CHAPTER SIX

 

The morning dinner bell cut into my dreams, wresting me awake. I raised my eyelids with effort. I was lying on the floor in the middle of the hall of the wing, my limbs twined with Jason’s.

He grunted over me as he moved away.

I tried to move, and I understood why he’d made the noise. My muscles screamed at me. My body was so sore.

Jason managed to get himself into a sitting position, resting his back against the wall. He rubbed his forehead.

I looked up at the cameras. So much for not putting on a show for them. We had. I searched for my jumpsuit, and then spied it, halfway down the hall. I crawled to it. But when I picked it up to put it back on, I realized it was no good. There was a huge tear down the front of it, running parallel to the zipper. I sat there, surveying it.

“Sorry,” said Jason. “I don’t know what...”

“Aphrodisiacs in the food,” I mumbled. “Boone says they’re trying to breed us.”

Jason made a face.

I clutched the jumpsuit to my chest, trying to shield my nakedness from the cameras.

We didn’t say anything.

Jason got up. He fished his jumpsuit off the floor at the other end of the hallway. It was a little bit torn too, but, when he put it on, it covered him well enough. “I’ll get breakfast,” he said and stumbled down the wing.

Jason returned with two breakfast trays and two new jumpsuits. “These were in the food door with the meal.” He helped me put it on, but I felt violated knowing that whoever was watching us would know I needed one. Maybe they sent them to everyone. I didn’t know.

His fingers brushed my skin gently. “You’re bruised all over,” he said. “Looks like it’s healing already.”

I zipped up the jumpsuit, wishing it went all the way up over my neck.

“Sorry,” he said.

I put my hand on his cheek. “No. It’s not your fault. Anyway, at the time... I was into it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.” He looked up at the cameras. “If I didn’t feel like we’d been sort of assaulted, I’d say that last night was awesome.”

I drew in breath sharply. “It was, um, intense.” That was putting it mildly. It had been heated and crazy and animalistic and prolonged. Actually, I felt embarrassed. I’d never done anything like that before. And even though it was Jason, the evening had taken me places I hadn’t even been aware I wanted to go.

I went and got one of the trays and pulled back the plastic. Bacon and eggs.

He got his own breakfast.

We ate in silence, cross-legged on the floor. I let Jason’s last words tumble around in my head, bouncing through my mind. Awesome? “You thought it was awesome.” It wasn’t a question, more like a resignation.

He raised his eyebrows. “Well, if it hadn’t been forced on us against our will and recorded on like six cameras, then yeah. I mean... you seemed to be having fun too.”

I pulled my jumpsuit aside to look at one of my bruises. Jason was right. It was healing. I stared at the faint purplish mark on my skin. “You know who used to say you gave her bruises? Lori.”

“Lori?” He gave me a blank look.

“You know, your head concubine in Jasontown?” I poked my eggs, but I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry.

A heavy sigh from Jason. “I thought we weren’t going to do this jealousy thing.”

I shrugged, still looking at my breakfast instead of him.

“You know, when I found you last night, you were wrapped in Jude’s arms.”

“I couldn’t—”

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not an image I’m likely to ever get out of my head, whether it was your fault or not.”

“It’s not about jealousy,” I said. I looked up at him. “Is that how you... like it? Would you rather be having really rough sex all the time?”

His eyes widened. Then he became deliberately interested in his bacon. “No.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Jesus, Azazel.”

“Is that the way you got it on with all those girls in Jasontown? Why Lori said she was relieved I was sharing the ‘burden’ of having to fuck you?” My voice was rising.

“She said that?” Jason wasn’t looking at me.

“Yes, she did,” I said.

He ate some bacon. He chewed.

“Are you holding back with me? Because if you are, then I’m never going to be enough for you, and there’s always going to be some redhead behind my back—”

“Stop.” He raised his gaze to mine. “Can we talk about this another time? Sometime when we’re not being filmed?”

I folded my arms over my chest. “So, it’s true? What I’m saying? I’m hitting too close to home, and now you’re running from the truth?”

“It’s...” He glared at the cameras. “Personal.”

“What more can we possibly hold back from these people?” I felt like I was going to start crying. “They’ve seen everything.”

Jason set down his tray and came to me. He wrapped me in his arms.

It was his nearness that undid me. I started sobbing, clinging to him.

“I did a lot of very bad things, Azazel,” he murmured. “I thought I was some kind of king or god in Jasontown. I did... I was horrible.”

And then I didn’t really care about that. I’d been drugged and manipulated. I’d been imprisoned and treated like a herd animal. I was trapped here, and I was going to lose it. I gave into my sobs. “Are we ever going to get out of here?”

He held me close.

But he didn’t answer.

* * *

I wanted to escape all of it, but there was nowhere to go. I turned to the books Jude had given me. I read about Zeus and Hera. Their love was extremely complicated. Zeus kept cheating on Hera, having children with other women, and she stayed with him through all of it. But the longer it went on, the more vindictive and awful she got.

It seemed to hit too close to home, so I put away the Greek mythology book and picked up the next one. It wasn’t a novel either. It was a collection of academic essays on Jewish mythology. My name came from a Jewish demon, so I was a little bit intrigued. Here, too, though, there was a note on the cover page with page numbers. I flipped to them, scouring the underlined passages.

“The story of the Nephilim is further elaborated in the Book of Enoch. Samyaza, an angel of high rank, is described as leading a rebel sect of angels in a descent to earth to have sexual intercourse with human females.”

I thought I remembered this. I might have read some book about it too, when I was a teenager. One of those books with some girl in a fancy dress on the cover. There were a bunch of those right before the solar flare. Apparently in the bible, before the flood, angels had come to earth and had sex with humans, creating these sort of human-angel hybrids. My upbringing had lacked much talk about the bible, considering I was raised by Satanists.

I flipped to a different page, read the underlined bits there.

“Genesis 6:4 implies that the Nephilim have inhabited the earth in at least two different time periods—in antediluvian times ‘and afterward.’ If the Nephilim were supernatural beings themselves, or at least the progeny of supernatural beings, there is a theory that the ‘giants of Canaan’ in Numbers 13:33 were the direct descendants of the antediluvian Nephilim, or were fathered by the same supernatural parents.”

There was a note in the margin here, in the same scribbly hand that had written in the Greek mythology book. “Similarity between Greek gods and angels? Nephilim equivalent to demigods?”

I set the book down. That was true, I supposed. Both mythologies had supernatural beings having sex with humans and producing half-human offspring. But there were all kinds of similarities between different mythologies. It didn’t really matter, did it?

If Jude had made these notes, what was he trying to tell me?

I sighed. Jude probably hadn’t made these notes. Someone else certainly had. Who knows where the books in the library here had come from anyway. Maybe they’d gotten donated by some guy who was interested in ancient mythologies or something. And whoever donated them might have made the notes.

Still. Jude had selected them with such care. He’d given me these specific books. He hadn’t just handed me a stack of random books from his room.

I set the book aside. This was ridiculous. I was wasting time in here. The important thing wasn’t trying to figure out if Jude was trying to send me messages in books or not. The important thing was to figure out how to get the hell out of here.

Jason might have thought it was awesome to be drugged and made so out of control that we were on each other like rabid wolves. But I thought it was terrifying. I never wanted it to happen again.

I went to the library and began searching through the DVDs for the one that Boone had mentioned earlier. The video of the escape attempt.

It took me awhile, but eventually I found an unmarked disc at the back of the shelf. I put it on.

The video was very short. It showed an elevator door being pried open and about eight people crawling out of it. The minute they were all free, there was an explosion.

Bits of blood and skin hit the camera.

When the smoke cleared, you could see that there was nothing left of them.

I felt sick. But I also had an idea of where those people had tried to get out. The elevator must be located in Jude’s wing. Because that was where I’d found the seams.

Which reminded me, I hadn’t told Jason about that. I’d gotten distracted right after I found out.

Of course, I didn’t know if it really made much difference, considering that even if we found a way up that elevator, we’d probably get blown up too. Still, I needed to let him know. Maybe if we put our heads together, we could get somewhere with the information.

I got up to go find Jason, but Boone opened the door and strode into the library. “Hey,” he said. “Watch a movie with me.”

What? Why would I watch a movie with Boone?

“Just do it,” he said. He picked up a DVD at random from the shelf and popped it in the player. If he noticed what I’d been watching, he didn’t comment on it. He started playing the next movie and jacked up the volume to extremely loud.

I cringed.

But Boone grabbed me by the arm and sat me down on the floor, directly in front of the TV. “It will drown us out,” he said.

I nodded. He wanted to talk to me, and he didn’t want the cameras to hear. I understood.

“I need out of here,” he said.

“We all do,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “That shit they give us is too good. Things used to be okay. I used to be able to hide in my room and do what I had to do until it passed. But now, they’re pulling that crap where they force me out of my wing by screwing with the temperature?” He shook his head. “Jude and I had to tie Grace to her bed and go hide in the gym last night. And I’m not even sure how we managed to stay that strong. I can’t do this anymore.”

I reeled. “You tied Grace to her bed?”

He clenched his jaw. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I didn’t either. I wanted to pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened. But it had. We were stuck here. And it had obviously happened before. I needed information, and Boone had it. “How often do they do that? Roofie us or whatever?”

He scratched his head. “I don’t know. Once a month or something? I can’t predict it. When there were more people here, it was less of a problem. They didn’t target people. But they’re trying to force me to be with Grace now. And she’s so young.” He shuddered.

He was right. It was awful and disgusting. What kind of people did something like that? It was like they were stripping away our humanity, turning us into animals. I felt horrified.

“I’m not going to do it,” he said.

“Once a month,” I repeated, thinking. “It’s not random.”

“What?”

“They must be tracking female cycles,” I said. “And if we’re all in here together for long enough, our cycles would sync up. They do it when the women are fertile. We can anticipate it.”

“We can?”

I nodded. I was sometimes amazed at the ignorance of people when it came to human reproduction, but, after society collapsed, I’d spent years of my life with no birth control. One pregnancy scare was all it took for me to figure out how things worked.

“Okay, well, I guess that’s good, but it doesn’t solve the problem,” he said.

“If we know it’s coming,” I said, “we can...” What? Lock ourselves up? We couldn’t lock the doors ourselves. They could lock us in or lock us out, but we couldn’t do it. Frankly, I was amazed that Boone had kept himself away from Grace for so long. I knew what that drug had done to me last night. I’d been completely out of control. It was psychotic to do that to a thirteen or fourteen year old girl, when she was just trying to figure out all those urges anyway. To dose an older teenage boy and throw them at each other. Whoever was behind those cameras was sick.

“I want out,” said Boone.

“I do too,” I said. “But if I knew a way out of here, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d be gone. Why come to me?”

“Because we can work together,” he said. “Because we have to do something. And I would have gone to your boyfriend, but something about him scares the hell out of me.”

I smiled a little. Jason could totally be scary. “Work together to do what?”

“I don’t know. You guys have been going over the place. You’ve been meticulously looking for weaknesses. I’ve seen you. And the way you were when you first showed up, you were about ten times more organized and efficient than anyone else I’ve ever seen come into this place. It usually takes days before some newbie busts a camera. Jason did it the first day. I think you might be able to do it. We might be able to do it.”

I shook my head. “We’ve got nothing. We don’t even know where we are. Why we’re here. Maybe if we could figure out what they wanted us for, we could find some kind of weakness we could exploit.”

“No one knows that,” he said.

“But you think they’re breeding us.”

“Why else would they pump us full of aphrodisiacs?”

“Has anyone ever gotten pregnant while you were here?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But Emma...”

“What about Emma?” I said.

“Emma was pregnant when I got here,” he said.

“Where’s her baby?”

Boone shook his head. “Emma and the baby’s father fought. He wanted to escape. She didn’t. He took the kid without her knowing.”

I covered my mouth with one hand. “Oh.” Then I thought about the video. “I watched the DVD. I didn’t see any children.”

“She was there,” Boone said. “He had her strapped to his back.”

I felt coldness wash through me. “If they’re breeding us, it means they want to make more of us. So, why did they kill the ones who escaped?”

“I don’t know,” said Boone.

“And what do they want us for?” I said.

“I don’t know ,” said Boone.

“But they want us for something,” I said. I turned to him. “Do they make us do anything? Take anything from us? Anything besides watch us and try to force us to get it on with each other?”

“Just the blood,” said Boone. “They draw blood from us once a month or so.”

“Blood?” I said. “How? Do we see them?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “They lock us in our rooms and gas us—knock us out. Sometimes you wake up while they’re doing it. They’ve got you strapped down and there’s a needle in your arm filling up a blood bag.”

“What do they look like?”

“They look like doctors. They wear lab coats and surgical masks. They usually have armed guards with them. Guys in all black with big guns.”

“They wear black?” I said. I swallowed. Jude said it was the Sons. Big guns, all black? It sounded like the Sons. But the Sons were all dead. I’d killed them myself. On the other hand, Jude was supposed to be dead, and he wasn’t. What the hell? The Sons fit the bill, though. They were ruthless and twisted enough to pull this off. But how had they survived?

“Does that mean something?” said Boone.

“I... I don’t know. The important thing is that they have guns. If they’ve got guns, no matter how strapped down Jason and I are, we can get those guns. And if we’re armed, maybe we can get out of here.”

“They shoot to kill,” said Boone. “It doesn’t kill you, not really, but a gunshot to the head tends to slow you down a good bit.”

I drew in breath. “It’s our best shot, though. Do you have any idea when they’ll come to draw blood?”

“It could be soon,” he said. “It sometimes seems to happen close to when the aphrodisiacs are in the food.”

I bit my lip. “We need to talk to everyone. We need to organize. And to do that, we need to be able to talk without the cameras. I’m sure if we bring everyone in here and blare a movie, they’re going to get suspicious.”

“The cameras are everywhere,” said Boone.

I told him about Jason’s idea to break a camera in every room. That way, they wouldn’t be able to put us all in our rooms while they fixed things. We figured they’d put us in one room, and that way we could break all those cameras and have some privacy. “But we can’t figure out how to do it. There are too many cameras and not enough of us.”

Boone raised his eyebrows. “Maybe if we do it at night.”

“What would that matter?”

“You might have noticed that I sleep pretty late all the time?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s because I stay up late, mostly hanging out and exploring and experimenting,” he said. “Once they turn all the lights out, they don’t pay as much attention. A couple months ago, I broke a camera late at night, just to see what would happen. They didn’t notice it for hours. So if we tried something like that, we might have enough time to get it all done.”

What did we have to lose? “We can try it.”

“When?”

“Tonight?”

“Okay. You guys help me out. But don’t start breaking anything until lights have been out for at least three hours.”