Subject Seven

Subject Seven

Seven got lucky with the fourth door. It opened into a long concrete tunnel that led to the Other’s house. The hallway was called a “shaft”-a word one of the technicians had taught him. That long corridor led to a place that was frighteningly familiar, even though he had never seen it.

It was a house. A one-story ranch house, with a lovely yard and a white picket fence. His mind swore to him that he had been inside the place before. “Bleed over”-that was another word he’d learned from the techs when they didn’t think he could hear them. Bleed over was what got Four and Nine killed. He knew they were dead because he could no longer hear their thoughts. They were gone now, silent, like all of the other subjects. He was the last of them. He was the strongest, the closest to a success. Bleed over was what they called the strange thoughts that he’d heard in Four and Nine’s heads, memories of things they had never experienced. He hadn’t understood that notion until he too began to be haunted by images that shouldn’t have been there and memories of happiness that he had never felt.

He shook the thoughts away and climbed up the long ladder built directly into the concrete tube. At the end of it there was another door, a heavy steel contraption that he knew was there to keep the outside world safe from the likes of him.

The door was not locked. All he had to do was wave a hand in front of the motion sensor and the thick metal slid to the side, opening to the floor of the house’s living room. There was a couch, exactly where he knew it would be, and a television facing it, just past the coffee table that he had never touched but knew just the same.

“No!” He shook his head and tried to force the memories away. They weren’t his memories. They belonged to the Other. He hated the Other, hated everything about the one that they loved and catered to. His heart pounded in his chest and he tried to calm down, but the anger was there growing like a burning fire.

Through the living room door, out to the sidewalk. Once on the sidewalk, he could go anywhere he wanted to because there were roads that led to different places, different houses and cities filled with more houses and more people. All he had to do was move through the house and he could have everything the Other had: friends and a real life, with sunlight and the wind and baseball and McDonald’s Happy Meals. It was like a promise of heaven. The Other knew about heaven. The Other went to church on Sundays. He went to Sunday school and to the Hillandale Montessori School. The Other had Mommy and Daddy and little Gabby and Toby the Puppy and G.I. Joe action figures and “NO!” He flinched as surely as if Dirk had swung the damned metal club at his face again. That was the Other’s world. He didn’t want that world. He wanted a better world, one that was his and his alone.

Seven reached out and touched the leather of the sofa with his hand. It was cool and soft under his bloodstained fingers. When he pulled back, there was a streak of gore to show that he had touched, had marred, the world of the Other.

That thought made him smile and want to scream at the same time.

The rage won. He grabbed the leather and hooked his fingers into claws and then tore at the leather as hard as he could until it split with a loud purring rip and revealed the soft stuffing inside.

He liked the feeling so much that he did it a second time and then decided he would destroy other things. TV was something the Other enjoyed, so he lifted it over his head and threw the two-hundred-pound set into the wall, where the pictures of the Other and his family rested. The impact destroyed the pictures too, and that only added to Seven’s joy.

He forgot that he was supposed to be escaping. For just a few moments he forgot everything but making the Other suffer for daring to live.

He might have stayed there and destroyed everything, but the man who came into the room looked at him and held up his hands and said, “Seven, you’re being bad. You know you aren’t supposed to be here.”

Seven looked at the man and growled low in his chest. The man was nervous. He could smell the fear sweat that came from the man’s pores. That simple fact was thrilling because he had never smelled fear on the man before. Certainly not when the man had been cutting Seven’s skin with the scalpel and peeling it back. Oh, the pain had been so very large, bigger than a house, bigger than Seven, to be sure, so large that Seven had screamed and begged for the man to stop.

The man had not laughed, not like Dirk, but he hadn’t stopped either.

“You… um… you aren’t supposed to be here, Seven. You need to go back to your room before you get in trouble, okay?”

The voice of the man was wrong. Normally it was calm, almost without tone. Normally the man was in control of the situation. Normally he had nothing to fear.

Seven looked at his hands, at the blood that coated his skin and at the cuts that were slowly healing, wounds that he’d received while getting here. Sometimes when he hit someone hard enough, their bones broke and cut his skin, but that was okay, really, a necessary pain to help him steal control from the man in front of him.

“Seven? Did you hear me?” The man was starting to sound more sure of himself. Probably because Seven had not answered him or attacked him. Yet.

Probably because he thought Seven was scared of him. Or because he thought he was still in control of the situation. That had always been one of the man’s favorite terms. He liked to tell people he was in control and could handle everything.

The man had a name, didn’t he? Seven tried to remember the name. It was close. It was on the tip of his tongue.

The man came closer, trying to take command. “Come on, Seven. Let me take you back to your room.”

Maybe he did fear the man. Maybe he did because, really, the man had hurt him many times over the years. He couldn’t hope to count the number of times, because almost every day that he’d been alive, the man had been causing him pain.

What was the man’s name? The loss of that name was like a bee buzzing in his head; it distracted him and made him angrier than ever.

The man’s hand touched Seven’s shoulder. The touch was tentative, gentle. Seven looked up toward the man’s face. The man was so tall, and he was so tiny in comparison.

“Come on, Seven. Let’s go home.”

“Home?” His voice was raw. He’d been screaming so very much and his throat felt hot and scratchy.

Home. The room. The place where he stayed when the man was done with the cutting and the lights and the sounds and the needles that made him sleep or made his heart race so fast he feared it would explode out of his chest. Home. Where the pain is.

The man grew bolder as Seven looked down at the plush carpet under his bare, bloodied feet. Why was the carpet so familiar? Why did the place where he stood smell of comfort and feel so safe when he had never been here before? Bleed over. The Other’s world was haunting his mind again, making him see the Other’s happiness and his own pain, making him compare the two.

“Yes, Seven. Home.” There was a softness to the man’s voice now, and a confidence that had not been there a moment before. He reached into his white lab coat and pulled out a syringe, even as he moved in closer to Seven’s side. “Everything’s going to be all right, Seven. You’ll see.”

Time slowed down. Seven felt the adrenaline kick into his system. The world around him oozed. He could see the man’s arm lifting, could feel the man’s body turning slightly as he looked down at Seven and decided where the needle should go. The warm light from the living room lamp gleamed off the stainless steel needle of the syringe, off the yellowish fluids inside. Yellow was the color of sleep. The yellow liquids always helped Seven rest when the pain was too great.

Home. Pain.

His eyes widened and he moved, shifting his body as his hand caught the man in the lower part of his back and pushed. The man grunted, surprised, and staggered forward, losing his balance even as Seven backed up a bit and bared his teeth.

And then he remembered the man’s name. The Other had a special name for him, an almost magical name. Finally the word came to him. “No, Daddy! No home! I go away!”

Seven understood words. Words were power.

The man, Daddy, let out a low noise of surprise and ran toward the door. Before he could reach it, Seven moved forward, lunging and letting his hatred loose. And oh, how he hated. His fingers grabbed Daddy’s neck and back and sank into soft flesh. Daddy screamed from the unexpected pain.

Seven’s body was changing every day. The man said so. Seven could have told him that. He felt stronger than he ever had before and he felt something else that gave him strength.

He felt hope.

Daddy’s head and face smashed into the wall as Seven pushed with all of his might.

He would be free.

Daddy let out a grunt and shook his head as he tried to break free, denying what was happening, trying to escape from the fury that Seven had held inside for as long as he could remember.

He would be free.

Daddy’s head crashed into the wall again. The paint changed color, splattered with the red that hid inside of Daddy.

Seven would be free.

Even if he had to kill everyone he saw, he would be free.