The Search for Artemis (The Chronicles of Landon Wicker) (6 page)

“Landon, can you please come back over here?” Sofia asked. Landon obeyed and walked over to the car. Once he got close enough, Sofia continued, “I would like you to meet the man who drove us all this way, Mr. Andrews, and these gentlemen in the white coats are Dr. Dodgson, Dr. Márquez and Dr. Longfellow. They will escort us into the facility and administer your tests.”

“Hello Landon Wicker, I’m Dr. Thaddeus Longfellow.” The older scientist stepped out from the line. “Would you please come this way?” He bowed slightly and stood there motionless, awkwardly staring at Landon.

“Sure.”

It wasn’t until Landon took his first step that Dr. Longfellow rose out of his shallow bow and began to walk up the gravel path toward the building; his fellow scientists followed close behind. As they approached the steps, the carving above the columns came into focus. It depicted a set of armored soldiers, each clad with a sword and shield, triumphing over a band of savage warriors. Etched into the shields of the victorious was a symbol. It looked like an eagle with wings outstretched and head cocked, carrying an arrow clutched in it talons. The carving was magnificent and terrifying. Landon stared at it in wonder as he mindlessly ascended the front steps of the building, not looking down to see where he was going until the carving fell out of his line of sight.

“Please try and keep up,” Dr. Longfellow said. The other five members of the group waited at the doorway, staring at Landon as he meandered down the portico. “Once we get inside, we have to head straight to the examination room, so please stay close. I know this is a lot to take in, but you’ll have time later. Shall we?”

With that, Dr. Longfellow forcefully pushed open the entrance that led into the Gymnasium. The large doors looked as if they were composed of pure gold, with intricate carvings etched into their individual panels. And the inside was massive. Landon could see straight back to the Atrium and beyond. He had no idea how far back it went. The light from the evening sun reflected off a series of mirrors ahead, bathing the entire space in warm golden light. The floors were a dark wood and the walls stretched high into the air. The ceilings reached so high, Landon couldn’t even distinguish what was up there.

Upon entering, the scientists immediately turned right. Dr. Longfellow swiped his identification card through a scanner and ushered everyone in while he held open the door. What was on the other side was much less grandiose. There were no high ceilings, beautiful flooring, golden doors, or detailed carvings. It looked as if they had entered a hospital. The walls were a strange yellowish-white. Florescent bulbs lined the ceiling, the floor was covered in nondescript tiles, and the walls were lined with doors.

“This is our medical wing,” Dr. Longfellow said. “Now if you will please follow Dr. Márquez. He’ll perform all of the required initial tests and then escort you to one of our main examination rooms.”

“I believe #132 is available,” Dr. Márquez interjected.

“That’ll do splendidly,” Dr. Longfellow replied.

Dr. Márquez turned to Landon and beckoned him to follow.

“Landon, I am very glad you have come to us,” Dr. Márquez said over his shoulder while the two of them walked down the hallway. “Now, first things first, we need you to take a shower and change into a set of sterile clothes. It’s just a pair of pants and a shirt that have been meticulously sterilized. We believe that all medical tests need to be conducted in an absolutely sterile environment. Therefore, the clothes you will be putting on have been put through quite a series of treatments to make them completely null in the examination process.”

“You know, you could have just told me to put on the pants and shirt. I would’ve understood.”

“Oh yes, of course. I sometimes get a bit carried away in the details. It’s just one of those scientist things.” The doctor opened a door and ushered Landon inside. As Landon passed Dr. Márquez, he noticed on his lab coat, just above the pocket, stitched in gold thread, an eagle holding an arrow. It was identical to those on the shields on the carving outside.

He walked into the room slowly, taking in the sight of the first clean bathroom he’d seen since he ran away. But this was more like a one-man locker room. A single metal locker hung on the wall and a small bench stretched along the sidewall. Resting on the bench was a clean towel and a set of pure white clothes and on the floor was a pair of white slippers. Everything was perfectly set out, waiting for his arrival.

He heard the door shut behind him, and when he turned, he saw someone he didn’t recognize. He starred into a mirror, gazing at a shadow of himself. The weeks on the streets had hardened him. His naiveté and innocence were stripped away and replaced with instinct and loneliness. His face looked worn from numerous sleepless nights trying to get comfortable on the asphalt or a bench. His shirt, which once was a warm yellow, was now some semblance of brown and black, with tiny holes that bore their way through the fabric around the shoulders and back. Dirt and grime coated his face, leaving no piece of skin untarnished. He ran his fingers through his dark brown hair. It was long and unruly, tangled and matted into a heap of greasy dreadlocks.

“Landon? Is everything all right?” Dr. Márquez asked, speaking loud enough so that Landon could hear him through the closed door. His voice drew him back to the present. It seemed like he’d been staring at himself for hours, dumbfounded by the battered doppelgänger staring back at him. “Please be quick. We have quite a few tests to run.”

“Oh yes, everything’s fine.” Landon reached into the shower stall and turned on the hot water before he started to undress.

When Landon reopened the glass door, steam exuded from the shower stall. Landon hesitantly stepped into the stream of running water. It felt like a blanket that was just pulled out of a hot dryer. It was comforting and familiar. It was amazing. As he washed himself, he felt as if he was slowly shedding off pieces of his harsh reality and watching them swirl down the drain. Like a time machine, it slowly peeled back the days, erasing the remnants of dirty streets, of the sweat from his bloodcurdling race through the city, and of the countless nights rolling around on asphalt. As he bathed, he was transported back to the normalcy of his life before everything happened. He was back in his room, listening to music on his bed, dreading the end of the summer. He could smell his mother’s delicious cooking as she prepared dinner. He even welcomed the memory of his father sitting on the couch yelling at the television.

He meticulously cleaned himself, ensuring that he removed every speck of dirt from his body. He even washed his hair four times, not satisfied with its cleanliness until it squeaked under his fingertips. The entire process took quite a while longer than he anticipated, and after that shower, Landon felt so relaxed and rejuvenated that all of his worries became a distant memory from where he was at that moment.

With his towel around his waist, he walked over and sat on the bench, staring at the set of white clothes beside him. He grabbed the top garment and pulled it toward him. It was surprisingly soft compared to what he had expected. Meticulously sterilized clothing didn’t really give Landon much hope.

He unfolded the shirt and began to pull it on, but as he threaded his arms through the sleeves, he started to feel uneasy.
What is going on here? What is this place?
To Landon, everything happened so quickly and so strangely. He obeyed these random people who said they could help him, but he had no idea what he was going to find out, or if they were really going to help at all. With a loud knock on the door, Landon was startled back into reality.

“How’re you doing?” Dr. Márquez asked through the door.

“I’m . . . I’m fine,” Landon replied. “I’ll be out in a second.”

Landon stood up and finished changing his clothing, donning the white drawstring pants, loose shirt and awkward slippers. Upon re-entering the hallway, Dr. Márquez was waiting, now with a clipboard in hand.

“Shall we?” Dr. Márquez asked rhetorically.

Over the next few hours, Landon was taken through a series of exams. As they progressed, Dr. Márquez always seemed to explain what was happening in far too much detail for each test. They seemed to want to measure things that made little sense to Landon, and the sheer thoroughness of the tests was strange. He was weighed, but the process included numerous different scales that Dr. Márquez said measured the weight of different parts of his body, like each individual internal organ and his bones. He was measured, which seemed to take forever, because they recorded distances as small as the space between each knuckle on his fingers and toes and the distance from the top of his lip to the base of his nose. Landon was even put through an extensive amount of other medical tests he had heard of before but never experienced: EKGs, MRIs, CAT scans, and blood tests. It seemed to Landon that they studied everything about him.

Once he finished what he thought was another MRI, he felt exhausted. He hadn’t eaten anything all day and these tests seemed to go on and on. There appeared to be no end in sight.

“Okay, Landon, we just have one more thing to do. If you would follow me.”

After a brief walk down the hallway, Dr. Márquez
led Landon into Room 132. It was a rather large room, compared to the others, and it was bathed in bright white light. In the middle of the room a steel gurney was bolted to the floor with a small metal tray sitting beside it, and along the back wall was a long mirror.

“Landon, if you would just take a seat on the gurney, someone will be with you shortly to administer the final test,” Dr. Márquez said from the entrance, after which he shut the door.

Landon was alone and consumed by silence and sterility. He wandered around, trying to kill time until the other doctor came in. He walked up to the long mirror and took a close look at himself. He was so thin. Weeks on the streets had taken a toll on his body and he now saw nothing but skin and bones.
At least I’m clean
, he thought.

Eventually, he strolled over to the steel gurney and sat on the flat portion of it, but for Landon, waiting was a bad thing. As he sat there he began to notice things; things like the leather straps attached to the gurney, and that sitting on the small metal table beside him rested a large syringe with a long needle and next to it, a vial of a strange opalescent chemical. Landon picked up the vial to see if he recognized the name of it, but it wasn’t labeled.

• • • • •

“It’s a unique compound of my own creation,” Dr. Dodgson said as he rotated around in his swivel chair. He sat at a console of monitors, each of them showing the test results from the numerous examinations Landon underwent. Brain scans and body measurements were all displayed on the various screens, showing every angle of Landon’s medical profile. “It’s a mixture of a psycho-stimulant that excites the cerebral cortex, as well as a cocktail of psycho-suppressants that reduces any extraneous activity in other regions of the brain. I also added a small quantity of a general anesthetic and paralytic to render the subject unconscious and immobile while the compound takes effect. Without it, subjects displayed signs of extreme pain.

“I developed it to verify the status of the subject and to determine how advanced their abilities are. In layman’s terms, it allows the subject to experience their apocratusis internally while manifesting their abilities externally. In their mind, they are reliving the moment that triggered their abilities, but the interesting part is that their abilities are part of the memory. So, when the memory comes to the forefront of their mind, their abilities will reappear externally, especially with the aid of the compound. Now, judging by the evidence, we’re in for quite the spectacle.”

The small observation room from which Dr. Dodgson operated was hidden behind the one-way mirror in Room 132. Joining him in the room stood Dr. Longfellow and a man in a well-tailored blue suit. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a stoic demeanor.

“What evidence exactly do you speak of?” the man asked.

“Well apart from his test results, which show the medical cues consistent with our other subjects, the field team says that the site of his apocratusis looked as if a bomb had gone off. The entire place was destroyed. But to top it off, look at this.”

Dr. Dodgson rolled over to a blank computer monitor and brought up an Internet browser, clicked a few times and typed in something quickly.

“This is a story that popped up on a blog about three hours ago. The story states that the writer was on a private tour of a museum this morning, and that when she was leaving, she watched our subject stumble into the street. He apparently lifted an oncoming bus off the ground to save himself. Evidently, he drew in quite a crowd but ran away shortly after.” Dr. Dodgson continued to scroll down the blog entry. Once he reached the bottom of the page, he turned to the man and said, “Sir, you’ll want to see this. They seemed to have snapped a photo of it.”

The photo showed a city bus lifted some six feet off the ground, a crowd gathered across the street, with some people pointing, others gasping, and front and center, a boy crouched on the ground. He wore a pair of dirty jeans and a muddied yellow t-shirt. The man leaned in closer to the screen.

“You are saying this boy here”—the man pointed at the guy in the photo and looked up to the thin boy with messy dark hair sitting with his back to them in the examination room—”is the same boy sitting in front of us?” 

Both Dr. Dodgson and Dr. Longfellow raised their heads and looked long and hard at Landon, who sat unaware of the audience gazing at him.

“Yes, sir,” Dr. Dodgson said. “They are one and the same.”

“But that should be impossible!” Dr. Longfellow exclaimed as he stared wide-eyed at the monitor. “That bus must weigh upwards of ten tons, not to mention the weight of the people inside! His body should have collapsed on itself from the stress of it all.”