FLOOD

All in the Family

The floor was moving beneath me. No, I was moving. Someone had me by the arms, their fingers pinching my skin, bruising me. My heels were dragging on the floor, and my head felt heavy, my eyes kept fluttering open and closed.

All I could see was the floor, and even that blurred in and out as fatigue weighed down my every limb.

Don't sleep. Don't sleep.

I shook my head, biting my tongue hard to try to stay awake. When I tilted my head I was able to peer through my hair enough to see that Eli was being dragged beside me. He was completely limp, and in the glance I got it looked like there was blood dripping down his face.

Voices floated somewhere above me, jerking me out of my terrified stupor.

"Put her on the far table. Not him. Just keep him out of the way."

The room lurched suddenly around me, and then my back hit the surface of something hard and cold, and my head snapped back. Something struck my temple and sent the room spinning again. I grimaced, but the drugs were obviously strong, since I barely felt it.

"Careful, you imbecile." Cain's voice, hard and angry, and there was a shuffling noise after, and something eased underneath my head. A flat cushion, maybe a bunched up sweater or jacket, I wasn't sure. His arm moved in my peripheral vision and I wanted to lean over and bite him. To hurt him somehow. But I couldn't move, and the hand withdrew.

"It doesn't matter anyways." The gravelly voice was the grandfather, and I tried to shake off the drugs and sit up. My head spun, I couldn't even lift it.

"What's that mean?" Cain's voice was low now, laced with something I couldn't place.

There was a metallic ping and then his grandfather said, "She's been altogether too much trouble. We can figure out what we did right later, with an autopsy."

"You said we'd take her with us." Now Cain's voice held a definite note of anger.

"I didn't say alive or dead," Cain's grandfather grunted. "She'll be easier to transport this way."

"As a deadweight? I hardly think so."

A sharp crack followed, right next to my ear. My adrenaline spiked, and I would have jumped if I could move. "Cain!"

Silence followed, and then...

"I can't help thinking that you're protesting for another reason."

"I'm not. I already told you." His voice was low and tight with anger. I could hear him moving behind me, shuffling back, as if he were trying to put space between him and his grandfather. "I hate it when you assume that about me. That I'm weak, like him."

Eli, he meant Eli.

Fire flickered to life in my belly, an anger so hot that it felt like it might consume me. Eli was worth a thousand Cain's. He was braver than his brother would ever be. Cain was the coward, the one too afraid to disobey his monstrous grandfather.

And I didn't even know where they'd put Eli. They weren't even looking at him, or talking about him. For all I knew he could be slumped over in the corner, bleeding to death.

Another surge of adrenaline shot through me, driven on a wave of rage. Pins and needles swept through my feet and up my legs, crept over my fingers and up my hands. I could feel my body again. Slowly, but surely.

But maybe too slowly.

"I'm not like him," Cain was saying. "I just think it's foolish to throw away our star test subject. You're letting your temper get the best of you here."