So sorry about the long hiatus, everyone. I have almost finished the last chapter of this story—chapter 21. So no more waiting, I will post twice a week till the end!
-XX-
"You woke them up," was the second thing the girl said, later. She was real. Elizabeth was still floating. "That's bad. You shouldn't have woken them up."
No argument there.
A long pause. Elizabeth's brain was creeping back online. This was real. This was a little girl—maybe eight? Nine? And she was real, she was alive. Now, alive didn't mean—
Alive didn't mean uncontaminated.
Still. "This lab is dangerous," Elizabeth whispered. "We should go upstairs. Where it's safer."
"We're not allowed."
God. Ok. Another long pause. "You woke them up," the child repeated, with a disapproving stare.
"Yeah. Pretty dumb."
The girl nodded gravely. Another silence. When Elizabeth felt her brain had, somehow, taken stock of the new situation, she studied the child again.
So thin. No cafeteria in those levels, just the ravaged food distributors. There must have been rations for the experimental subjects, stacked somewhere. Had the reserves been dwindling?
"You are allowed to come upstairs with me."
The girl looked dubiously at the color of Elizabeth's bracelet, then shook her head. "No." Silence. She studied Elizabeth again before asking. "Have you been punished too?"
"No," Elizabeth answered after a shocked pause. "I work here. I do the… I manage the, the files? The papers? For everyone here." Elizabeth stood up. "I work for the lab, and that gives me the right to say what happens here," she declared.
The girl looked at her with scared wide eyes. Maybe the show of authority would be enough. And it might even be the truth. Did you see other bracelets around? No? Elizabeth was highest caste then. "Do you like cake?"
The child's eyes widened even more. She nodded. Discordant info, playing in Elizabeth's mind. Media recommendations, at the end of the war. How to take care of refugees. Do not overfeed them, their stomachs, fragile, a sudden amount of high-caloric food could kill them—but also, BEWARE. Of contamination.
So. First things first.
Elizabeth forced a smile. "Let's go."
They stepped outside the tiny room, the child at her side, following like a shadow, Elizabeth trying to be aware of outside threats while discreetly watching the girl's gestures. Because, of course. This child? The innocent archetype? The naive, sweet-looking angel any human being worth its salt would scramble to protect?
She could be Frank.
She could be the Frankenstein monster, looking innocuous, opening doors, letting zombies in, biting people.
The Girl From The Gas Station, the kid version.
-XX-
There was an elevator on the left and a stairwell. With any luck, the door at the end would only have a lever.
They climbed the steps.
If the girl was mutated, if she was Frank, Elizabeth was taking the enemy by the hand—literally, because the girl had slipped her hand in hers—and bringing her inside their safe zone upstairs. But please tell me, what exactly were her other options? Leaving a child there to starve to death? There was a part of "Undead Defense Level Two" about "precautionary measures" if you thought a human was close to turning, but—no. Despise her if you dared, Elizabeth was not going to "restrain the suspect," she was not going to "neutralize" an eight-year-old girl, no chance in hell.
Bite away, Frank.
-XX-
The girl did not bite her. There was a lever at the door. Elizabeth activated it, and slowly they worked their way up in the opposite direction from heaps of bodies and ravenous monsters, and then they were back home, in the so-called safe zone.
-XX-
"Listen," Elizabeth started. There was no gracious way to say this. "Before the, before cake, you have to take a test. To check if you're not, hum, contaminated? If one of them…if you got bitten?"
"No," the child whispered.
"You mean, no one bit you, or you do not want to take the test?"
The girl rolled up her sleeve, the grey sleeve of the dirty, oversized B-13 sweatshirt. There were many, many identical cuts, dozens of them, the same size, perfectly parallel. Scarred. Everyone knew those scars, Elizabeth had a series of them themselves. From when they rescued her. From "precautionary measures" every month in the camps. Before she and Nawal were allowed to enter the first apartment they rented, years later.
Part of any job interview. Mandatory every semester in the Center.
"The Test", it had an official name but everyone called it "The Test", the "Have you been bitten?" Test, the "Are you contaminated?" Test, the "Are you going to turn into a carnivorous evil creature in two to six weeks" Test.
"Sure, honey, but those are old." Honey. Where did that come from? Elizabeth's head was hurting. Calling Maybe-Frank "honey." And even if—she had just met this girl. Elizabeth should not—she should keep her guard up but Nawal, Nawal had worked for one of those children rehabilitation preschools, the kids there, some of them were feral, some of them did not even remember their own names, and Nawal called all of them "honey", so.
"'Gleefully desperate for human connection.' This is what you wrote, Elizabeth. When I asked you to describe yourself in ten lines or less," Dr Chettouf had said, at the time. "Before our first session, do you remember?"
Elizabeth remembered. She still thought Chettouf would turn out to be a real therapist then, and not a snitch. A snitch to the Witch. If Elizabeth had known, she would not have poured her heart out on paper. "The Empress of PTSD and bad jokes. Gleefully desperate for human connection. Looking for affection and acceptance in the weirdest places."
God.
The girl's expression had softened. See, not a budding psychopath. Or, maybe, on the opposite, a brilliant, experimented psychopath, able to mimic human micro-expressions.
"Let's go take the test!"
The girl slid her hand in Elizabeth's again, and if this was fake, if this was Frank's way of establishing trust, well played, Frank, because it totally worked. They walked, a few minutes later they entered the closest infirmary, two by level, a small room with a chair and whatever medicine was left from the evac—what Elizabeth had not stolen for her secret lair. Hundreds of boxes of "The Test" in colorful drawers. The girl sat in the chair and held up her arm, as if she had done it a thousand times, which, certainly, she had.
Elizabeth opened the box. She took out the tiny, sterilized blade. She cut the girl's skin. Blood on the grey strip, press the plastic switch, the apparatus would chime in three to four minutes.
They waited.
"Are you the one going to conduct the experiments?" the girl asked.
Elizabeth's throat tightened. "No. No—experiments. No more."
The girl seemed dubious.
"Maybe on food," Elizabeth continued. Her protégée seemed even more lost, so Elizabeth rambled about homemade soup, and how maybe cake might not the best choice when you did not have, hum, regular meals for a while, but the kid looked so disappointed, Elizabeth instantly caved.
"Maybe just a little slice."
Yeah. If the child was Frank, Elizabeth was so toast.
The apparatus made a stern, professional-sounding "beep". Result: Negative. No contamination.
Ok. Another test, from a different batch. Official procedure. Because, what if one batch of tests was deficient?
Box. Blade. Blood. Three minutes. Tik. Tik. Tok. Negative.
Another test, from a different batch. Tik. Tok. Negative.
Another. Same.
Ok. Ok. Elizabeth fell down on the other chair and just stayed there, mind buzzing with relief. Then she took her head in her hands, and waited, for— For nothing. For the world to resettle.
"I'm always negative," the girl said. "They tried it on me, the lowest dosage? But it didn't take."
"That. That's good. That's good, honey."
"They tried it on Daddy. It worked. That's why—"
Elizabeth stood up brusquely. Yeah. She wanted to sleep for a week, maybe she'll wake up and the world would have resettled indeed. It would be better because she did not like the shape it was taking.
"May I have the slice of cake now?"
Experimenting on contaminated humans, who had not yet turned. This was, this was wrong, inhumane, a first step in horror although Elizabeth had known, and she stayed. But. Now. The girl. Negative.
Negative.
Uncontaminated humans experimented upon.
The child. And the dad. And the mom.
"We're still finding survivors out there," Mary had mentioned, once. Or was it Karima?
"You saw these reports. You got them. You got them too."
What reports? Shards of voice. Memory splinters. Elizabeth's migraine was pounding.
"If the end justifies the means, then."
Edwards, Edwards had said this. "When there was an incident at work, Tara took the blame, while she did not have to. And she did a rousing, warmhearted speech about team cohesion and keeping hope—despite—well. We just had to take—a difficult—series of decisions. I was the one—I made the decisions."
-XX-
Elizabeth and the girl locked themselves inside Elizabeth's apartment. Homemade vegetable soup, tofu, a small slice of cake.
They both got in the same bed, door locked, the dinner table and two chairs pushed in front of it. Gun under the pillow.
They slept.
-XX-
Morning. Coffee. Defrosted mashed banana for the girl. New clothes. Elizabeth's clothes, too big, still better than the grey, shapeless B-13 uniform.
"My father ate my mother," the girl said. After the banana.
"Yes, honey, I know." Elizabeth took the child's hand. "Can you… Do you mind not saying this—to me, for a while? It's difficult—difficult for me to, to hear, I mean." The girl kept looking at her. "What is— Do you have a name?"
The girl didn't answer.
Elizabeth drank her coffee.
"Are you the one who's going to do the experiments?" the girl asked.
Crazy. Elizabeth was going to go crazy.
-XX-
What now?
Elizabeth sent the child to her (their) bedroom. She needed to be alone.
Ok, so. Ok. Think.
Point one, the girl needed a therapist—no, a psychiatrist. To get one, she needed to be evacuated. But considering the Center was falling apart and no evac was coming, it was unlikely the presence of a child refugee would change the status quo.
Point two… Point two was, let's say, interesting.
The Center had been experimenting on healthy human beings. Uncontaminated refugees. Families, children. People trapped in the Lost Area, probably. Maybe they had stumbled into the Center for help.
The Witch hadn't evacuated them when the Center closed, they had just left the survivors over to die. No—sorry—they had murdered the survivors so there would be no witnesses. This was certainly not a fact the Witch wanted to become common knowledge. As civilization was regaining ground, medias were back in play. And sure, public opinion was pretty jaded, but still. Kids.
The heap of corpses. Most of them must have been willingly contaminated during the experiments. Sleeping zombies, turned after death, that she had inadvertently woken up. Zombies-in-waiting.
If Elizabeth went to the radio room and asked to speak to Coulson—first, would Coulson even answer? ("We cannot communicate again.") If she went to the communication room and asked to speak to someone, anyone, if she told them she had found a survivor, a witness, what would the Witch do?
Not send an ambulance, lollipops, and a warm, motherly children psychiatrist. Or—maybe this was just incompetence? Maybe the uncontaminated kid left behind was an honest mistake? Maybe the Center would take stock of the situation and decide to help them at last?
Right.
Edwards. Edwards was at best complicit, at worst actively implied in the experiments. He was, he was a bad man, by all definitions of the term. But Elizabeth had known about the experiments and she had stayed, and sure she did not know the extent of the crime, but she knew one was being committed.
So.
Again, what now?
-XX-
It was not a court martial. Coulson's actions did not deserve one, and anyway, the martial part of his life was over. No, this was the hypocritical, softball, civilian equivalent. A stern warning. In a passive-aggressive way, where the key words—blame, warning, consequences—were implied but never uttered aloud.
Everybody knew what was really happening though.
The four of them, and Coulson. Officially, just a work meeting. Normal. Commonplace. "We trust you completely, of course," Witch Number One said.
Translation: we do not trust you. Anymore.
Witch Number Two: "We're not worried; it's just, you broke communication protocols. Not only during this last, illegal phone call to Ms Moore, but repeatedly."
Translation: we are worried.
Witch Number Three: "Your job is not in jeopardy, but we reviewed the texts' transcripts."
Translation: your job is in jeopardy.
They all looked at Coulson, waiting. "Ms Moore is a work friend," he stated with perfect calm. "As for the phone, I had two goals in maintaining this alternative line of communication. To check on her—Ms. Moore can be, let's say, volatile. And to have an in into what was happening in the Center."
Witch Number Two frowned. "Elizabeth Moore is not volatile, not according to the psych reports. In fact, Ms. Chettouf recommended her especially because she was so resilient." The man looked at Elizabeth's file, a paper file, printed, like in the Middle Ages. "Resilient for all the wrong reasons, but— How did Ms. Chettouf write this? 'A tendency for denial, for underestimating the severity of a situation or the reality of her own mental state.' Which plays in our interest here. We needed someone who stayed in the direst of circumstances."
Charming. There was also a file on Coulson, somewhere. Most of the content would be redacted, but maybe not his psychological profile. What did the reports say about his mental state? Certainly nothing good.
"If your intentions were so above board, Mr. Coulson, why did you hide the existence of this phone?"
"Because one, there was a chance that my request would be denied, and two, as I said—Ms Moore is a friend. I wanted our conversations to be private."
It was the unvarnished truth, but also a clear, "I knew it was against the rules, and did it anyway, so."
Witch Number Two frowned; Witch Number One seemed thoughtful. Coulson expected Witch Number Three to be on his side. She would be the one in charge of recruiting someone if Coulson was fired or transferred. Finding someone with his credentials would be a pain.
He was right. "There is nothing outrageous in the transcripts, and Mr Coulson's intervention actually helped us," the woman intervened. "He saved Ms Moore's life, which is a relief—because we highly value the lives of our employees, of course. But for the sake of the Center, too."
The three others nodded good-naturally; it did not mean they actually agreed, just that it gave them the perfect opportunity to table the subject for now and pretend everything was settled—it was not.
"What about the possible intruder?" Witch Number Three continued. "If he even exists."
"I don't think we want to pull that thread. Considering."
This was Witch Number Two again. The others all seemed uncomfortable.
"Did the cameras show anyone?"
"No," Coulson replied. "But most of them have stopped working. I do believe the danger is real, and I made my recommendation clear."
"Of course."
Silence.
"So, Coulson," Witch Number Four said after a few seconds, with his best 'we're all friends here' tone. "How about Edwards's attempt at blackmail? Is the man even serious?"
"Edwards? The psychopath?" Witch Number Two grumbled—he was reading another file, twice as thick.
"Psychopathic tendencies," Witch Number One intervened. "Or we would not have let him into the Center."
Everyone knew this was bullshit. Scientists had been in such high demand at the time, nobody looked too close. But Coulson knew how to pretend.
"The blackmail attempts," he began. "Yes, I do believe Edwards is serious, which is one of the many reasons I am pushing for this evac. To save both their lives, but also to get Edwards away from any sensitive documentation. As you know, my recommendation would be to fire him as soon as he put a foot out of the helicopter—with an ironclad NDA. This is not a reliable asset."
"I must say, I agree," Witch Number Three said. "The man is dangerous."
"The military certainly think he is," Coulson commented. "And this is a problem on its own."
They all nodded. The military getting spooked was always concerning, and the possibilities grim.
-XX-
Edwards tried to contact her three times on the intranet. Elizabeth did not answer.
She and the girl, they stayed in Elizabeth's apartment. Home, through the looking glass, darkly. A woman and a little girl in a nice, warm place, plants and chocolate, colorful soaps and creams. The child, watching cartoons. The woman, lounging on the couch, sipping tea. Vaguely reading a book. Gazing at the nonexistent view. Baking brownies.
Even more homely? The girl helping, getting the hot pastries out of the oven. An ad from the 1950s, those with the little boy in the garage helping his dad, the little girl in the kitchen cleaning the dishes with her mom. Everyone happy and smiling.
These ads obviously suffered from a dreadful lack of zombies.
"My father ate my mother," the girl said, her mouth full of brownie.
Told you. Home.
-XX-
They had to venture out. Elizabeth had to reestablish contact with Edwards. If she didn't, he would come looking for her in person, and then—what? She needed him as an ally, she and the girl needed him as an ally, if they wanted to make it out of the Center alive, but what the hell was Elizabeth going to say?
"Hello, remember those people you tortured, one of them is alive?"
After lunch. Elizabeth was going to reestablish contact after lunch. Lasagnas. The girl loved them.
Then. Stop procrastinating.
-XX-
They made a backup plan. Well. Elizabeth made a backup plan, the girl politely nodded.
"Do you want to choose a name?" Elizabeth asked after the child refused to answer her questions again.
The girl shook her head no, clearly terrified.
"Ok," Elizabeth sighed. "Ok." She squeezed the girl's hand briefly, the child melted, as she did each time Elizabeth touched her in a friendly way, or with softness.
"I'd really prefer if you did the experiments," the girl whispered.
Ok. Ok.
-XX-
They went to Edwards office—to the LT zone.
They knocked.
"Pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up."
Little Red Riding Hood pulled the bobbin, and the door opened.
"Come in," Edwards said.