The Death of Wendell Mackey (6 page)

Still, would they have invested money, time, and manpower for nothing?

They,
he thought.
Unit 200.

He first saw the title—he assumed it was their title, Scotia and the others that he was encountering daily—while being wheeled on a gurney out of one of the institution’s elevators and onto a new floor. Unit 200. It was printed on yellow signs with black lettering that hung on both sides of the hallway, a hallway that looked too long to have ever fit into the institution’s building, which brought to mind the terrifying possibility that he was now on one of the underground levels. On that first visit, the nurses wheeled him into an examination room where Dr. Scotia and Dr. Thane gave him a once over, peering into his eyes and ears, feeling his glands with their hands, examining and writing on his chart, and then curtly motioning for the nurses to wait outside.

“Why are you doing this?” he remembered asking them. “Why me?”

They stared down at him with antiseptic eyes, curious at the question. Or surprised, as if they had just heard their frog speak up from the dissection tray.

“Here there is no reason why, Mr. Mackey,” said Dr. Thane.

“But what did I do?”

“You’re looking too deeply at the situation Mr. Mackey,” followed Scotia. “Just relax. You, your neighbor, your mechanic, the man whose locker is next to yours, it doesn’t matter. Randomness, Mr. Mackey, the nature of nature.”

Their answer was that there was no answer, which was unacceptable to Wendell. There had to be a reason why they chose him. But Scotia and the other doctor remained tight-lipped, calling for the nurses, whispering to them, and then watching as they wheeled Wendell out of the room and down the hall into another room, as cold and uninviting as the first. An injection followed. Then dizziness. Strong hands moved him to another bed. Wrists tied down. Metal collar on the neck. A waist belt cinched tight. A hard piece, like a horse’s bit, jammed between his teeth. Electrodes on the forehead, collarbones and sternum. Then came the pain, metallic and electric, sucking his eyes deep into their sockets.

He remembered almost constant pain after that—peppered throughout with periods of complete exhaustion and drug-induced lethargy—which didn’t allow him the time to consider their reasons for choosing him. But now, sitting anxiously in his mother’s apartment, Wendell’s fear of returning to the institution brought it to the fore. Whatever their ultimate goals, he had made himself an easy target, perhaps out of his timidity, his anonymity, his preternatural ability to blend into a dull wall like an even duller shade of paint. They chose him because he was someone who wouldn’t be missed. And if he didn’t want the torture to start again, he’d have to run, or fight back.

“They’re too strong, and I’m just…”

Just nothing
, he thought. He looked down at the word
nothing
that he wrote on the table.

“No, I gotta get outta here, gotta run, or fight, or something.” If not, Wendell knew they would come, and it would all start again. He looked up, and thought back.

Every test they performed was followed by copious notes, and a gaggle of doctors would whisper about the results in the hall. He remembered overhearing one doctor calling Scotia on his cell phone:

“We were a bit overambitious at the beginning, I’ll admit. But this won’t be like the others, of that I’m sure. Full transformation will take time, perhaps more than we initially intended, but it should arrive nonetheless.”

Transformation was a broad term. Maybe he was a secret military test subject. Or perhaps they were trying to give human evolution a kick start. But the specifics didn’t matter. What mattered was the end result: they were turning him into some sort of creature.

“Why me?” became the end punctuation for each test. But eventually even their responses stopped. Of course, the tests continued unabated.

Gas tests.

Pressure tests.

Injections. In the arms, the neck, the base of the spine.

He shuddered to think of what happened while he was heavily sedated, which was common, or while completely unconscious.

And then there were the surgeries.

Unit 200 was, among other things, the institution’s surgical center. The Unit consisted of at least two floors, Wendell determined, both underground. Its surgical floor was Sub-1 and held a few offices, what looked to be a test animal room with rows of small cages (which were always empty), and an assortment of examination and testing rooms, with which he was all too familiar. Sub-2 held more elaborate testing rooms and equipment, and a line of empty rooms that Wendell could only guess were once patients’ quarters. But surgery was Unit 200’s primary focus. Wendell would see some of the unit’s doctors and nurses on other floors and in other capacities, even visiting him in his room on one of the higher levels. He even remembered some of the unit’s OR nurses from the NAB, which convinced him that the NAB was just a false front, nothing more than the entryway into the institution’s heart. But never did any of them look more comfortable than when hovering over an operating table in their blue scrubs and masks. After a month or two, being wheeled down Unit 200’s bright and lonely Sub-1 hallway usually meant that the IV line was already in his forearm and the iodine swabs and scalpels were soon to follow.

There were matching scars, one on each side of his torso just below the ribcage. They were the results of some of the early surgeries, and the ridged purple lines and tiny rows of suture holes like centipedes had already begun to fade to white. Then there was his back. At first it would throb and then fade into a soreness that set in like rust on metal. But over the past week the backaches had become crippling, with spasms that felt like the muscles were tearing themselves apart. Wendell reached back with his left hand and scratched at his scapula, feeling something next to it.

“What is…what
is
that?”

Wendell stood up and walked to the bathroom next to his mother’s bedroom. He flicked on the light which bathed gray tile in bilious light. There was the bathtub with a brown ring, the toilet seat missing one of its hinges, and the white—or once white—linoleum peeling at the edges. The white pedestal sink rose up from the linoleum like a cheap china mushroom, and above it and mounted to the wall was the medicine cabinet with a mirrored door. Wendell stared at himself in the mirror. His mat of brown hair, greased and clumped together, had been pushed to one side and frozen in place, probably the result of falling asleep at the kitchen table. His eyes were ringed with red, eyes once blue but now a leaden mix, something between green and gray. Each sclera was yellowed. And under his few days of stubble were sunken cheeks the result of hungry days, and months of a diet laced with pharmacological party mix. Still, his small frame was not completely emaciated, with his arms covered in small but wiry muscles. He took off his t-shirt, and turned his back to the mirror.

“That’s not good.”

There were more scars. Two ran horizontally at the back of each shoulder and ended where the trapezius muscles turned up into the neck. At the small of the back were two vertical scars, more raw—and thus, he thought, more recent—than the shoulder scars, seeming to trace the backbone. But what were most striking were the two thick black lines, like bruises, running down each scapula to the lower back. They looked to be ten or eleven inches long, at least. At the center of each was the telltale incision line healed over. It all created a topographical map of sorts, with purpled mountains and running eskers and strip-mined, decimated skin revealing a landscape reengineered and laid waste.

“This isn’t real,” he told himself. A lie, of course, but one he hoped would bring some comfort. But none came. He stared at the carnage.

And to his mind came the operating room and the team of doctors scrubbed and gowned and ready for him. They would place him on his stomach, pump the anesthesia, and he would awaken in his room with bandages across his back. Nurses and techs would come in every hour to check his pulse and blood pressure. Scotia would occasionally wander in, pull down on Wendell’s lower eyelids to examine his pupils, or tap his fingers on Wendell’s stomach to listen for abdominal sounds. Blood was drawn from a bruised hole in his arm at least three times daily. By then, even in his weakened state, Wendell knew he had to escape.

He slipped the t-shirt back on, leaning in and baring his teeth at the mirror, examining the swollen line along the edge of his gums, and caught something in his periphery.

No, I’m not seeing that, I’m not seeing it at all.

He turned his head towards it, but stopped himself.

No, don’t do it. It’s not there. It’s not real.

He closed his eyes, then opened them, and there it was.

Sitting on the rim of the sink, with what looked to be its own trail—like the silvery slime trail of a slug, but this one red, this one clearly blood—was a torn piece of flesh, still retaining the shape of the thumb from which it was ripped, still attached to the thumbnail, like some mutant mollusk that had dragged itself out of the sea.

Proof. Of what he did. Of what he was becoming. He looked at his own fingernails, at the flakes of blood. That shape, darker than the darkness, somewhere outside of the apartment, he had killed it.

The air in the bathroom felt heavy, viscous, laboring his breathing. The thumbnail began to spin, the ceiling switched places with the floor, everything moved one way and Wendell moved the other. The light was on, but the room dimmed.

And Wendell’s face rushed to meet the linoleum. 

Wendell’s vision swam, then slowed, solidifying on his room in the institution.

Strobe light in the hallway.

Lab tech, oblivious.

Shackled hands.

He began to tremble. Shake.

Hands were now free.

Of course it was a dream. He knew it was a dream. He had been here before. Still, it felt new.

The dream flickered like the strobe’s pulse, in and out, light and dark. Hand up—

Dark.

Tech’s head down—

Dark.

He bashed the lab tech’s head into the metal railing running alongside his bed, the act nearly effortless. With hindsight it was horrifying. But now he was seeing it as if for the first time. And none of it bothered him.

Lab tech falling—

Dark.

At the door—

Dark.

Bare feet on tile. Long hallways.

Normally, they would be snoring into cups of cold coffee, the graveyard shift. Not now. It was high alert, but not for him, so they ran in the opposite direction.

No, not for me, for that…that thing.

Floors below him. Those screams. That was where they were all running.

The doors and—

Dark. And for a moment, this darkness felt like it wouldn’t end.

—his hands pushed them open, but now a second alarm sounded, shrill and insistent. He was spotted after slipping through the stairwell at the end of the hall. The stairway led to—

—his mother, and her bedroom, clean and ordered, lights on and windows open. But this was the final day of that, Wendell knew, reading the lines on her face. He
knew
. It was that night, when it all changed. She was backing up, moving toward the head of her bed, because she knew it was happening. She turned the lights off, and knelt down.

And if I go into the living room, I can stop it all…

Turned for the door, the open door through which he saw—

Dark.

Infirmary. The institution. They were behind him.

The can opener was left on a tray with an assortment of silverware outside of the kitchen, down the hall from the infirmary. He used it to remove some screws and squeeze into the infirmary’s vent. After thirty feet of pure claustrophobia, he realized that when desperate, no exit is too small. The grate to the outside was already loose, as if it had been waiting for him, requiring little effort to punch off.

Night sky. Clouds rolled in like smoke, obscuring the moon.

Was that gunfire? Below. Stopping the screams.

I’m gonna die in here.

He slithered out the end of the vent, panting, fevered, basted in sweat and grease. The night air cooled his face and he dropped, followed by a belch of exhaust, from Level 2 into a line of shrubs. Then came the siren, the slow moan of a dying animal. The front doors to the building opened, and he dashed through the trees behind the building, holding out his hands for—

Wendell awoke face down on the floor next to his mother’s bed. He shot up to his feet, surprised. Nothing looked to have changed. He shook his head, feeling a grogginess like the after effects of a drug. He walked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, flicking on the light.

“Don’t remember turning the light off.”

The skin, the nail, the thin trail of blood, all gone. The rim of the sink was clean, almost cleaner than it had looked when he had first entered. He reached to open the medicine cabinet, finding an old toothbrush in a plastic glass. He took the brush, reaching with it to scratch the persistent itch between his shoulder blades, and left the bathroom with the light on. Walking towards the couch, his eyes wandered around the living room space, to the books and magazines where the television once sat, and to the wall behind it, with dark rectangles like ghosts showing where frames used to hang.