The Trial (The Tree House) (17 page)

“That’s your tracker,” Eli replies and takes a small tablet looking thing out of his jacket pocket. Then he turns it so I can see the screen. With my fading vision, it’s all a blur so I don’t know what he’s showing me. “It monitors your heart rate, brain activity, blood pressure.” Then he turns the tablet back to himself and touches the screen a couple times. The beeping stops. I open my mouth to say something but I don’t know what. I can’t think. I can’t see. I can’t stand the pain. “According to this thing
, here,” he says matter-of-factly. “You’re going into shock.”

And then I do

Chapter
three

For the second time since I got here
, I wake up in my little cement room. This time though, the pain in my side is almost completely gone and I’m able to get up off the bed without feeling like I’m going to throw up. The mattress crinkles and I half expect to hear Anna ask me if I’m alright but I don’t hear anything from her. Even when I whisper her name, she doesn’t respond.

The sound of a heavy door opening down the hall has me on my feet and I go over to the barred window to see what’s going on. A couple of nurses are following after a man in gray scrubs similar to what I’m w
earing and he’s pushing a wheelchair. Anna is slumped over in the seat groaning and mumbling something incoherently.

“Hey,” I say out loud and one of the nurses glances at me for a second before returning her attention to a clipboard she has in her hands. “Hey,” I say again. “What did you guys do to her?” Still no one answers me. Instead
, the man slides a keycard into a slot next to the door to Anna’s cell and I hear a beep and then a click as the door unlocks. The two nurses stay out in the hall while the man pushes the wheelchair into the room. He disappears for a few seconds before emerging again with the empty chair. I can still hear Anna murmuring from inside her cell. “Is she going to be alright?” I ask anyone that’ll listen.

The nurse that looked at me the first time glances at me again then turns to the other woman. “I wish we could just keep them drugged so they wouldn’t talk to us,” she mutters without even caring that I can hear her. I step back from the window as the three make their way back down the hall and close the heavy door behind them with a clang. Immediately
, I go back to the door and grip the bars with my fingers. “Anna,” I whisper loudly. “Anna, can you hear me?” I hear her groan in response. At least it’s something. “What did they do to you?”

“Ben?” she calls weakly. “Just let me sleep.” Then she’s quiet again.

Feeling defeated, I slump back against the door. Eli told me in his office that I’m here to be a lab rat for whatever new thing he’s trying to perfect. Is that what Anna is here for too? Did she just get back from having something put in her so they can monitor the results? My hands clench into fists. Why didn’t I shove that scalpel into the man’s jugular when I had the chance?

There’s not a whole lot to do in a ten by ten cement room and it takes me all of twelve seconds to explore the place. There’s my crinkly mattress and the metal toilet. And that’s it.

The tray of food I didn’t get a chance to eat isn’t even here. They must have taken it when I blacked out. Now, my stomach is growling and who knows when I’m getting more food? Awesome.

* * *

I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here. Anna still hasn’t said anything and I’m not sure if she’s asleep or dead. What kind of experiment is Eli doing with her? How many of us are here and how long before some guy in gray comes pushing a wheelchair into my room? Maybe they’ve already started on me. I touch my side as I imagine what could be buried underneath these stitches. What if there’s some kind of bacteria in there or something that’s going to grow and eat its way out. I can feel my heart quicken as a scene from Alien pops into my head. I have to know what’s under these stitches.

When I lift my shirt up to look at my side, a tingle flashes quickly th
rough me exiting out of my fingers like electricity. For a second, I freeze expecting an excruciating pain to make me black out again, but I feel fine. Nothing else happens. My cut isn’t even bruised or gross looking anymore. It’s just a clean cut stitched shut with black thread. There’s a tiny knot on either end to keep it from coming undone. How am I going to take them out? Looking around the room again, I don’t have many options. Carefully, I pinch one of the knots between my fingers and give it a tiny tug. The skin pulls with it and a wave of nausea hits me sending chills up my spine and causing my forehead to break out in a cold sweat. I feel sick. I feel so sick. Closing my eyes, I breathe and wait. It takes forever for the nausea to fade but the cold sweat and tremors stay behind. Probably because I know what I have to do and I really don’t want to, but I need to know.

I don’t want to stay on the floor so I get up carefully and make my way on wobbly legs over to the bed. It crinkles as I lay down, resting my back against the wall so I’m sitting up and my feet are dangling over the edge. I need something to ease the pain.
Anything. So I take off my shirt, ball it up tight and shove as much of it into my mouth as will fit. It’s hard to breathe around the material but I still try to inhale deeply. Alright, it’s now or never.

For the second time, I carefully pinch the thread woven through my skin. This time I pull at the first stitch
after the knot. It sticks right at first – unable to budge due to the dried, crusted blood, but a little bit harder and the string pulls free. Another wave of nausea hits me like a tsunami and I bite down hard on my shirt. You’re okay, I tell myself. You’re fine. You’re fine.

I tug again and the knot pulls the skin with it. If I tug quick and hard, maybe I could get it to go through the hole. Okay. I can do this. Breathe in. I squeeze my eyes shut. Breathe out. Bite hard. And yank.

Pop
.

It hurts. There are no thoughts in my head. There are no words.
Just pain. My head is just filled with pain. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.

I feel the familiar pinch in my arm and an alarm sounds right outside my door. I don’t have much time.

I pull again.
Pop
. Some sound between a scream and a grunt escapes my throat. I bite down harder, feeling the shirt scratch my gums and my teeth creak and I hit my head back against the wall but the throbbing in my skull is nothing compared to the searing white hot pain in my side.

Only a couple more.

With another loud scream, I pull one last time and the thread comes all the way loose, the knot catching in every hole. My body slumps and I just lay there for a minute, feeling the pain slam into me over and over like a line of semi-trucks. The alarm outside my door is still going off but no one has come yet. The black thread is stiff and sticky with blood but it’s out. Thank God, it’s out.

I hear the heavy door at the end of the hall open and close.
I’m running out of time. Looking down at my wound again, I see it’s still crusted shut with something brownish and dark. I lay my fingers on either side of the wound and gently pull at the skin. Come on. Come on.

Carefully, slowly
, I pry and the skin stretches until the scab begins to give. A crack appears and blood starts welling to the surface. I pull harder, biting down on the shirt. The wound is splitting open. It hurts. I’m sweating cold sweat. Hot sweat. I’m groaning, grinding my teeth into the t-shirt. Ah it hurts. The pain is sharp and I can feel each little molecule separating, peeling apart. Blood is smeared all down my side now and I look up for a second to see a face frozen in horror at me from the barred window in my door. Hurry, I tell myself. The wound is finally all the way open and without another moment to waste, I push my finger into the cut. Another scream makes its way around the t-shirt as I dig, searching for anything out of the ordinary. My vision is becoming spotty again and the alarm is blaring in my ears along with shouting voices from out in the hall. The guy outside has dropped his key and has to bend down to get it and I’m still searching, trying to find anything hard or out of the ordinary. Instead my finger only digs at flesh. Taking it back out, I rip the shirt out of my mouth and gasp from the pain. Looking down again, I see that it’s just a hole. An empty hole. A perfectly circular hole. I’ve only ever had one other wound like this and I glance at my bare shoulder as it comes to mind. It’s a bullet hole.

The door to my cell bursts open as memories flood into my head.
Everything. All of a sudden, like the floodgates have been opened, it all comes back. The letter, London, the flight home, Aly, Sy, David, the Tree House, the patients, Hailey.

Jack.

I kept him from getting shot. I saved him. And now he thinks I’m dead.

Hands are on me but I can’t see whose. I feel a sharp prick in my neck but it’s nothing compared to the pain in the rest of my body.
Then suddenly the pain subsides and the last thing I see is my brother’s face as I’m bleeding in the snow and yelling at him to “go”. Then everything disappears.

* * *

“Ben?”

I can’t move my arms,
my legs. Nothing. I’m paralyzed.

“Ben, are you awake?” It’s Anna.

I’m able to move my fingers now and my toes and relief washes over me. Then I try to lift my arms but they stay where they are. My eyes fly open and I’m staring at the cement ceiling in my little room. I can’t lift my head.

“Ben?” Anna repeats.

“Yeah, I’m awake,” I reply with a deep breath. “I can’t move.” Whatever they injected me with before I passed out must have something to do with why my head feels like a cinderblock. I can’t lift it.

“It’s just the drugs,” Anna’s voice explains to me. “They’ll wear off in a couple minutes.”

She’s right. Just a few minutes later I can lift my head again. Not my arms or legs though. I’m about to ask if that’s a side effect, but I get my answer when I look over and see a leather cuff securing my wrist to the bed. “What the…” There’s one on my other wrist and around each ankle too. What kind of people am I dealing with here?

“Is something wrong?” Anna calls to me.

I tug hard at the shackle on my wrist. No use. “They have me chained up like Frankenstein’s freaking monster.”

“Yeah, I think it’s so you quit trying to hurt yourself.” Just as the last words leave her mouth, I hear her cough and then retch. The sound of stomach acid splattering in the toilet makes my own insides ache.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Anna replies weakly
, her voice echoing off the metal bowl.

“You sure?”

“Believe me,” she says. “This is nothing compared to most days.”

My hands tighten into fists as Anna heaves again into the bowl. I hate this place. I hate these people. I especially
hate that I can’t do anything about any of it.

There’s nothing I can do while I’m strapped down to my bed. Every few hours – at least I’m guessing it’s every few hours since there doesn’t seem to be
a clock in this God forsaken place – a guy in gray has been coming into my room. Sometimes it’s to check my new stitches. Sometimes he draws blood or checks my vitals then rattles off numbers to a nurse outside my door with a clipboard. Sometimes he sticks a needle into my neck and injects me with something that leaves a salty taste in my mouth. Every time I make it as difficult as I can for him, whether it’s shaking my head back and forth so he can’t get the needle in or trying to bite him. He always overpowers me but at least I’m making him irritated.

“I’m getting really tired of this,” he says at one point and drops the tray of food he’s been trying to feed me onto the ground.

“
You’re
getting tired of this?” I mutter staring up at the ceiling, “I’m the one with the toilet taunting me from six feet away. Unless you’re here to help me with that too.”

The guy in gray grabs ahold of my chin and yanks hard so I’m forced to look at him. “Listen here,
lab rat.
I don’t know why Eli Scott thinks you’re so important but we have plenty of other lab rats and I’m willing to take the slap on the wrist I’d get if anything were to happen to you.”

I jerk my head out of his fingers. “If I’m so important, I’m sure you’d get more than just a slap on the wrist,” I spit out trying feebly to look intimidating even with my hands and feet bound.

“You think you’re so tough.”

My eyes drill into his. “I
can think of at least fifty ways to put you on your back and that’s just using the tray on the ground.” My wrists are raw and hurting from working at the cuffs. It’s not use. They haven’t loosened one bit.

With a smile and a shake of his head, the man picks the tray back up and turns away to leave. I don’t watch him
go. Instead I stare up at the ceiling angrily and feel my ears grow red. The door to my cell closes and latches and then the gray man’s footsteps fade down the hall. Another door opens, shuts, and locks and it’s just me and Anna again. With a loud grunt, I pull hard against my shackles but they hold fast. I’m still lying here just as stuck as before only now I’m breathing harder.

This sucks.

This sucks. This sucks. This sucks.

“This sucks!”

I hear Anna groan from her cell. I probably woke her up.

Eli thinks
I’m important. I haven’t been wheeled out of here and brought back in all drugged up like Anna yet. So what are they waiting for? Maybe for my stitches to heal. Or maybe they do this with every patient they capture. It’s only been a couple days, right? Maybe it hasn’t even been that long. I guess it’s hard to keep track of time when you’ve spent most of it unconscious. There aren’t any windows here so I can’t tell what time of day it is. There hasn’t really been a long period of time between any visits so they must be working around the clock to keep my checkups consistent, but I bet if I ask that guy in the gray scrubs what time it is, he won’t tell me. He’d probably give me another look like I’m this helpless little kid. A helpless little lab rat. Well, I guess I am.