.”

“You’ve seen this?” her mother’s eyes widened.

“Oh yes, I had one test subject who had vivid dreams of an event that came true… Of course, he ended up going quite mad, but that’s not important for our purposes. These places – they exist only in our mind, but they exert a tangible effect upon physical reality.”

“Like heaven?” Carmen gasped.

Doctor Robert J. Karasevdas glanced backward as if startled by her presence. He smiled at her, and the smile was charming, in an unpleasant way.

“Or hell.”

Second Circle – The Examination Room

The room was small and unadorned, and Carmen, who had seen the inside of too many hospitals, was struck by the plainness of the space. Her room at Vanderbilt had been piled high with teddy bears, and the Mayo Clinic provided an actual robot, an AI-operated mechanical dog that kept her company during the long hours of chemotherapy. This room was more akin to a morgue, the place where children went when all treatment options were exhausted. Doctor Karasevdas whistled as he strapped her arms to the gurney.

“Do you understand what’s about to happen?”

Carmen nodded. “I’ve been in hospitals before.”

“This is a research facility, not a hospital.” The doctor stared at her with vacant eyes, and Carmen wondered whether she had given offense, but he said nothing more as he turned to his keyboard. Doctor Karasevdas typed a numeric code, and her medical records began scrolling on the holographic screen that projected into the empty air.

“Let’s go over your case – please state your full name.”

“Carmen Alexandra Ryan. I was named after my uncle Alex – he died in the war.”  

“Fascinating.” He typed a few keystrokes. “And how old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Residence?”

“Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve never been to Colorado before –”

“All right, that’s quite good,” he interrupted. “Now, tell me about your stay in the hospital.”

The question puzzled her, for the answer was listed on the screen. “I have a tumor in my brain.”

“Yes. Glioblastoma Multiforme of a variety never seen before the war.” He smiled again, and Carmen noticed that in her mother’s absence, the doctor’s veneer likewise vanished. “We have made great progress in the treatment of many cancers, but this particular variety is resistant to radiation treatment and to most forms of chemotherapy. It is typically found in children under the age of fifteen, and –” the eyes locked on her face with a predatory stare – “it is uniformly fatal. Correct?”

“The doctor in Nashville says that I have another six months.” 

“And those final months, sadly, are not pleasant. However, I think you will be amazed at what we are able to accomplish.” He pressed another button, and a red light flashed on the holographic screen, a sign that the doctor was recording the events of her treatment for posterity. “Carmen Alexandra Ryan, case number 29A. Let’s begin.”

He produced a syringe from the pocket of his white coat, and Carmen flinched at the sight of the large-bore needle. Hospital visits typically required hours of preliminaries – paperwork, physical examinations, blood draws, and other unpleasantries – that delayed the real pain of treatment, and though she been nervous from her first step into the sterile hallway, Carmen had convinced herself that she had plenty of time to prepare for what lay ahead. She squirmed on the gurney, suddenly fearful.

“Right here? Now?”

“Oh yes.” The doctor spoke in a low voice, the caressing whisper of a serpent’s hiss. “I’ve been following your case for a long time, and you have no idea how anxious I have been to make your acquaintance. I think we should begin right away.”

There was a sharp pain as the needle jabbed her upper arm, and Carmen had time for a single yelp of panic as the room spun beneath her and the doctor vanished from sight.

Photo by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on Unsplash

Third Circle – The Lobby

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

She was in a large open room, like the old hotel where they had stayed during her last trip to Memphis. The center of the room was dominated by a carpeted staircase leading upward, its landing adorned with a pair of ornately carved wooden panels, and an ancient radio, a massive thing of vacuum tubes and wooden cabinetry, rested at the foot of the stairs. Carmen approached the radio and, after an instant of hesitation, touched the dial.

“Our project dates back to the war years.” She jumped as the voice of Doctor Karasevdas, barely discernable in the hiss of static, sounded over the speaker. “Do you remember the attack on the Pacific fleet in 2035? The radiation from the neutron bomb killed the sailors, but one ship launched an EMP counterstrike that destroyed the Chinese mainframes.”

“I remember,” her father’s voice answered from the ether. “We won, if a hundred million dead could be called victory.”

“What was never reported is that one man, a janitor, was sleeping belowdecks at the time of the Chinese attack, dreaming sweetly while his shipmates perished. He should have died with the others, but something about that deep sleep enabled his body to heal – in nearly instantaneous fashion – from the effects of the radiation. That was our first clue. The second was the dream.”

“The dream?”

“Oh, yes.” The doctor’s voice faded, and Carmen wondered whether she had lost the signal. “The survivor dreamed a long numeric sequence, which turned out to be the code needed to launch the EMP. You have to understand, Mr. Ryan, that this code is one of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, and something that a janitor should never be able to access.”

“That was never reported in the news…”

“It should have been, for the sailor should have been celebrated as a hero when he returned home. Instead, he spent the next year under interrogation to discover the source of the leak. When it was over, with his body exhausted by sleep deprivation and his mind wrung dry from all the drugs, the only possible conclusion was that he was telling the truth. One man had a dream, and that dream revealed information that he could not possibly have known. Dreams are powerful things.”

“But how could you possibly know…”

The static faded, and the voice of Doctor Robert J. Karasevdas boomed through the speakers with such clarity that Carmen was certain that she was hearing his thoughts rather than his voice.

“Because I led the interrogation unit that examined him.”

“Where am I?” she said aloud to no one in particular.

“You are in the lobby.” A woman’s voice answered from the speaker, its tone both strange and familiar. “This place is part of your own mind, a doorway that allows you to access a deeper reality. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“You will, in due time. For now, take the staircase, then follow the passageway downward. Your journey will be difficult, but I have every confidence in you. Good luck.” The radio fell silent, and she was alone. I don’t know what to do! They had told her nothing about her treatment, and Carmen knew only that an obscure research facility offered a ray of hope, a chance at life denied to so many others. The doctor said that dreams were important, and maybe I’m dreaming…

Or maybe I’m already dead. She clenched her fists, angry at her own helplessness – and gasped in shock. The muscles of her forearms, wasted away by chemotherapy, were healthy and strong. Carmen flexed her toes, her calves, the muscles of her thighs – her body positively hummed with newfound vitality.

“All right, then.” Perhaps it was merely a dream, or a trick of her dying mind, but she approached the stairs with newfound confidence. Carmen ascended, seven steps, then ten, then thirteen, and stood on the landing.

What now? She said to follow the passageway down, but the stairs only lead up. She stopped to think as the radio below crackled to life, and a distant, static-choked voice urged her to go back, go back before it’s too late, he’s lying to you… Then the wooden panels opened before her and Carmen was pulled inward, screaming as she fell into the void and the world went black around her.

Fourth Circle – Virginia

The highway ran through a narrow valley, and the forested peaks stretched upward into the twilight, their tops lost in the gathering darkness. The sky above was clear, and a few stars were visible overhead. Carmen stood in the center of the road, one foot on either side of the yellow line, and read the sign posted on the shoulder.

Welcome to Russell County – Pop. 26,000

I know this place. Her mother had grown up there, though she rarely spoke of those eighteen years – she had nearly died of malnutrition as the night sky shimmered with the fearful aurorae of the high-altitude nuclear bombs that devastated the power grid of the east coast. A place with nothing but bad memories. Carmen had visited when she was ten years old, the year that the city unveiled a plaque in memory of Uncle Alex. She had found it beautiful at the time, but now, the mountains were taller and sharper, and the hollows that extended like tendrils from each ridge were bathed in shadow. I’m dreaming, she thought. I’m strapped to a hospital bed somewhere in Colorado. In the distance, near the top of the highest mountain, a searchlight panned over the valley floor, its red beam sweeping through the trees with the back-and-forth motion of a metronome. The darkness made her uneasy, for in her own neighborhood, in the time before her illness, Carmen was expected to be home before the streetlights came on in the evening. Order had been restored with the war’s end, but one could never be certain what lurked in the dark… Her eyes wandered toward the mountain. The searchlight was much closer now, and Carmen stared at the asphalt ribbon as she prayed for the comfort of approaching headlights. She began walking, and the stars overhead began to wink out of existence.

It came quickly, and later, Carmen would realize that she made no conscious decision to flee – she was simply running, her bare feet slapping the pavement as something crashed through the forest behind her. It moved with the rasp of a thousand tentacles on dry leaves, and paused occasionally to sniff at the night air. Those pauses were even more frightening, for Carmen knew that it was homing in on her own smell through some vestigial proboscis, and when it reached the highway, where the trees did not disperse her scent, it would run her down with ease.  She imagined being lifted upward, her body squeezed by one serpentine arm, and carried toward the open mouth. She risked a backward glance, and the red eye was in the middle of the road, its beam casting to and fro like a great searchlight. The beam locked upon her, and it rushed forward with astonishing speed as Carmen tried to run. It’s too late!

She felt a hand upon her shoulder, and another hand covered her mouth as she was pulled backward, and Carmen fell in a gangly mess of pinwheeling limbs. An arm snaked around her torso, but she made no effort to flee, for the creature that passed by on the empty road filled her with dread.  The rasping sound of movement faded, but its roar of unsatisfied hunger rang in her ears long after its passage.

“Don’t scream, okay? “It’s gone, but it can find us again if we make too much noise. Understand?” Carmen nodded, and the pressure on her mouth eased.

She lay quietly at the edge of the road until she caught her breath, then rolled to face her rescuer. He was dressed in camouflage pants and a flannel shirt that smelled vaguely of sawdust and motor oil. His cheeks were fuzzed with patches of dark hair, a young man’s first attempt at a beard, and though she had never laid eyes upon him in life, Carmen recognized him immediately from her mother’s photo album.

“Hello, Uncle Alex.”

Fifth Circle – Hawaii

“Where are we?”

They were sitting on the beach in the bright midafternoon of a summer day, and Carmen tried to make sense of her surroundings. Uncle Alex had led her through the dark forest, and when they passed between a pair of boulders, there had been a cool breeze, a downward sloping path… and then we were on the beach. The beach was beautiful, but the town behind them was a ruin; the coastal buildings had been swept from their foundations, and for a quarter mile from the water’s edge, there was nothing but rubble.

“I think we’ll be safe here, at least for a little while.” Alex removed his shoes and dug his toes in the sand. “This is one of my favorite places on the entire planet – I was stationed here when I was in the Navy, before we shipped out on our last mission.”

“You served here in the war? Is that why the buildings are gone?”

“No. This –” Alex waved his arm at the debris pile – “is something that I read in a book. In 1946, there was an earthquake in the Aleutian Islands, and a tsunami crossed the ocean and wiped out the town. I was here for six months, and I couldn’t stop dreaming about it – the wave that came ashore was as high as the tallest palm trees, and it stretched along the shore for as far as the eye could see. Anyhow, I thought that if I pulled you into my dream, then that thing wouldn’t be able to find you for a while, and we could talk.”

“What…” Carmen tried to remember what she had seen in the forest, and a wave of sensations rolled over her – the nausea of her chemotherapy treatments, crying at the mirror when her hair had fallen out, the looming knowledge of her own death. “What was that thing?”

“Let me ask you a question – what’s the common thread that runs through every religion, every myth, every legend? There are monsters. I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s been around for a long time, and for some reason, it’s been supercharged by your presence. Ask a metaphysician if you want more than that.”

“Uncle Alex?” Something was bothering her. “You’re really smart, but my mom said…”

“That I spent my time in the Navy swabbing the deck? Yeah, I was kind of a dumbass in life.  Never paid attention in school… do you do good in school?”

“I guess.” Carmen frowned, for her own studies had begun to lag as the illness ate away her body. “Does that mean that you’re dead?”

“Now that’s a very interesting question. I’ve been waiting to bring this up, but… oh shit.”

The water that lapped about their ankles turned black, and in the distance, a line of foam appeared on the horizon. The tsunami rushed toward the beach, and in the center of the churning foam, Carmen saw the light of a single red eye scanning the shore.

“Run.” Alex shoved her away. “I’ll hold it here for as long as I can. Get off the beach and find another portal, and I’ll meet you as soon as I can. Carmen?”

She stared into his eyes, grateful to look away from that awful staring light.

“Whatever happens next, don’t forget the code. Do you understand?” He gave her another shove. “Now go!”

She sprinted toward the pile of dead houses as the earth began to shake beneath her feet, and found a doorway, its frame oddly intact among the splinters. Carmen plunged across the threshold, pausing for a backward glance at her uncle, who stood alone at the water’s edge, dwarfed by the wave of black water that rushed toward the beach.

Sixth Circle – The Interrogation Room

The room was brightly lit by rows of fluorescents, and Doctor Robert J. Karasevdas sat across the table from the prisoner. The computer at his fingertips was an old model, a type that she recognized from history books, and the texture of his face possessed the odd, grainy quality of a classic movie. On the far side of the table, Uncle Alex was strapped to the interrogation chair. Blood trickled from the cut in his shaved head, and a wrinkled gray uniform lay discarded at his feet. It was cold in that room, Carmen thought, and they left him with nothing but his underwear. Uncle Alex’s open eyes stared vacantly across the table. She called out, but neither Alex nor the doctor revealed any knowledge of her presence – she was haunting the room like a ghost.

A glass of water lay at his fingertips, and the doctor took a long sip.

“Let’s go through this again, Alex – do you mind if I call you Alex? We’ve done this for nine months, and you haven’t given us anything.” The doctor’s fingers drummed the table. “All we want is the truth – the war is over, thanks to your actions. Think about that! You could have told us the truth from the beginning, and we would have given you a hero’s welcome. Instead, you stick to this… ridiculous story that the numbers came to you in a dream. Just tell us the truth – you’ll spend a few years in prison, but that will be nothing compared to what you’ve endured.”

“Told you already.” Alex’s words came slowly, as if each word required a great effort. “Told you… the truth. It… wants to eat her.”

“No Alex.” Doctor Karasevdas smiled as the water in his glass turned black. “It’s far worse than that. It wants to lay an egg inside her mind, so that when she returns through the lobby, it will escape into the world above. I called it into being, and now it whispers to me in my dreams – all I need is the right medicine, the right experiment, the right test subject, and I will solve the puzzle. It’s ironic, isn’t it? It will take another fifteen years to be certain, but the test subject will turn out to be your own niece. Isn’t that right, Carmen?”

The red eyes swept over her, and the doctor’s handsome features melted away as she fell to her doom. Whatever is beyond this door will be the end, Carmen thought, and as the blood drummed through her head, she heard a distant echo, its words intelligible but its meaning opaque.

“Remember the code.”

Seventh Circle – Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean

The neutron bomb tore a hole in the fabric of existence, and the entity that poured through the opening crackled with the black lightning of an alien universe. Its tendrils brushed the deck of each dead ship, seeking her presence, as it fed and grew on the pain of the sailors’ final moments.  Carmen stood at the railing and stared at the foundering ships as the sky reddened for a hundred miles in every direction, and the pungent smell of ozone assailed her nostrils.

A staircase led from the deck to the ship’s interior, and she moved quickly, ignoring the dead voice that whispered defeat. The ship was massive, and Carmen knew that it would take days to learn her way through the maze of bulkheads and passages, but this was a dream – her dream – and Uncle Alex was here somewhere. Steam hissed from leaking pipes, and the engine noise made her head throb, but she kept moving until she found the row of bunks.

“Uncle Alex!” Carmen shook his arm, and the skin sloughed away in her hand. “Uncle Alex, wake up!”

“I can’t wake up kid.” A drift of hair fell away as a hand brushed at his scalp. “The bomb went off while I was dreaming of you, and I died before I even knew what was happening. Sorry I can’t help.”

No. She had seen the interrogation, had heard the doctor’s voice. You survived!

“Uncle Alex, please! I don’t know what happened, but I’m alone right now, and I’m so scared – you’re the only one who can help me.” For the first time in a year of illness, Carmen began to cry.  “Maybe you are dead, but if I’m dreaming, then you can come back – at least for a little while.”

The dead eyes opened, and a hand stroked her shoulder.

“All right… If you’re only dreaming, then I guess we have a little time. Do you remember the code?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll figure it out.” Uncle Alex, still dead, sat up and gave her a wink. “Just stick with me, and everything will be okay.”

The control room was a confusion of dials and knobs, and the arcana of the ship’s operation was displayed on a series of electronic monitors. There was a keypad in the center of one console, and Carmen guessed that its plastic cover had been unlocked by the dead man at her feet. The plexiglass windows gave her a good view of the world outside, where the entity loomed at the ship’s bow. Its fingers explored the deck until it found her path to the stairwell, and it descended below decks. Uncle Alex placed a dead hand on her shoulder.

“Do you remember the code?”

“No!” Carmen looked about the room, searching for a codebook, a scrap of paper – anything to provide a clue to her salvation, and found nothing. We only have a few more minutes.

“Think Carmen – you dreamed your way this far, and the solution is somewhere in your head.” Alex stared at the computer screen. “There are sixteen numbers in the code.”

“Sixteen?” Her mind was completely blank as black tendrils began a slow along the fringes of the plexiglass window.  Carmen closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

“Last year, the United States set a record for the number of super-centenarians, and by 2100, we expect to have no less than five thousand people that are over a hundred and thirty years old…”

“Try this – two, one, zero, zero…” Uncle Alex began typing on the keypad as she fought to control her panic. If she was wrong, they were both going to die. “Five, zero, zero, zero, one three zero.”

“That’s good. What else do you have?”

All right. I passed through the lobby and entered the forest – what was there? Carmen visualized the sign on the shoulder of the road – Welcome to Russell County – Pop. 26,000.

“Two, six, zero, zero, zero… Are you sure about this?”

She cried out as cracks appeared in the plexiglass and a black fog crept across the control room floor. Uncle Alex took her hand in his own.

“You’re doing great – just four more numbers to go. Don’t think about me, don’t think about what’s happening around you… Just relax and let it come.”

She took another deep breath and released the tension in her body in a slow exhale. There was nothing but empty space… and then it hit her with the force of a tsunami crashing onto the shore: “In 1946, there was an earthquake in the Aleutian Islands…”

“That’s it! Oneninefoursix – hurry!”

What came next was light and heat and searing pain, a sensation unlike any that she had experienced in twelve months of illness. There was a distant flash, and a coppery taste filled Carmen’s mouth as a ten-megaton warhead detonated in the stratosphere, but the secondary event was infinitely larger, a blast unobserved in the known universe – by comparison, the EMP had been little more than a child’s popgun. Her eyes were blinded as gamma rays bombarded the entity, and as its own pain reverberated throughout her own body, the greatest agony was concentrated near the center of her head, in the mass that had been killing her for the last year.  Carmen groped about the deck, calling out for her Uncle Alex, but there was no answer.

Eighth Circle – Return to the Lobby

Her fingers clawed at the carpet for stability, and the lobby spun in a kaleidoscope of red and green as Carmen’s sightless eyes regained their function. The pain and dizziness eased, and when the spinning ceased, she pushed herself into a sitting position.

“Carmen?” The woman’s voice crackled over the radio. “Carmen, can you answer me?”

“I’m here,” she croaked. “I want my mama.”

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

“I don’t care about your bad news!” She was crying again, and a distant part of her mind wondered whether her face was streaked with sand from a distant beach. “I want my mama, my daddy – anyone! Please!”

“Carmen, do you know who I am?” The radio spoke softly, and there was genuine sympathy in the voice. “Listen closely.”

“You’re…” Her mind refused to acknowledge the truth. “You sound a lot like me.”

“That’s because I am you, Carmen. Or what you will be in a few years, at any rate. You’ve been through a lot already, and from here, things are going to get harder. You will see your mother and father again, but it’s going to be a while.”

“Am… am I dead?”

“On the contrary, you’re very much alive, and you’re going to live for many years.”

“The bomb,” she said. “When the bomb went off, I felt an awful pain in my head.”

“That’s right.” The radio faded as the distant speaker weighed its words. “And something more, for the thing that was on the ship emitted its own… we’ll call it energy for lack of a better word, that killed your tumor with its death throes.”

“Then I’m cured.” Carmen touched her hands, her face, the wisps of hair that were regrowing atop her head. “I’m going to live.”

“Yes, but your heart stopped during the session, and Doctor Karasevdas told your parents that you died on the table. He sent them away, their hearts broken, with a promise to return your body as soon as the autopsy was completed. A promise, I should add, that he has no intention of keeping. From here, you’ll have to find your own way home.”

“All right.” Her mind remained that of a child in many ways, lacked full understanding, but she was alive, and that was enough for now. “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“When I wake up – if I wake up –will all of this have been a dream?”

The radio hummed, a sound that she found comforting. “When you wake up, you will know the truth.”

Ninth Circle – The Morgue

She awakened slowly as a wave of stimuli tickled at her synapses and eased her brain into consciousness. There was the hum of electricity, a comforting sound that reminded her of the radio, and the pneumatic hiss of automatic valves opening and closing with a rhythm eerily reminiscent of waves upon the shore. It was all a dream, wasn’t it? Her journey through the abyss of Project Blackwater had been thrilling and terrifying by turns, and the final moments had given her hope for a life beyond doctors and hospitals and the dreadful countdown to the end. That’s the thing about dreams – sooner or later, you wake up. Now she was back in the world of lost hope, a world of dying children and grieving parents.

Why is there a sheet over my face?

The straps had been removed from her arms and legs, and Carmen sat up on the gurney. She was terribly thirsty, and the deep growl of her stomach surprised her, for her appetite had been nonexistent for months. At the far corner of the room, there was a small office, and she rummaged through the desk until she found two packs of peanuts, which she devoured with relish. In the adjacent restroom, Carmen drank from the faucet, and the chlorine-tinged was water so delicious that she nearly fainted with pleasure. She returned to the desk and stared at the keyboard as her mind raced.

It killed your tumor with its own death throes…

An hour into the session, your heart stopped…

From here, you’ll have to find your own way home.

She began to type, her own voice a whisper as she repeated the sequence. “Two, one, zero, zero… Five, zero, zero, zero, one three zero…” When she was finished, the holographic monitor came alive. Hello, Doctor Karasevdas. How may I be of service?

“Carmen Alexandra Ryan, case number 29A.”

She deleted her medical records, and when she was finished, Carmen opened the secure doors to the outside. It would be cold in the mountains, and dangerous, but she was anxious to be going. First, I need to do one more thing.

The interrogation room was located at the far corner of the basement, in an annex barely large enough for the gurney that took up the center of the room. Carmen made her way through the nest of tubes and monitors and rested at his side, holding one hand and stroking the wisps of thinning hair as she whispered of all the things that she would do when she was sixteen, eighteen, thirty. When she was finished, she kissed the pale forehead.

“Goodbye, Uncle Alex – and thank you for everything.”

She turned off the life support systems, and when his breathing stopped, Carmen pulled the sheet over his head. She was crying again, but she felt better now, for a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Turning off the lights, Carmen made her way upstairs, toward the outside world and her new life, as the electrical wiring hummed and the pneumatic lines hissed, a sibilant cacophony akin to a whispered secret.

“You’ve beaten me, Carmen, but you haven’t killed me. I will be back.”

A special thanks to The Chronicler (linked below), without whom this story would never seen the light of day. In memory of Karmin and Lesa, who died far too young.