Everyone's Favorite Girl (19 page)

Patton, though, knew each one intimately.  Where I saw six groups comprised of five of the same girl, Patton saw individuals with unique personalities, wants, and fears.

He couldn’t even keep himself from crying, and it was scaring the girls half to death.

“I need you girls
to lie down on your backs,” I said.

They all obeyed without question.  Even the Vampire Girls, who gave me snarls and looks of disapproval, gave me no sass whatsoever.  In one moment the room was live with the shuffling of feet.  In the next, thirty Favorite Girls lay moti
onless, trusting that whatever we were about to do to them, everything would be okay.

It was an anticlimactic event.  James, Patton, and I stood there and watched as Judy went back and forth from the cart to a Favorite Girl, first securing a band to her wrist like the ones you get at the hospital, then injecting
her with one of thirty varying cocktails of the Loyalty Drug, testing not only for potency but for percentages of ingredients.  Judy had tried to explain the details of the study, but they were lost on me.  All I knew was that among the varieties, most would likely produce undesirable results.

I pulled Patton away, insisting that he show me the stairwell entrance.  I wanted to put a few lab techs near it, so if Sean appeared
someone could try to lead him to the elevator while the other broke away to come warn us.

As it turns out, the stairwell entrance was right out in the open.  Just a heavily secured door near the corner far left of the loading dock.

I put the two girls here.  They were both young, nice, and pretty.  Perfect subjects for the eyes of a killer like Sean.  I didn’t even know their names, but the Love Drug gave them googling eyes and a readiness to follow any instruction I gave.

When I asked which one could run faster, one girl raised her hand and her friend pointed
at her in affirmation.  I instructed the fast one to come tell us if Sean came through the door.  To the other I handed the task of leading him to the elevator, where the lab techs, by my instruction, were prepared to act as though they’d just repaired a blown fuse.

That would give me time to hide Judy and Patton, at least.  If it came to that.

Patton stood ten feet removed from us while I told these two girls what to do.  Like he didn’t want any part of it.  I had to make it quick, because after pacing bath and forth a few times, he decidedly turned and headed back in the direction of the Favorite Girls.

I caught up with him remembering that I should have created some believable reason for my door girls to be on that end of the warehouse.  Hopefully they were smart enough to figure that out for themselves.

When we returned, Judy had just finished the last injection and was returning the syringe to the cart.

“That’s it,” she said.

“That’s it?” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“So what now?”

“Now we see the results.
  The most effective variety should basically reset the brain circuitry, making the subject susceptible to new imprinting of thoughts and ideas.  The first person to speak to the subject, touch her, and give her commands will theoretically become the subject’s mother figure.”

That all sounded fantastic.  I still didn’t know what to do.

“Give them a command,” Patton said angrily.

Of course.  To see which girls obeyed
it.  My mind was all over the place.  Patton just wanted to know if the girls were okay.

I stepped forward and yelled out, “Stand up!”

Only one girl did: the youngest Frog.  Two of the Vampires tried to stand, but they both fell forward and lay there writhing slowly.  Otherwise, no one moved a muscle.

Frog Girl stood with her back straight, staring ahead, awaiting my next command.  I walked up to her, Judy following close behind.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

Frog Girl gave me a big toothy grin.  “I
feew fine.”

Judy slipped to the side and peeked at Frog Girl’s wrist band.  Then she
scribbled on her clipboard.

Pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, she said, “Do you know your name?”

“Frog.”

“Do you know your ABCs?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Frog, I’d like you to recite them.”

Frog Girl went slowly through the alphabet.

“What is this?” I whispered to Judy.

“A simple mental acuity test.  This will take a minute.”  Frog Girl paused, seemingly worried that she was interrupting our conversation.  “Keep going,” Judy told her.

I noticed the face of the Glow Girl to Frog’s left.  Her eyes and mouth were open.  She didn’t appear to be breathing.

I knelt before her and took a closer look.  Her chest wasn’t moving.  I checked her pulse.  She was dead.

“Judy.”

“Just a moment.  Frog, what’s five times seven?”

I looked at Patton and turned to
the next Favorite Girl, another Glow, as Patton came around to her other side.  The Glows had all made sure to lie next to one another.  I imagine the one next to Frog was the youngest, pushed aside by her older sisters.

All of them were dead.

Patton and I went down the line checking pulses, him one way, me another.  The only heartbeats I found came from the two Vampire Girls who had tried to stand but toppled over, but it was as though they’d forgotten how to breathe along with how to walk.  In a few minutes they would be dead, too.

James was already at work cleaning up.  The sheets and blankets served two functions, as it turned out: a place for the girls to lie, and something to wrap them up in afterwards.  I watched him roll up the two Floras on the end and start dragging them over to a pallet hooked onto forks.

As James collected two more bodies, Patton went to the forklift and double-checked the Floras’ vitals.  He did the same for the next two.  And the next.  With six dead girls piled up, James hopped on the forklift.

This was why we couldn’t hold the clinical trial on Level D.

We needed the incinerator.

When Judy finished her mental acuity test, she asked me to come over and
observe the final test.

“What’s the final test?”

She held her hand out, palm up.  In it was a razorblade.  She looked Frog Girl in the eyes.  “Take it.”

Frog Girl reached out and pinched the dull side of the blade.  When Judy pulled her hand away, Frog held the razor up to her face, inspecting its sharp, smooth edge.

“What the hell are you doing?” Patton asked.

Judy balked, intimidated by his anger as much as his stature. 
“We must observe absolute loyalty in the subject,” she said, “or else the results are inconclusive.”

“Fuck the
fucking results, goddamn it!”

His voice carried off into every corner of the warehouse.

“Our fates are the results, Patton,” I said, turning to him.  “Our lives.”

“What about
her
life?”

Frog didn’t even know he was talking about her.  She just stared at the razorblade.

“It’s her life or everyone’s, right?” Patton said, not giving me a chance to respond.  He was falling apart right in front of me.  “Tell me again how we’re any better than they are?  I can’t figure it out anymore.”

I came up close to him, closer than I’d been to him in what felt like a long time.  Close enough to feel his warmth.

“Maybe we’re not,” I said, taking his face in my hands.  “Maybe it’s just about us winning at this point.  Patton, your boss—your
brother
—is going to take the misery he gave to your Favorite Girls and spread it all over the world.  We have to do what we have to do.”

He stared into my eyes, face trembling, lips pressed together.  A calmness was coming over him.  He began to breathe easier.

“What are we waiting for,” he said.  “Let’s do it today.”

I turned and nodded to Judy.

She gave the command.

Frog Girl didn’t scream, didn’t cry, didn’t flinch or even hesitate.  She slit her wrist in one fluid motion, and then she stood there watching the blood seep down her arm, tilting her head curiously, like a reptile studying an insect.
  Patton went to her immediately and made her sit down.

“It works,” Judy said, her excitement entirely inappropriate for the circumstances.  She turned to face me and held out her arms, doing a small curtsey.  “It really works!  It really works!  Oh my God,
suck it Brian! 
He would have taken credit for this, you know?  He was so busy trying to take over the company.  If he’d focused on this, he could have taken over the world.”  She stopped and her eyes went adrift for a moment.  Then they found mine again.  “Come here, Melissa.”

She gave me a vial of the Loyalty Drug and showed me how much to use on a person.

“Any more than this and they’ll be brain dead.”

James was returning on the forklift.  He pulled up next to the row of bodies, hopped off, and started to lift a Giggle Girl onto the pallet.

I looked at Judy.  She knew what I was thinking.

We waited for him to finish loading six bodies, but before he could hop back on the lift, I called him over.

I never asked Judy how many times a day she had to drug James to keep him in our good graces, but this was like a Depo shot.  No more daily birth control pills.  It’s time get wild.

After the injection, James stood there staring straight ahead, not smiling,
not frowning.

Judy walked him through a mental acuity test, just to be safe, and then I sent him back to work.

“One down,” Judy said.

Something about that phrase struck a major cord in me.  The two words echoed in my mind, as though my subconscious were trying to tell me something.

“One down,” I repeated, thinking about who to brainwash next.

Then it occurred to me: if I used the Loyalty Drug on everyone in the building, it wouldn’t matter what arrangements Mr. Shriver had in place to protect himself and ensure that the rest of us took the fall for the company’s endless crime.  With unanimous and unwavering testimony, we could all walk free.  Free and alive.

But I still needed to get to him.  Today.  Now.  Those barrels of water went out last night.  At any point someone could realize what I’d done.  I do know the packing slip contained a gross error that we couldn’t avoid: the order of Libido Drug, measured by weight, not volume, did not match the weight of the shipment.  Water is heavier than Libido Drug.  One stop at a weigh station along the interstate and the information could get back to Mr. Shriver.

I had to get to Level E.

I had to get Mr. Shriver alone.

And I only knew one person who could help make that happen.

~ ~ ~ ~

I was determined to do this part alone, but I wasn’t confident I could take her in a straight-up fight if things went bad.  I couldn’t just pop open her little cage and come straight at her with a syringe.

Before heading down to the Showcase Hall, I had to stop by my room to grab Kate a robe.  Walking her through the Level C lobby buck naked would draw too much attention.  I grabbed a robe from the shower room closet and noticed a small spray bottle on a rack.

Using the device from Flora’s arm, I added a few drops of Love Drug into a glass of water and poured the contents into the bottle.  Just enough to sedate her, make her trust me, and keep her still long enough for me to inject her with the good stuff.

I passed by Kate’s window and she jumped at me like an angry dog on the other side of a sliding glass door.  Her muffled screams chased after me like ghosts until the Showcase Hall curved around enough to mute the sound.  I followed the hallway all the way to the end, where a secured door led to the room I’d always wanted to see: the secret room where Mr. Shriver’s son had worked caring for the available batch of Favorite Girls—the one who’d gotten his head smashed by a Frog Girl’s pelvis, the one Mr. Shriver never mourned.

Mr. Shriver’s son.

For some reason I thought of my clone.

I entered the room expecting to find it unoccupied, but sure enough a young man sat at a desk, clicking away on his computer mouse.  He was wearing a headset and had his back to me.  A first-person shooter game lit up the computer screen.

This was most certainly an odd room.  Circular in shape, of course, with seven cubicles built along the wall, each one containing a door to a window display.  I stepped into the closest cubicle before the kid at the computer could see me.

I was surprised to find a bed
inside.  On the bed lay an open book.  The Favorite Girls were periodically removed from the display window, their devices turned off, their minds able to return to normalcy perhaps long enough to get through a few pages of a book before they passed out from exhaustion, only to be woken in the morning to crawl back into the wall and hump the air all day long once again.