Shudder Page 12

  By this time, everyone else must have thought I was dead. If I’d disappeared, they would have assumed the worse.

  What was Jason doing? Did he know? Sometimes, it felt as if we were connected with invisible threads. If I were alive, would he somehow know that deep down?

  That was silly. He wouldn’t know.

  And if he really thought I was dead, he would go absolutely insane or he would give up. He needed me.

  I tried to focus on Jason, to think of him, and to let my memories of him be the thing that kept me going, kept me from giving up. I remembered everything we’d been through together, all the things that had kept us apart. In the end, even my own hatred of him hadn’t been enough. Nothing could keep us apart. I began to repeat this to myself, silently at first, but occasionally I realized my lips were moving. Nothing can keep us apart. Nothing can keep us apart. Nothing can keep us apart.

  But as the days wore on, I couldn’t do it anymore.

  I was the one who was going insane.

  I was trapped here. I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t see other people. I had been alone for so long. Eventually, all I could think about was how incredibly helpless I was. How I could do nothing to save myself. I had no power at all. I had been deprived of everything.

  Why were they keeping me alive?

  My period came. I wasn’t pregnant. I waited, knowing they had seen it on the cameras. Now that they knew I wasn’t pregnant, would they come and kill me?

  They didn’t.

  The boredom was eating into my skull. At first, I’d resisted talking, because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of watching me talk to myself on that camera. I didn’t want them to know that they were beating me. But after a while, it didn’t seem to matter. I talked directly to the camera, asking them when they were going to kill me, giving long and detailed descriptions of my boredom.

  “Why am I here?” I said to the camera every day. “What do you want with me? You don’t want my blood. Why don’t you just kill me?”

  I lost track of how many days it had been. If there were even days. They turned the lights off, but that didn’t mean that it was actually night. They could turn them off whenever they wanted. I had no way of knowing.

  “Nothing I do makes any difference,” I told the camera. “I try to fix things. I try to save people. But it’s all pointless. Are you going to keep me here until I die of boredom? Just kill me already.”

  Sometimes I cried. I sobbed a lot, pressing my face into the flat pillow on the cot. The crying never made any difference.

  I dismantled the bed one day. I took it apart, piece by piece. I scattered the headboard and the metal bars over the floor. I crumpled the blankets in a pile in the corner. I ran water over the mattress from the faucet. It took all day. When I was finished, I curled up on the ground and slept.

  When I woke up, the bed was back together. The mattress wasn’t wet.

  Another day, I broke the camera.

  But they fixed that while I slept too.

  I spent hours hurling a string of profanities at the newly repaired camera. I invented ways to use the word fuck. I made obscene gestures. But it made no difference, and eventually I got bored.

  I thought about not eating. I even told the camera I wouldn’t. I said they’d have to watch me waste away in here, and would they be able to handle that?

  Of course they would. They didn’t see us as people or they wouldn’t be treating us the way they did.

  The worst of it was that absolutely nothing happened. Days and weeks passed. Hell, it could have been years. It felt like years. Everything was the same, and no matter what I did, nothing changed. I had been stripped of my ability to change things, to interact with the world. I hadn’t realized before that having an effect on my surroundings was integral to my humanity. I hadn’t realized that it only took being completely alone before the monotony drove me nuts.

  I talked to the camera about it. “You think we’re like animals, right? What if pets feel this way? We feed them and take care of all of their needs, but we won’t let them leave our houses or our yards. We cage them up. Maybe they only seem to like us so much because the captivity has completely destroyed their minds. Maybe our pets are all shocked and damaged. We’re torturing them, and we don’t even know.”

  I thought about it. “Of course, I’m all alone. Maybe if I had another doggy to play with, maybe then things wouldn’t seem so hopeless. And if pets really hated their lives so much, you think they’d try to escape. Slaves always tried to escape. I want to escape.”

  I glared at the camera. “But you won’t let me leave, will you? You’ll keep me here until I go barking mad, and... for what? You don’t need me! I don’t have the blood you want. Stop torturing me and kill me already.”

  Then I sobbed again, on my put-back-together bed. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

  One day I woke up, and I felt a stab of panic, because I realized that I might be losing my mind. I actually wanted to go crazy. If I really lost it, maybe they’d be forced to come in here and do something with me. Anything would be better than nothing at this point.

  I was afraid, though, of letting go of my last shred of sanity. I was afraid I’d never get it back. I reasoned with myself that I might not spend the rest of my life locked in this room. I might get out. And if I got out, I was going to need my wits. I needed to fight, because I couldn’t afford to go nuts.

  But it also seemed so pointless. I could keep struggling, keep fighting, and it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference. I was still trapped here. There was no way out. I had lost Jason. He probably thought I was dead. Nothing I did made any difference at all. I was completely at the will of the people who kept me locked up here. They wanted me to suffer, and I was ensuring that I did suffer by staying sane.

  But if I let go, tipped over the edge, swam in the sea of madness, then I wouldn’t suffer anymore. They couldn’t hurt me. Everything would be okay.

  It was terrifying. I’d never seen my sanity like a threadbare sheet like that before. I’d never questioned it before. I’d never thought I could lose it.

  That day was hard. I didn’t come to any decisions.

  And the day after that, he showed up.

  * * *

  He brought a small shot glass with him, full of red liquid. He wore a lab coat. He was tall, with piercing blue eyes and chocolate brown hair. At first I thought I was dreaming, so I didn’t bother to move. I hadn’t seen another person in what felt like eternities.

  He set the glass down on the floor next to my cot. “Your lover’s blood,” he said.

  And then he left the room. The door clicked shut behind him.

  I lay on my cot, frozen for some time. Then I got up and went to the door. I tried to open it. It was locked.

  I went to look at the glass of red liquid.

  My lover’s blood?

  Jason’s blood?

  Gross.

  I picked it up. I went to the sink. I started to pour it down.

  Then I stopped. I remembered how amazing drinking Jude’s blood had made me feel. It had been exhilarating and wonderful.

  I set the glass down on the sink.

  I stared at it for hours.

  “Why did you bring this to me?” I asked the camera. “I don’t want it. I’m not going to drink it.”

  Then why didn’t you pour it out?

  It was a voice in my own head, I knew that. But it seemed almost like it was coming from the walls.

  “I’m going to pour it out,” I said. “I’m going to do it right now.” I got up, marched over to the sink, and picked up the glass. I started to tilt it over the drain.

  Then I stopped and set it back down.

  That’s what I thought.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  The gray walls laughed at me.

  “Shut up!” I screamed. I looked up at the camera. They were watching me. They must know that I was losing my mind. Was that what they wanted?

  I perche
d on the edge of my cot and stared at the blood. Several times, I convinced myself to get up and pour it down the sink. But I didn’t. Towards the end, I didn’t even get up from the cot.

  I remembered the sheer pleasure, the feeling of absolute euphoria.

  Finally, the lights went out.

  In the blackness, I felt my way over to the sink. I lifted the glass and put it to my lips. I drank it.

  Ecstasy.

  * * *

  He was back the next day. He picked up the glass. “Did you pour it out in the night or did you drink it?”

  “I poured it out,” I said.

  He pulled a small scalpel from his pocket. Before I had time to react, he’d slashed my arm. Together, we stared at the wound.

  Within five minutes, I couldn’t even tell it had ever been there.

  He smiled. “Very good.” And then he left.

  * * *

  I felt guilty about drinking the blood. I didn’t need it. I tried to rationalize it in my brain. I hadn’t done it because I wanted to feel good. I’d done it because it was part of Jason, and I wanted to be close to him. I’d done it because I loved him, not because I was anything like the monsters keeping us locked up.

  But deep down, I knew that wasn’t true. I wanted to feel that crazy pleasure again. That was why I did it.

  I rationalized further. It wasn’t my fault. I’d never have done it if they hadn’t kept me locked up in this room all alone for God knew how long. I was desperate for something—anything—to break up the sameness that dogged my hours. I only did it because I was bored.

  Somehow, that seemed even worse.

  He left me alone for two more days after I drank the blood. I had time to turn the situation over and over in my mind, looking for reasons, for excuses. I had time to damn myself completely. But that was okay. I was used to doing that. I was Azazel Jones, vessel of a demon. I was the Witch of the OF. I had killed so many people, it hardly mattered if I’d somehow developed a taste for drinking blood. In fact, it was appropriate. I’d managed to keep living somehow and to forgive myself for my many transgressions. I’d find some way to live with this too.

  He was there when I woke up. He was standing at the end of my bed, still wearing his lab coat.

  The minute I saw him, I leapt out of bed and lunged for him. I wrapped my hands around his neck and squeezed. He didn’t resist. I strangled him to death right there in my cell, watching his face go red, then purple, then lifeless.

  I’d never strangled anyone. I’d never killed so close up. The guns made things easier.

  I climbed off of him and glared at the camera. “You’ll have to send someone in after him, won’t you?”

  The camera didn’t answer. But that was okay. I was used to the fact it was silent. It watched, but it never spoke.

  There was movement on the floor. He got up and dusted himself off. He looked fine. He’d healed.

  “Well,” he said, “now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, perhaps we could talk.”

  Had I really been so stupid to think that I could kill him by strangling him?

  I backed away from him, backed up until I felt the cold wall at my back. “Talk?”

  He smiled.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  He shrugged. “All right then. I’ll be back in another thirty days. Perhaps you’ll be more interested in talking then.” He went to the door.

  Maybe if I cooperated, I could figure some way out of this place. Had it really been thirty days? Would I survive another month like this? “Wait.”

  He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “Have you reconsidered?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Excellent.” He took a pair of handcuffs out of one of his pockets. “I’m going to have to put these on you.”

  I supposed I couldn’t start resisting now. I held out my hands, and he clicked the manacles closed over my wrists. Taking me by the arm, he opened the door, and I emerged out of the small room I’d lived in for so long.

  Outside, there was a hallway quite similar to one of the wings in the place I’d been in before. Gray walls, doors along each side. Gray carpeting. It was just wide enough for the two of us to walk next to each other, and he led me up the hallway, to another gray door.

  He opened that one too. We emerged into another room, which I can only describe as a control room. There was a row of monitors along one wall. Each screen depicted the place I’d been in before. The main room. The library. Even the gym. Apparently, they’d fixed the cameras inside. I could see Emma, lying on her bed reading. Grace was in the library, tossing books on the floor. Boone was in his bed sleeping.

  This was where they watched us.

  But who “they” were, I still had very little idea. There was no one in the room except the man in the lab coat. There were several desks and chairs facing the monitors, but they were all empty.

  I scanned the monitors again, feeling a stab of panic. “Where’s Jason?”

  He stepped around me, chuckling softly. Bending down over a desk, he made a few quick strokes on the keyboard.

  The scenes on the monitors shifted. Now they all showed Jason in a tiny room like the one I’d just come out of. He was sitting on the floor, staring up at the camera, his eyes hollow.

  “He’s here somewhere,” said the man. “The other one is too. Jude, I believe? We couldn’t keep them in the general population anymore. They were causing too much trouble. They had to be moved.”

  I swallowed. Jason had been stuck in a room by himself, just like I had. He was probably losing his mind.

  The man tapped the keyboard again, and I could see Jude, lying face down on his bed. “You see? Contrary to what you kept yelling in your room, we don’t kill.”

  I laughed harshly. “I saw the video. You killed all the people who tried to escape.”

  “We didn’t,” said the man. He touched the keyboard. Now all the monitors displayed different people in tiny rooms. “We wanted those in general population to think the others were dead. But we simply had to subdue the unruly ones.”

  “I saw it,” I said. I squinted at the images, trying to determine if I recognized anyone from the video.

  The man smiled. “It’s not difficult to manipulate film these days, not with all the lovely technology that comes standard on a computer. I was able to make it look like they were dead, but they weren’t. There was an explosion , but explosions generally don’t kill the immortals. They’re remarkably resilient. Of course—” He pointed. “It sometimes causes some damage.”

  One of the men seemed to have lost an arm.

  I gaped in disgust.

  “Oh, please,” he said. “Spare me your moral indignation. I’ve figured out who you are.” He crossed to me, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Witch of the OF.”

  I shied away. “Don’t touch me.”

  He laughed, turning back to the monitors. “We’d never have killed all of them. We need them. Demand for blood has sharply increased since Eve and Kieran disappeared. For some time, people were quite content. But recently, business is booming. We couldn’t afford to diminish our supply so greatly.”

  “You sell the blood?”

  “Oh dear.” He looked back at me. “I suppose I’m giving it all away, aren’t I?” He offered me his hand. “I’m Bartholomew Penn.”

  I refused to shake his hand. It would have been awkward anyway, considering I was in handcuffs. “I found your book.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Many of the books in the library are from my own personal collection. Perhaps I should have been more careful about that, considering it allowed your Jude to figure everything out. Of course, it did take him ten years.” He looked wistful. “It’s really too bad. I had high hopes we’d convince him to couple with someone. His blood is quite strong, and his children’s blood would have been—”

  “You disgust me.”

  “We don’t have to be friends, my dear.”

  “Good,” I said. �
�What do you want with me, anyway? I don’t have the blood you want. I’m useless to you.”

  Bartholomew made a tent with his fingers and rested them against his chin. “Well, that’s not true. No one is useless. I went to considerable effort and expense to get you here in the first place. Simply because I was mistaken about your being an immortal doesn’t mean that I can’t recoup my investment, does it?”

  I grimaced.

  He went back to the keyboard and brought up the images of “general population,” as he called it. As he spoke, he watched them lovingly. “We wouldn’t keep anyone here together at all,” he said. “We find that the immortals are much easier to manage if we isolate them.”

  “If you break them, you mean,” I said, thinking about how tenuous my sanity had seemed a few days ago.

  “You’re very dramatic.” He caught my eye and gave me an amused smile. “I enjoyed your little musings on the plight of pets, I must say.” He turned back to the monitors. “But managing is only part of what we want to do with them. As you deduced while you were there, we want to breed them. A child of two immortals has much more potent blood. It increases profits by quite a margin. But we don’t seem to be very successful in that regard.”

  “Gee,” I said sarcastically, “I wonder why.”

  He turned. “I do wonder why, Miss Jones. That’s why I’ve brought you out here. Due to your unique experience being in general population, I believe you can provide insight that will ultimately make us more successful.”

  I glared at him. “I don’t want to provide insight. I don’t want to do anything that will help you.”

  “I thought you might say that. But I’ve noticed that you do seem to have developed a taste for the blood, much as the rest of us here have. If you help, I can give you more of it. Not too much, you understand. While it’s tempting, we must be scrupulous in our consumption. As you’ve noticed, the effects are quite enjoyable, and it can be tempting to want to have it all the time. But it truly is the elixir of life, you see. The fountain of youth. It halts aging, even reverses it. Taking too much of it peels away at one’s age. Large, frequent doses leave one in a mewling child’s body.”

  That was what the blood was doing? Reversing my age? Well, it did seem to make me feel stronger and more alive. Maybe that was how youth felt. I lifted my chin. “I don’t want any more of it.”