Chapter Forty-Three

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.