The Final Freedom Chapter 3: Pelatast

You do find a stairwell, and beside it, a set of elevator doors. The buttons are dark, and pushing them yields no response. Claes opens the stairwell door, but it only leads down. She descends one step.

"Wait," you say. "Didn't you say we were underground? Why... Why go..." You gesture at the dark maw. Why won't the words come?

"This floor is all cells. I've already found two other stairways, and they both go down."

At that word, your eyes refuse to close, to blink. A roaring fills your ears. Your breathing, so rapid, so deep, it makes thoughts cloud. You grasp the doorframe as your knees weaken.

"Are you coming?" Claes flicks her flashlight at you. Upward. She's on the landing, half a flight of stairs below you.

"Wait! Don't go that way! It's... bad. It's bad."

"All right. Suit yourself." The light swings away. You hear her footstep, but it's softer. Further. She's walking away!

You catch up as she opens the door to the next floor down.

"You fall behind like that again, and I won't wait for you. Got it?"

You nod.

"Got it?"

You force a croak past your parched throat. It evidently sounds enough like "Yes" to satisfy her.

The doorway leads to another hallway, but instead of extending left and right like the previous floor, this one leads straight forward from the stairwell, ending in a set of double doors, each with a round window at a normal adult's head height.

There are doors lining the hallway on both sides, but Claes walks directly for the double doors. Even standing on her toes, neither you nor Claes can see into the room through round windows.

You are trying to snare the elusive memories that these doors evoke. They are many, they are strong, and they are elusive.

She pushes one open.

In the same instant as she and you step into the room, you remember it when it was lit. Lit, and functioning.

The center of the room is commanded by a bed-sized platform balanced on a large spherical pivot. The platform is a stainless steel plate perforated with orderly rows of slots each the length and width of an index finger, about two fingers apart. Through some of the slots are threaded thick straps, their material dark and strong, their buckles shining with malevolence.

The straps are placed to ...

You look away. You try to force yourself to conquer this fear, but can only bear a single glance at it before your eyes squeeze shut. In your self-imposed isolation, you slowly flex your arms, quietly shift from one leg to the other, just to reassure yourself that you are not still strapped to that table.

The floodgates open. You look up, and see the multi-headed lamp. Currently it is just a shape as Claes' light sweeps the room, but you superimpose your own memory of it. It's bright, it's hot. Sometimes, a hand, a head, an implement casts a shadow across your eyes, but most of the time, you remember being blinded by it.

You remember fear, and you remember pain.

Claes continues her sweep, either unaware or ignoring your thoughts. Her light lands on a cabinet.

"That's where they keep the machines, the ones that hurt."

"Oh, so you are starting to remember?"

Instead of answering directly, you indicate where her flashlight now illuminates. "That's where they store the bottles of the bad medicine."

"Bad medicine?" Claes pulls the drawer open.

It's empty.

You close your eyes and nod. "They would inject us with it. After they put us on..." You point at the steel table. You know Claes isn't looking at you. You know she can't tell what you mean, but... The right words are so hard to say!

"And that's where they store the little knives. The ... the ones with the long handles." You blush. Claes must think you are weak.

"Razors? Or scalpels?"

"S... scalpel... scalpels." At last, one of the words you were avoiding comes out! It was a whisper, but it came out. You clear your throat and say it again. "They were scalpels. They used them... to put things in us."

"What kind of things?" She opens this drawer. "Hm... Looks like they packed everything."

"I don't know. I didn't want to look. It hurt." You scratch the back of your head, where your hair and neck are. "It hurt a lot. Most of the time, most of the time, I was crying."

"Did you know why? What were they trying to do? What did... Hello, what's this?"

The pool of light now shows a trio of cages on wheels. Each is the same size: about a meter-and-a-half on each side. All have hasps and padlocks securing the doors.

The middle one has some bars with sections missing. You both walk closer and study the ends. They were cut with a torch or welder.

"Well, someone wanted to get into there." Claes reaches out to touch one of the ends, a tap at first, then a steady grasp. She gives a grunt, then lets go.

You're not sure, but the end of the broken cage bar seems slightly bent.

"Do you remember what they kept in there? Why would someone want it bad enough to take a torch to-"

"Us. They kept us in there." You grasp your upper arms and shiver. "When it wasn't our turn. Our turn on the ... on the ... the table. We had to watch. And listen."

Claes' flashlight remains motionless on that one cage for a few long seconds. After that, she resumes the sweep of the room, slower. She asks no further questions.

You see their faces, hear their voices. Not the adults. They always wore those surgical masks. However, you remember the others. Their faces, streaked with tears. Their voices, hoarse from cries. They were just children. All girls, all young.

Just like you.

You remember one in particular, a darker-skinned girl. You were both in theses cages, listening to a machine whine, listening to another girl on the table scream for mercy. The girl in the next cage reached her hand through the bars. You reached out, and grasped her hand.

Why can't I remember her name?

You are so deep in thought, you almost walk into Claes. She stopped suddenly, and is staring at what the flashlight shows before you.

Two charred skeletons lie on the floor. What clothing and flesh were on these bodies have long since been burned away. One is adult-sized. The other is child-sized.

You-sized.

From the looks of the blackened skeleton, both are face-down, the child atop the adult.

Whatever burned them was intense, leaving a fine ash in the vague shape of their bodies and limbs on the tile floor.

"Not a lot left, is there? Do you have any idea what happened?"

You lack even the willpower to look again at the scene. "I... I don't know. There were a few grown-ups here. Maybe that's one of them." You sneak a peek at the remains. "And there were a lot of kids here, too. They were as old as us, I think. That could be..."

"Okay, no idea. Got it."

She starts to move around the disturbing sight, toward the nearby double door.

You follow closely.

The door leads to a second hallway. It ends at another door with a sign indicating it is another set of stairs.

No sooner have you taken two steps toward it that it starts to open.

Claes switches the flashlight off

In the darkness, you say, "What-"

"Quiet!" The reply is an angry hiss.

You comply.

The door opens, then shuts.

As soon as it clicks, the flashlight comes on.

In the light, you see a distortion of a man, his body bulging in asymmetric and unnatural ways under a stained white lab coat, torn pants and a button-down shirt that was once a light blue. His face is also twisted and malformed. His eyes are red orbs under a headband on which is fastened a round mirror.

The Doctor! That was your name for him. He looked human in your version of the past.

At the sudden illumination, he growls and lumbers at you.

Again, you hear three blasts so rapid that you have to concentrate to enumerate them. You see three strobes go off in time with the gunfire. You see three holes appear in the center of The Doctor's shirt.

There is no other effect. There is no blood. There is no scream.

He is still nearing.

Claes fires again, and the forehead mirror shatters.

He takes another ponderous step forward.

"Now would be a good time to remember something," she yells, just before squeezing the trigger once more.