The Gift

Chapter 56

Wisty

"WELL, 'GRIM' HAS A new dictionary entry," I comment aloud to myself as I explore my latest venue. The Isolation Ward they put me in is actually the vast, windowless, unbearably dank basement of the BNW Center. "This place makes the General Bowen State Psychiatric Hospital"-one of the dungeon cribs that we busted out of-"look like a flower shop, a tea parlor, and a cribbage hall."

Great. Five minutes in solitary, and I'm already talking a blue streak to myself.

No worries, though. My giant bunker is about to be filled with six bighearted scientists running inane tests on me. You know how your doctor bangs your knee, shines a flashlight in your ear, and presses your tongue down with a stick and never finds anything wrong? It starts out kind of like that. The medicos seem particularly interested in my fuzzy head, examining it with a magnifying glass.

"A shame that the original was destroyed," a giantess I decide to call Helga says to another "researcher," who looks like a beautician from a backwater town-who nearly flunked out of cosmetology school. I call her Gigi.

"The informant has provided a small specimen, but the rest is said to be lost, or possibly under heavy guard," says Gigi.

Am I actually hearing that my hair has become like the Holy freaking Grail?

Then someone starts plucking out some samples of my hair-or, rather, reddish stubble-with a tweezerlike tool.

"Ouch!" I yell, and try to slap the hand away, but my wrists are grabbed by a doughy-faced lab assistant I call Hans.

Gigi, who I think is the lead scientist, steps back and looks intrigued, almost pleased, by my reaction.

"Why don't you just wax my whole scalp while you're at it?" I spit out sarcastically, and then instantly regret it.

Because that's when the torture really begins.