Alex stumbled into his glass room, his small glass room. He could only take about five steps from one end to the other in any direction. Immediately, he collapsed onto the bed that stuck out of the wall like a cot. His entire body hurt. In the room to his left one of the doctors laid Charlie on a bed almost identical to Alex's.
Man, Charlie must be worse off than I am, Alex thought. The boy looked as if he had been shoved through a blender. Blood stained his white t-shirt and plaid pajama pants. Alex felt his jaws tense. How could anyone be heartless enough to beat up on a blind kid? He wondered. Alex painfully turned his head to the right. No one sat in the next room, in fact, none of the other rooms looked occupied. He tried to reach out with his mind but then remembered that he no longer had that ability.
His eyes wondered around the giant lab. Long black topped counters raised just slightly above the level of the glass rooms stretched across the room in front of the doors. High tech computers with red and green blinking lights, and other various pieces of technological equipment covered the counters. In front of the center counter more machines that Alex did not recognize sat planted in the ground. All around the walls were charts of the inside of the ear, the eye, the mouth, anything and everything pertaining to the human body.
The double doors sprung open and six doctors came in with his six friends. Most of them held their "specimens" arms dragging them like convicts to their cells. All accept one doctor, Pearl's doctor, amazing, as it seemed. The two actually walked side by side. Alex liked him immediately. Maybe there is hope, he thought.
The doctors herded them into their individual rooms. Pearl walked through the glass walls into her room and eased down into her bed. Her brown eyes stared as if locked on the doctor's face as he hesitated at the open glass door. For a moment, it looked as if he would let her free, but another doctor came up behind him and pushed the door shut. Then, he put a hand on the young doctors shoulder and guided him away from the glass cage. Pearl continued to stare after the two, and when it did not seem that she would ever look any place else Alex tapped on the glass quietly.
Slowly
Pearl's head turned in his direction and her eyes went from excited
to sorrow. She glanced in the direction of the doctors and then
crawled over to the glass wall.
"Alex, you're here too?
Are you okay? Is that Charlie over there? What happened
to you? What-"
"Stop," Alex said through clenched teeth. His jaw still ached.
Pearl pursed her lips together and waited for him to answer her questions.
"I think that Charlie and I messed with Paul and Karma a little too much and so they decided to deal with us personally before delivering us here. I'm not too bad off but I'm not sure about Charlie." Alex said throwing a glance over at the other room. "He hasn't moved since they threw him in there, and we are having a serious lack of power here, so I can't talk with him telepathically, and chances are that he can no longer here as well as before so..."
They sat in silence for a moment as the weight of their predicament swept over them.