"He's clean." It was supposed to be good news, they needed someone to replace the lunatic in the hatch, well, two someones, otherwise it wouldn't be long until Sawyer became the lunatic in the hatch. Plus, it had been too long since they had a child in the program, and that was one of the most valuable parts of the experiments they conducted. Not surprisingly none of the people involved in the experiment had been too eager to produce children having seen what happened to those in it. They had tried to take some of the children involved in the plane crash, but they had all been taken with the rescue. It was too risky to keep any of them behind with outside interest being what it was. And the rescue had to happen, they had been far too disruptive to do otherwise.
That Kate and Sawyer had been left was an irritation, they had obviously underestimated the stupidity of the armed forces. So something had to be done about them. The hatch was an obvious place to put them. The man currently in there was at the end of his tether, the observation teams at the Pearl had reported that he wasn't far from suicide. No one was likely to volunteer for that duty, and outside recruitment programs had been abandoned.
So it was good that Sawyer was clean, useful, and it solved a multitude of problems. But he couldn't be happy about it. He wanted that bastard to suffer, he deserved to suffer. He was rude and vicious, an asshole of the worse sort. Plus, if Sawyer wasn't available for the project, that meant that there was no use for the hellcat they had back at base, and he could have a whole lot of fun with her. Instead the two of them got off easy.
"Let's get moving then." He might not be happy, but he wasn't about to show Alex that. She'd been enough trouble as it was recently, and if she wasn't so important they'd have got rid of her.
By the time they whipped his hood off, Sawyer was practically choking. The coarse fabric had been itching at his face, making his skin crawl, and even though he knew he could get enough air through his nose, the binding in his mouth was still disconcerting. His eyes were met by a harsh, invasive light, and it took him a moment to adjust to it.
"Welcome to your new home, Mr. Ford." The same men, the ones that had been holding him, the ones that had been threatening to hurt Kate if he misbehaved, were once again pointing guns at him. But this time the power balance was different. He might have been tied up, gagged and being held at gunpoint on his knees, but he could feel it. Something had changed. The disdain in the mans voice had disappeared, he was being addressed like a human being rather than as a piece of dirt. It mattered to them if he lived or died, and he was thankful of the gag that prevented him from smiling at what that meant.
His rising confidence was short lived, as two gunshots ripped through the air. He felt his blood run cold as a sickening thought entered his head; what if the fact that they needed him meant that they didn't need Kate? He had seen her bloody and beaten, inches away from death, and it didn't take much for him to imagine her lying lifeless on the floor of this artificial prison. He had thought he was safe, but his safety had cost Kate her life.
The fat man that Sawyer thought of in his head as Zeke leant down until the ends of his beard tickled Sawyer's face. "Bad things happen to people who don't co-operate with us. You might want to keep that in mind." The words rung falsely to Sawyer, there was something not right with the tone the man had used. He could easily imagine Kate not co-operating, she was obtuse enough as it was without being held in captivity. But she was no worse than him, and even though his behaviour had been controlled by the thought of what they might do to her, he didn't honestly believe they had killed her because of that. Something else was going on here.
Movement caught his eyes, two men dragging a body in from an adjoining room. For a moment he thought they were going to parade her in front of him. But the body they brought out, blood dripping from the chest, was not hers. It was a man who couldn't have been much older than Sawyer, although his face was tired. If this was meant to terrify him into submission though, Sawyer thought they had missed their chance. If this man was who they were using to bully him, then it meant that Kate was alive, and that she was just as needed as he was.
"You need to listen carefully. There is a computer here. Your job is to enter six numbers into it every time the alarm goes. If you don't, or if you attempt to leave, we will kill you both." Both, meaning that he was right, that she was alive, and that they were going to extreme lengths to intimidate him into co-operating with them.
Even though he had been told there would be an alarm, when it went off it still made him jump. It was an intrusive sound that would be difficult to ignore. So this was what they had brought him here for. To answer to a bell.
They pulled him roughly to his feet, he was used to that and didn't bother fighting back at them, he was curious to see what they had gone to such lengths for. The room he was dragged into was full of electrical equipment, none of which was familiar to him apart from the computer that was clearly its focus. The seat in front of the computer had a wet stain on it, drips of red still falling from it to the floor. Without any consideration, they dumped him on it, he could feel the wetness seep quickly through his shirt to stain his back.
Zeke smiled as he watched Sawyer's feet settle into the pool of blood on the ground, letting him fall still before pulling a knife from his pocket. He reached behind Sawyer, enjoying the uncertainty in the man's eyes before cutting the binding on his wrists.
"Six numbers, Sawyer. Four, Eight, Fifteen, Sixteen, Twenty Three, Forty Two." He watched as Sawyer's fingers entered the numbers into computer, hovering uncertainly over the keyboard. "You enter them every time the alarm goes, every one hundred and eight minutes. If you don't do this, you will die." Then he turned away, leaving Sawyer in the company of two gun-wielding men who looked incredibly bored.
The girl with the dark hair slipped into the room, flashing him an awkward, worried smile. Her hands were trembling, and she couldn't keep her eyes off the blood on the floor. Sawyer wondered what the hell a kid like her was doing here, why she was trusted so much when she clearly wasn't stable.
She placed two pill bottles next to the keyboard. "She will need two of these a day," she tapped the bigger bottle, making sure Sawyer nodded before moving on to the other bottle, "These are sleeping tablets. She should stay still, these will help you if she does not. But you cannot give her more than one a day." Again Sawyer nodded, looking more worried. His skin was shivering at the thought of what state she might be in, and his body was acutely aware of the wetness on his back.
Reaching into her pocket, Alex pulled out a piece of paper and placed it on top of the computer screen. "The numbers you must enter." There was an emphasis on must, a veiled warning meant to be hidden from the men in the room, but all too obvious to Sawyer. She turned to leave, but Sawyer was oblivious to the apologetic look she gave him as she slipped away, and to the tears that were hastily wiped from her face.
Instead, all he saw was Kate, dark hair flowing about her body as she was guided into the room. She was pale, ghostlike, and she practically floated towards him, her eyes seeing nothing. She was left in the middle of the room, the man who had guided her there leaving with the two who had been left to guard Sawyer. She just stood there, not moving, not even breathing, trapped in a moment that didn't exist. Sawyer was afraid to move, afraid to speak. With a gulf of silence between them they stood in an unfamiliar room, metres from each other, but metres may as well have been miles.
It was Kate who broke the silence, the distance between them shattering as she jerked her head up. Eyes filled with pain and tears met eyes filled with fear and hurt, and she was in his arms in an instant, willing to let herself be swallowed up. And for the moment they were both happy to stay like that, hiding from words that would be uttered later and from the prison that they were caught in.