When No One Is Watching(88)

“Let us go!” he screams, writhing so that the bed he’s strapped to shakes and the metal buckles of the straps clang against the rails.

The two young doctors, scientists, whatever, are in this room with us and bustle around us like they’re just at a regular office job. Like Julia and her coworker, they wear normal clothes and white jackets, and both of them are sipping tea from winter holiday Starbucks thermoses even though it’s summer.

The curly-haired one is power walking back and forth around the room, opening small fridges and gathering glass bottles of chemicals. The white guy is sitting in a rolling office chair, and his hair hangs in his face as he looks over some papers and eats wings from a Crown Fried Chicken box.

We’re about to get killed by some dude who probably hasn’t changed his underwear in the last five days and doesn’t care about getting strangers’ bodily fluids in his food.

Great.

“You know what would be cool?” Greasy Hair asks.

“Letting us go,” Theo answers.

“Me not having to do all the setup for once,” Curly Hair says irritably. “That’s what would be cool.”

“Hey, I still have ten minutes in my dinner break because I got interrupted by all those suits stampeding down here. You get to go home after this and you got to go to the shareholder dinner and eat all the good food.”

Curly Hair rolls his eyes. “It was boring as hell, I almost got killed at the dinner, and the food was worse than what we feed the test subjects.”

“Let us go!” Theo shouts again, the tendons in his neck cording.

They’re mostly ignoring him, but the curly-haired one’s gaze keeps flicking over. He seems disturbed, having to do this to a white guy, even though he looks more like the previous test subjects.

Greasy Hair sucks his index finger and thumb, and then drops a chicken bone into his paper box. “I was gonna say it would be cool if there was a Whole Foods here already, so I could go to the buffet instead of eating this ghetto shit. There was one by my old job, and it was fucking—”

“Let us go!” Theo yells, and Greasy Hair grabs a syringe, stretches a lanky arm over, and squirts a liquid into Theo’s face.

“Shut. Up.” His voice is deadpan, like someone mildly annoyed by a cat scratching furniture that’s already been shredded by three cats before it.

Theo sputters and blinks liquid that I hope is water out of his eyes, then glares at the guy. “Don’t you know that you’re killing people? That—”

His words are cut off because Greasy Hair picks up the used latex gloves beside his food and shoves them deep into Theo’s mouth.

I gag along with him.

“Shut. Up. My rent just got jacked up. This job pays well. End of story,” Greasy Hair says, then leans back in his seat. He shakes his head. “And you two just killed a bunch of people? You’ve got a lot of nerve judging me. At least I don’t kill my own kind.”

Curly Hair knocks over a beaker, swears, then heads to the medical-grade fridge humming in a corner.

“What are you doing now, then?” I ask.

“He’s not one of us.” He shrugs. “If he was, he wouldn’t be here, would he?”

Funny how much race matters until it doesn’t.

“Besides, there’s no guarantee he’ll die. In fact, he’s gonna feel really good for a little while. Unless I overdose him on this oxy since he ruined my dinner.”

“Let’s do this already. He’s giving me a headache and I don’t want a migraine at the beach tomorrow,” Curly Hair says as he walks over to me. He places his little tray of meds on the table next to me and I see the familiar setup for a medicine port from when Mommy was in the hospital.

He tightens the band around my arm, and I take a deep breath against the panic and the anger at the unfairness of this all.

It strikes me that it’s pretty typical that I’d discover a goddamn conspiracy theory, infiltrate a secret research center, kill a bunch of bad guys, and still end up not saving the day.

I snort a laugh and Curly Hair looks at me quizzically, which makes me laugh more.

Shit, what a stupid fucking way to die. And if there is a hell, I certainly just earned my way in with all the blood now on my hands from this dummy mission.

What a week.

“What’s so funny?” Greasy Hair asks, throwing his wings box into a garbage can with a biohazard label on it and wiping his fingers on his jeans. He takes a sip from his thermos. “Are you already high or what?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“Then shut the fu—ack!” I glance over at him and he drops his cup, his hands going to his throat. His mouth is stuck in an exaggerated O shape and his eyes bug out of his head as his face turns a violent shade of purple.

Curly Hair’s brow creases in concern and he puts down the port he was about to insert into my arm so he can go check on his buddy. His hand slams into the tray clumsily.

“What the hell?”

Greasy Hair drops to the floor, convulsing—I can’t see him but can hear his desperate flailing and the squeak of his sneakers against the floor. Curly Hair staggers forward, and then the door opens slowly.

Slowly.

Shit, what now? I wish Curly Hair had managed to drug me before whatever fresh hell is about to go down takes place.