Why were they here? Weren’t they supposed to be officers somewhere else? It didn’t make any sense.
Unless Cat was right: we were nothing more than prey—raised in a hatchery for someone else’s sport.
I tried to speak but nothing came out. No words, not even sounds. What could I possibly say to ease their pain?
My eyes squeezed shut and the images returned. Dripping crimson on a tiled floor. The press of darkness. Shortness of breath.
Raucous laughter broke the spell; Brown Shirts were approaching. I lowered the door back in place and hurried away, praying I hadn’t been spotted. As I hustled back to the Quonset hut, my mind refused to let go of what I’d just seen. It was like K2’s death: I knew if I didn’t do something—soon—those faces would haunt me the rest of my life.
EACH ROLL CALL IS the same: names are called in groups of two. Sometimes four, sometimes six. Always in pairs.
This morning, only two names are called. Jane F-738 and Jane F-739.
Faith and Hope.
While the others rush gratefully back to the barracks, Faith and Hope stand alone in the middle of the parade ground. Hope feels her legs go wobbly. A glance at her sister tells her she’s in a kind of shock, the blood draining from her face.
“Coming, girls?” Dr. Gallingham asks, dabbing his watery eyes with a soiled hanky.
Although it’s no more than a hundred yards to the infirmary, it feels like a hundred miles, each step worse than the one before. Hope hears a rattling sound and realizes with a start that it’s Faith. Her teeth are chattering as though it were the dead of winter, even though it’s a warm spring morning, sunlight stroking their faces.
“H and FT,” Hope whispers.
Faith doesn’t seem to hear. She shuffles forward like a sheep to slaughter.
Hope can’t take it. First there was her father’s death, then their capture. Now this. Any moment she expects to wake up from this nightmare.
The infirmary stands two stories high, with peeling white paint and bars covering the second-floor windows. Like a prison … or an insane asylum.
Dr. Gallingham leads them into a front reception area. A Brown Shirt tugs a key from his key ring and unlocks a door. Faith shakes uncontrollably as they’re herded upstairs. Before them lies a long hallway. White-coated technicians hurry from one room to the next.
Hope glances into one of the rooms and sees a dead girl lying motionless on a stainless steel table, her lifeless eyes boring into the ceiling. A man in a white coat slices through her chalky skin with a scalpel, removing organs and plopping them in a bowl. In the next room, another man is powering up a portable handsaw, preparing to cut through a corpse’s clavicle. Hope hears but does not see the scrape of metal biting into bone. The smell is like burning hair.
“Eyes forward,” Hope commands her sister, trying to spare her.
The two girls are led into a small room near the end of the hall. Water stains tattoo the ceiling. Before them are two beds, the white iron splotched with rust. Dr. Gallingham makes a grand motion with his damp hanky, indicating the girls should lie down.
“Good,” Hope says. “I wanted to take a nap.”
“And if you’re lucky,” Gallingham responds, “you might even wake up.”
As soon as they’re horizontal, two middle-aged female technicians begin attaching leather manacles to their wrists and ankles.
“What’s this?” Hope asks, fighting against the straps. “Think we’re gonna run away?”
“You’d be surprised.”
At just that moment, the techs hold up syringes and tap the plastic cylinders. Small bubbles of hazy liquid dribble from each needle’s end.
“Now then,” Dr. Gallingham says cheerily, “is everyone ready to serve the Republic?”
“Just take me,” Hope blurts out. “Leave my sister alone.”
The doctor shakes his head. “You’re missing the point. We need both of you. You have the same genetic makeup, so you’re perfect for evaluating our drugs. You can help us determine which ones work”—he pauses dramatically—“and which ones don’t.”
“But we’re not sick,” Hope says.
Gallingham’s thin lips part in a hideous smile. “Not yet.”
One of the techs passes him a syringe, and before Hope can say anything else she feels the prick of the needle as it penetrates skin. Dr. Gallingham’s fat thumb pushes against the syringe’s plunger. “Good to the last drop,” he says with a chuckle.
Hope doesn’t know if it’s her imagination, but she swears she can feel the poisons invading her bloodstream, spreading up her arm, her chest, racing through her entire body.
“What if it kills us?” she asks.
“That’s why we have vaccines.”
“What if they don’t work?”
“Why do you think there are so many singles running around?”
Hope finally understands: the haunted expressions, the lack of trust, the sense of despair. The girls all came here as twins. Thanks to Dr. Gallingham, many are now sister-less. Exactly what her father was warning her about.
“Finally get it, do you?” Gallingham asks.
As Hope tugs at the leather manacles, a wave of nausea rolls through her. Whatever they’ve been given works fast.
“We’ll be back later,” the doctor says in a cheery tone. “Sleep tight.”
When he’s gone, Hope swivels her head toward Faith and tries to say, “H and FT,” but she only makes it to the first letter. Her eyes roll back in her head. Her last thought before blacking out is the boy in the barn, the touch of his hand, the press of his skin.
MY WORDS WERE MET with silence. The five LTs—Flush, Twitch, Red, Dozer, and June Bug—all looked at me like I was crazy. We sat on the eastern outskirts of camp, hidden behind a heaping mound of rusted cars. “You really expect us to believe this stuff?” Dozer scoffed. “A massacre in the mountain? LTs in a bunker? A girls’ camp surrounded by barbed wire?”
“I’m not making it up,” I said. “Any of it.”
Dozer laughed derisively and spat on the ground. His name was short for Bulldozer, as he had a tendency to bulldoze his opinions on everyone else.
“So what are you suggesting?” June Bug asked. Unlike Dozer, there was no hostility in his voice. Even though Omega’s radiation prevented him from growing taller than five feet, it hadn’t dampened his spirits. Which was probably why he was our unofficial leader. It was impossible not to like the guy.
“Head for the next territory. It’s what Cat said he was doing. Maybe it’ll be different there. In any case, we can’t stay here.”
No one spoke. Hard enough to just draw breath.
“How would we get to the next territory?” Red asked. “The mountain and desert are bad enough, but then there are those p-people.”
He didn’t need to say their names. The cities were inhabited by roaming gangs of criminals, referred to as Crazies. Even scarier were the Skull People,