The
House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos
The Evening of Friday,
August 27
All afternoon and into the evening
Eighty-two thought about what had happened down in the garden. Not
simply the guard kicking the female-that sort of thing happened
fifty times a day here in the Hive-but the way the three New Men
had looked at him. If they had even seen him. and he was sure they
had. Or sensed him. Or something.
They had heard him sniff back tears. When he
had brushed those tears out of his eyes they had mimicked the
motion. Why? What did it mean? Did it even have a meaning, or were
they acting on their imitative impulses? Eighty-two had overheard
Otto saying that it was hardwired into them, that they were natural
mimics. Like apes, only smarter, more controlled. It had been an
intentional design goal. That was how Otto had phrased it when
discussing it with one of the doctors.
But had it been only that?
What if it had been something else?
Eighty-two hoped so. If the New Men were capable of independent
thought and action, then maybe once the Americans got here the New
Men could be shown how to break out of their
conditioning.
If the Americans got here. It was already
two days since he had sent the hunt video. He ached to sneak into
the communications room and check the e-mail account he set up.
Would the techs realize it? Would they-or more important could
they-somehow determine that it was him? If so, what would Alpha do?
Worse, what would Alpha let Otto do?
The more the boy thought about it, the more
frightened and desperate he became. and the more he wanted to do
something else to try to reach out to the man known as
Deacon.
The August sun set slowly over the island
and Eighty-two sat on the floor, in the corner between his bed and
the dresser, staring at the TV without watching it. He was required
to watch six hours a day, every day. Nothing of his choosing, of
course. Otto made the schedule and programmed his DVD player. This
week it was all war films. Eighty-two didn’t mind those as much as
the sex stuff he had to watch. He didn’t completely understand why,
though, because there was a lot of violence in both kinds of
videos. There was violence in almost everything Otto scheduled for
him. Even the videos of surgeries looked violent. The blood. the
screaming of the patients strapped to the tables. Even with the
sound down it was ugly.
And it was no good closing his eyes or lying
about having watched it. Otto always asked Eighty-two questions
about what he saw, questions that he could only answer if he
watched. Eighty-two had learned fast not to get caught in a
lie.
The sun was down now, but he didn’t turn on
the lamp. He heard noises and walked to the window and peered out
into the night, listening to the sounds that filled the air almost
every night. Shouts. Cries of ecstasy, cries of pain, sometimes
overlapping in ways that turned his stomach. Screams from the labs
and the bunkhouses where the New Men lived.
He thought about the stone that the female
had been kicked for throwing. It burned him that she hadn’t picked
it up and taken it with her. It seemed to Eighty-two that it was
the smartest thing to do. Keep it. Maybe. use it.
But she had tossed it in with the dirt being
dug from the hole, unwilling or unable to find a better use for
it.
The wrongness of that refused to leave his
mind. It burned in his thoughts like a drop of frying grease that
had spattered on his skin. Why hadn’t she thought to take the stone
for which she had been beaten? What was it about the New Men that
kept them from fighting back? There were hundreds of them on the
island and only sixty guards and eighty-three technicians. The New
Men were very strong, and though they screamed when beaten it was
clear to Eighty-two-who knew something about hurt and harm-that
they could endure a great deal of pain. They would cringe, cry out,
weep, even collapse to the ground when being beaten, but within
minutes they were able to return to hard labor. Eighty-two did not
yet know if they faked some of their pain, amplifying their screams
because that’s what was expected of them, because screams satisfied
the guards and satisfaction was part of why the New Men existed. It
was an idea Eighty-two had been playing with for weeks, and it was
what made the incident of the stone so crucial to his
understanding.
In his dreams-sleeping and waking-the New
Men rose up all at once and tore the guards to pieces. Like the
animal men in the H. G. Wells book The Island of Dr. Moreau,
Eighty-two’s dreamworld ideal of the New Men saw them finally
throwing off the abuse and torment and slaughtering the evil
humans. Eighty-two longed to see the House of Screams echo with the
same kind of cries of furious justice that had shook the walls of
Wells’s House of Pain.
And Eighty-two would have believed it to be
more of a possibility if the female had just taken the damn
stone.
The evening burned on and Eighty-two found
that he could not endure another night of doing
nothing.
He left his room and crawled along the
sloping tiled roof to the end, waited for the security camera to
pan away. Eighty-Two had long ago memorized every tick and flicker
of the compound’s cameras. When you’re that bored you find ways of
filling the time. Once the camera turned away he would have
ninety-eight seconds to reach the rain gutter on the far side of
this wing. He made it easily, paused again as another camera moved
through its cycle. One move at a time, always counting, always
patient, Eighty-two made his way from his bedroom window to the
spot where he’d perched earlier today. The garden below was draped
in purple shadows.
Eighty-two jumped from the corner of the
roof to the closer of the two big palms, caught the trunk in a
familiar place, and then shimmied down with practiced ease. At the
base he stopped, waited for the ground camera to sweep past, and
then he sprinted along the edge of the new chicken coop to the
flower bed on the far side. The rich black dirt from the postholes
had been spread out atop the flower bed. Eighty-two bent low and
let his night vision strengthen until he could make out every
detail. He ran his fingers over the dirt, sifting it back and
forth, up and down, until he found the lump. His nimble fingers
plucked the egg-sized stone from the soil and he weighed it in his
palm. It was a piece of black volcanic rock, smooth as
glass.
Eighty-two rolled it between his palms as he
crouched there, and his eyes drifted toward the porch where the
guards had been playing dominoes. The big Australian’s name was
Carteret. Eighty-two could imagine him drowsing in his hammock,
stupid with too much beer, a porno movie playing on the TV, a
cigarette burning out between his slack lips. The image was as
clear as if Eighty-two was actually looking at the man.
Carteret.
Another part of Eighty-two’s brain replayed
the image of the female lying in a knot of convulsed agony. And the
laughter of the guards as Carteret walked away from her as if she
was less than nothing.
The stone was a comfortable weight in
Eighty-two’s hand.
He looked up into the sky-a great, vast
diamond-littered forever above the trees-and he wondered why the
man named Deacon had not come. Did the e-mail ever reach him? Was
he coming at all? Would anyone come?
Eighty-two closed his fist around the stone,
feeling its ancient solidity and hardness.
He wondered if he could risk reaching out
one more time.
If that didn’t work. then what would he
do?
There was a high-pitched female scream from
the House of Pain. Was it the same female? Had thoughts of her
festered in Carteret’s mind all day, the way the thought of the
stone had burned in Eighty-two’s?
The boy stared with narrowed eyes at the
laboratory complex. The House of Screams. Above him the speakers in
the palm trees began to wail. The dog handlers were getting ready
to release the dogs for the night.
Time to go.
He smoothed the dirt to hide the spot where
he’d removed the stone, waited for the ground camera to move, and
then went from stillness into action. He ran across the garden,
scaled the palm tree effortlessly, and leaped onto the roof. The
stone was in his pocket.