Allie passed an intersection, then turned a corner, following the boy’s scent to what felt like the heart of the building. At least the newest layer of hell looked different.
Blue carpet covered the hallway floors. At some point, the front of her shoes had split, letting the soft fibers brush her toes. The walls were an almost pleasant shade of off-gray, and the doors, although still adorned with crimson numbers, looked straight out of a high-end hotel. Compared to the rest of the building she’d seen, the place looked downright comfortable. In another place and time, Allie could have believed herself to be strolling down to meet a friend.
“Like I’ve ever had one of those,” she muttered.
Allie scowled. She really was a great candidate to turn into a monster. No friends, no family, no social graces other than what she had to fake to get into the art galleries or sell a few works. She doubted anyone would ever know she was missing, let alone look for her.
A few feet away, a door sat ajar. Allie stopped and stared at it. The boy’s scent came from behind it, but it wasn’t the only one. Various sweet and salty smells wafted out, along with an undercurrent of potent sourness. The other scent that had been dogging her since waking up flowed out as well.
She figured her new bloodhound powers stemmed from turning into a monster. Being drawn to the kid made sense. She always liked kids, even if she never could keep a relationship long enough to have one. That other smell, though. Why did she want to follow it, too?
A living room greeted her as she eased open the door. A couch, a recliner, little desks with lamps on them, a glass coffee table. The room itself was dark, but pale yellow light leaked from a side room, casting the deep blue furniture and carpet in sickly shades.
Crinkling. The sound of a box being ripped open.
Allie slunk toward the light, half of her brain screaming to run, the other half screaming to get the kid, then run.
Something slapped against what sounded like tile. Shuffling, then footsteps. Allie yelped and jerked back as the boy popped out from around the corner.
“Shit!” Allie hissed the word through clenched teeth as she grabbed a nearby chair to steady herself.
“Kyle.”
“What?”
“My name’s Kyle,” the boy said.
“Oh… uh….” Allie gulped in a deep breath, willing her heart to slow.
“What’s your name?”
“Um… Allie.”
Kyle nodded as if they’d just run into each other at the store, then turned and disappeared back into the lit room, where more crinkling ensued.
“The hell?” Allie muttered. She glanced back at the front door. Perhaps she should just walk out and be on her way. There was no way that kid was normal. His scent crept around the corner, and she’d taken three steps toward it before she realized she’d moved. “Damn it.”
She gave in and walked into the other room.
It turned out to be a kitchen. A marble island stood in the middle, a scattering of paper and a tote surrounding a fruit bowl with near black bananas on top. An electric stove, dishwasher, sink, fridge, and pantry lined the kitchen’s walls, with another doorway leading into a dark hall. Allie quickly dismissed the idea of going there. She’d had more than enough hallways for a lifetime.
Kyle glanced back at her before returning to a cereal bar he held in his hands.
The pantry and fridge stood open. Wrappers and containers littered the floor. The fridge’s pale light was what she’d seen from the living room and was seemingly the only light on in the place.
Allie took a tentative step further into the kitchen. A cracker box crunched under her foot. She tried to count the bits of trash and lost count at twenty. “Did you eat all this?”
Kyle shoved the last bit of cereal bar in his mouth and let the empty wrapper fall to the floor. “Not all of it. But most of it.”
“Wow. You must have been hungry.”
A heavy understatement. Allie wasn’t sure she would have been able to eat as much as he did in an entire day. Then again, she had no idea how long he’d been getting food from here.
“Super hungry. We usually get food every day, but no one’s come around for a while.”
“We?”
“Me and my friends.”
“Are your friends kids too? Are they….” Human, is what she wanted to say. Still, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Kyle waited a moment for her to continue, and when it was clear she wasn’t, shrugged. “Yeah. I’m the oldest, and bravest, so I came out to get food for everyone.”
“I… see.”
“I got distracted, though. There was too much really good stuff, and I was so hungry. I wasn’t sure how to get enough food back, anyway. But you’re here now.”
“Huh?”
Kyle waved toward the pantry, which, surprisingly, still held a lot of unopened food. “You’ve got longer arms, so you can help me carry stuff.”
Allie stared at the shelves of food, a pack of beef jerky catching her eyes. Her stomach growled.
Kyle scrunched up his face. “You’re not going to eat the rest, are you?”
That was rich coming from the kid who looked like he’d eaten through half the pantry and part of the fridge’s stock. Allie forced a smile. “No. But you can help me too.”
“With what?”
Allie grabbed the tote from the table. “You said you and your friends usually get food every day, so how long….” She hesitated as she focused on one of the pieces of paper scattered across the countertop. “Uh… how long have you guys been here?”
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The writing on the paper was loose long hand, with notes scribbled along the margins. A sketch took up most of the center, and it was the drawing that had caught her attention.
“Not sure,” Kyle said. “A lot of days. I was one of the first kids in the class, you know. We all came at different times.”
The crab-thing that had stabbed her adorned the page, its limbs stretched in a twisted version of the Vitruvian Man. Experiment Five Summary, it read at the top of the page.
The strain is amphibious, and capable of feeding off of detritus. It is highly sensitive to the guide scent. With even a small amount, all patients of strain five willingly track without rest. Unfortunately, strain five’s modified gills dry out rapidly outside of strict humidity ranges, and uncontrolled air pressure slows their functions. Organ failure, dehydration, or suffocation happens within an hour in the field. Conclusion: unviable.
Another hand-written report talked about the zombies.
Attempts at regeneration are effective only in regards to the nervous system. The extra energy required rapidly depletes energy stores, starving the rest of the body and causing rapid decay along with an insatiable appetite. Complete collapse of sanity followed by the disappearance of any notable intelligence happens within weeks. Conclusion: Unviable.
A snake-headed, winged lizard with sharp teeth snarled at her from a different sheet.
Stable transition, but extreme energy costs. Cell cannibalization occurs without a constant food source. Regeneration is stable, but increases energy demands exponentially.
A chimeric insect. Fish people with leech mouths and dolphin tails. A bat with a disturbingly human face. Report after report, all unviable.
“You helping, or not?”
Allie jumped at Kyle’s voice, then shook her head. Here she was standing in a building seemingly housing every nightmare hiding in the human psyche, and she got absorbed in reading.
She grabbed the tote and walked over to the pantry, smashing quite a few wrappers on the way. “I’ll help. Anyway, who fed you guys?”
“The White Coats.”
“White Coats?”
“Yeah. People in white coats. Same people who gave us shots, made us do things.”
“Do what things?”
“Whatever they wanted.”
Allie stopped halfway to tossing a bag of bread into the tote. “Bad things?”
“I need to get back. My friends are hungry.”
Kyle grabbed a pack of lunchmeat and a veggie tray from the open fridge, balancing them between his thin arms. He turned and left without another word.
“Hey, wait up!”
Allie caught up to him at the front door. She’d been chasing the kid around the place. There wasn’t a point to stopping now. She’d just have to not think very hard about what the ‘White Coats’ had been testing, or what exactly awaited her among Kyle’s friends.
*****
Hope hadn’t spent as much time reading over the notes as Dr. Miller had expected. She hadn’t even got to the list of patients funneled to the facility through orphanages, jails, and trafficking. Oh well. Hope wasn’t the first to fail to comprehend what was in front of them. She had read some, though. If it was enough to accept the truth, well, they’d both just have to wait and see.
The kid remained a surprise. She wished Dr. Yevon had survived to see it. Imbedding a strong maternal instinct into strain seven had been his idea, and the care of the children his domain.
She’d scoffed at the idea at first. Children were messy, unpredictable, easily broken. Everything she didn’t need in an experimental subject. Still, he’d pointed out the flaws, and many failures, of relying solely on synthetic scent, and after she’d thrown him out of her office and cooled down, she’d realized the merit of his plan. Maternal instinct in humans was hardly something to rely on, however, in the other genetic contributors to strain seven, it ran deep.
Dr. Yevon had been one of the few brave enough to point out flaws in her designs, and the only to survive doing so. If he hadn’t tried to condemn her methods, he’d still be alive. No matter what she did, or what she gave them, people always betrayed her in the end.
She narrowed her eyes at Hope as the security cameras continued to track her across the research facility. Hope hadn’t betrayed her yet, and for once, her strain wasn’t hard-coded to prevent it. Another suggestion from the late Dr. Yevon.
“Free will increases mental stability,” he’d said.
Dr. Miller chewed her lip until she tasted copper. Free will had run him into ruin. Free will had run the world to its knees. Whether it would do the same to Hope remained to be seen.
*****
The hairs on the back of Allie’s neck prickled. She scanned the area around her and Kyle for what felt like the twentieth time in the few minutes they’d been walking.
She tried to tell herself it was because they were going back down. After all, she’d been attacked on the two deepest floors already. This floor, the third, and the one she’d skipped while following Kyle’s scent, was a mystery, and she still didn’t know how much she could trust the kid. Her gut told her lots. Her brain disagreed.
Even so, the prickles on her neck spoke of something different. Something was watching. She was sure of it. The feeling had started shortly after she’d killed the woman in the office. Every creature she’d seen so far seemed driven to kill, and nothing more. If one of the things had enough restraint to stalk her….
Kyle stopped in front of a set of double metal doors.
“This is it,” he said. “Stay here and be quiet until I introduce you.”
He eyed Allie, his back straight, with all the authority a ten-year-old child could muster.
“Right. Sure.”
He nodded curtly and turned back to the door, rapping a detailed rhythm against it.
A moment passed, then a slight squeal as one side of the doors eased open.
“Food!” a kid’s high-pitched voice called out. A dozen other voices echoed the word.
“Yeah, I got food,” Kyle said in that same self-assured tone. “I brought someone to help, too.”
The door creaked further. A blond-headed girl, roughly the same size as Kyle, peered from around the edge. She narrowed her eyes, took a deep breath, then gasped. “Oh!”
The girl was in front of Allie in a second, clear blue eyes gazing up into hers. “I’m so glad you came. Come on!”
She grabbed Allie’s hand and tugged. Allie still hadn’t seen the inside of the room. There could have been anything hidden behind those massive doors, yet if Kyle’s scent could draw her from another floor, the scents wafting from the girl and the room itself could have drawn her from across a continent. She’d have an easier time refusing to breathe than refusing the girl’s invitation.
Allie gritted her teeth and followed the girl into the room. Six long, metal tables, surfaces smooth and shining, stood at equal intervals in the expansive square room. Classroom style chairs surrounded each table, while a massive blackboard covered the back wall. Two doors sat on either side of the blackboard, leading farther in.
A dozen or so children sat clumped at one table, hospital gowns hanging off of each. One child, barely two feet tall, slid off their seat, ran up to Allie and pointed to himself. “Shar-ee.”
Allie stared. The kid prodded his chest and uttered the syllables slower. It only made them harder to figure out.
“Charlie,” the girl said, her hand still holding on to Allie’s. “He’s saying his name is Charlie. He’s the youngest. I’m second oldest, so I’m second in charge.”
Before Allie could think of a response, the other children bounced off their seats. A tidal wave of names, ages, and jobs crashed into her until she could feel a headache blooming in her skull.
Every one of the kids seemed normal, if scrawny, yet not one seemed scared of her. More than odd considering she was a complete stranger wearing shredded clothes, not to mention being covered in filth. Whatever they looked like, they couldn’t be normal.
“Hey!”
Kyle’s voice boomed, echoing against the concrete walls. Silence fell, but all eyes stayed locked on Allie.
“I found food,” Kyle said. “Just like I said I would. You going to eat it, or what?”
The kids fell on Kyle, pulling the food from his grasp. Allie had seen dogs go after scraps like that, and if you got in the way, you’d get bitten. She dropped the tote and took a step back. The sound drew their attention. Within seconds, the bag lay empty, while the room filled with the crinkling of wrappers and the crunching of food.
Allie glanced sideways. “You not eating?”
The girl didn’t move. She shook her head. “No. I’m second biggest, too, so I don’t need as much food. I’ll get some next time.”
A flutter of guilt rose in Allie’s chest. She’d done nothing but suspect the kids, yet this one would rather starve than let another go hungry. “What’s your name?”
The girl grinned. Her smile was pretty, now that Allie was paying attention.
“Lucy.”
“Hello, Lucy. How about I help you all get out of this place?”