The Things We Bury - Part 1: In Anticipation of the End of the World [Completed]

Chapter 3: The Big Show (Part 1 of 5)

The beige foam mat didn't look comfortable.  The girl rolled onto her back in her fitful half-sleep.  An arm flopped over her face, blocking the light from her eyes.  A leg kicked out, and the thin blanket was yanked down to her waist.

Horus fought to regain the sensor connection, but her arm was in the way.  The tiny reticle on the monitor blurred along with his vision.  He was getting too old for these hours.  His body didn't bounce back like it used to.  He could feel it in his joints and in the way his brain felt like a dried-out sponge.  It didn't help that he couldn't sleep during the day.  Despite being up all last night, he'd only managed to get a couple of hours that afternoon.

He rubbed his burning eyes.

The girl stretched her neck and exposed her forehead enough to line up the crosshairs on it.  The EEG reading began coming in again.  The steady flow of jagged lines scrolled down the monitor recording her brain waves.

The fatigue was a strain, but overall it was easier tonight.  Horus was more familiar with the controls.  And more familiar with watching that poor girl in there.  It didn't comfort him in the least that he was getting used to the sight.

She was in the wolf room of the enclosure.  The reinforced steel box didn't have any official name, but someone had called it the wolf room last night and it stuck, even though the wolf never showed up.  Just the girl.

They watched her all night and for two hours past dawn, but there was no transformation.  Just about the entire team had been crammed into the OC waiting for the big show that never happened.

R.J. had worried that being so far underground may have affected the results. 

"Perhaps she needs to see the moon or at least be in closer contact to it," he had mused to Wiley, while the man sat there silently, looking like he hadn't gotten his money's worth and R.J. was to blame.

Secretly, Horus suspected most of the team was like him and didn't for a minute expect that it would actually happen.  There was that brief moment of anticipation last night, like at the start of a magic trick – where for a second he was willing to suspend disbelief.  They had built all this, gone to all that trouble, they must know something.  But then the magician stepped onto the stage and pulled fake flowers from his sleeve, and he knew it was all just hocus pocus.  And so did the others.  Well, most of them anyway.  R.J. still believed.  Or perhaps all his talk and theories were only to convince himself.

The only thing they got to see that night was some sad, abused girl screaming to be let out and slowly crying herself to sleep.

It was depressing and pitiful that her outburst went down in his notes as an improvement.  Sticking her in the stark, gray cage had snapped her out of her near-catatonic state.  The panic had replaced the unresponsive condition she had been left in by that sadistic witch.  Boy, had she ever done a number on that girl.

And here she still was, practically rubbing shoulders with him for the second night in a row.

Wiley had done nothing.

Thinking about it, a fire spread up from his belly to his chest helping him stay awake and focused.  What she had said — what she had done — and she was still here – it made him want to scream.  Just let out a primal yell to deafen the room.

"She's worse than when she arrived."  It wasn't easy, but Horus had held his cold stare, meeting Wiley's eyes without flinching.  He hated how much the sly agent knew about him.  Wiley, now there was an appropriate name if there ever was one.

"It's true."  R.J. seemed even more agitated than Horus.  He refused to sit and instead stood beside his chair.  "She's a lunatic.  She's completely out of control.  I can't believe you would have put someone with her background in here with us."