Hell is Empty
"Are you sure about this?" Caitlin asked Iris nervously, holding the dreaded jump drive in her hand.
Iris nodded determinedly. Caitlin sighed and inserted the jump drive into the computer behind the desk in the cortex. She was shocked when literally hundreds of files appeared on the screen in front of her.
"I didn't know there were this many," she said quietly.
With a nervous glance at Iris, she clicked on one of them at random, one labeled "Log 105 Resp Cmpd 34." A video instantly appeared on the screen. Caitlin paused hesitantly for a moment and took a deep breath before hitting play.
What first appeared in front of them seemed to be some kind of prep table with different medical tools spread out on top of it. The camera appeared to be attached to someone's glasses or something on their head because the shot seemed to move with each turn of their head.
"This is Dr. Cormier," a voice rang out, "Log entry number 105 for subject number 227. Today we will be continuing the respiratory stage of our experiments, using compound number 34."
At that, they could see a pair of hands, Dr. Cormier's hands, preparing some sort of blue liquid chemical and putting it into some sort of device with tubes attached to it.
"That's a nebulizer," Caitlin explained to Iris quietly, "It aerosolizes substances so they can be inhaled."
When the drug was ready, the doctor picked it up and turned, and the camera showed his progress as he walked out of the prep room and into the next room, one that was almost completely white and lit with harsh fluorescent lighting.
Iris's breath caught in her throat when Barry came into view. She had already seen in person what he had looked like, lying naked on that surgical table with metal restraints strapping him down, but she had somehow forgotten how terrible the sight had been. He looked so helpless and undignified. Without any clothes, he was completely exposed, strapped down pathetically, allowing them to do whatever they wanted to him. It was humiliating and degrading, and the sight alone was enough to make both women's stomachs churn.
Barry looked exhausted. He laid limply on the cold table, his tired eyes just barely cracked open. He looked like he desperately just wanted to sleep, but he couldn't. They never let him fully rest. He was covered with different marks and bruises from some other prior experiments they had done to him, and he was trembling slightly. Whether it was from fear or from the cold, they didn't know, but it was heartbreaking to see. He just looked so worn down.
When the doctor approached the table, Barry turned his head weakly away from him, the only movement he could manage to try to escape him. It was futile, though, because a second later the doctor's hand gripped his chin and roughly turned it back towards him. Barry grimaced but didn't try to turn away again. He clearly was too weak to fight it, and there wasn't a point in trying to anyways. If the doctors wanted to do something, they were going to do it, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
"Subject is alert and oriented," the doctor stated, his hand still on Barry's chin as he observed his face.
He took out a penlight and shined it into each of Barry's eyes.
"Pupils are equal and reactive to light and are accommodating appropriately."
The camera then looked up to the heart monitor.
"Pulse is 180. Blood pressure 126 over 84. Pulse ox is at 95 percent, below his norm of 99 percent. He has a slight heart arrhythmia as an after effect of the cardio experiments yesterday. It shouldn't affect our results today, though."
Barry was visibly growing more agitated. His breathing was steadily increasing in rate, and his eyes were filled with fear as he watched them prepare their materials. The camera soon showed another doctor fitting a breathing mask over the lower half of Barry's face. Barry whimpered quietly, the sound being muffled from the mask. Iris and Caitlin seemed to be the only ones affected by his cries, though, because the doctors in the video didn't falter or hesitate with their procedure.
"P-please," Barry cried weakly, "No drugs. Please n-no more drugs."
"The subject's respirations are at twenty per minute," the lead scientist drawled, "Higher than usual, but the cause is most likely from psychological stress rather than a medical causative factor."
The scientist hooked up the nebulizer to Barry's breathing mask, and after making sure everything was attached correctly, he turned it on. The blue liquid quickly started to take on a gaseous form, filling the mask that was sealed over Barry's face. Barry sobbed as the unknown chemical enveloped his mouth and nose. He tried not to inhale, but within a minute the urge became too great, and he was forced to breathe in the substance.
Caitlin and Iris barely heard the observations that the scientist was now voicing to the camera. They were too focused on the tears in Barry's eyes and the wheezing breaths he was now taking. He coughed violently several times, the chemical seeming to burn his lungs and airway. His breathing only grew more labored and pained the longer he inhaled the substance, and the tears in his eyes eventually brimmed over, streaking down the sides of his face. He tried to plead some more, begging for them to stop and to remove the mask from his face so he could breathe, but the doctors ignored him. They were too preoccupied with studying their results to even hear his pleas.
"Pulse ox has dropped to 91 percent. If it gets below 85, we might have to stop the procedure. Respirations are now thirty per minute, and hypoxia is becoming uncompensated. Subject will most likely go into shock within two to five minutes."
Barry had stopped begging now. He was too breathless to speak. He was taking quick gasping breaths, trying to get oxygen but only getting more of the drug into his lungs. His eyes were bloodshot and watery and after a few minutes they became hazy as Barry become more disoriented. He started to gag weakly, his stomach lurching a couple times, but nothing came up.
Iris sniffed and wiped a few tears from her eyes while Caitlin simply glared at the screen, becoming more and more angry as she watched. Barry was now deathly pale, and his respirations were growing weaker as nearly all of the drug had now been inhaled. A sheer shine of sweat was visible on his forehead, and his eyes were now completely unfocused.
"Subject is now going into asphyxiated shock. Pulse ox saturation is now at 83 percent. There's only a small amount of the compound left, though, so we're going to continue."
Barry's bloodshot eyes were rolling back in his head as he made harsh gasping sounds through the mask. His back arched off of the table, and his arms tugged weakly against their restraints, no doubt as a last desperate attempt to remove the mask from his face, before his entire body suddenly went limp as he lost consciousness.
Another doctor's hand, what looked like a woman's hand, suddenly ripped the mask off his face.
"He's gone into respiratory arrest," she said urgently.
Caitlin and Iris both stiffened. They knew that voice. It was Dr. Holland. She quickly placed an oxygen mask over Barry's face and started giving him ventilations.
"Doctor, the experiment," Dr. Cormier's agitated voice said.
"There won't be any more experiments if he's dead," she said irritably.
After a few minutes of ventilating Barry, he started to breathe on his own again, but his breathing was far from normal. Just when Caitlin and Iris were starting to feeling somewhat grateful towards Dr. Holland for showing Barry some compassion, the doctor started to strike him, harshly slapping him across the face to rouse him.
"Hey, wake up!" she shouted angrily at him, "Come on! Open your eyes!"
Barry's eyes cracked open slightly, but it seemed like he was using all his energy just to keep breathing.
"Pathetic," Dr. Holland muttered, "With the powers he has, he shouldn't be so weak. He should be able to handle more."
She turned away from Barry then, grabbing her clipboard to write down some of her observations. She pulled out her stethoscope and listened to his lung sounds.
"The compound seems to have caused severe bronchoconstriction in his airway," she said after a moment of listening, "Wheezing and rhonchi are audible in his upper airway with a slight crackling heard in his left lower lobe, indicating possible fluid build-up in his lungs."
"Should we give him an albuterol treatment to dilate his airway so he can breathe easier?" Dr. Cormier asked her.
"No," she said dismissively as she wrote on her clipboard, "It should fix itself like always. Don't waste the medication. Just go finish your report for the experiment."
Caitlin paused the video then. Iris tore her eyes away from Barry's face on the screen and looked back at her, tears in her eyes.
"Have you seen enough, or did you want to keep going?" Caitlin asked her quietly.
Iris swallowed and wiped her face, which was set in determination.
"Play the next one."
"Cisco, I'm really sorry, but my work just called, and they need me to go in," Joe said apologetically, "One of my cases just got a big lead, and I have to follow up on it right away. I know you were just about to go back to STAR Labs, but would you mind watching Barry for a couple more hours while I'm gone?"
"Sure thing, Joe," Cisco said, "He's still in bed, right?"
"Like always," Joe said quietly, "I checked on him not too long ago, so I would just try to check on him again in maybe a half hour or so."
"Gotcha," Cisco said, plopping down on the couch with his tablet.
"He should eat again in about an hour. I have the diet plan Caitlin put together for him on the fridge," Joe told him, "He'll probably want to shower after eating. He showers every couple of hours. It keeps him calm. He can be in there alone now, but make sure you check on him frequently in case he slips."
Joe sighed and then dropped his voice to a whisper.
"There's a tranquilizer in the cupboard above the kitchen sink and one upstairs in my bedroom nightstand. Just in case."
Cisco nodded seriously, having been quickly reminded how serious this was and why a Barry-sitter was necessary right now.
"I'll watch him, Joe," he said sincerely.
"Thank you, Cisco," Joe said gratefully, "If you need anything—anything at all—please give me a call. I'll try not to be too long."
After Joe had left, Cisco looked down at his tablet with a sick feeling in his stomach. He hated this. He really hated it. Not that he had to stay here and watch Barry. He really didn't mind that. It was the fact that Barry even needed to be watched that Cisco hated. It was hard on everyone to see him this way.
When he went upstairs to check on Barry a half an hour later, he didn't find Barry in bed. Instead, he was surprised to find Barry sitting at his desk.
"Hey, dude," Cisco said cheerfully, entering the room slowly, "Whatcha up to?"
Barry sighed and set something down on his desk. It was his cellphone.
"Nothing," he answered quietly, "I can't hit the keys."
"Who are you trying to call?" Cisco asked curiously, "I could help you."
"No one," Barry responded dryly, "Just forget it."
Cisco sat down on the edge of the bed, a few feet away from where Barry sat. Barry stared blankly at his desk and didn't look at him.
"I know you don't feel like talking right now, man," Cisco said gently, "And that's okay. I just want you to know that you can, whenever you're ready. You can talk to me, to any of us. We're here for you."
Barry nodded.
"I..." he started to say.
He swallowed once.
"I want to try," he said quietly, "Cisco, I really want to try. I don't want to be this way anymore. I want to try to be better. I just don't have it in me to. I just don't have the energy to care about anything anymore."
"You will, Barry," Cisco said confidently, "You'll get past this. I know right now the world seems like this dark, cruel place, but it will get better. You won't be like this forever."
Barry didn't answer. He simply stared at his phone again. Cisco looked at it curiously.
"Barry, who were you trying to call?" he asked again.
"Felicity," Barry whispered in reply.
"Do you think it would be easier to talk to her about everything?" Cisco asked somewhat hopefully, "I can dial the number for you, if you think talking to her would be easier for you. You should really talk to somebody, Barry. Anybody."
Barry shook his head.
"I just…I just wanted to see if she had found them," he said, looking at Cisco, "The scientists."
"Oh," Cisco said quietly, and Barry looked away again, "Barry, you know that's not what you should be focusing on right now."
Barry nodded slightly.
"I know," he said in barely more than a whisper, "But it's all I can think about. It's all that I can still make myself care about. The fact that they're all still out there…"
"I know, man," Cisco said, "I know. They're going to get what's coming to them, though. They're going to go to hell for what they did to you."
Barry didn't respond right away. He stared thoughtfully at his desk for a moment or two before speaking again.
"Hell is empty," he whispered, "All the demons are here."
"Let's see what a few more hours at negative thirty degrees has done to our specimen," Dr. Holland said to one of her fellow scientists.
"Hopefully it helped improve his attitude," the other doctor said bitterly.
The camera wasn't attached to anyone this time but was instead in the upper corner of the room, looking down on the entire scene below so that Iris and Caitlin could see everyone all at once. When the two scientists approached the table, Dr. Holland nudged the unconscious subject roughly to wake him. Barry opened his eyes to glare at them.
"Are you ready to cooperate?" she asked in a deadly calm voice, her breath visible in the frigid air of the lab.
Barry didn't answer right away. Instead he looked at the two scientists for a moment, and Iris and Caitlin were shocked to see his bruised face suddenly stretch into a wide humorless grin, his teeth bloody.
"Nice face, Thompson," Barry smirked.
The other doctor, Dr. Thompson, lunged at him suddenly, but Dr. Holland held him back, stopping him instantly with a deathly serious look on her face. Barry just laughed darkly.
"Let me knock that smug grin off his face," Dr. Thompson growled angrily.
Even through the camera footage, a dark purple bruising around the doctor's eye was visible, and judging by the context, Barry was responsible for the man's shiner.
"He'll get what's coming to him," Dr. Holland said dismissively, "I don't think he'll be laughing once we start the next procedure."
Dr. Thompson nodded angrily while Barry continued to stare defiantly at them, no longer smiling but also not allowing his fear to show.
"Maybe you'll cooperate more if we bring your little family in here," Dr. Thompson threatened.
"Do it," Barry spat angrily.
Dr. Holland shook her head.
"It's what he wants," she told the other doctor, "He doesn't believe us that they're even still alive. He wants us to bring them in here so he can see them…or what's left of them," she added just to torment Barry.
Barry's rebellious façade cracked ever so slightly, and his defiant expression waivered at her words.
"If you hurt them, I swear to God…" he said in a dangerously quiet voice.
"There is no God here," Thompson answered smugly, "There's only us."
Barry glared at him.
"I'm going to get out of here one day," Barry said quietly, looking at both of the doctors, "And when I do, I am going to find you. I am going to hunt you down, every last one of you, and I'm going to make each of you suffer before I kill you. I promise. I'm going to kill you, all of you."
Barry didn't speak again after that. He let them go ahead with their procedure, his face set in determination.
Dr. Holland stared at the inside of the pipeline cell walls. Now she had a small taste of what it felt like to be held captive. She knew this didn't even begin to compare to what had been done to that young man. What she had done to him. To Barry.
That was the worst part. The guilt, the crushing guilt that weighed on her every moment of every day she spent in the cell. There was nothing to distract her from it. She simply sat there all day long, thinking over all the unspeakable things she had done to that man.
She could hardly bear to think his name. Barry. She forced herself to think it, even said out loud to herself sometimes. She had spent enough time trying to ignore it, trying to ignore the fact that he was a person who had a name and a life, who had actual thoughts and feelings. He wasn't just some faceless, nameless subject like she had spent so long telling herself. He wasn't some emotionless thing to be studied. He was a human being. And she had destroyed him.
It killed her that there was nothing she could do to help him now. She knew he would never heal. How could he? His family didn't even know the half of it. Even the videos wouldn't show them everything. They didn't show the little moments in between the procedures. They didn't show the sick mind games she had played, the little things that she, herself, had said or did to drive Barry over the edge. The videos didn't show the long hours Barry spent staring at the ceiling as he clung to his sanity while they ran their routine tests on him, the things they never bothered to film. Barry's family was in denial, but Holland knew the truth.
Barry would never truly heal from this.
They had lost track of how many videos they had watched. Iris had needed to cover her eyes for some of the gorier ones, but she had insisted that they keep watching. She needed to understand. She needed to do this for Barry. She needed to see this, so she could help him.
The last video that Caitlin clicked on was labeled 'Log 123 Marburg Day 3.' A woman wearing a full hazmat suit was visible on the screen, blocking Barry from view as she spoke to the camera.
"This is Dr. Mendes, the etiologist for experiment 227. We are on day three of the Marburg trials, and we have some interesting advancements."
When she stepped to the side to allow the camera a view of Barry, Caitlin and Iris gasped. Barry looked like hell. He seemed to be bleeding from every orifice. Blood was flowing from his mouth, nose, eyes and ears. His veins were all dark and visible through his translucent skin, long dark webs of blood vessels bulging out in his neck. He was clearly very sick.
"The Marburg virus," Caitlin said quietly.
"The what?" Iris asked her, her voice cracking slightly.
"It's arguably the deadliest virus in the world," Caitlin said, "Worse than ebola or any other disease you can think of. The survival rate is very low. Most people die from the hemorrhagic fever it produces. It makes all of your blood vessels leak, causing severe internal bleeding. It's a horrible way to go. It's downright ugly."
Barry started coughing, and more blood spewed from his mouth. He was covered in sweat and lines of dried blood streaked down his face. He looked like absolute hell.
"The subject has progressed to the later stages of the disease within a matter of days," Dr. Mendes continued, "It takes most victims weeks to reach the hemorrhagic stage for this particular strain, but it appears his immune system has sped up the process to work itself through the virus quicker. Whether or not this increases chances of survival, I don't know yet, but it could completely change the way we think about treating viral diseases."
Barry's eyes were starting to droop shut, but the doctor used her gloved fingers to pry them open and shine a light in them. Barry let out a sob in protest. The whites of his eyes were completely red, all the blood capillaries leaking blood.
"As I mentioned in my written report, his bloodwork indicates significant changes in viral structure and etiology. His unique immune response seems to have triggered some sort of mutation in the virus, making it potentially even more dangerous. It shows promising evidence that his body might be capable of synthesizing and incubating deadly superviruses for biological warfare."
"That's sick," Iris said angrily, "Eiling wanted to use Barry to create biological weapons?!"
"At this point, I don't think there's anything I would put past Eiling," Caitlin said, her stomach churning as she saw how sickly Barry looked on the video.
It didn't even look like him. They were using Barry's body as an incubation vessel for a deadly virus. That was almost worse than the surgeries.
"I think I've seen enough," Iris finally said in a drained voice, "I can't watch any more."
Caitlin nodded in understanding. She was a doctor, and even she was starting to feel a bit queasy from the surgeries and sick procedures they had watched over the last couple hours.
"There are hundreds of these," Caitlin said quietly, scrolling through all the files, "I can't even imagine…"
"I know," Iris said brokenly.
Her eyes felt itchy and dry from all the tears she had shed. She thought she would understand after watching the videos, but if they had done anything for her, it was to help her come to the realization that she would never fully understand. None of them would ever even begin to understand everything Barry went through.
Here she had accused him of not coping well, but how the hell was somebody supposed to cope with that?! Nine weeks of continuous, unrelenting round-the-clock torture. Nine weeks. It was amazing Barry could even form a coherent thought and that he wasn't just completely insane after all of that. Most people would have been catatonic for the rest of their lives. Iris felt an ache in her heart as she finally considered the possibility that Barry might not ever fully come back from this.
He would never be her Barry again.
Like Joe had predicted, Barry wanted to take a shower shortly after eating. It made Cisco nervous, and he knocked on the bathroom door every five minutes or so to check on him. Barry seemed to be taking the longest shower known to man. He probably had to wait to shower every couple hours just because there wasn't enough hot water to stay in the shower all day. Otherwise he probably would have never left the shower at all.
Cisco knocked on the bathroom door for the fourth time. He had been in there for twenty-five minutes now. Cisco tentatively opened the door and stuck his head inside again. The room was filled with steam. Barry no doubt had the water on as hot as it would go.
"Hey, man," Cisco called into the bathroom, "Still doing okay?"
"Fine," Barry answered quietly from behind the shower curtain.
His voice almost sounded strained, though.
"Alright," Cisco said hesitantly before closing the door.
With a sigh, Cisco headed back down the stairs, thinking about how much he missed his best friend. He missed Barry, the real Barry. He instantly felt guilty for thinking this way, though. It was selfish for him to be moping over the loss of his best friend when Barry was the one who was really suffering here.
Cisco tried to think of ways he could help bring Barry out of his post-suicidal stupor, but like always he was at a loss for what to do. It seemed like the only thing that would help was time, and at the moment, that didn't feel like nearly enough. He wanted to do something, but there was nothing he could do to make this better. All they could do was wait and be there for Barry to support him as he worked through this.
It wasn't enough.
Cisco's thoughts were abruptly interrupted when he suddenly heard a loud thud above his head that had come from upstairs. He felt his blood run cold.
"Barry," Cisco said to himself before rushing up the stairs in a panic.
Disclaimer: "Hell is empty and all the devils are here."—Shakespeare, The Tempest
