06. For Answers

 

Kibo tore down the hallways, his eyes red from crying, his throat sore from screaming, and his lip bleeding a little from biting it so hard.  The hallways echoed his footsteps loudly, since no other sound was about.  Everyone had gone to bed about a half hour earlier.  Everyone except for Rave and Kibo and Forty-Eight. 

 

Kibo kicked the door to the boy’s dorm room open.  His feline eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness, and he could see that no one stirred.  No one had heard him so forcefully enter.  At last, his eyes fell upon a half-empty bunk bed.  It was the one that he and Ex shared.  Naturally, his bed was empty, but there was a lump under the blankets in Ex’s bed.

 

Without hesitation, he jumped onto Ex’s bed.  The old bed groaned and sagged under their weight.

 

“What the…?” Ex mumbled, turning over on his bed.  He sat up, hitting his head on the bed above him.  He swore and tried to rub the sleep from his eyes in vain.  “Kibo…?  Is that you?”

 

“Yes,” Kibo cried.  He clung at the old, thin shirt that everyone wore to sleep.  He curled his fingers in the fabric and rested his head against Ex’s chest.  “You were right, Exy.  You and that scary little kid were right!  There were tons of us, Exy!  Tons of us!  And now they’re all dead!”

 

Ex yawned loudly, wondering if he was dreaming.  Something told him that he was wide awake.  He half-consciously cursed the programming in him that made him a lover of sleep.  As he instinctively wrapped an arm around Kibo’s shaking shoulders, he tried to get his mouth to form words.  “What are you talking about?  Who’s dead?”

 

Searching Ex’s eyes for an answer, Kibo stared at him anxiously.  “All the other experiments.  All the ones that came before us.  There were hundreds of us, and we all died because the scientists let us!”  He hugged Ex to him closer, willing him to understand.  “Rave and Sammy, you know, Forty-Eight?  We were doing a late-night experiment for Professor Luna.  It was small, just seeing if we were affected by some stupid West Nile Virus.”  He paused to take a deep breath.  There were tears threatening to fall, but he wouldn’t let himself cry until Ex knew everything that he knew.  “I wasn’t tired so I was just wandering around when I came across one of those rooms that are usually locked but this one wasn’t locked so I went in and-”

 

“Whoa, whoa, slow down!”  Ex pulled Kibo farther on his lap, like they had done this a million times.  As if this wasn’t the first time they had ever let themselves touch each other more than the occasional brush of hands.  “What are you talking about?  Which door?”

 

“The doooooorr!” whined Kibo, tugging at his ears frustrated.  “It’s kind of near the bathrooms in the hallway to the left!  That one!  But that’s not important!  I went in to see if I should close it or not and inside there were file cabinets.  Like ten of them.  They were all full of folders on hundreds of experiments like us.  And on each one, in big red letters, was stamped ‘Failed.’”  He slowed down now, obviously calming down a little as Ex’s hand stroked his back rhythmatically.  “The newest file was Forty-Five.”

 

There was a short silence.  Ex’s superhuman mind quickly processed Kibo’s scatterbrained story.  In a matter of seconds he understood that there had been many experiments that had died before them.  They would just be a couple more to the list. 

 

The next thing that came to his mind was simple.

 

“We have to get out of here.”

 

Kibo raised his tired head a little.  Crying, and running, and being in completely shock and worn him out.  “I know, and that’s why I came to tell you.  But how?  When?  There’s no way out of here!  We’re underground, and the exit is probably one of those goddamn locked doors!”

 

Ex stroked Kibo’s head comfortingly.  “I know, I know.  Don’t worry.  We’ll find a way out.  In the meantime, we shouldn’t let anyone know that we know.”  He chuckled a little at the way the sentence came out.  His reward was a tiny smile on Kibo’s lips.  “I don’t know if we should even tell anyone.”

 

“We have to!” Kibo cried.

 

“Ssh!”  Ex covered Kibo’s mouth, and pulled him down on the bed.  Then he pulled the blanket over the two of them.  In this even more complete darkness, he could make out the shadow of Kibo lying next to him.  “If we tell everyone, they’ll all panic.  They might doubt us.  They might confront the professors.  Then what?”

 

“Then they’ll put us to sleep,” replied Kibo solemnly.

 

“What?”

Impatiently, Kibo sat up again.  The old blanket fell off them.  Ex half-wondered who had been lying under it before the Forties.  Before the Thirties.  Before the Twenties.  He shook his head and tried not to think about it.

 

“In the files, there was causes of death,” Kibo whispered.  He counted the ways off his finger.  “Leukemia.  Leprosy.  Strokes.  Heart attacks.  Internal bleeding.  Skin cancer.  Mad cow.  Malaria.  Tuberculosis.  The scariest one,” he said, the tears finally finding their way down his face, “was intentional.  The scientists killed some of us by putting them to sleep like we were pets!  They’ll kill us if they find out we know!”

 

Ex swore.  He rubbed his forehead, like he had the moment he had been awakened.  “Then all the more reason to keep this to ourselves.  Right now, it’s too late to do anything, and some one will probably hear us talking.  We should go to sleep.”

 

Kibo nodded slowly.  He sniffed and rubbed his nose.  “Okay.  Good night, Exy.”

 

“Good night,” Ex smiled.

 

Without another word, Kibo clamored up onto the top bunk.  As the bed above him sank like it always did, Ex lay back down and tried to sleep.  But thoughts raced across his mind in rapid succession.  He couldn’t close his eyes and rest.  After what seemed like an eternity there was a creak of the bed above him moving.

 

“Exy?”  Kibo’s head was hanging over the side, gazing at him longingly.  “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

 

Ex propped himself up on his elbows and smiled reassuringly.  “Of course.”

 

When morning came upon the underground laboratory, it came on two boys squeezed into one small bed, holding each other like they didn’t have another care in the world. 

 

 

When Axie walked into the cafeteria late, she knew something was wrong.  Everyone was back to talking in hushed voices.  They sat in two’s or three’s, huddled together as if being in numbers was the key to survival.  She glanced at the watch she had gotten as a reward for undergoing a Cholera experiment.  She had woken up almost an hour late today.  What big thing could have happened in the time that she overslept?

 

She took a seat next to Rave and Cari.  “What’s happened?  Why is everyone so hush-hush all of a sudden?”

 

Rave turned to look at her slowly.  The sight startled her a bit.  His eyes were glazed over, like he wasn’t seeing anything.  It took him a few moment’s to register Axie’s voice and Axie’s face.  “Oh, Axie.  You’re awake.”  He swallowed hard.  He hesitated, like he had something important to say but didn’t want to say it.

 

It was Cari who broke the news.  “It’s Sammy.  She died last night.”

 

Axie sat in stunned silence, all words escaping her.

 

Rave hung his head, covering his eyes with his hands in disbelief.  “That’s two of them, already!  It was only the West Nile Virus, for Pete’s sake!  It shouldn’t have killed her that fast!  I know it shouldn’t have!”  He grabbed his small, black, winged backpack off the ground and pulled a bunch of wrinkled papers from it.  He shoved it in Axie’s face impatiently.  “Look!”

 

Her eyes skimmed through the computer print-outs quickly.  It was the standard information packet that the experiments got before getting tested for immunity to a new disease or virus.  This one explained about the virus, spread by a misquito’s bite, caused high fevers, headaches, convulsions, and paralysis among other uncommon symptoms.  It also said that it took people three through fourteen days to get sick – not a few hours. 

“This says that the WNV improves on its own,” Axie said, skeptically.  “Why did Sammy die?”

 

Rave groaned and hid his face even more.  “I don’t know!  I don’t know!  Why did Sammy die?  Why am I still alive?  Why is Kibo still alive?  None of this makes sense!”

 

“…Unless the information is wrong…” Cari ventured, a little hope in her voice.

 

“It’s not.”

 

Everyone turned to see Ran standing near them.  “That information is accurate.  The only reasoning that I can make behind her death is that she developed an incredibly high fever in a very short amount of time.”

 

“Obviously,” Ex muttered to himself.  He and Kibo were sitting a table away, their shoulders touching.  He and Kibo had been one of the first to hear the bad news, since Kibo had been part of the experiment, too.  They had warned him that if he felt a fever or a headache coming on, to tell a professor immediately.   

 

Kibo shifted in his seat uncomfortably.  He let his hand wander onto Ex’s, entwining their fingers together.  Ex squeezed his hand tight to reassure him.

 

“We can’t leave Cari and Axie,” Kibo said quietly, watching the two girls jump into an animated discussion about the West Nile Virus.  “We can’t leave Ran or Rave either!  We can’t leave any of us!  We have to tell everyone, Exy!  We have a chance to save them all.”

 

Ex frowned and looked out over the cafeteria of hushed cats.  “I want to, but we can’t.  We can never save them all.”