Subject 11

5

“Guess I’m the token black guy in the mix, huh?” 6 said as he swiveled the office chair from side to side, tapping his hands on the armrests. “And I’m Dominican, so I’m Hispanic, too.” He laughed and shook his head. “You couldn’t even get two people for that; you covered them both with one guy. And you got your one token Asian, too, I see.

“Speaking of 3, she’s a cutie and a half, man. Something very hot about a sexy woman in a pint-sized teenager’s body. It’s hard to catch her away from that fucking big guy, 2, though. He’s guarding her like a pit bull with a bone. When I do get her alone she says she likes me, but I don’t know if she’s just fucking with my head or not. I asked for her number, but… shit, what am I telling you for?” He laughed again. “Sorry about that — don’t cut off my money! She didn’t give it to me, anyway. After we’re done with this, she said. That isn’t against the rules, right? After we’re out of here and in the real world again, we get our lives back.

“Speaking of which, I wonder how my old man is doing right now. My cousin promised he’d look in on him, but that Ace is such a fuck up. He better check in on him, or when I get out of here he’ll be sorry. I know I shouldn’t really have left my Dad alone to do this, but shit, I’m not working… I need the money. And to be honest? I needed some time away from my Dad, too. I hate to say it, but I feel like I’m in a jail cell in that apartment. I’m only twenty-five years old… I should be out there living a little more, you know? Not taking care of a grouchy old man like a fucking nurse…”

A babble of excited voices came to 6 from the other side of the confessional’s door, and he took this as his cue to bring his daily monologue to an end. And so, curious, he rose from the chair and threw the door open to see what the hullabaloo was about. Across the spacious banquet hall, he noted three people gathered at one of the large windows. He strode toward them, calling ahead in a voice that reverberated off the high ceiling, “What’s up?”

Bearded and balding 8 looked over his shoulder and said, “We heard breaking glass outside. I don’t know if one of the windows above us just fell out of its frame on its own, or if somebody up there broke it.”

Hunched at one of the less foggy panes that made up the composite window, not taking his eyes off the scene outside, 10 said, “I told you guys how 9 and I saw someone running around screaming in that brick building. We’ve either got a loony homeless person, a teenager fucking with us, or Dr. Onsay trying to freak us out.”

Peering through the cloudy glass beside him, 9 protested, “And I told you what I think that was. This place is haunted, and I bet Dr. Onsay knows it, and this is all about how we’ll react to it.”

“Maybe it was one of our lovesick lovebirds doing a suicidal swan dive,” 8 said.

“Who?” 9 asked.

“2 and 3.”

“Wait — what’s that, in the grass?” 10 exclaimed.

6 drew close to another of the panes, tried cleaning it with the heel of his hand but the view remained blurry. All he could discern was a dark, uncertain shape moving erratically in the tall yellowed grass and drifts of brown fallen leaves. “Is that a dog?”

“Shit… it’s a person, and they’re hurt,” 8 said. “That glass we heard — I think somebody did jump right through a window up there!”

“Oh my God,” 9 gasped.

“How’d they get through the bars that are on the windows?” 10 asked.

“They obviously did somehow.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a person,” 6 said.

8 watched the black, flopping form sink down out of sight within the overgrown weeds. He waited for it to resurface. It did not. The stirring grass had gone still. “If it was a badly injured person,” he said, “they either just passed out, or died.”

“Well, we can’t get outside, apparently,” 10 said, “but we’d better go upstairs and see if we can figure out what happened.”

9 said, “One of us should stay here and keep an eye on the window.”

“Okay, you do that. You others with me?”

“Let’s do it,” said 6.

“They should really let us have a cell phone for emergencies,” 9 said, “they really should.”

“I’ve got an idea,” 8 said. “I’ll go in the confession room and tell them what we saw. Maybe they’ll be listening, and come around to check things out.”

“Good idea, man,” 10 agreed. “Go for it.”

“Okay,” 8 said, then turned to jog across the room toward the confessional’s door.

10 nodded to 6. “Let’s go, then.”

“Someone was saying that the freaky graffiti in here was making them dizzy,” said 8. He was sitting in the padded office chair, talking to the wall in between biting his nails and spitting little shreds of them onto the floor. “I can’t remember who. But I think it’s the drugs we take every morning. What are those things doing to us, huh? I mean, why are we even taking them?”

He felt a light tickling sensation on his upper right arm, and thinking it might be a spider, quickly pushed up the short sleeve of his scrub top. There was no spider, only his tattoo which spelled out ONE LIFE. He studied these words oddly, like the proverbial buffoon who is mystified at a tattoo they received while drunk. But as if he finally recognized it, he let his sleeve drop back into place to resume talking. Only, he forgot what it was he had wanted to say.

“Definitely your drugs messing me up,” he said accusingly. “I hope I’m not fucking up my health for the rest of my life for a measly four thousand dollars.” In truth, since he had been laid off from his job as a mechanical engineer, these days four thousand dollars was far from measly to him. It wasn’t bad at all, considering the test’s time span. But as 8 considered all this, he realized he couldn’t remember how long they had already been there. In fact, he could no longer remember how many days, or weeks, the test was to encompass in total.

Thinking of his former job now, he recalled how his coworkers had dubbed him Scotty, after the character in the TV program Star Trek. He chuckled as he related this fact aloud. “Well, you have my name, so you know why they called me that. Sometimes when the floor managers called me to come look at one of the machines in the plant, I’d answer the phone in a Scottish brogue. I’d tell them I’d need two hours to fix something, and they’d play along and say, ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes, Mr. Scott.’” He chuckled some more. “Hey, you know what my favorite Scotty moment was? It was in one of the movies, the one where they went back in time to Earth. They needed some repairs done to the ship, so Scotty gave some technology to the guy who was destined to invent that technology. But since Scotty is the one who gave the guy the technology, the guy never had to invent it. So… it’s like the technology never got invented, it just — became! That’s a weird loop, huh? Trippy.

“Ohh… God. Speaking of trippy,” he groused, his good humor fading, “I’m feeling sooo… I don’t know, right now. You’re making me have seconds thoughts about all this, you fuckers.” To his own ears his words sounded increasingly groggy, or drunken. He felt like he could fall asleep right here and now… take a nap right in this chair. “You think I haven’t been through enough stress already, getting laid off — and my Mom dying of uterine cancer last year? And what I went through as a kid? Did you know my father left us when I was only eight? And that business with good old Father Ryan. He’s dead now — may he burn in Hell.”

2 and 3 were exploring again, like restless zoo animals pacing in their cage. What else was there for them to do, when they weren’t eating or sleeping or washing their clothes or bodies?

Gradually, as they walked along on a second floor level, 3 had turned oddly melancholy and philosophical, and she murmured, “Who knows what they used to do here? People worked here for years, and laughed together, and got excited if their friend was going to get married or have a baby, and they all looked forward to Christmas and vacations. Maybe old people came here to live the end of their lives, and lay here feeling lonely and helpless and neglected. There had to be so many people in these rooms doing this or that or whatever, and now maybe everyone who ever worked or lived here is dead. All gone now.”

They continued along until they came to a staircase, and without needing to consult each other ascended it together, though 2 glanced sideways at 3, wary of her sulky mood.

“Wow,” he said when they arrived at the top of the stairs, now looking down a broad hallway with large composite windows on either side, its ceiling and walls flaking away and the floor covered in these fallen flakes, like a carpet of autumn leaves. The plaster under the paint was crumbling, and radiators against the walls here and there encrusted with rust. “I feel like I could get lockjaw just breathing the air in here.”

In their wandering they had passed into a structure that appeared to be situated halfway between the building that served as their base camp, and the old brick building directly across from it — though it was hard to tell exactly where one of the buildings in this complex ended and another began. Were they discrete buildings, after all, or just wings of a single building, like the limbs of one great body?

At the far end of the corridor was a door painted emerald green. 2 started forward, as if its vivid color mesmerized him. 3 hesitated. “I’m getting tired — maybe we should go back. I think I could use a nap.”

“Hold on,” 2 said. “Let’s just look at what’s beyond here, for a minute.”

“Why?” she asked, growing irritated, but after it was apparent he wasn’t going to turn back she huffed and started after him.

“I just feel… this door looks familiar.”

“Why? How could it be familiar?”

“I didn’t say it made any sense.”

When they reached the end of the hallway, the door proved to be made of green-painted metal. 2 shoved it inward and it groaned and squealed on its hinges, resisting him. In the end it became stuck about halfway open, but it was enough for 2 to slip into the room beyond. 3 followed.

It was a fair-sized chamber without windows, water-damaged, some of its scaly ceiling fallen away to reveal its slatted understructure, the scabby mottled walls looking diseased. As always, whatever machines had formerly operated here (had the complex been a factory) or beds resided here (had it been a hospital) were gone as if they had never existed. But there was one interesting feature in the room. In one corner, as if cowering together in fear, stood four chairs. With their metal frames and torn vinyl seats showing the spongy padding inside, they were identical to the chairs that stood around the table in the banquet hall. And piled upon this grouping of chairs were four rolled-up sleeping bags. They appeared new, and identical to those in which 2 and 3 and the others slept every night.

“Spares?” 2 wondered aloud. He walked to them, took one sleeping bag down and opened it up, spreading it on the debris-covered floor. “Yeah, definitely, same as ours.”

3 approached the quilted sleeping bag, got down on hands and knees upon it and smelled the area in which a person’s head would rest. “Huh,” she said.

“What?”

“I can smell the soap we all shower with. Someone’s been using this. Maybe the testers have been camping in this room all along, and we didn’t know it? Or do you think there could even be another group of subjects in this place with us?” 3 felt something under her knee, changed her position and unzipped the bag further. She reached inside, took hold of an object and drew it out to examine. “Ugh!” she exclaimed.

“What’s that doing in there?” 2 asked.

She held the small head of a doll with long, bleached-blond hair. 3 flung it away from her, across the room. “Weird,” she said with distaste, but she then rolled onto her back and stretched her body out fully. “God I’m so tired. Maybe I should just nap here.”

2 stood over her, gazing down. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said.

“Why don’t you open a bag, too?” she said, holding his gaze. “And we can take a nap together?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” he repeated. “Maybe I’ll open up all the bags, so we’ll have plenty of room to take a nap.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” she echoed, smiling subtly.

So 2 took down one rolled sleeping bag after another to unfurl them and spread them on the floor together. In so doing, tucked into each of the bags he discovered another disembodied doll’s head, each doll different in style. “Why would anybody do that?” he asked.

“Get rid of them,” 3 said. “They give me goose bumps.” She embraced her own bare arms.

Having tossed the last severed doll’s head into a far corner, 2 got down on their thin makeshift mattress and stretched out beside her. “If you’re cold,” he offered in a soft voice, rubbing at the raised bumps on one of her arms, “maybe I can make you warm.”

10 and 6 had mounted a series of cement staircases to a third floor landing. Here they came upon a corridor with its right-hand wall masked by graffiti, its far end lost in gloom. They could see enough, however, to tell that some of the black paint had run down from the wall and puddled on the hallway’s floor. What drew their attention, though, was a large window facing onto the stairwell. Bars covered it, but the glass was shattered outward. As the two men approached it, 6 wondered, “Could someone squeeze between the bars?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think they could dive through the glass between the bars.”

“Maybe they broke it first and then squeezed through.”

“Or maybe nobody jumped out at all.”

“So what was that we saw in the grass?”

“Whatever it was,” 10 stated, gazing through the large gap broken in the pane, “it isn’t down there now.”

6 grunted in assent. “Yeah. Did they get up and walk away?”

“Like I say, maybe it wasn’t even a person.”

“Hey… look,” 6 said. “There is something.”

Now both men noticed that in the spot where they had seemed to observe a figure from the banquet hall’s windows, a nest of numerous black filaments floated and rippled in a breeze, which rustled through the tall grass with which the strands blended. As the men watched, one after another of these whipping strands became dislodged and airborne… until within only moments of their first noticing them, all of the thin black streamers were gone.

“What was that?” 10 asked. “Some trash or something somebody threw down there?”

“Guess it was. Guess that’s what we saw: trash.”

10 then realized that white flecks were also being borne along in the breeze. “Hey,” he asked stupefied, “is that snow?”

“Snow in summer?” 6 said. Then, perplexed, he added, “It is summer, isn’t it?”