Second and final chapter!
Reviews and constructive criticism is welcome!
Immunity
Chapter Two
As soon as the door closed behind Dr. Paige, Newt leaped off the bed and tried the nob. Locked. A swell of panic. A sensation becoming all too familiar. The walls felt far too close. He needed to get out of the room before they suffocated him, he couldn't breathe, he was going to be crushed by the walls –
Stop! He pushed his back against the door and closed his eyes, forcing himself to take three deep breaths. When he opened them again, the camera's red lights were still there, staring. They were watching.
He would not let them see him like this. He would not give them the satisfaction of knowing they had frightened him. He tried the door once more, not because he really thought it had suddenly unlocked, but more to convince himself that there was nothing more he could do at the moment.
He went slowly back to the bed and pulled himself back up, perching on the edge.
He didn't know how much time had passed but he was growing tired, in spite of himself. It had been well past one in the morning when he and the others had snuck out onto the rooftop. There were no windows in the room, so no way of knowing if dawn was approaching. That didn't really bother him anyway. There seemed to only be a handful of windows in the entire WICKED complex anyway.
No clocks though. That bothered him. There was always a clock around to ensure they were punctual to their classes and appointments. He realized he had grown dependent on them.
Newt felt sure the absence of a clock was intentional. Why, he didn't know. They had done the same thing when he and Lizzie first arrived. He had resisted his new name and they had locked him in an empty room with no way of telling the time for hours, sometimes days on end.
His palms grew damp, hands held limply together in his lap. He wanted to lay down. Go to sleep and forget the whole awful night, but feared the moment he did, something terrible would happen. So he sat, completely still while his mind drifted through anything and everything.
He mostly settled on Thomas and the events of the night and what the guards had said. He wondered if he was dying. Maybe the test results had come back positive and they were going to leave him here until he died so that no one else got infected.
The thought almost set him off again. He didn't want to die in this dank little room, not knowing what had happened to Tommy and his friends, not even knowing what time it was!
He shoved the dark thoughts away and concentrated on thinking of something else.
Anything else.
Lizzie.
The name echoed through his body and brought a sense of calm with it. Lizzie. Of course that wasn't her name anymore. They called her Sonya now. She didn't know her real name was Elizabeth. Newt was the only one who knew now. Well, Newt and WICKED. He supposed they must keep records on all of them somewhere.
Newt had called her Lizzie for short. And Lizzie had called him… something. Something just out of reach of his memory. When they retrained him after their arrival, he knew no matter what they did to him, he could not forget his sister. And so Lizzie's real name had stayed, even after his own had been ripped away.
Lizzie, with her golden hair, habitually in a messy braid that flopped against her back every time she walked. Lizzie with her warm smile, always there to comfort him before they'd been taken. Even though he should have been the one doing the comforting.
She was getting taller now. Almost as tall as him, he thought with a little smile. He watched her sometimes. After the other boys had gone to bed, he snuck out to the seemingly forgotten observation corridor that looked down on Group B and watched her sleep or talk with the other girls or read. He wanted so badly to go to her. It broke his heart whenever he caught her crying alone, after all the other girls were asleep. He always pressed his hand against the glass, pretending she could feel his touch even though she never even knew he was there.
Newt's heart had slowed, and he had let himself sink back against the wall. WICKED could do anything they liked to him. So long as they didn't hurt her.
He must have drifted off then, because the next thing he knew, the door was clicking open again and light from the hallway poured in to mingle with the cold light from the solitary bulb above the bed. Two guards in full WICKED gear were standing there and the tallest motioned for him to come. Newt had learned long ago that it was best to do as one was told the first time and save strength for when it became truly necessary to fight back. He thought two fully armed guards for one little kid was a bit overkill though. Maybe they were still just trying to scare him.
He was led further down the hall and deeper into the hospital wing. They passed through the sections he spent the most time in. The large open section with curtains to section off smaller cubical, the private examination rooms a little further down. There weren't many people around so it must still be nighttime. He knew the complex began to wake up around five thirty each morning.
The more metal doors they passed, the less familiar his surroundings became. He knew he had been there before, but not for a long time…
His heart dropped and he almost stopped walking. He had been here before. He had been here daily for almost two weeks when they had been retraining him to accept his new name.
He did stop when he caught sight of the door that had become so dreaded over those two weeks. Identical to the rest, it was just a steel door, like the others. But there was something different about this one.
The tall guard pushed him forward. "Move it. We don't have all night."
He shook his head. "No." his voice was small, and he could feel himself shrinking back in the guard's grip. "Please, please don't make me go in there!"
The guard shoved him forward and Newt stumbled into the room, right into the waiting arms of Dr. Randall. He panicked. He pushed against him, struggling madly to break free, but Randall was stronger.
"Calm down! If you don't knock it off, I'll have to sedate you. And you won't like that."
Newt stopped instantly. He remembered Randall's sedations well. His heart still pounded wildly in his chest and, to his shame, a painful lump stuck in his throat.
"Get on the bed." Randall leaned down to murmur the words in his ear. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just going to teach you a lesson, so you won't disobey out rules again."
Newt swallowed against the lump and gave a jerking nod.
"Good. I knew we would understand each other." Randall let go of him and turned toward the counter. It was nearly identical to the room Newt had just come from.
With a growing sense of dread, he climbed up onto the hard bed with the scratchy white blanket. Why did he feel like a prisoner on his way to the electric chair? Because you are a prisoner. The ugly voice in his mind was there, whispering to him again.
"It may interest you to know," Randall said as he washed his hands in the metal sink, "That your blood tests came back negative. You were retrieved before you could be exposed to anything dangerous." He gave a disapproving nod as he pulled on a pair of the blue plastic gloves. "I warned them that the non-immunes should be told. But they didn't listen to me." He turned back to Newt. "And then things like this happen."
Newt blinked several times. There were more? Just how many 'non-immunes' were there?
Randall pulled a rolling stool over and sat down in front of him. He held an electronic pad in his hands, similar to the learning pads Newt and the other boys were given for their studies.
"Lay down. Try to relax."
Relax. Fat, bloody chance of that. But he complied, still feeling watery in the stomach from Randall's previous threats. He stretched out and laid his arms flat at his sides.
Randall reached under the mattress and pulled out two thick nylon straps. He buckled one around Newt's chest and the other over his legs.
Newt found himself trembling ever so slightly.
Randall placed two cold sensor pads on Newt's temples and tapped a button on his pad. "To monitor your respiration, heart rate, and brain activity," he explained shortly.
Newt picked a spot on the ceiling to focus on and clenched his fists. He didn't know what was coming, but he knew WICKED. And the day they did anything pleasant or good was a day he would die to see.
"Try to relax."
"Not bloody likely."
Randall punched a button on his pad and Newt's world went dark.
There was a chip implant in all of their brains. Something Newt tried not to think about. He remembered the day they had taken him in for surgery and he had come out with a foreign object in his head.
He had suspected WICKED of messing around with his memories because after that, many memories of life before were faded and fuzzy. Like a photograph left too long in the sun.
What he had not known until today, was that they could put memories in too. Memories of things that had never happened to him, that were not his own. Memories wasn't really the right word though, he decided. They were more like flashes of a horrific story that played out in his mind that he could not shut his eyes against, because when he closed his eyes, the images only became clearer.
In his mind, he saw Tommy and Alby and Minho and Teresa, and he was confused at first. It felt so real. But at the same time, he knew it wasn't. he knew this was one of WICKED's mind games. A trick; an illusion.
The five of them sat around talking and laughing as though they hadn't a care in the world. Newt tried to speak but found he couldn't. He couldn't movie either.
Without warning, the walls around them began to crumble and the cheerful banter stopped. Newt tried again to yell but nothing came out. The walls were dissolving, bubbling into a liquid around their feet that burned like acid.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw them coming out of the woods. People. They yelled and screamed and suddenly turned into wolves as they drew closer, their screams turning to howls.
he watched as the wolves pounced and his friends were killed one by one. Tommy being the last. It felt desperately real as he watched helplessly from the sidelines, unable to even cry out to them.
"What was that?" He could barely hold back a sob as Randall unbuckled the straps. "What did you put in my head?"
"I didn't put anything in your head. That was all your own imagination. I just gave it a little prompting and enhanced it."
Newt didn't know what to say. But he felt dirty inside. Why would his own mind conjure up such a terrible scenario?
The weeks went by and their routine went back to relative normalcy. Alby and Minho wouldn't talk about what they had seen in the Crank Pits. Likewise, Newt did not speak of what he had gone through.
Newt's visits to the observation corridor to see his sister became less frequent and he only went during the day now. He didn't want to risk another session with Randall. But they were all the more special for that.
Just as Ava Paige had said, they didn't see Tommy or Teresa again for nearly a year. The night Teresa came and woke him, Alby, and Minho, was the first time in nearly a year he felt a spark of hope in his chest.
When he saw Tommy, he could barely contain the grin that threatened to burst.
"You look bloody fantastic for three in the morning!"