The DollHouse

Chapter Twenty

When I open my eyes I am in a room in the compound that I have never seen before. It is clean and sterile, nothing like the cells I have slept in the last couple of days. I sit up and look around me to see rows and rows of beds, empty and neatly made. I wonder if this is where they took the outcasts, making them live and work like a concentration camp.

The dorm is silent and no one is around to tell me to stay put. I get up and walk to the door, expecting at any moment for someone to burst out from hiding and yell at me for moving.

I wonder if Nick is safe.

I open the door to find a clean and sterile corridor. It leads in one direction, with many doors spaced along it and a large set of double doors at the end. I walk slowly toward the double doors, wondering why the sun on my skin feels so strange.

Then I notice the windows. I stop and stare outside. There is no commune. There is no jungle. There is desert, stretching on and on as far as I can see.

I back away until my feet hit the wall. I stand, pressed up against the plaster, struggling to keep my breath slow. I try to remember what happened the night before, but I can only remember the struggle and then blackness. I have to be hundreds of kilometers away right now.

I remember the loud, constant noise. It must have been a helicopter. But whose?

I keep walking toward the double doors. They open onto what looks like a reception room in a hospital. A woman behind the desk smiles at me pleasantly.

"Feeling better?" she asks. "They're waiting for you in the main meeting room, whenever you're feeling up to it." She looks me up and down.

I look down and see I am wearing a hospital gown, complete with backless lower half.

"I'll get you some clothing," she says, still wearing the same smile. She stands up and opens a cupboard behind her. She hands me a folded set of what looks like hospital scrubs: neat slacks and a bland shirt. I put the pants on in front of her, feeling like I'm in a daze.

"Where am I?" I ask, pulling off the hospital gown and pulling on the shirt.

The woman looks away modestly, as if I could care less right now. "It will all be explained to you when you meet the others," she says. "There are procedures to follow, so I don't want to jump the gun."

"Whatever," I say, shaking my head and holding up my hospital gown. I don't know what to do with it.

She leans over the desk and takes it from me, holding it by the tips of her fingers as if it is diseased. "Second door on your left," she says, pointing down the corridor behind her.

I nod mutely and walk toward the door. It is all wood, with no glass window to give me a peek of what I'm in for. I set my shoulders and push it open.

A set of tables curves in a large u-shape around the room, facing a lectern at the front of the room. There are around twenty seats, with only one free. The man at the lectern turns to me.

"Welcome, Cameron," he says, looking me over. "I see you are well rested. Join us, we're having a debrief."

I sit down in the free chair, not quite brave enough to look around me. One of the people makes a loud noise of shock, but I don't look up.

"Cam!" someone yells.

My head whips up involuntarily. "Nick?" I start to say, hope rising in my chest. I stutter at the first syllable, the word catching my throat as I see the one person who can make this surreal experience somehow okay.

Jules leaps up from his seat and grabs me, gripping me so tight I can barely breathe. "I thought you were dead," he whispers in my ear, his breath catching. "You had to be dead. Everyone was dead."