Power Surge
There wasn’t much for Bennett to do inside the clean room except worry about Kimberly, so he did that. He worried in ways he hadn’t ever accessed before. For all he knew, she was lying on a dissection table right this second as THEY (whoever they were) carefully placed each invisible organ in a separate, well-labeled container.
Or she could be fine. She might have shaken off their attackers, escaped, and be plotting his breakout right now. He shook his head. Probably not. Then again, he didn’t know.
The not knowing was the part that bothered him, and it bothered him plenty, so rather than sitting around waiting for his (or her) fate to come to him, Bennett decided to get proactive. He stood up and examined the door of his cage. It was air-tight, which probably meant he was being fed oxygen from the vent--which means he could be fed other gases as well.
There was wasn’t even a knob on his side of the door. If there hadn’t been a seal around the edge, he might not have noticed it at all. He put his hands against it and gave a good-natured push. It gave in not at all to his weight.
He looked under the cot--it was bolted securely to the floor. In fact, it was bolted a few inches into the floor, and concrete had been poured in to make it flush. The cot had no slats, just a flat stainless steel panel with a layer of egg crate foam that would crumble with the slightest pressure.
The commode came out from the wall (with no exposed pipes) and the flush was button activated, again from the wall. Even the toilet seat was welded into place.
After an exhaustive examination, Bennett came to the reasonable conclusion that he was totally screwed. He had gone over every inch of the cell, come up empty, and there wasn’t anyone...except...what the hell?
Bennett strolled up to the door calmly and knocked.
"GOOD MORNING, DR. BENNETT."
The voice sounded like that of God, if God’s voice had been manipulated with a computerized scrambler. But it was that loud. Quick, he thought. You’re a scientist--analyze.
First, they clearly knew who he was--probably had known for a while. They had enough background on him to know about his Ph.D., since nobody ever referred to him as Doctor. He looked up towards the camera.
"Where am I?"
"YOU’RE IN QUARANTINE."
Quarantine? Obviously, because of his contact with Kimberly. Did they know how much contact? Don’t give anything away, he thought to himself, not even a name. Let them tell you.
"Where is she?"
"DOCTOR HARLOW IS ALSO IN QUARANTINE."
Okay, she’s alive. Probably. And they know who she is, too. Either they tracked her down after the accident or stumbled onto her while observing him. Bennett couldn’t think of a reason why he might have been under surveillance, so he was going to assume the former.
"Can I see her?"
An electronic chuckle went through the room. It annoyed Bennett, but it told him Kimberly was still invisible.
"Can I be with her?
"NO, WE DON’T THINK IN THIS CASE THAT TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE."
We. There was someone else besides the voice making decisions. Good, he thought. With conspiracy, dissension could follow. What we, though? Government?
"I don’t suppose you’d consider letting us go."
"NO."
"You want to tell me a story, then? It’s awfully boring in here."
"YOU’LL LIVE. FOR NOW."
Well, Bennett thought, that didn’t sound encouraging at all.
* * *
Kimberly awoke again, wearing the quasi-hospital gown that she had earlier shed--to her detriment. She stood and looked down inside her gown. The gas was long gone from her lungs, but she still felt a bit sluggish.
She looked at the toilet, then at the camera overhead, then at herself. Kimberly knew that she had to go and they were going to watch. It’s not like they could really see anything anyway. Just a hospital gown floating over a toilet seat. Impossibly, she smiled to herself that this image would seem normal to her, but it did. She pulled up the gown and sat down, listening to the liquid cascade into the empty toilet. When she finished, she stood up and moved her hand toward the button on the wall.
The toilet was empty. There was no water at all. Not just no urine, which she was used to by now, but no water, period. A toilet with no water.
"FLUSH THE TOILET."
The voice again. She knew why.
"No thanks. I don’t feel like donating a specimen until I meet my doctor."
"WE CAN TURN THE GAS BACK ON IF YOU’D LIKE."
Kimberly didn’t. She didn’t at all. She pushed the button, and the invisible liquid was sucked with a strong blast of air into the wall. Presumably, it was going to be collected and analyzed. But by whom?
"THANK YOU. ARE YOU HUNGRY?"
Great, they wanted to try another experiment. Who knows what kind of dyes or markers her food might be laced with? Or how they would collect the data?
"No."
"YOU’LL HAVE TO EAT SOON. YOUR INVISIBILITY MUST BE USING UP NUTRIENTS AT AN ACCELERATED RATE."
Nope, she thought. Hunger was a fact of her invisible life, or at least the first month of it. She could take it, and it gave her a little charge to hear that there was something about her that they didn’t know.
"Where’s Peter? I want to see him."
"EAT SOMETHING."
"Not until I see Peter."
There was a pause until a minute later, when the hum of the lights was joined by a louder hum. She recognized it as a hydraulic noise, but muffled. Kimberly immediately went into an alert mode--after the gas, they might be moving in some awful force-feeding device.
Suddenly, the wall opposite the cot started to slowly slide upwards.
* * *
Bennett ran to the other side of the room and got down to catch a glimpse of whatever was about to come from behind the wall. His mind kept making mental notes--the hydraulics were moving the wall up. It had to be going somewhere. He deduced that they were in a sub-basement or multi-level building.
It was only a moment before Bennett realized there was a thick layer of glass or Plexiglas behind the wall and moment after that before he saw a gown matching the one that he wore, filled out in a familiar curvaceous form, floating a few inches off the ground. He sprinted to the glass (Plexiglas, he noticed quickly) and saw the gown do the same.
"CAN YOU HEAR ME?" he yelled, moving his lips deliberately in case she couldn’t.
Kimberly saw him speak, but there was no sound coming through. She shook her head, but she knew he couldn’t see that either, so she put her face near her side of the glass.
Bennett stood in excited amazement as the glass above Kimberly’s empty gown fogged with her deep breaths. It took a few puffs for the moisture to stick--then, with joy, he saw her fingerprint plant itself in the middle of the mist. It moved up and down, forming letters.
I Love You, it said.
His response was the easiest lip read in the world. Even without his voice, she could hear him say it back to her. They cried for a minute in their own silent worlds--together. Then the wall started coming back down.
Bennett refused to move away from the barrier, following the wall as it moved down, cherishing each extra second to be near Kimberly. She tried to wave him away and damned her invisibility yet again, not just for the predicament they were in, but for the failures of communication that were impossible to avoid. Even at her most expressive, all her lover, the man with whom she was closer to than she had been with anyone in her life, all he saw of her was her shape.
The wall sank back into place, burying itself once again in an airtight seal a foot into the floor. Kimberly wept loudly, the arms of the gown ending where her face would be, shuddering with her sobs.
Across the room, the door to her cell opened. She heard a loud hiss as the seal broke, and a man entered. He wore a biohazard suit and carried a large pistol, which was aimed directly at her gown. Inside the faceplate, he was rendered featureless by a kind of ski-mask stocking and a pair of goggles that looked too complex to be anything but electronic. She looked at the gun even as the booming voice returned.
"INFRARED, IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING. HE CAN SEE MORE THAN ENOUGH TO SHOOT YOU IF YOU FEEL LIKE MOVING TOWARD HIM."
Another man wearing the same kind of suit and goggles entered the room behind the first, this one carrying not a gun, but a tray of food. He edged into the room and laid the tray on the cot. It, like everything else, was stainless steel—traditional cafeteria-style. What was not traditional was the food.
It was like there was a rainbow sitting on the tray, each section a different bright color and consistency. Kimberly thought immediately of the different things they could learn as the colors passed through her body. There was no water--no dilution. She worried that the colors were chemicals designed to stay visible in her bloodstream. Were they going to run some sort of MRI or CAT scan? How long would she be visible? Would the chemicals poison her?
The men backed out of the room and the door sealed shut as they left.
"EAT IT."
She continued to stare at the food. She peered down her collar and imagined how it would look inside her. She imagined it sliding down her throat, leaving a colorful, permanent trail behind it, moving down into her chest into her stomach, dissolving into tiny bits and moving into her blood. Kimberly remembered a kit called the Visible Woman from her school days. Would she look like that? Better an invisible freak than a horribly visible one. She couldn’t eat it. She couldn’t.
"WE LET YOU SEE DR. BENNETT. IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO HOLD UP YOUR END OF THINGS AND EAT."
She picked up the tray. It hovered a few inches away from the cuffs of her sleeves--part of her imagined the men on the other side of the camera getting very excited at the sight--she carried it to the toilet, quickly turned it over, and pushed the flush button as hard as she could.
"**SIGH** HAVE IT YOUR WAY, DR. HARLOW."
She looked up and saw the gas billowing from the vent. Instead of shrinking from it, Kimberly quietly laid down on her cot and waited. If they were going to turn her into an experiment, she sure as hell wasn’t going to help.
* * *
Bennett got his own tray, without nearly the pageantry that Kimberly had received. The men in the biohazard suits didn’t bother with infrared goggles, and he threw steely looks at them as he focused on their eyes. Memorized them. They weren’t getting away with this for long.
The gunk on his tray was colorless--oatmeal, he figured, plus who knows what else? The man with the gun left the cell too carefully to take advantage of, so Bennett was alone with the stuff soon enough.
"You expect me to eat this shit?"
"IT’S THAT OR YOU DON’T EAT AT ALL, DOCTOR. BESIDES, POISONING YOU WOULD HARDLY MAKE DR. HARLOW MORE CO-OPERATIVE."
Atta-girl!
"OF COURSE, KILLING YOU MIGHT MOTIVATE HER."
"Doubtful. What’s plan B?"
"TORTURE, I SUPPOSE. WE’LL START WITH YOU, THEN MOVE ON TO HER. I’M SURE YOU’RE BOTH FOUNTAINS OF INFORMATION."
This was not going to be pleasant. Perhaps, though, he could use it to his advantage.
"Come on in and get me."
--------------------------------------
Click here to read the next chapter.
Back to the Guest Authors section
Back to Main