The Human Xenocide

Chapter Four - Look What I can Do

As Lilly placed the hat on her head and covered her hands with the gloves she took note for the first time of the lack of her parents, she expected at least a visit, “I haven’t seen my parents since the gunshot. What happened to them? My mom would be worried about me.” She slowly twisted her head around, smelling the warm moist concrete and noticing the graffiti on the white wall across from them.  The backdoor exited into what appeared to be an abandonded employee parking lot, only a pair of dumpsters and the graffiti to keep it company.

“Parents, well. Your dad is in jail for attempted murder and your mother still thinks you’re dead, even when we tried to convince her otherwise.  She saw you get back up, and saw you get dragged off to the hospital, but no matter the circumstances she cannot be convinced you’re alive. We haven’t told her you’re awake now.”

“You haven’t told her? And my dad is in jail?”

“Oh, yes it was fairly obvious; the police arrested him moments after you were rushed out of the house, his finger prints were found on the gun and gunpowder was on his hand.  The evidence piled up against him is so convincing that he’s going away for a long time .”

Lilly took a good look at Dr. Hemaz’s face.  Noticing he was completely serious her eyes steered back to the sidewalk now in front of her, “And you didn’t tell my mom I’m awake because…?”

“I don’t know, it didn’t seem important.”

Lilly thought that response was even odder than the first.  As she remembered it, she shot herself in the head. She thought a patient not being dead was an important factor that doctors were supposed to tell the patient’s loved ones.

The pair didn’t have to walk far through the small neighborhood behind the hospital.  The hospital was never supposed to grow as large as it did, but as more people decided suburban life was the way to grown the population that used it grew as well.  Soon the hospital which was built to replace a large closed down high school, had taken up the entire several-acre plot and then some.  It’s most recent construction, the wing Lilly’s room was in, had to buy out and bulldoze almost a dozen homes and remove a small cul-de-sac, resulting in the hospital pushing awkwardly into suburbia.

A short walk from the back door through the empty alley/parking lot and a turn to the left was a neatly repaved sidewalk, courtesy of the hospital which partly destroyed it during construction.  The particular side of the hospital they exited out to didn’t actually have an official entrance, only a side door, this was to prevent unwanted hospital-related traffic from brothering the local residents any more than they had to. A couple blocks down the street, with the two-story rehab wing still in sight the sidewalk was lined with neat houses, each with a considerable amount of front yard and nicely trimmed green grass, required by the home association. 

The fresh sent of trimmed grass only grew as they moved another block to a three-way intersection, to the right more houses, in front of them as far as they could see was a never-ending street the road and houses rolling ever-so-slightly with the hilly terrain, and to the left, just off the corner and behind a row of houses was a park.  A distant lawnmower roared from somewhere deep in the park, but otherwise it was entirely empty.  During this time of day, it being a weekday, any visitors would be at the very far side, with the play structures and children too young for school instead of the grass field and quarter-mile dirt track circle surrounding it.

As Lilly’s feet touched the dirt track Dr. Hemaz, acting as if the current conversation about her parents wasn’t as interesting as Lilly thought it was, asked her, “Ready?”

“Sure,” she was completely stumped.  Nothing seemed to make any sense at all, but she wanted to learn what happened as much as he did—she wanted to do this.

“Okay, first I want you to try to run the track. Go as fast as you can, but don’t push yourself too much. If you feel dizzy or nauseous, stop immediately. I don’t want you to hurt yourself..” he glanced down and a metal clipboard he produced out of the small bag and glanced at the chart, his assumptions were written on the paper.  Lilly glanced over real quick and saw that, if his guesses were correct she would either collapse because of her low blood pressure, or go faster than a normal athlete because her regulated, slow heartbeats would allow her to push her body much further.

And she took off.  At first her speed was quite normal, but she slowly went faster and faster and faster. He clocked her first lap as she continued around the track. “Fifty-six seconds!” he yelled, the speed of a trained runner. She barreled around the second lap, this time with her speed up to par with professional runners. As she zipped by Dr. Hemaz, he checked the clock, “39.8 seconds!”. she just beat the world record! She zoomed around the third lap, “34.4 seconds!” fourth lap—this seemed impossible! “Twenty-eight seconds!” There was no way this is possible!

“Stop!” he yelled out at the track.  She froze in a quick halt on the opposite side of the track. He looked shocked she was able to hear him while going so fast. She just ran a mile in two and a half minutes. Impossible.

“Come here, quick,” he spoke  at a normal volume to see if she could still hear him. On cue she jogged across the middle of the track and approached him. “Come closer.” He beckoned, pointing at her arm.  She lifted her arm and handed it  to him. He placed two fingers on her wrist to count her pulse as he admired her breathing.  Her breaths were slow and controlled. The mile was easy for her. He pulled his fingers away from her cold skin and jotted down the results: pulse, twelve.  It managed to rise. If twelve is what it rose to after a mile, then her body could take a lot more before she was pushed to the limit..

“Well?” Lilly’s voice was calm and controlled. “That was actually easy.” She actually enjoyed running the mile, it felt—good.

“Can you go faster?” he asked.  It was fairly obvious the collapsing factor he feared wasn’t going to happen.

She smiled at the doctor. “I’ll try.”  She took off; this time her start wasn’t as rusty, thirty seven seconds the first lap. Twenty-eight seconds the second.  Fourteen the third- how  could someone move this fast?  Then, she was gone. A sickly cloud of black smoke slowly evaporated across from Dr. Hemaz, at the exact location she was at a moment ago.  He stopped the clock and threw his hands into the air, shouting at no one in particular, “What the hell!?”

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