Day 16

6: Journal

“Keith Perkins?”

I glanced up from my desk. The voice had come from the door, so logically it had to be a guard. There were a number of scientists who liked to interview me or take blood or subject me to X-rays or more invasive procedures, but they were always accompanied by a guard and they rarely spoke to me or, for that matter, looked me in the eye.

“Mr. Perkins, if you'd come over to the door please.”

That sounded a bit more guardlike. I got up – it wasn't as though I had a choice, if I decided to be intractable they'd barge in, beat me into submission, drug me and worse yet take away the computer I was using to contact the outside world – and walked over to the door, where I could peer out through three inches of bulletproof plastic.

The guard was new, which explaned a lot. For one, she hadn't apparently been in a facility like this before, because she looked somewhat shell-shocked. I guess I was the last person at the end of the tour.

“Master Sargent Merrick” she said by way of introduction. “I understand you're our mind reader?”

“Yep.” I said, trying not to sigh. Given the choice between feeling like a test subject and a freakshow exhibit, I'd of course choose the latter, but that didn't mean it wasn't tiring.

“Read me.” she said, looking at me sharply.

I frowned. I'd been asked numerous times by scientists to try to read their minds. Even guards had asked, mainly to settle bets or just to see if I could do it. Sgt. Merrick's demand seemed a bit more urgent. It worried me, but what could I do? I listened in.

She wanted to help.

I was treated to images, images of people I'd known. In the early days there'd been the common rooms, the lunchrooms, even the laughable group therapy our experimenters had used to get a feel for our psychological state. Now I was seeing these people who I'd been cut off from for months again, and they were not in anywhere near as good a state as I was. Sgt. Merrick had seen all this, checked in on all of them before speaking to me. She was revolted, and she wanted to prevent what had happened to them from happening to me. Other images were there too, of sick people dying of some strange disease. I'd heard rumors of plague lately, after my comrades had been pulled away and we'd been locked in separate rooms. Apparently it was as bad in here as it was out there. I hadn't felt sick, thankfully, but I didn't need to to know what was happening to the people who were. Merrick knew, and that was enough.

I wanted to ask what she wanted of me. It was nice to know she was on my side, of course, but the only channel I had to the outside world was a hacked net line talking to a man whose voice I'd only heard a few times before we'd been put under surveillance. There wasn't much I could offer her, and given she was just as non-telepathic as nearly everyone here I couldn't communicate to her in secrecy.

“I wanted to introduce myself.” she said, adding, “I'm the guard for this wing now. Your old guard was reassigned.”

My old guard was dead, shot for desertion. There was no official reason given for his having left, but Merrick had heard rumors that he'd left when he got the plague.

“I'll be keeping my eye on you.”

She'd be stopping by and looking in, yes, but she'd also be letting me know what was going on in the outside.

Before I could reply, before I could even indicate that I understood, she was gone, and I was left alone in my room.

Orin needed to know about this.

---

The scientists had a big demonstration for me today, and I swear, they timed this on purpose just to panic me. I was in the usual kind of test chamber – soundproof room with a one-way mirror which I was, naturally, on the reflective side of. I had no idea who they had on the other side, but he must have been important because the scientist and the guard were going through no end of formality with the test. It was the usual mind-reading, except instead of having some civilian on the other side of the room looking at cards and me saying what suit that person was looking at, the guard did it.

It looked absurd, the guard sitting in full armor, helmet and all, holding a card to his face and looking pointedly at it. The scientist asked me to read him.

And I couldn't. That was the part that got me. I thought they'd done something to me, put some drug in the water or injected some poison into my system during one of the blood tests. I couldn't read the guard at all. It wasn't like his mind was blank to me, it wasn't even like he was trying to keep me out, it was like he wasn't even there.

I nearly panicked, convinced that they'd execute me the moment they discovered my ability gone and therefore my use to them as well. I nearly got up to make a run for it when I realized I could read the mind of the scientist doing the quizzing.

The helmet, the experimenter was thinking. It was about the helmet. It was blocking me.

“I don't know.” I said, truthfully, and both the scientist and the guard relaxed. So much for double-blind studies, I thought, but they were trying to demonstrate effectiveness on telepaths, and there wasn't a very big sample size available.

They sent me back to my room. Merrick was my guide and she was worried. There were more things they'd done, and most of them they intended to test on me before everything was said and done. One of my comrades, Jeremy, was in the infirmary after some test had gone horribly wrong. There were very few of the original volunteer group, myself included, who were even alive anymore. Plague had taken some. Experiments had taken more.

My net access had been down for a week at this point, but was back up when I arrived. I got the strange feeling that I was being rewarded.

--

Plague was everywhere. The people who were Merrick's bosses had either died or were hospitalized. My fears of being a test subject had been put on hold because most of the people who would have been running the tests wouldn't dare approach the prison. There were no euphemisms for us now – we were in a prison wing. I'd even heard some other guards refer to us as the Quarantine Ward. It wasn't my fellow volunteers, but others, plague sufferers they'd shipped in to study.

Orin had promised to get me out, and the only thing I had to do was let him know where I was. When Merrick had brought me her food, I'd pretended to be on a hunger strike out of sympathy with Jeremy, who had apparently been subjected again to the same experiment that had nearly killed him the first time. In reality, I slipped in a note telling Merrick that I had a contact on the outside. The next time she did her walkby, she was furious with me for taking such a risky move for communication's sake, but still let me pick up the location of where I was being kept. I wrote it down here and scrambled it. I started writing a program to scramble almost everything in here. I had to leave some of it available, so if my captors took this away from me it'd look inconspicuous, like an ordinary journal. Fortunately, I'd recorded everything Orin and I had spoken of. At the time, it'd been nostalgia for a concerned voice. Now it might just save my life. I set up a program so that the PDA would scramble the important parts if it left my presence for more than a minute.

--

All hell broke loose. Merrick had ran to my door, pounding on it to get my attention. She yelled at me, and it occurred to me that it was one of the few times I'd actually heard her voice.

“Keith! They're going to move you, they're going to do it soon, and they're going to burn this place down. You've got to save whatever you can.” she was out of breath, having sprinted here. I glanced up at the camera in my room reflexively, and to my surprise found it dark. No wonder she was talking, she probably found it a relief to be able to talk freely for once.

“The cameras are dark because they don't want any record being made of what they're going to do to this place.” Merrick warned me, forcefulness tinged with fear.

“The man named Orin, do you think you can find him?” I asked her. Orin himself hadn't given me any specific information, but if I could smuggle out the PDA, Merrick could hopefully get it to the resistance.

She didn't seem so optimistic on this point. “Are you kidding me? Keith, they're going to shoot you. This place never happened, do you understand? They'll shoot you and they'll transfer me to the front lines where I'll get shot by some Old Line or West Coast grunt. You have bigger worries. The rebels aren't breaking you out.”

“I have a son.” I objected weakly. This, however, got her attention.

“How old?” she asked.

“He'd be about four by now.” I said. “His name's Derek, lives with his mother in Carson. I haven't spoken to either of them in nearly two years.”

Her thoughts were full of conflicts. She was damned if she did this, but she was a dead woman anyway. Screw it. She leaned forward and unlocked the tumblers to my door. Pushed it open, and gestured to me. “Go.”

I stood rooted in place. Early on when I figured this place was more of a prison than an actual study for my condition, I'd tried to escape a number of times, and each time I'd been hurt a great deal for the effort. Nowadays I was afraid to even try to leave my cell without permission.

Merrick sighed loudly and grabbed my arm, pulled me into the hallway. “Get the hell out of here. If they catch you escaping you're dead, but you'll be dead no matter what, so get the hell out of here!”

I pushed the PDA at her. “Please, just take this with you.”

“You don't even know my name.” she objected loudly. “You don't know you can trust me!”

I could, though, her only concern was that I get away, quick, now, while I still could “Fine, tell me your name. It doesn't matter. You're the only one I can trust now.”

She sighed. “My n--

--

To whom it concerns,

Keith Perkins was discovered attempting to escape and was executed immediately.

-- Journal Ends --

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