Howie watched Samantha and Kevin nervously from behind the stretcher. He never had to accomplish something so perfectly in his life, not even a dance routine or an a cappella song for a recording company. Both of those times his career along with the others’ was hanging in the balance. But now it was his life. While he was waiting so nervously, he began noticing small things that just pissed him right off. Like how everything was so white. It was such a sinful place that it brought down the meaning of the color. Now it just seemed to symbolize sterilizism. The guards were beginning to piss him off as well, he figured that if he lost his concentration at the wrong moment, it would be their fault. They were so idiotic that they only peered into every room, looking for the escaped prisoners. It irked him so bad that they didn’t search the room for them. They were that lazy. At one point he even felt like leaping out from behind the stretcher and screaming, “Here I am!” but he was just too scared.
The second that he saw Samantha and Kevin nail the two guards, he signaled rapidly to Charn and AJ to come out of their hiding place and join him behind his. Instead of joining Howie right away, they volunteered to stuff the lifeless bodies of the two guards into the vent. That way the door wouldn’t remain unguarded. There was another stitch in the plan; Samantha and Kevin would have to stay guarding until everyone was out of the hole.
After AJ and Charn packed away the two bodies, they joined Howie just as a guard poked his head lazily into doorway. There were no actual doors in the place, just arches where a door should be. And this particular room was a waste of time. It had three doors, the one on the right with Kevin and Samantha guarding it, the one on the left which Howie and AJ were about to take over and an arch at the top of the room. If you were to draw a line from door to door, it would form a triangle. The top arch was where the annoying guard kept sticking his head through. Howie concluded that he did this out of sheer habit, but it bugged him. But the main reason why the room felt like such a waste of time was because it wasn’t really a room – more like an open area. What grossed Howie out this time, was that he was sure they did operations in here, where just any filthy person could barge in whenever they felt like it.
Anyway, Howie and AJ made their way to the door, knocked the two guys out and slipped on their putrid white uniforms. Howie wasn’t trying to be picky, but he hated them, mostly because they were white. AJ hated them because they were polyester. Boy, did he loathe polyester. The only person he didn’t mind that wore polyester was his bodyguard. And the only reason why he let him wear it was because the bodyguard was so much BIGGER than him.
Soon after they got there, AJ felt a tap on his shoulder and knew that it was another guard ready to take his place. They had to keep letting the real guards take their places so that everyone in the group would have a uniform.
AJ and Howie took off down the hallway. AJ prayed that Howie remembered the directions. But not only did Howie remember the directions, he wrote them down on a piece of fabric on the stretcher with a pen that he found in white trench coat pocket. At first he was going to dye the sheet black with the pen, but then he decided that directions would be more useful. Now everyone would know where to go after a guard takes their place.
************************************************** Brian had been feeling a lot better lately. Not only because the drugs were wearing off, but he had gotten more sleep than the others. Being at the end of the line came in handy sometimes. Of course, he wasn’t in the very back in the first place, Nick and Dakshana were behind him, but he didn’t think that they’d mind him catching a few winks. It did create a tremendous gap in the line, and he had to keep on crawling to catch up. What he didn’t realize was that it was his turn to come out, and everyone thought that he wasn’t coming.
Finally, he appeared and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. He, Nick, and Dakshana had no idea what was going on at first, but they read the directions that Howie left them, and they were fine.
Nick offered to be last. After Brian and Dakshana left, he had to beat up the two guards for the price of one suit. He nearly strained his back dragging the bodies into the vent. By now there was a whole pile of them on the left side, so Nick shoved the ones he had on the right side.
As he stood in the doorway, he realized how his body had changed in a month. He felt uncomfortably skinny, and he wished he didn’t know how hard he worked. He felt as though he would replace the six pack he had received for twenty pounds of cellulite if he never had to work that hard again. The thought of food depressed him, since he hadn’t eaten in three days. He tried thinking of the homemade goodies his mom used to make, but surprisingly, the thought of it almost made him throw up. And he loved his mom’s cooking.
Nick was glad that he was wearing the coverall suit. It just would have depressed him more to be able to look at himself. He hadn’t seen his hands in three days, and he was afraid of how the skin would contour his bones. The thought disgusted him as well. He had used his hands in the past few days, but he didn’t think enough to look at them.
While those thoughts roamed through his mind, two guards appeared to take over his duty.
“Where’s your pardoner?” the shorter man of the two asked. Nick knew that he didn’t really have an accent, but he said “pardoner” to make himself sound superior.
Nick decided not to try his own accent. He didn’t have time to play that game with the man. He’d picked up some interesting dialects on his world tours and of course plenty of things from Brian. But he was afraid and wanted to get the hell out of there.
“He went for a coffee and never came back,” Nick answered promptly.
The short man snorted deep in his throat. “Figures.”
Nick turned to leave and out of the corner of his eye, saw two guards taking Samantha and Kevin’s place. He hoped that he guards in the vents wouldn’t wake up and ruin their whole plan. He hoped a lot of things, but mostly just that. Nick would rather have them dead from internal bleeding or brain damage than him dying in this hellhole. He knew that he was changing in the way that he thought, but he couldn’t help it. The place had turned him into a heartless criminal. He had learned to lie and hate, but he knew that his mom would straighten him out when he got home, so he didn’t worry too much about that.
Nick made his way down the hall, walking slightly off balance. He hadn’t walked upright in a while, and it felt kind of weird. Nevertheless, he remained discreet.
He got to the room and his eager fingers shook as he opened the trap door. Once inside, he ran down the corridor, almost madly. He didn’t even feel like stopping when he saw his friends. But he had to. Not only because he would maul his friends and ram face-first into a concrete wall, but because he was afraid that he was losing more weight by the second.
So, he stopped, and greeted Dakshana, who removed his helmet. But when she tried to remove the rest of the suit, he stopped her.
“Oh I’m sorry Nick,” she said, “I shouldn’t have…”
“No, I just don’t want to take it off.”
“Nick finally gets a body that might even envy Kevin, but he doesn’t want to show it off. You’re weird, little buddy.” AJ scanned Nick’s expression.
“I don’t like the way I look now.” Nick hugged his knees.
“WHAT? Why? I’m not saying I like what they did to us but…”
“I’m too skinny.”
“Naw, come look in your helmet, it’s like a mirror…”
“NO! I don’t want to look at myself. Can’t you see that I was happy with the way I looked? They ruined everything for me. I can’t even think about food anymore without nearly throwing up! It’s awful! Like bulimia in reverse!”
Brian put his arm around Nick. “I’m sure that when you’re outta here you’ll be as good as new. Personally I think you look great.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
*************************************************
Samantha led Kevin down a narrow corridor, which was quite run down. They had been walking for twenty minutes now, and Kevin wasn’t sure if Samantha knew what she was doing. He figured that if you walked forever and you felt like you were going nowhere, then you were probably lost. He kept his mouth shut though, because he knew that she was smarter than he gave her credit for.
They came across a rusty old door that looked more like a beat-up vault than a door. Samantha asked for Kevin’s help to turn the wheel at the front of the door and he obliged. The thing jerked suddenly, nearly sending Kevin onto his sore bum. It creaked noisily as it opened, but Kevin was so intrigued by it that he didn’t notice that Samantha had already slipped inside.
He soon followed, his effervescent green eyes scanning the room nervously. Before he adjusted to the dark, he bumped his sore knee on a corner of the room. He didn’t know what it was, but the blow nearly caused him to scream, “SHIT!” right aloud. Kevin was glad that he had more sense than to do that.
Samantha appeared at his side a moment later. He could tell that it was her because his eyes had finally adjusted to the dark. Without a word, she pointed to a dark object directly in front of her. Kevin could almost see it in total detail. It was a bed, with (surprisingly) green sheets and blue pillows and placed directly below a window. It was a window with no bars and pure light flowing gracefully through it. Kevin loved the way it looked. But what was interesting was the person. There was a person in the bed, and Kevin was sure that it was Jansin. He was hooked up to a respirator, and had tubes protruding out of his body, but Kevin knew it was him.
Kevin turned his attention to Samantha. He was wondering why she wasn’t walking up to him. Maybe they had made a mistake and it wasn’t Jansin.
But when Kevin looked at her, he saw that she was crying. Crying in the dark with her gloved hands planted on her eyes. That’s when Kevin realized what a moron he was. It was unethical for Samantha to walk up to Jansin right away. They had only met once before when Jansin was comprehensible and they thought they would never speak again. But here they were, in this lonely room, together.
Eventually Samantha crept up to the bed to take a closer look. She shook him lightly to wake him up, but Jansin just kept on sleeping. Kevin shrugged his shoulders and Samantha tried again.
When that didn’t work, Kevin said, “Here, let me,” and stepped closer to the front of the bed. He leaned down so that he was right next to Jansin’s ear and whispered, “Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman are having sex in your living room and there’s nothing you can do about it because you’re sleeping.”
Jansin’s eyes flickered open and he looked at Kevin strangely. “Perv? Is that you?”
“In the flesh!” Kevin and Jansin hugged briefly, until Jansin noticed that he had another visitor.
“Samantha!” he cried, wrapping his arms around her from his position in the bed. He buried his face in her stomach because she was still standing and wept lightly.
Finally she knelt, and they embraced one more time. Meanwhile, Kevin had grabbed a chair from inside the cluttered room and was standing on it to look out the window.
“I see grass, grass I see GRASS!” he exclaimed while leaping off the chair. “That means that all we have to do is remove the window and we’re free!”
“We can’t break the window though. The guard will hear.” Jansin was now sitting up on the bed and plucking all the devices off of his body. “He went for a coffee break and he’s just around the corner. I was so boring; he’s been gone for three hours. But I know he’s right there.”
“Then how do we get rid of the window?” Kevin asked.
“There outta be some surgical knives sharp enough to cut through steel around here somewhere. Besides, the wall is practically paper. It gets so cold in here…” Jansin trailed off a bit. “There, there’s one, use that.” He pointed straight ahead to a six-foot dagger lying on a bureau.
“They put it there to piss me off. They put me here to piss me off in fact. It slays me, it really does. They’re like those dumb asses in old movies…”
Kevin picked the thing up, gently at first, then grabbed it tightly with both hands. He practiced swinging it around like he had seen in Jackie Chan movies. Then he ran forward suddenly, jamming it into the wall beside the window. To make sure that it sliced right through the wall, Kevin attempted to pull it back out. The thing was really jammed in there. But eventually it tugged loose, and there it was. A hole right beside the window.
Kevin approached it slowly, as if it were some kind of holy object. He then placed his cheek against the hole and felt the brisk air against his skin. He loved it. He even loved the way it pierced the cuts on his cheek. It felt so free to him.
Without wasting any more time, Kevin shoved the dagger back into the hole and cut all the way around the window. When he was done, the window slowly fell into his arms, and in its place was a large hole.
Kevin kissed the dagger, as if to say goodbye to it. He really wished that he could take it with him. He loved that dagger, it symbolized his freedom. But, instead of taking it, he placed it back onto the bureau and got back to work.
First he lifted Samantha through he window, then Jansin. He could crawl out by himself. They decided before they left that Kevin would carry Jansin because he could no longer walk by himself. Once outside, Kevin could see the extensive damage the agency had done to Jansin, and looked instinctively away in shame.
Kevin turned to take one last look into the room, and that was when he saw the guard stumble on in.
Chapter 18
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