Subject Seven (2 page)

He should have been happy. Instead he found himself wondering how he would leave the building that had been his home for most of his life.

He was not foolish. He knew that the people around him lived outside of the compound. They spoke of places they had been, of houses and apartments and different locations. But knowing that those places existed was like understanding that there were other planets in the solar system. It was a matter of faith in the world beyond what he had seen.

His Other had seen different places, hadn't he? He thought so but wasn't sure.

Seven shook his head and pushed the thoughts away. There were doors. One of them would lead him out into the real world. He'd have to keep opening them until he found the right one.

IF ANYONE HAD ASKED Evvy Hope how she felt, she'd have told them that she was in love and happier than she had ever been. She'd come to the Janus Project straight from Haverhill University, when the project was little more than a think tank designed to come up with new concepts, and though she had lived and breathed around the notion of making everything work for the company, she had also managed the impossible when she met and married Tom.

Thomas Hope was tall, dark and handsome. He was also caring, sweet, funny and intelligent. He had everything that she wanted in a man, and they spent years with both of them pretending that the feelings they had toward each other didn't exist before he finally got the nerve to ask her out on a date.

That had been years ago now, and they'd been married for a decade. Ten wonderful, amazing years.

They worked together, of course. There wasn't much chance of either of them ever meeting anyone outside of Janus because the work was too involved to let them go out and have real lives.

Especially now. They'd been working for years, but the latest results from their tests seemed positive, wonderfully, almost magically successful. Six months, maybe a year, and they'd know for sure. That was one problem with a life of scientific study: you could never move too quickly or you risked missing something important.

But all she had to do was look at Subject Seven to know that it was worth it. If Tom hadn't been smart enough to insist on keeping a few of the subjects for additional study, they'd have never realized how close they were to success. Because of Tom's forethought and brilliance, they had proceeded with similar experiments, and now look at where they were.

A flutter ran through her stomach. There were complications, of course, the most significant of which was bleed over—a beguiling problem that the Janus scientists were working night and day to solve. Subject Four and Subject Nine had both begun to experience memories that didn't belong to them—recollections that should have been impossible under the circumstances. Subject Four had described the bedroom she stayed in outside of the compound with startling detail and accuracy. The house she'd lived in was just two houses down in the cul-de-sac. Too close to home for comfort.

The compound was a necessity for their experiments, and the subdivision was the perfect disguise. Ten houses with ten families, each one connected to the project. Ten little family units on top hid the facility the houses rested on, like a prison hidden under their homes. There was only one access point into the facility in each house, of course, and that was only used when they were taking subjects from their homes to the laboratories. Her eyes looked toward the concealed entrance to the tunnel. It was at the end of the hallway off their living room, hidden in the back of a coat closet. Sometimes she almost felt like cheating and taking the shortcut to work, but that was a no-no. Bobby might figure something out, and she never wanted that to happen. If Bobby felt the bleed over, he'd have to be removed from her life and she never wanted that. Despite everything, he was like a son to her now. She couldn't allow him to go away. Not ever.

She sighed and rose from the couch in her living room. Tom was working the graveyard shift. He had a few experiments he needed to take care of, a few more tests on Seven that were necessary to fully understand his recuperative abilities. Seven healed better than they'd expected. Not true regeneration, perhaps, but still a very accelerated rate of recovery and almost no scars to show that he had ever been injured. It was remarkable. And had the potential to be very, very profitable.

She moved toward the kitchen. She needed to brew a little coffee, and then get ready for work. Tom would be coming home, and she would be taking the car straight back to the compound only a few minutes after that. Before then she wanted to make him a decent breakfast and set herself up with lunch. There was nothing in the cafeteria that appealed to her, and even if there were, none of what they offered would be good for her waistline.

She had just reached the kitchen when her cell phone buzzed. She frowned and looked at the wall clock. Three thirty in the morning. No one would call her at home unless there was something wrong.

“Hello?”

Tom's voice was tired but cheerful. “Hi, Evvy! I'm on my way home early. I didn't want to scare you half to death like last time.” His voice carried a note of amusement. He was referring to the time he came home while she was still sleeping and tried to sneak into the room without waking her. Evvy kept a stun gun and a baseball bat on her side of the bed. Luckily for Tom, she'd gone for the stun gun and he'd backed away before she could shock him senseless. They'd both had a laugh about it, but they also understood the risks of living right above the compound.

“So how long until you get home?” She was hoping they could have some time to themselves. That almost never happened when Bobby was around. He was a dear, but he was also almost always underfoot.

“Look out the window.” She turned and stared just as his headlights appeared in the driveway. Her face lit up. She loved Tom with all of her heart. Evvy was about to go outside to greet him when her phone rang again. This was a different ring tone. This was the tone that meant someone from the compound was calling.

The call ruined her chance of spending any time with Tom. She hung up, raced out to the car and took the keys from Tom. She could see his handgun on the passenger's seat. She nodded to herself, glad of the weapon. If something had gone seriously wrong . . .

“You want me to come with you?” Tom asked hesitantly. He wanted to be with her, of course, but he was deeply tired and had no desire to go back to work.

“No, honey. I've got it. I'll let you know what happens.”

“Don't be surprised if I let the machine get it.” He gave her a quick kiss. “But I'll be listening, just in case it's a real emergency.” The last two alarms had been a result of raccoons finding ways into the compound's ventilation. Modern technology and state-of-the-art construction meant nothing to the furry little thieves.

“Get some rest. Love you.” She kissed him back and climbed into the car. It was only a half mile to the main entrance of the facility. The official entrance. Tom waited until she'd backed out and was starting the actual drive before he went inside. She smiled, loving him as much as anyone had ever loved another person.

She never saw him alive again.

SEVEN GOT LUCKY WITH the fourth door. It opened into a long concrete tunnel that led to the Other's house. The hallway was called a “shaft”—a word one of the technicians had taught him. That long corridor led to a place that was frighteningly familiar, even though he had never seen it.

It was a house. A one-story ranch house, with a lovely yard and a white picket fence. His mind swore to him that he had been inside the place before. “Bleed over”—that was another word he'd learned from the techs when they didn't think he could hear them. Bleed over was what got Four and Nine killed. He knew they were dead because he could no longer hear their thoughts. They were gone now, silent, like all of the other subjects. He was the last of them. He was the strongest, the closest to a success. Bleed over was what they called the strange thoughts that he'd heard in Four and Nine's heads, memories of things they had never experienced. He hadn't understood that notion until he too began to be haunted by images that shouldn't have been there and memories of happiness that he had never felt.

He shook the thoughts away and climbed up the long ladder built directly into the concrete tube. At the end of it there was another door, a heavy steel contraption that he knew was there to keep the outside world safe from the likes of him.

The door was not locked. All he had to do was wave a hand in front of the motion sensor and the thick metal slid to the side, opening to the floor of the house's living room. There was a couch, exactly where he knew it would be, and a television facing it, just past the coffee table that he had never touched but knew just the same.

“No!” He shook his head and tried to force the memories away. They weren't his memories. They belonged to the Other. He hated the Other, hated everything about the one that they loved and catered to. His heart pounded in his chest and he tried to calm down, but the anger was there growing like a burning fire.

“NO!” He flinched as surely as if Dirk had swung the damned metal club at his face again. That was the Other's world. He didn't want that world. He wanted a better world, one that was his and his alone.

Seven reached out and touched the leather of the sofa with his hand. It was cool and soft under his bloodstained fingers. When he pulled back, there was a streak of gore to show that he had touched, had marred, the world of the Other.

That thought made him smile and want to scream at the same time.

The rage won. He grabbed the leather and hooked his fingers into claws and then tore at the leather as hard as he could until it split with a loud purring rip and revealed the soft stuffing inside.

He liked the feeling so much that he did it a second time and then decided he would destroy other things. TV was something the Other enjoyed, so he lifted it over his head and threw the two-hundred-pound set into the wall, where the pictures of the Other and his family rested. The impact destroyed the pictures too, and that only added to Seven's joy.

He forgot that he was supposed to be escaping. For just a few moments he forgot everything but making the Other suffer for daring to live.

He might have stayed there and destroyed everything, but the man who came into the room looked at him and held up his hands and said, “Seven, you're being bad. You know you aren't supposed to be here.”

Seven looked at the man and growled low in his chest. The man was nervous. He could smell the fear sweat that came from the man's pores. That simple fact was thrilling because he had never smelled fear on the man before. Certainly not when the man had been cutting Seven's skin with the scalpel and peeling it back. Oh, the pain had been so very large, bigger than a house, bigger than Seven, to be sure, so large that Seven had screamed and begged for the man to stop.

The man had not laughed, not like Dirk, but he hadn't stopped either.

“You . . . um . . . you aren't supposed to be here, Seven. You need to go back to your room before you get in trouble, okay?”

The voice of the man was wrong. Normally it was calm, almost without tone. Normally the man was
in control of the situation
. Normally he had nothing to fear.

Seven looked at his hands, at the blood that coated his skin and at the cuts that were slowly healing, wounds that he'd received while getting here. Sometimes when he hit someone hard enough, their bones broke and cut his skin, but that was okay, really, a necessary pain to help him steal control from the man in front of him.

“Seven? Did you hear me?” The man was starting to sound more sure of himself. Probably because Seven had not answered him or attacked him. Yet.

Probably because he thought Seven was scared of him. Or because he thought he was still
in control of the situation
. That had always been one of the man's favorite terms. He liked to tell people he was
in control
and could handle everything.

The man had a name, didn't he? Seven tried to remember the name. It was close. It was on the tip of his tongue.

The man came closer, trying to take command. “Come on, Seven. Let me take you back to your room.”

Maybe he did fear the man. Maybe he did because, really, the man had hurt him many times over the years. He couldn't hope to count the number of times, because almost every day that he'd been alive, the man had been causing him pain.

What was the man's name? The loss of that name was like a bee buzzing in his head; it distracted him and made him angrier than ever.

The man's hand touched Seven's shoulder. The touch was tentative, gentle. Seven looked up toward the man's face. The man was so tall, and he was so tiny in comparison.

“Come on, Seven. Let's go home.”

“Home?” His voice was raw. He'd been screaming so very much and his throat felt hot and scratchy.

Home. The room. The place where he stayed when the man was done with the cutting and the lights and the sounds and the needles that made him sleep or made his heart race so fast he feared it would explode out of his chest. Home. Where the pain is.