Jessica and Cassy told June and Eleanor that Adie had supposedly died of a blood clot in the brain.
“A blood clot?” June was skeptical. She couldn’t help but remember how hurried the nurse who was doing checks had been. It had to have been something. “Did any of you see her?”
“No,” Jessica said quietly as the girls stood together in front of the nurses’ station, waiting for their morning capsules. “Nurse Chelsea told us when she woke us up. But she’s not here, is she?”
“Shh,” Cassy hissed, turning her body away from the group and toward the front of the station, her sweater wrapped around herself as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “All of you, shut up! I mean it.”
When June’s name was called, she stepped forward to find two blood-red capsules waiting for her in the tiny plastic cup instead of one. “The doctor is going to double your dosage from here on out,” the beaming nurse behind the protective layer of fake glass said. “Please take them right here, so I can see.”
June hesitated. She didn’t even know what these things were doing to her in the first place; as far as she could tell there was no noticeable reaction. Still, the idea of taking two capsules made her uneasy.
“Down the hatch, Junebug,” the nurse chirped. “Open your mouth, and lift your tongue afterward so I can see.”
June fought the urge to turn around and look at Eleanor, and instead poured the pills into her mouth and swallowed them with the water the nurse had provided. Once they were down, she did as the nurse told her, then moved on. By breakfast, June felt fuzzy. This was more along the lines of how she’d expected the pills to make her feel the first time she took them. She wasn’t talking much, which Eleanor noticed.
“Are you weirded out about last night?” Eleanor whispered after they’d settled onto the couch in the rec room to watch the black-and-white television in the corner. “I’m sorry if I did anything wrong.”
June still couldn’t believe what’d happened with Eleanor. The images that flashed through her head when she thought about it were enough to make her body warm. She wondered if it would happen again. She hoped it would.
“It’s not you,” June assured her. “I promise. Last night was wonderful. It’s just this extra pill, it’s making me feel strange.”
“I wonder why they gave you that,” Eleanor said, biting her nails. “I don’t like that. Sometimes they change up people’s medication before...”
June waited for her to finish. She noticed that on the next couch over, Jessica was frowning and Cassy was shooting her a sideways glance, her brows knit together as if worried. Right away, she became afraid.
“Before what?” she demanded, but it only seemed to upset Eleanor.
“Just stop talking about it,” Eleanor insisted, turning away from June, apparently no longer in the mood to talk. “There’s nothing we can do but wait. Have you been looking for...that thing?”
June remembered Eleanor’s dream about Simpson, how she’d said that Nurse Joya and the doctor and the rest of the staff were looking for something. That June would be the one to find it first. That when June found it, she’d have to make sure they didn’t find it. But how was she supposed to know where to even begin looking? Furthermore, June didn’t have the confidence that she’d be able to successfully hide anything that she did find. Nurse Joya had a way of knowing things.
“It’s only been a few hours since we woke up,” June said, a little defensively. “It’s not like I know what to do, or where to look, or how to look. And honestly, it was just a dream anyway, wasn’t it?”
As soon as she said it, June felt guilty. She knew that Eleanor didn’t believe it was just a dream and, truth be told, June didn’t either. But the sudden pressure that came with the knowledge that Eleanor was expecting June to save them all was immense. She suddenly felt a little itchy, sweaty. She tried to sit up straighter, tell Eleanor that she was sorry, but she was having a hard time opening her mouth. Eleanor was too busy giving June the silent treatment to notice.
I’ll try to find whatever it is, June yearned to say but couldn’t no matter hard she tried. I’ll find it and get us out of here. Just, please, look at me again.
She didn’t have to wait long. Eleanor did turn back and notice June’s softened state, but it wasn’t because she’d chosen to look back—her attention was drawn by the sound of squeaking wheels from somewhere behind June. The instant June heard the sound and saw Eleanor’s expression, she knew that it was Nurse Joya coming for them. What if they tried to take Eleanor away? June wouldn’t be able to fight.
She put all her strength into sitting up. It worked okay enough, but something was still wrong.
“What’s the matter?” Eleanor asked, finally realizing what was happening. “Oh, my god, June, your eyes! Can you even hear me right now?”
“Sss,” June slurred, an effort for yes.
“Hello, ladies.” Nurse Joya’s voice was extremely close. June realized that the nurse must have been stopped right behind her. “I’m here to collect June for her appointment today.”
Good luck getting me up, June thought, and then there was a set of hands underneath each armpit, and with a swift motion June was lifted to her feet, by who she now realized were two additional nurses that had come with Joya. When they turned June around, she was able to see that it wasn’t the medication cart that Nurse Joya had been pushing, but a wheelchair.
“Wait,” Eleanor said, and June could hear the pure panic in her voice. “Wait, please...”
“Something wrong, dear?” Joya said with an edge. “We really must get going if we’re to make June’s appointment.”
June heard Cassy say, “Sit down, Eleanor,” and before she knew it she’d been lowered into the wheelchair. She was able to keep herself upright, but not much else. The wheelchair began to move, the breeze blowing June’s hair out of her face. She could hear Eleanor start to say something else before what sounded like one of the nurses cutting her off.
“June!” was the last of Eleanor’s voice that she heard, and then all she could see was the big wooden door to the doctor’s office getting closer and closer.
“It’s a special day for you, June Hardie,” Nurse Joya whispered in her ear. “A special day indeed.”
When the door was opened for them, June noticed right away that something was different with the office. There was a white stretcher beside the doctor’s desk, and he was standing beside it. June realized that she’d never seen him standing before. He was exceptionally short, almost shockingly so, dressed from head to toe in what appeared to be full surgical garb.
This is it, June thought, although the effect of the medication was allowing her to remain surprisingly calm. This is when I die.
“Let me ask you something,” the doctor said, stepping forward. “Have you ever heard of electroshock therapy?”
She couldn’t answer. In fact, June was vaguely aware that she wasn’t able to think beyond the immediate. Trying to concentrate on anything that came before this was wildly difficult. It felt like a literal block had been placed in her head.
The nurses were already in the process of transferring June from the wheelchair to the stretcher. Her head was laid to rest facing the back wall. She noticed that the vent-obscuring bookshelf was now gone, exposing the wall.
There was an air vent there. The same one June had peered through while she was crawling through the tunnel that was pooled with blood.
“I have another question for you,” the doctor said when June didn’t answer, looking down to peer into June’s face. “Who is Robert Dennings?”
Robert Dennings. Dennings. The name was familiar to June, but she couldn’t quite place it. Robert? Someone she knew...when, exactly? When she tried to push herself to remember, a sharp pain bloomed somewhere deep inside her brain.
“Your face says all I need to know,” the doctor said, satisfied. “And where did you live before you came here?”
The feeling of having no idea was tremendously terrifying. Again came the awful pain whenever June stretched to remember the truth.
Before I was here...I was...at a school?
In a house?
In outer space?
There was a place she could picture somewhat before the pain, a place that was metal and cold and smelled like formaldehyde. Outside, there were stars. Inside, there were creatures.
No, she thought. That place wasn’t real; that’s from your story...
Whose story?
“Patient appears to be confused and disoriented,” Nurse Joya spoke into a large tape recorder that was running on the desk. “Increased dosage was successful.”
Yes, June remembered now, without pain. She’d taken an extra red capsule this morning. Eleanor had been worried. She had been right to be worried. June would never get to see her again and tell her so. She was about to let Eleanor, Jessica, and Cassy down, and have Simpson’s, Lauren’s, and Adie’s deaths remain in vain. She would die before finding whatever was supposedly hidden in this place.
It was in that moment June got her first idea of where to look for the thing Eleanor had dreamed about. If she somehow lived through whatever was happening, she’d try as hard as she could to get herself back into that tunnel.
“The air vent,” June heard herself slur as Joya went behind the desk and put her hands on the wall. What on earth was she doing?
But the wall appeared to rattle at the nurse’s touch, and then all of a sudden it was sliding sideways into itself, a large secret door that led to what looked like a laboratory of some sort. They wheeled June in and parked her at the near end of the room. There was a thick plastic sheet separating another side of the room, and it looked like there was another stretcher with someone lying motionless on it on the other side.
“What we’re going to be doing today is essentially force a seizure on your brain to try and shake loose whatever nastiness has clogged its way through,” Nurse Joya said. She was now wearing a crisp white mask that covered her nose and mouth, and bright blue gloves that made grotesque snapping sounds as she adjusted them. “I won’t lie to you either, sugar. It’s going to hurt.”
“No,” June tried to say, but already the doctor was binding her to the table with heavy straps. The nurse squirted something thick and oily from a tube onto her rubber-protected fingers and rubbed it on June’s temples.
With every second that passed, June started feeling less fuzzy and more awake. She was able to remember her story now and felt like she was the girl on the spaceship getting cut into and experimented on. She suddenly felt sorry—very sorry—that she’d put her heroine through so much.
But she needed it, June thought. She needed it to fulfill her destiny.
June had always suspected that something great would become of her. Maybe finding the missing thing before Nurse Joya did was her destiny. Maybe she’d just failed it, and they had already found whatever it was.
“I can tell by your face that you think you’re about to die,” Nurse Joya said, placing a hard, thin bar in between June’s teeth and strapping two metal plates against either side of her head. “But I promise you, you won’t. We need you, silly girl.”
There it was. The admission that they weren’t trying to treat anybody at all, they just needed them to find whatever it was they were looking for. June remembered Robert and her parents with such a startling intensity that she jumped, as if she had already been jolted. Before she was in the hospital, she had lived at home with her parents. Robert had proposed. The engagement party had happened, and everything had been ruined beyond recognition.
And now she was here.
“You know what to do once it’s through, Joya,” the doctor said, his wrinkles very prominent in the lighting. “I think this may be it.”
“I do, too,” the nurse murmured as she fidgeted with whatever device was behind June’s head, the one attached to the wires and metal plates. “There’s something especially unusual about this one.”
If they wanted to keep her alive, why were they speaking openly about her like this? They know that you know.
“All right,” Nurse Joya whispered deliciously, out of sight, the smile evident in the sound of her voice alone. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
And then came a strange wheeee sound that got louder and louder, and just when June thought, This isn’t so bad, there came a great crackling jolt that caused every muscle in her body to harden and seize. It hurt to an unfair degree. She could feel the straps holding her down too tightly as she convulsed, pressing into her bones, threatening to snap them.
She thought she heard someone gurgling, before she realized she was hearing herself.
Everything went white, then blue, high heat, dry heat, a head screaming in pain. The sound of the machine whirred sharply in June’s ears, made them feel like they were bleeding.
Finally, finally, it ended. June could have sworn her eyes were open, but everything was black. She could smell something unpleasant, like burning hair. She didn’t dare move a muscle, in case they weren’t finished with her yet. She didn’t know how she was even able to survive such a thing.
“Monitor readings are impressive,” June heard the doctor murmur.
“Can you see what she’s thinking?” Nurse Joya demanded. “Any signs that she’s ready to talk?”
Someone was crying, far away. “Drat,” the doctor said. “The other one’s awake. I don’t think we’re going to find anything with her, to be honest. The language she hears can’t be decoded in any way that we’ve found. It’s another lost cause. Might as well do away with her.”
June could hear Nurse Joya and the doctor step away, then came the sound of the heavy plastic sheet wrinkling as it was moved.
“Please don’t,” a voice pleaded, and June recognized it immediately as belonging to Adie.
This was when June’s vision came back, or she was simply able to open her eyes for real, she wasn’t sure which. Her mouth was still gagged with the bar, and she could see outlines through the thick plastic sheet, Joya and the doctor standing at each end of the other stretcher. June recognized Adie’s head of short, dark hair though the heavily blurred plastic. She was alive!
Then she remembered what the doctor had said before they stepped over there. Might as well do away with her.
“Adie,” June called out clumsily through the bar, but wasn’t heard over her friend’s shrieks. She sounded terrified, but June couldn’t hear any sort of machine running, and at first it appeared as though Joya and the doctor were standing still.
Through the plastic, June was able to make out that something was happening to them. The mass making up the doctor’s head was expanding to an impossible form, as though it was a giant, fleshy, wrinkled flower that was opening up like a four-parted mouth. The gaping end of it lowered down over Adie’s feet, and then June could hear a nasty crunching noise.
Her heart raced as Adie continued to scream. Nurse Joya’s form was changing, too—it had grown slightly and was hunched over. Long appendages extended out from her face, shredding into Adie like a parcel on Christmas morning. Soon Adie’s screams came to a bubbling stop and were replaced by loud, long slurping sounds. The two monsters shuddered, and their forms resolved to resemble humans once again. June was suddenly grateful that the plastic had made it so hard to see clearly.
Monsters. They’re monsters!
When they returned to her side of the room, June closed her eyes and held still. “Her eyes are closed now,” the doctor noted right away. “Do you think she came to during any of that?”
“Impossible,” Joya said brusquely, and June felt her straps being roughly undone. “Nobody ever remembers anything with the voltage level we use. I am very eager for her to wake up, though, so we can see if it worked. Should only be a few more minutes.”
If what worked? June thought, her pulse racing. Whatever it is, it apparently didn’t work with Adie.
The bar was yanked from her mouth, and right away June’s head felt like it was filled with wasps. She moaned as they wheeled her back out, then felt them lift her back into the wheelchair. They wheeled June out of the laboratory and back into the office.
“Her hair got scorched pretty good,” Joya said, parking June beside the doctor’s desk and retrieving something from a cabinet in it. “The skin opened, too, but that’s to be expected.”
June felt her head being wrapped with some sort of gauze. She must have looked an absolute fright. What would Eleanor think when she saw her? There was no way she would continue to love June, especially when she eventually realized that June wasn’t capable of finding anything that would help them escape this place. They’d been so silly, getting close like that.
The Simpson in Eleanor’s vision had been wrong about June. She had to have been.
“Wake up, Nightingale,” Nurse Joya said, very closely, her voice deeper and more stern than it’d ever been. Monster. “Wake up, and tell us exactly what you did at that goddamn engagement party.”
June opened her eyes. The nurse looked like a human. There were no holes in her face, but June feared that they’d appear any second, and then the terrible limbs would reach through them to rip June into pieces. She tried to make what had happened at the engagement party come back to her, but it didn’t work because it wasn’t a real thing to begin with; it had been a terrible coincidence was all.
The smile on the nurse’s face faded fast. Minutes of silence passed as she stared at June, unblinking, expectant.
“It didn’t work,” Nurse Joya finally said under her breath to the doctor, and she got up. June vaguely registered the sharp sting of the injection needle in her arm. “She’s still hiding what she knows.”
What do I know?
When it was done, Nurse Joya grabbed the wheelchair handles and started pushing June incautiously. June half expected to be discarded by the monsters like Adie had been, but then she realized she was being wheeled to the office’s exit, not back to the awful laboratory behind the secret door in the wall. “We’ll just have to keep trying with some more...invasive procedures,” the nurse said, clearly let down by whatever hadn’t happened.
More invasive than this? June couldn’t comprehend anything worse than what she had just been through, or what Adie had just been through. Poor, poor Adie.
“We won’t let them win,” Nurse Joya went on, and the doctor let out a gruff sound of agreement. “Those disgusting things think they can come to our home, wipe us out like bacteria. They don’t even want to live here. They just want us dead. We don’t have much longer to find where they’ve hidden the key.”
Who are they? June wished she could ask, but already whatever she’d been injected with was drawing her into a deep sleep. She fought it only for a moment before giving in to the darkness.