Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (21 page)

“All right. Ready?”

I push the tray away and settle back against the pillows. “No.”

I see the moment she realizes I’ve played her. “You little …”

I smile. She bites back whatever it was she meant to say. Leaving the tray and everything else behind, Dr. Donna leaves the room, slamming the door behind her.

This time, it’s three days before she comes back.

THREE DAYS IS A LONG TIME TO GO WITHOUT
food. I’ve had water from the bathroom sink—they didn’t think about that. And the human body can survive much longer without food if it has something to drink. I’m so hungry, though, that the moment Dr. Donna opens the door and the waft of noodle soup hits my nose, I’m ready to do just about anything she asks.

“Funny, isn’t it? How simple it is to get someone to give you what you want?” She gestures for Arnaldo to put the tray on the dresser top and waits for him to leave before she leans against the dresser. He gives me a sympathetic glance before he goes, and incredibly, a wink. It makes me feel better, like he’s rooting for me.

I’ve been sitting in the chair by what the curtains want me to think is a window to the outside. My knees to my chest. Chin on my knees. I unfold myself carefully, my muscles stiff and creaking.

“Tell me something first.”

She eyes me. “What?”

“You tested me for Contamination. Twice.” I touch my eye sockets, one, then the other. “Why?”

“Your results were inconclusive.” Today, Dr. Donna’s wearing a tight gray skirt with a pale gray shirt, but the black pumps are the same. I can’t imagine how she can even walk in them, much less run.

If I get the chance to run, I’m taking it.

“What does that mean?”

“Inconclusive means not leading to a firm conclusion,” Dr. Donna says smugly.

I’m so hungry that even if she weren’t treating me like I’m stupid, I’d be annoyed. “I know what the word
inconclusive
means. I want to know what it means that my test results are inconclusive.”

She gives me a shifty glance. Her mouth thins. “It just means we weren’t able to determine if you were Contaminated or not. That’s all.”

I should be relieved, but I’m angrier now than I was before. “Is that why you want to do tests on me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I stand. My knees are weak, and I’m so hungry, I’d eat anything. Liver. Bugs. Bowl of lard with a hair in it. Anything.

“Because we’ve determined that the Contaminated have certain … attributes that additional testing can show, if the
initial results aren’t as focused as we’d like. We can make a diagnosis of Contamination based on certain other results.”

“Why do you care so much?” I refuse to look at the food on the tray, though the smell of it’s impossible to ignore.

“We need to make sure the Contaminated are taken care of, obviously,” Dr. Donna says smoothly. “So we can make sure you’re given the proper treatment. That’s all. We want you to be well.”

“You can’t cure Contamination.”

She gives me another shifty look. “We’re working all the time on trying to figure out a way to prevent Contamination, or to reverse it in people who’ve already succumbed. So if you come and let us test you now, Velvet, not only will you be contributing to the research that will help other people, you’ll be fed and taken care of.”

“I want clothes.”

“You’ll be given clothes.”

I don’t agree right away, and apparently, Dr. Donna’s had enough. She gives some gesture toward the window, and two armed soldiers come in and take me by the elbows, lifting me so my toes barely scrape the floor.

“Take her to the testing room,” she says to them. To me, she adds, “Velvet, you bring this on yourself.”

Before I have time to ask her what exactly that means, they’re dragging me out of the room and down the hall. I don’t fight them, not because I don’t want to or can’t, but because I’m trying to see as much as I can about where I am
and where I’m going. We pass closed doors that look identical to mine, but I can’t see inside any of them.

The soldiers don’t say anything to me on the trip, which includes a ride in the elevator. We go down nine floors to the basement, where they force me to walk in a quickstep through dripping and dimly lit underground tunnels until we get to another elevator. I pay attention in case I have the chance to run for it, the best I can, anyway, with a haze of hunger making everything sort of blurry. I don’t get a chance to run.

“This place gives me the creeps,” one of the soldiers mutters as he punches the elevator button over and over, though it’s already lit up and everyone knows hitting it won’t make the elevator come any faster.

The second soldier eyes me. “Think this one’s gonna be trouble.”

“Hey,” I say sharply. “This one can hear you, you know.”

After that, neither of them says anything. In the second elevator, one hits the tenth-floor button, but we stop on the seventh floor first. With a muttered curse, the soldier immediately begins to pound the close-door button, but it opens, anyway. Not into a hallway, but into a large ward, lined with beds. Nothing is new or bright or white there; nothing smells of paint. The waft of urine and sweat pours in on us, and before the doors close, I’ve had a full-on view of the people in those beds. All of them collared, all sitting, staring at nothing. Some milling around. The hum of their
muttering sends a chill through me, and when the door finally closes, the soldiers with me both grip my arms even tighter, like I’m going to try to get away.

“What was that?”

But they won’t tell me anything. I should’ve pretended I didn’t talk, or at least couldn’t hear. The elevator opens on a short hall, then they take me through a set of swinging doors into a large room set up with gym mats and equipment. A rock-climbing wall. Other equipment I don’t recognize, set up in what looks like an obstacle course, sort of like the ones they’d had us running in gym class before I left school for good.

A man in a white lab coat, his glasses pushed on top of his head, greets me with a broad, sincere grin. He shakes my hand, and I’m too surprised to resist. “Velvet Ellis! Hello. I’m Dr. Arthur Billings. Thanks so much for joining us.”

I blink. Dr. Billings doesn’t look at the soldiers, but not as though he’s ignoring them. More like he’s afraid of them, and that’s interesting to me. It makes sense to be afraid of soldiers with guns, but Dr. Donna hadn’t looked at them that way. She was totally in charge.

“I didn’t have a choice,” I say.

The soldiers let go of my elbows, and I stumble forward. The back of my gown flaps open, and I hold it shut with one hand. I turn around, glaring, but neither of the soldiers seems to have noticed.

“If you expect me to run that course wearing this, you’re crazy,” I tell Dr. Billings flatly.

He laughs. “Oh, no. No. Of course not. Jenny here will fit you with a tracksuit and some sneakers.” He frowns for a second. “You don’t have your own clothes?”

“I had my own clothes when I got here, but when I woke up, I was wearing this.”

He consults a clipboard. “Ah. Yes. You were in a house fire?”

“The entire neighborhood was on fire,” I tell him. “What else does that say about me?”

“Let’s get you dressed, and we can talk about the testing.” Dr. Billings gives me a smile I don’t return.

Jenny turns out to be a few years older than me. I think we went to school together. She was a senior when I was a freshman. She’s wearing a white lab coat, too, her name on a tag pinned just below the embroidered script that says
Industrial Dynamics
.

“What’s that?” I point. “ID?”

“It’s the company the government hired to run the tests.” Jenny pulls a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt from a drawer and holds them up to me. “These should fit.”

“Underwear?” I can’t keep from sounding snide.

She digs around in another drawer and hands me a pair of plain cotton panties and a matching sports bra. Also a pair of white socks. There are a few pairs of sneakers in a small closet, but none of them fits me.

“You can do the testing in your bare feet,” Dr. Billings says. “For some of it, we require that, anyway.”

“I don’t suppose you have a granola bar or something in one of those drawers. I haven’t eaten in three days.”

Dr. Billings won’t meet my eyes. “Well. Yes. Umm, well, that shouldn’t actually affect the efficacy of the tests; in fact, it might actually enhance some of your responses.…”

I put both hands flat on my belly as it gurgles. “You’re serious?”

“If you’d agreed to the tests the first time,” he says apologetically, “you wouldn’t be so hungry now.”

My hands are shaking. He notices, and writes something on the clipboard. When I start to pace, Dr. Billings stands back, out of the way, and gives the soldiers a nervous glance.

“What is it you want me to do?” I ask. “The sooner we get this over with, the sooner you’ll let me eat?”

“Yes. But we have to—”

“What. Do. You. Want. Me. To. Do,” I say through gritted jaws.

A lot, as it turns out.

When he pulls the thing from the box, at first I’m convinced it’s a collar. It’s round and black, but there are wires attached to it. They fix it to my head like a headband, with flat pads of soft material at my temples.

“It monitors your brain waves,” Dr. Billings says.

“Does it shock me to death if I don’t do what you want?”

He looks a little embarrassed. “No. Of course not, Velvet. It’s just part of the test.”

First, I run the obstacle course, clearing it in a few minutes, which Dr. Billings times with a stopwatch and notes on the clipboard. I have to climb a rope, something I’d never have been able to do even a few months ago, but now is easy enough that I make it all the way to the ceiling and back, barely breaking a sweat, even though it makes me hungrier.

He has me run across gravel in my bare feet. He has me kneel on grains of rice, timing me to see how long before I squirm. I have no idea how good or bad I’m doing, because even though every so often Dr. Billings lets out what seems to be a squeak of joy at something, he won’t tell me what anything’s supposed to mean.

He lets me take a break after a couple of hours. By that time, I’m seeing double with hunger. The fruit-and-nut bar they give me tastes like dirt, but I gobble it, anyway. Dr. Billings has been scribbling notes the entire time, and he’s dancing like he’s got ants in his pants. He excuses himself like I’m going to tell him he can’t go and leaves me with Jenny.

“What’s the deal with all this stuff?” I chew on a second granola bar, not exactly savoring it since it still tastes terrible. But definitely taking my time with it.

“I don’t know, I don’t ask. I got assigned this job as my over-eighteen thing.” Jenny hands me a bottle of water
with a plain white label on it. “I don’t care what it is; it beats working at the sewage treatment plant, which is where my sister got assigned.”

After three days, my stomach was squeezed so empty that even this small amount of food has filled it to bursting, but my hunger’s back, twice as fierce. I hate Jenny. I hate Dr. Billings. I hate Dr. Donna, most of all.

Dr. Billings bustles back in. “Ready to get started again?”

“What about all those people I saw? The Connies. Do you run tests on them, too?” I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

“That’s really not relevant,” he says.

Jenny shrugs, though the look on her face tells me she doesn’t know anything, and it’s because she doesn’t want to.

“It’s probably relevant to them,” I say.

“Hmmm,” Dr. Billings says, and makes some more notes.

Then the rock wall.

I stand in front of it, looking up. It tilts up and out near the ceiling, which means that in order to get to the top level, you have to hang almost parallel to the floor. There are padded mats below, along with a pit full of spongy blocks, but even so, it looks hard. And scary.

“Oh, there’s no safety rope or spotter,” Dr. Billings tells me. “We want to test your reactions to situations as well as your ability to navigate.…” He stops himself, as though he’s said too much. “Just climb it, Velvet.”

It’s easier in bare feet. My toes grip, my fingers grasp. The first few feet are easy. After that, my head swims from lack of food. I’m convinced I’m going to fall. If I do it now, it won’t hurt so bad.

I go a little higher. Closer to the top. If I fall now, I could break something. Maybe kill myself. So I keep going. Determined now. I won’t let them win. And I get to the top, digging my fingernails into the ledge until I can pull myself up to sit with my feet dangling over the edge.

Dr. Billings and Jenny are both staring up at me, mouths open.

Now the only problem is going to be getting down.

THIS BECOMES MY LIFE. EARLY TO BED, EARLY
to rise. Arnaldo or Cody brings me breakfast and dinner. I like Arnaldo better, because at least he tries to make me laugh. Cody’s always trying to catch a glimpse of me when I come out of the shower.

I’m allowed to eat lunch in the cafeteria, always accompanied by someone to and from the room. Never allowed to walk alone. And every morning, the soldiers take me to the other building, where Dr. Billings has something new for me to try. They test me, day after day. I think it’s about a week of running the obstacles and climbing the rock wall before they put me in a different room.

White walls. White floor. White ceiling. White tables, white chairs. Mirror on the wall that I’m smart enough to know is really one-way glass.

I make a face at it, sticking out my tongue and waggling
my brows. Dr. Billings laughs. I’d like him if he weren’t working for Dr. Donna.

“Okay, Velvet. I’m going to give you a set of manipulatives, and what I need you to do is put them in rainbow color order. I’m going to time you, so don’t start until I say to begin. Okay?”

I haven’t done this sort of thing since, what, preschool? Kindergarten? But it’s not hard work, that’s for sure. We spend the morning at it, and I must’ve done it all right, because Dr. Billings comes in looking very happy.

“Lunch,” he says. “I think we can take you to the cafeteria now. If you promise to be a good girl.”