Heartless (17 page)

The memory of the gray van, waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain, made me shudder. I wondered if I had goosebumps beneath the layers of clothes I wore to hide my tattered body.
Probably not,
I thought, and then I forced myself to focus. “We can go down the road, just a little. Wait out the storm in a different driveway. I have a bad feeling about this.”

Lucy shook her head. “I’m not backing out now. If you don’t want to go in, I’ll go by myself. I want to see the people who did this to you, face-to-face.”

I eyed her.

Lucy was still pale, either with sickness or with cold. I wasn’t sure which, but her skin was milky, devoid of its usual pink, cheerful flush. She also looked misshapen, all folded up on herself in the driver’s seat of the Honda, her head swallowed up in an oversized pink hat. She’d not been able to shed her thick down jacket to drive. My stench necessitated open windows so she wouldn’t asphyxiate, and the air outside was frigid. Her gloved hands held tight to the steering wheel, and I imagined her knuckles stretched white within the knitted wool.

In short, she looked awful. Terrified, sick, scared—whatever it was, it wasn’t good. And as such, her determination shamed me. I hadn’t come this far to let my best friend fight my battles for me. Add to that, deep inside, I still clung to the idea that the composer of the email, which had led us to Primrose Path, wanted to help me. Maybe it was still possible for my story to have a happy ending.

Lucy groaned and curled up tighter for a second. “My stomach needs to knock it off,” she said, scrunching her face in pain. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

Sick but still fearless, that was Lucy. Well, I could be brave too.

I opened the car door and stood, turning my face into the onslaught of tiny, icy snowflakes. I looked back to Lucy, still seated in the car, and gave her a half smile, aware of a crack opening in my frozen cheek as I tried for what used to be my most winning facial expression.

Lucy laughed, suitably horrified. “Oh, crap, your face!”

“Never mind my face,” I said, smiling more broadly. The crack widened to my ear. “I’m ready to go meet my goddamn creator. Are you?”

She stood up beside the Honda. “Like a frat boy in a sorority house.”

I laughed. It felt good to laugh. There was no other way to release the emotions at war within me. “Let’s go.”

Clutching each other, we walked through the shrieking winds, our boots silent in the powdery snow. Lucy’s hat flew from her head, the pink cloth disappearing over the side of the mountain, and off a cliff behind the cabin. She started to squeal but clapped a hand over her mouth. “We should be quiet,” she whispered.

“Screw that.” I walked up the front porch steps, my legs stiff and inflexible from the cold, pretending the cracks and pops I heard weren’t permanent damage. There was no way to silence the clomping sound my heavy, uncoordinated feet made on the frozen wood, so I didn’t even try. Instead, I walked up to the solid front door and banged on it with all the strength I could summon from my wrecked arms.

“Hey, in there!” I shouted, my voice raw, inhuman. “Hey! It’s me! It’s Jo! Jolene! You wanted to see me, so let me in!”

Lucy jumped back, startled.

I turned back to her. “Well, I just figured, might as well let them know I’m home.” The words surprised me as I said them, but I meant them. Home. The cabin
was
a home to me. Sort of. If you looked at things a certain way, I was practically
born
there.

Home.

“Somebody let me in!”

No one came to the door. I tried again. “Come on, you in there! You told me to come! Answer your door! Come on!” I banged harder, pulling off a glove in the hope that my bare, marble skin would make more of an impact. It didn’t, and pieces of me rained down amid the snowfall.

Still, there was no answer.

Beside me, Lucy stood almost knee-deep in the snow, her body shaking and shifting against the sub-zero temperature. The tip of her nose was turning white as the snow worsened. We were in a blizzard, nearing whiteout conditions, and could barely see the car, not ten feet away. If we shifted our feet, they emerged from the powder, but like bare toes in the surf were almost immediately covered again with the next gust of wind.

“We have to do something,” Lucy shouted over the howling wind. “I’m so cold! Maybe we can wait out the blizzard in the car?”

“You’ll freeze to death!”

I reached down and tried turning the doorknob. It moved easily beneath my hand, and with a loud click, the door slid inward. We rushed inside. I slammed it behind us, closing the storm out, and Lucy and me inside.

We stood in near pitch-darkness, with only the faint light of a computer screen illuminating the room at all. In the disorienting mix of darkness and green-tinted light, it was harder to match the room to the foggy memory of my awakening, but I knew I was in the right place. Microscopic hairs on the back of my neck jerked to attention.

Lucy took a few steps forward. “Maybe there’s a light.”

“Wait, no,” I started to say, but had barely formed the “w” with my dry, brittle lips before I heard a crash. The faint shadow of Lucy, outlined against the computer screen, tumbled head over heels to the ground.

Her scream built slowly at first, but once begun it rose steadily into a shrill, panicky shriek. I ran with my hand trailing down the wall, fumbling and stumbling, searching for a light switch. I found one and flipped it up.

Light flooded the room from circular, stainless steel fixtures hanging on the ceiling. It reflected off metal tables, bouncing off cabinets lining the far wall. Bu the light was cruel, forming multiple spotlights that rained down upon bodies, prostrate on the tabletops. They were girls. Dead-looking girls, each in their late teens, early twenties. Each wore like a badge of honor a mangled, stapled incision running down her entire abdomen. Each looked exactly like I must have looked when I awakened on the lone, empty table.

Lucy lay on the ground beside an upturned table, struggling beneath the weight of another girl’s body. It was supple, arms and legs bending and wrapping around Lucy’s inert figure as she fought and cried and wailed in terror. The table, heavy and metal, pinned them both to the ground.

“Jo! Help me! Please, Jo, get it off! Get it off!”

I rushed to her, but my knees gave way beneath me and I fell to the floor beside them. Lucy stared at me, tears in her eyes. “Please, help.” She sounded meek, defeated. I didn’t blame her. She’d just lost a wrestling match with a cadaver. “Please. I think she’s dead.”

Grunting with effort, I pulled myself back to my feet and grasped Lucy’s arms. I pulled, and I tugged, but she was stuck. My mind raced, and my eyes darkened with fear. The light in the room faded. I couldn’t see. My hands found the table’s leg, and my fingers closed around the smooth, cold, metal. I pulled. The table moved, ever so slightly. I pulled again.

The table and I tumbled back, crashing into the wall, where I landed in a heap of arms and legs bent at impossible angles. I sat in silence as the room came back into focus. Two feet away from me sat Lucy. She was free.

“Thanks,” she said, panting heavily. She disentangled herself from the dead girl’s limbs.

“Any time.”

“You okay?”

I nodded, and then leaned forward to lay my cracked cheek against her sweat-damped hair. “Yeah. Are you?”

“Uh-huh. I might have broken my ankle, though. I’m not sure. The table landed on it.”

“Crap.”

“Yeah. Sucks.”

“Well, the good news is,” I said, shrugging, “we know nobody’s here. We made enough noise to even wake the dead,
if
they were ready to be awoken.”

Lucy eyed the body beside here. “That’s not funny, Jo.”

“Yeah. I know.”

We sat in silence for another minute. Lucy pulled herself out of my grasp to lean against the wall beside me instead. She looked around the room, taking her time to linger over each table and the body atop it. One hand slid up to cover her mouth. Finally, she turned to me with tears in her eyes. “You know, you told me. You told me about this place, but I didn’t believe you. How
could
I? This is…unbelievable.”

I nodded again. “I know.”

“Who
are
they all? Where are they from?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? College girls, like me? Townies? No way are they all local though. We’d have heard if this many local girls were missing.”

“What if no one knows they’re missing? I didn’t know
you
were missing.” She took my hand in hers. “I’m still so sorry about that.”

“Quit apologizing.” I glanced around me, and quickly counted the cabinets against the wall. “There are twenty-four drawers. We should see if they’re full.”

Lucy struggled upright, balancing against the wall and favoring her right foot. I reached out an arm and pulled her to me. Leaning against each other we hobbled to the cabinets, taking care not to bump any of the bodies on the metal beds. Each was plugged into a socket in the floor, and their cords threatened to trip us up with every step. With time and extra care, we made it to the wall of cabinets unscathed.

The wall itself was intimidating.
Twenty-four bodies might lie in these drawers
, I thought.
Twenty-four more girls.
Lucy gave me a look, and I lifted an arm. I yanked on a cabinet handle, but it resisted. It was locked. Lucy tried a different one. Locked.

“I want to know what’s in there.”

“More bodies, I’m sure,” said Lucy. Then, as if having an epiphany, her eyes lit up. “This is bad,” she said. “No one here is going to help you.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I think I agree now. We should leave.”

The wind howled outside the cabin, and then, within, we heard a loud, echoing click. The hair on my arms rose as a surge of electricity crackled around me. I rushed to the door on unstable legs and reached out for the doorknob. Sparks crackled as my fingertips approached the metal knob. I ignored them, and grasped and turned.

For the first time in our surprisingly odd relationship, the doorknob was locked. I tried again, twisting, rattling, pulling, and shaking it in desperation. It wouldn’t budge.

I turned to Lucy. “We…can’t…”

To my surprise, she only shrugged. “We couldn’t leave yet anyway,” she said. She pulled out her cell phone. “We need evidence. We need Ad…Officer Strong.”

“Yes, but now we really
can’t
leave. Like, physically cannot leave.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll find a way. We’re the good guys, and the good guys always win in the end.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I had no choice. I tried to believe.

“Do you have a signal?” I asked, pointing at her phone.

“No, but I’m a good photographer, aren’t I?” Lucy walked to the body on the ground and knelt beside it. She reached out a hand and touched the girl’s chin, pointing the face toward her. “She’s warm,” she said. “Not cold like you.” As I watched from my place against the cabinets, she snapped a picture with her phone.

Then she walked to the next girl, still on the table, and snapped another picture. Then to the next girl, and the next.

“Brilliant,” I said.

“I can send these to Adam when we get out of here. I mean…Officer Strong. Whatever. Maybe it’ll help let these girls’ families know what happened to them. I don’t think they’re going to make it home.”

I nodded, and didn’t point out: I probably wasn’t going to make it home, either. No one was going to save me, at least not in this godforsaken laboratory. My quest for self-preservation was falling apart around my ears…and including my ears. I reached up and sure enough, one was gone.

Oh well. Just one more thing to fix.

But maybe, just maybe, I could help make things right before it was my time to go. “Yes. Let’s help them.”

W
e walked from girl to girl. I adjusted the stainless steel lamps hanging over each body while Lucy took their pictures. There were twelve girls in all, including the one who’d fallen. All were silent, immobile, and all were plugged into the electrical sockets in the floor beneath them. We had no way of knowing if any of them would wake up like I did, but it didn’t look likely. According to Lucy, the smell in the room was overwhelmingly of death and decay, and more than once she dry-heaved over a rusted trashcan.

I, of course, couldn’t smell a thing.

Each girl was lovely in her immobility, like Snow White in her glass coffin, awaiting her prince. There was a brunette with pale skin, dots of pink just barely marking her cheek with a slight sign of life. A redhead with freckles covering the whole of her face. Several blondes with orange-tan skin. Not one was overweight, not one was anything less than beautiful.

I thought of myself prior to my own transformation into a half-dead monster-robot-cyborg-
thing
, and I realized exactly how beautiful I had once been. Young, vibrant, imperfect for sure, but maybe all the more beautiful for my imperfections. It takes dying, or something close to it, to get a teenage girl to realize her own beauty, I guess. At least, it did for me.