“You aren’t . . . weren’t the only one who thought that.” I reached the bottom and opened the door. It was already unlocked and bore the thumbprint of a guard’s hand, which was now lying on the floor. The guard was superfluous, heavy, and unnecessary. Only the hand had been needed. I stepped around it and into the lab to turn on the lights inside. Two weeks—that one guard upstairs had been an exception. I didn’t think we’d find any pseudo zombies down here.
I ignored the room. I remembered its double in Florida, although I’d seen it only once. Large with five cells, the room held video cameras to record the “play” and computers to type in reports for Jericho—or for Bellucci after Jericho’s death. Bellucci was here now, right here. I couldn’t recognize his face through the rot, not from the other four researchers dead on the floor, but his once-starched and immaculate lab coat had his name stitched over his chest. It was easily readable through the stains. He had less confidence or more false pride than Jericho. Jericho wore a suit. He didn’t need his name out there like a billboard. We knew who he was—the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega of our lives. That didn’t need a name tag. It would be the same as marking the Apocalypse on a puppies and kittens wall calendar.
Pointless.
I took what I was searching for from the flop and stink of Marcus Bellucci’s hand. An eight-by-ten rectangle—I could picture him holding it between him and Wendy or Peter as the most useless of shields. It was only a clipboard, made to hang on a hook beside the door. It wasn’t high-tech like most things in the Institute, but it was as informative.
Stefan, I saw from the corner of my eye, had walked forward to examine the cells. They were the same as jail cells basically: a toilet and a bunk. You couldn’t be sure how long it was until someone earned their playtime. You had to keep the prisoners from stinking up the place. For hygiene, there was a hose and a floor that slanted down to a drain to let the soapy water pour away.
“What the hell is this?” Stefan moved from cell to cell and finally I let myself see. Two cells were empty and three others had a dead man in each. Unlike the “red birds” upstairs, they weren’t ready to fly, fly away; they had virtually exploded. Torn apart, they covered the floor of the six-by-six cells in pieces. Did you ever wonder what would happen should every vessel in your body burst under enormous pressure, each one, down to the tiniest vein? Probably not. Why would you wonder something like that?
But if you did . . . Wendy was the answer, and now Peter, unfathomably, had her on a false familial leash.
I looked away from the human version of raw hamburger. “In the Everglades, they brought us the homeless from Miami. Here, I’m guessing they went all the way to Las Vegas. Barstow is too small. The disappearances would be noticed.” I handed Stefan the clipboard. He read it aloud.
“Wendy, Peter, Peter, Peter, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, Michael Three, Wendy, Wendy, Lily Four, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Belle Three, Peter. What is this?” He dropped it on the floor. I didn’t blame him. The paper was as stained as what was left of Marcus Bellucci.
“This is the Playground. This is where you got to go if you’d done especially well, scored very high on a particular test,” most often of the killing sort, “and deserved to be rewarded. You were brought down here to pick a prisoner and play as long or as quickly as you wanted. As messy or neat. Down here was the only free-for-all in the Institute. And there should be two names that stood out on the list. Every time you saw their name, someone down here died.” I bent down and picked the clipboard up to hand it back to Stefan. “Maybe you should count.” I’d scanned the date at the top of the page, which looked to be the first of about fifteen pages in all. “And the clipboard covers only three months. You need to know, Stefan, who spent most of their time down here. I said some of the students wouldn’t want to be cured. Peter and Wendy would sooner die than be cured.”
“But they’d much rather we die than try to cure them,” he said as he shuffled through the pages, either counting or seeing what he’d rather not know the exact numbers on. “Did they ever bring you down here, Misha?” His eyes were on mine. “Not because you were the killer they wanted you to be, but for accidentally doing too well at some other test.”
Everyone was brought down here. Ninety percent of the time it was a reward; ten percent of the time it was a test in itself. “I never killed anyone down here,” I replied. And I hadn’t. I’d been brought down in the evening of the same day Stefan had rescued me, four hours before he’d shown up in the doorway of my room.