Back then, I didn’t think. I had stopped a few months in, some time after they cut off my limbs, gave me new ones, then taught me how to walk again. I’d basically become a captive animal, pacing back and forth in my blinding white cage as a fluorescent light buzzed above me. During that time, they kept having to restrain me so I’d stop making noise, trying to punch holes in the walls.
Eventually, they wore me down to where all I would do was stare straight ahead, waiting for them to bring my next meal, then eventually sleep. Whether it was at night that I would sleep or not, I had no idea. They’d never turn that light off. It only bothered me the first few months. There was one time it went out, though. The last day I spent there.
I don’t know for how long I’d been asleep, but something woke me up. I don’t know if it was the lack of light or the deafening silence, but the suddenness of it almost made me jolt upright. I had even thought I had gone blind before my eyes started to adjust.
Once I could vaguely make out the blank walls around me, I tried laying back down to sleep until the lights inevitably came back on.
Somewhere down the hallway, I could hear a door open, then close. It was a hinged one, unlike the sliding kind that the room I was in had. Either the other doors in that hall had hinged doors or the door to the stairs had opened, I was thinking. I had never actually seen any of the hallways, so I couldn’t be sure. The people there wouldn’t let me see the halls whenever they’d take me anywhere else in the building. I wrote it off as some worker seeing if it was the whole building that got shut off, or something.
The footsteps kept going after that, though. If it were a worker, they probably would have just come out of their office, or whatever, then went back in. They sounded like they were getting closer, too. It made me sit up in anticipation.
Through the space between the door and the floor, I could see a light approaching. Soon after, I could see the feet of whoever was holding it. They stopped in front of my room and knocked.
“Put your clothes on if you’re not dressed, I’m coming in. Or don’t. I’m down with whatever. I’m gonna be giving you new clothes either way. But yeah.”
The voice didn’t sound nearly as uptight as any of the other ones I’d heard so far. Of the ones I could remember, at least. I was caught so off guard that I hadn’t even realized that I stood up after hearing it.
After a while, the door slid open, and not automatically like it normally should. I couldn’t make out much about the person who opened it aside from that she was tall and wearing some kind of mask. The light was coming from a rectangular object, more than likely her cell phone.
“Yo. You Matty? Or, Matthias, I mean. Vega.”
It takes me a second to even think of how to answer, and all that came out was “Who are you?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, not even answering me. “C’mon, I’m getting you out of here. We gotta hurry, though.”
Before I got a chance to say anything else, she started walking off in the direction I assumed she came from. Not seeing any other choice than just staying, which I really didn’t want to do, I followed after her. The hallway was just as dark as the room, so I couldn’t make out much of it. Based on what her light hit, though, it seemed like the walls were also a bright white, with the tiled floors being more greyish.
Eventually, we reached a door. She opened it and, sure enough, it was a stairwell. It was still lit in there. Probably they were emergency lights that had some outside power source, or something.
“Alright,” she said, heading down to the flight right below. “Your new clothes are in that bag right by the door we came through. Bring the old ones with you, we’re gonna need ‘em. I’m gonna be heading down to the parking garage. Meet ya there.”
“Wait, you didn’t answer my question.”
“Yeah, sorry,” she replied, continuing down. “Like, legit sorry. We for real gotta hurry. Real bad. I’ll introduce myself when we’re outta here.”
She kept going before I could even reply, leaving me with the bag of clothes. I hurried up and changed into them, each piece of clothing being a bit too big for me and having weird stuff printed on it. Probably someone’s idea of a joke, or something. The shirt said something like “Born to Raise Hell, Raised to Birth Angels,” and the pants had the words “Piss Stain” printed down the front of the left leg. She had also brought socks and shoes, but I wouldn’t have been able to put the feet of these legs in them.
Once I finished changing, I headed down the many flights of stairs. I must have been kept pretty high up, with how many I went through. With how little physical activity I’d gotten those past couple months, it was a hard descent.
Some minutes after my start down, she came back into view. I did my best to hurry down to meet up with her. She must have noticed my footsteps, since she stopped leaning against the door to that floor and looked up. Once I reached her, she opened it.
“Hope you’re ready for an hour drive.”
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She led me through the parking garage to her car. A plain grey one, a big contrast to the few cars still in the building at that hour. All luxury kinds. Seeing how the cars were lit made me realize something, though. The light coming in was all the same color. The power was out in this whole area. I couldn’t really tell if it was for the whole city — I really doubted it was, with how big it is — but it definitely was for the area near the building. I didn’t ask how she did that, even with how much I wanted to know.
About thirty minutes after we left that building, once we got to a stoplight, the lady leaned back and sighed.
“Finally, a stoplight,” she said, pulling off her mask and readjusting her hair, shaved on the sides and long on top. She turned to me and gave me the brightest smile I’d seen since moving down here. “Hey. Name’s Elizabeth Vargas, but you can call me Eli. Nice to meet ya, Matty.”
“Yeah,” I eventually managed to say as the light turned green. “Nice to meet you.”
“You’re probably wondering why I’m bringing you way out here, right? My boss wants to explain it herself, so I can’t tell you right now. For real, I really want to, so your head won’t be all swimming, but she wants what she wants, I guess. Oh, by the way, can you put the SIM card back in my phone? It’s in the cupholder.”
The way she talked was weird. I had no idea how to respond to a lot of it, so I just did what she asked me to.
“How you liking the clothes, by the way? Sorry for them being so big, I got ‘em out of my own closet. I’ll get you some for yourself.”
“They’re fine, I guess,” I answered, trying to keep myself from giving her a weird look. “You’re gonna buy me clothes?”
“Yeah. Well, my boss is, technically, but you get what I mean.”
I didn’t get why someone who had done what they had just done would get me clothes. I thought that someone who did that kind of sneaky thing would just give me whatever they had, then have me buy my own stuff with whatever money I manage to somehow make.
“There,” I say once I finish putting the SIM card into ger phone.
“Thanks. VOS, call D.”
The phone rang once through the car’s speakers before being picked up. The voice that came through was soft and slightly raspy, sounding almost like a kid’s.
“What?”
“We’re, like halfway there. You hungry?”
“No.”
“So, the usual?”
“No.”
“I’m gonna get it anyway. If you don’t want it when we get there, I’ll just eat it, alright?”
“Whatever.”
“See you in a bit, sweetie pie.”
“Shut up.”
The call ended and Eli laughed. “Quite the boss, huh? VOS, play Tejano Playlist.”
“Sounds like a kid,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, just wait ‘til you see her.” Again, she laughed.
It was another twenty minutes before we stopped at a fast food place in a small town. She asked for and order of chicken strips and one of the more expensive burgers, then asked what I wanted. I told her I was fine, but she ordered me a burger anyway, saying she’d eat it if I ended up still not wanting it.
After getting the food, we continued to drive through, passing old buildings with missing windows, schools, and at least one raspa stand. Eventually, we passed all of that, to where it was mostly plants on each side with one convenience store off to the side. Past that, we turned in to a neighborhood, where the houses had space between them and large backyards. It was nothing like the parts of home and Valley City that I’d seen. Way more open.
We reached a house towards the back of that neighborhood, a bit smaller than some of the other houses, but still good-sized.
“Help me with the drinks, please,” Eli said as she parked. “And take the clothes with you, too.”
I did, stretching once I got out before getting both bags. I followed her to the door, lit only by a nearby street light. There didn’t seem to be any lights on inside, at least not towards the front.
“Honey,” Eli called out as she knocked on the door. “We’re home!”
We waited a bit and, eventually, I could hear the locks on the door turn. It opened, revealing what looked like a kid with extremely low-end prosthetic arms. Her hair was half-dyed blonde and half chin-length, the other half being light brown and buzzed short, showing off how the eye on that side — her right — was a pale color. As far as I could tell, she was half blind. She had very visible scars on her cheeks and above her blind eye, one across her forehead and the other through her eyebrow.
“Be quiet,” she said, her voice obviously the one that was on the phone earlier.
“C’mon, D, we both know you wouldn’t hear me if I just knocked. Now give me a ‘welcome home’ hug.”
“No,” she said, turning to look at me. Her good eye was a bright brownish color that felt like it could burn holes in whatever it looked at.“That’s ‘RED-033’?”
Before I could ask what she meant by that, Eli spoke up. “Matthias, actually. Actually, I forgot to ask you, you alright with me calling you ‘Matty’? I kind of just started without checking.”
“It’s fine,” I told her. “Now why’d you bring me here?”
The girl stared at me for a second before wordlessly and almost robotically turning and walking off into some other area in the house, turning on the light when she got there.
“Don’t worry,” Eli said, leaning towards me. “She’s just like that. C’mon, let’s eat.”
She led me into the kitchen/dining room area, in which was just a folding table and some folding chairs. Nothing on the walls, no plates or utensils that I could see, nothing on the counter. It made me uncomfortable how empty it was, like they didn’t actually live there. I tried suppressing that feeling by repeating my question.
“Why did you bring me here?”
Eli turned to the girl as she got her food out of the bag.
“Well, D?”
“What?”
“You said you wanted to wait to bring her here to explain stuff, so explain it. And don’t forget to introduce yourself, too! You gotta be polite about it, y’know?”
The girl rolled her eyes, then gave her short explanation. “DA-0111. Call me Dai. You’re my bodyguard now.”
Before I even got a chance to question her, Eli spoke up again.
“That’s not a very good explanation, D. Want me to tell her the rest, or what?”
“Whatever.” Even though she said she wasn’t going to eat, she did, holding the chicken strips as if she didn’t want to get her hands dirty.
Eli turned to me, not having had even unwrapped her burger yet.
“Okay, so, like, D’s been building up a ton of info on the people who run Medi. Recently, they’ve started sending people after her, so she needs someone to stay with her in case they show up. Now that someone is you!”
I looked Eli up and down. Tall. Muscular. “Why don’t you?” I asked, probably sounding more confrontational than I meant.
“Oh, because I’m usually the one out getting that info. We got connections out in the city, so we can’t really send out new faces to meet with ‘em. Maybe when we’re closer we can send you out while I stay, right, D?”
She just shrugged.
Without me thinking about it, words spilled out of my mouth. “What if I want to go home?”
“They take you back,” D said.