Disappearing was easy when you didn’t want to be found.
And I really didn’t. At all. Ever again. I wanted to fade into the wind, slip through the cracks of time, become nothing more than a distant memory hopefully everybody would eventually forget. There was too much. Just too much.
Even leaving them a note seemed wrong. Like informing my friends of my intended suicide mission was outlandish. And maybe it was. Either way, I did it, and it was happening.
Denver was a speck behind me. Not even in sight. After having it out with August, I left the safe house, passed Denver, trailed the edge of the highway until it broke off into fields. Even then I continued on, for hours, heart beating a melancholy ballad in my chest. There was nothing left. Angel continued to parade images through my mind. Every single thread of sanity within me broke, one after the other, and I feared the abysmal hysteria that lay on the other side. I may have been created from genetic experimentation, but was I not human? Did I not have feelings and wants and fears? Did I not warrant the right to choose my life?
Apparently not.
Walking along the highway, the toxic memories of my past drifted by me like ghosts. Tia, my town, my fallacious parents. Jim, Esme, Lana, those years in torture, all those months running for my life. The fact that I was still running, defending myself, never able to get even a half-step ahead. Because Angel would be there, always. She was inescapable.
Those memories seemed to guide me, leading me onward through the fields and side-roads, all the way to the edge of a bridge. By this time night had fallen, stars sprinkling the sky. The crisp air bit my skin, reddening my cheeks and hands, but what should I care? In a few moments I could be dead. I would be dead.
Everybody told me to hold on. To be strong, and fight the good fight.
How could they possibly expect that of me?
My feet swung over the cords, resting along the edge of the concrete. Not even a full step and I would be tumbling through the air, ten—twenty—thirty feet below, smacking against rocks and the riverbank, seizing to live. Was this not solving the problem? The Prophets wanted me dead. The government intended to keep me a secret and subjugate me in any way possible. Angel had her own mysterious vendetta against me. Even my allies lacked consistency.
Ryan should be able to attend that Johns Hopkins university.
Blake should be able to go to culinary school and become a world famous chef.
Jessica and August should be together, because that made sense, and because they wouldn't destroy each other.
I was the oddball; the outlier. The audacity of me, to try and squeeze into spaces where I just did not belong, was appalling. How dare I? My heart cried and bled for August and had I remained in that room with him even a moment more, I would have surrendered. Feeling his hands in my hair and his breath on my face, tugging at my loose self-restraint, was my undoing. This fact, though I came to terms with it, was terrifying. Me caring about somebody was their death sentence.
That was just the way it was.
I didn’t even cry standing there with my arms woven through the cords, the strength of my upper body all that kept me from plunging into the dark depths below. Why did I hesitate? Why did I stare into the murky void and feel fear penetrate my heart? I should have been ready. Had this been months ago, I would already be dead. Alas, there I stood, heart in my throat, and indecision festering within my mind like an open wound.
Do you not deserve this?
Now there was a voice, tiny but there, that said, No, I don’t.
“Sit down and take it, Ellie,” was what everybody always told me. “It’ll get better. Endure. Just sit down and take the hits.”
No.
No more of that.
I couldn’t protect Tia because I did what she told me to do. Because I cowered from my abilities and hid beneath her shadow. Hid beneath everybody’s shadow. And when I did end up killing someone or maiming them, or even something of a lesser caliber, the guilt threatened to outdo me. Perhaps this was my flaw.
My name was Ellie Armstrong, and I was a genetically-modified human being. I was brought to life on accident the way I was. Completely unauthorized to live in the world, hunted down by a radicalistic group that formed explicitly because of me, and the government’s dirty little secret.
Enough.
Enough.
I couldn’t protect Jim or Esme because I allowed August to tuck me away within a safe house. I endangered my friends just by being around, selfishly remaining with them even though I fully knew protecting me was like one man trying to stop a tornado. Impossible; defied nature.
My own mind eroded under the weight of perpetual guilt that never left. Guilt I permitted to linger around my very being. Take away that guilt and who was I?
Your sister.
But, no. I was not Angel. I was Ellie Armstrong. Nineteen years old. I liked milkshakes, and eighties movies, driving down the highway in the middle of the night with my arm hooked out the window of August’s Corvette, the radio turned off, smiling up at the jet-black sky.
Enough.
Why should I hide? Why should I feel guilt over who I was? Why should I deprive my own self from flourishing and thriving, and doing more than just getting through the day? We deserved the right to surpass survival. Just surviving was no fun.
I should know. It was all I’d ever done the nineteen years I’d been alive.
Not now.
Not now.
Enough.
But the epiphany came too late. Too late to pull my feet from the edge. Too late to clear my mind of self-deprecating thoughts.
Too late to make me believe I was better alive than dead.
If I was going to go, though, at least I would have the satisfaction of going with my dignity. Going, knowing I was me and all me, and not hiding under somebody else’s shadow.
The letter, however outlandish, stated this the best I could:
Dear friends,
You have been nothing but helpful to me over the course of these last few months, and I am nothing but grateful. However, there comes a time when you have to take some sort of responsibility for yourself, and I feel that time has come for me.
For someone like me, friends are like four leaf clovers; nearly impossible to come by. That all of you would aid me even in the midst of all the danger, and call me your friend rather than another duty, meant the world to me. Know I will never forget any of you, and I mean you all the best when I no longer can track your progress myself.
Hopefully after they find my body, the carnage will end. Hopefully all of you bound some sort of way to the government can go on to lead happy lives, I suppose, until you’re called in again to serve. Perhaps this will silence my sister, and the Prophets, and everybody else who has engraved my name into their mind.
I mean no pain by leaving this letter. No pain at all, for any of you. There must be some light at the end of the tunnel, and I see it. I finally see it, though faded and dim and flickering, it’s there. I pray, someday, you all see the light as well.
August . . . there aren’t words I can put here. No words. Just know when it comes to it, when I’m about to end everything . . . you’ll be the last thing I think of. I’m sorry for ever hurting you. That was the last thing I ever wanted to do.
Sincerely,
El
Great.
I knew my thoughts would stray to him, it almost seemed inevitable, but still I hoped I would have managed to jump before his face sprawled across the canvas of my brain. Before his laugh ricocheted like a pinball machine off every corner. Before my chest stabbed with pain, like a million needles being jammed through it.
I should have told him. Standing there on the edge, and I’d already allowed myself to dig up a regret. I should have told August, in that room with him, how strong my feelings were. Letting him down, making him guess . . . driving that rift between us. The wrong things to do. Always the wrong things. And now I would never get that chance.
It’s okay. Something would have happened, anyway. Something horrible.
At least that was a variable I could always rely on.
The wind picked up, as if anticipating my long descent. The grip of my fingers on the thick cords loosened. I slid my toes to the edge of the concrete and closed my eyes, leaning forward, waiting for—
Hands grabbed me, quite suddenly and roughly, more or less ripping me from the edge and throwing me to the ground. Shocked, I could do nothing more spectacular than lay there and stare up at the dark sky, wondering what on earth had just happened.
“Sorry, girly. You ‘ain’t dying tonight; not on Angel’s watch.”
No.
No.
So close to absolute liberation, and still the Prophets found me. Still they messed everything up.
Goose bumps broke across my flesh. Now that imminent death wasn’t on the horizon, the chill could be felt through the air. The adrenaline in my system died down, as defeat resumed dominancy and I slumped to the pavement. No good. What good was I if I couldn’t even carry out a simple task? All I had to do was jump.
The universe, it seemed, was intent on preserving my life, if for its own sadistic enjoyment
I was tired of being fate’s sadistic enjoyment.
The man lumbered up to me, sprawled on the pavement. He wasn’t the man from the failed reconnaissance mission with Jessica; in fact, I’d never seen him before. But it didn’t matter. They all had the same faces; the face of my sister. That was who they worked for, by loyalty, fear, or force, and it made all of them identical.
“You’re gonna have to come with us,” he said. “Per Angel’s orders.”
Of course.
How could I have not seen this coming?
Of course she would foil my plans. She could get in my head and mess things up. She probably knew exactly what I was going to do and where I was going to do it. This man was probably waiting in the bushes, waiting for me to almost jump, waiting to foil my plans.
Of course.
Zero resistance was offered as he bound my hands behind me and roughly dragged me to my feet. A truck ambled down the road, headlights piercing the night and causing me to squint my eyes and turn my face away. Words were exchanged between man and driver, and then I was once again thrown into the back of the vehicle.
~*~
The ride took hours. I knew, because the bleak, greyish rays of morning slipped through the cracks in the back door of the van. Every muscle in my body ached, and every part of me was numb. My wrists chafed beneath the rough, thick rope, and my head pounded from the incessant jostling of the van over bumps and dips. Previously, the men stopped to refill gas or have a bite to eat at a diner. They locked the doors, of course, but didn’t seem too worried about me making an escape. Perhaps it was the serum they pumped into me, which worked as a blessing and a curse, because it debilitated me but lessened the pain of my deteriorating body. Even so, they enjoyed themselves like I wasn’t rotting away in the back, bound and limp; jostled and bruised. Maybe they sensed the defeat emanating from me like heat waves from the sun. I didn’t know.
Colorado must have been far behind. Parts of me wondered if anybody at the safe house discovered my note. If they were looking for me, or carrying on as usual, or praising God that I was finally out of their hair. The latter created a dreadful stone in the pit of my stomach, but how could I blame them? I would want to get rid of me.
The doors opened abruptly, searing my cornea with the rising sun. I whimpered, angling my body away, but the two men simply grabbed me and drew me out. The surrounding area looked much the same, just without so much of the trees, and mostly a lot of land accommodating to secrets. I tried to speak, but my throat was dry from hours without water, and the words morphed into a rattling cough that jarred my ribs. Not good, I thought, as I stumbled slightly to the side, realizing it had been a generous amount of time since I’d eaten anything.
Not good.
“Welcome to Nebraska,” one of the men stated, breathing in the crisp air with a deep inhalation.
Nebraska. All around was fields and stalks of corn and a large barn house a few feet away. There was nothing else. Nothing. Nobody to hear screams of agony or cries for help. Nobody to stumble upon a body tossed carelessly in a field.
Just nobody.
Because the serum was still working its way through my system, I had to be guided in the direction of the barn house. Lethargy attacked me like a parasite, feeding off my strength and drive, not that I had much to begin with. The absolute silence was the most perturbing thing. Like the demandingly quiet portions of the horror movies August used to show me, right before something terrible happened. When another character was murdered, or the protagonist had a close-call, or there was something else of equally horrifying caliber.
Even the sun hid behind a sudden deluge of clouds, as if ashamed to be shedding light on such a scene.
“Through here,” the man stated gruffly, shoving me through the doorway. My boots skidded through scattered boughs of hay littering the floor. I expected to hear the sounds of animals, but there was more mocking silence. Something horrible is waiting for you, it jeered.
I could do nothing about it.
The barn was huge, by what little daylight there was to see by. Tall walls of wood, rafters, lofts, and windows set so high up I wondered how they could have been done. Probably by the tallest ladder in the world. The odor of barnyard animals lingered, fresh, as if the entire place was vacated mere hours before. The lack of animal brays and murmurs was unsettling.
“Stay here and don’t move,” I was ordered, and subsequently pushed into a stall that smelled heavily of manure. The protest dangling off my lips was shoved back down my throat as the door was closed and locked in my face, penning me into the cramped space with nothing but an overturned bucket to sit on. I did just that, holding my head in my hands, trying to make sense of everything that had happened thus far.
But that was the thing. When you had someone like me, and a situation like the one I was in, it didn’t make sense. If the roots were indefinable, how could one possibly hope to draw logicality from the extending limbs? Impossible. Accepting that which didn’t make sense was the first step to maintaining sanity.
My knee jiggled up and down, in time with the marathon pace of my heart. Trying to unscramble my head was a futile mission, so I evacuated it. I focused on the tangible reality around me. The barn, and the Nebraskan landscape, and the smelly manure that would cling to my clothes and my skin and my mind long after the whole ordeal had passed. The case being that it would come to pass, somehow, and I would be right back in the middle of Angel’s sick game. As usual.
Time passed, creeping by on reluctant haunches. I began to wonder if they forgot about me, or if their intention was to let me rot away surrounded by manure and scratchy hay. That was what I wanted anyway, right? To rot. To fade. To cease existing in a world that didn’t care for martyrs of any kind. Because I would die and dissolve into the earth, and nothing more would be done. Nothing more would be known.
The government would probably release a collective sigh of relief that one more problem was taken care of.
The Prophets would have to disband, considering the one and only target would be gone.
Angel could continue to rule, but for what? She would indeed be all powerful, since there was nobody else like us, and I would be out of the picture.
So why do it? Why give her that advantage?
Simple.
I was tired.
Not the eye-drooping, head-bobbing kind of tired. It was the fatigue you felt clear to your soul, engraved in your bones, screwing up your entire system. The kind of exhaustion that warped your psyche and depleted all means of hope and faith. Mental obliteration. Emotional squalor.
Self-destruction.
I knew a person in my old town of Oak. She was just another body in the cemetery, but before all of that—before the Prophets found me—there was this girl.
Her name was Amanda Biscotti, which everybody always thought amusing because biscotti was something you bought from the local store and dipped into your hot chocolate during the wintertime. She was a thirteen-year-old genius, much too advanced for anybody to handle. People from all sorts of places wanted to interview her and test her, and see whether or not the genius girl from a nothing town in Virginia was a hoax. Everybody was continually impressed and shocked, that she was very much real, and very much intelligent.
Amanda Biscotti was five-foot-four exactly, with blonde hair that reached her waist and chocolate brown eyes. Her body was covered in freckles, her front two teeth were crooked, and she wore wire-framed glasses that were always a bit too crooked on the left side.
At first the fame was a welcome attraction to Oak. Us, not even labeled on a map, finally assuming some sort of importance in the world. Like we finally mattered in the greater scheme of things (though they would matter a whole lot for a completely different reason when I killed them all). This girl was amazing; a prodigy. The leader into the next era.
I never spoke a single word to Amanda Biscotti. The only times I saw her were when she walked by my house before and after school, backpack weighing her down, blonde hair catching in the straps. She drudged with an invisible weight on her shoulders; as though she felt the pressure of carrying her entire town. And maybe she did. She surely was.
Eventually everything became too much, though, as most things did. I realized there was such a thing as bad publicity. Bad coverage. Bad limelight. Everybody seemed to forget she was a thirteen-year-old girl.
Amanda Biscotti didn’t die when I lost control and slaughtered my entire town, because Amanda Biscotti committed suicide.
They found her in the bathroom, an empty bottle of pills in her hand, and an unfinished suicide note in the trashcan.
I thought about Amanda Biscotti from time to time. Never recently, until now. It was mostly during the grueling time with Lana, that I would think about this genius girl who felt cornered, like me. Comparatively, Amanda wasn’t a freak by any means. But she felt that way. When she looked in the mirror and heard people talk, she probably felt as if she didn’t belong. Like the world wasn’t ready for her; couldn’t handle her; didn’t need her.
Sometimes I wished I’d said something to her.
We weren’t so different, Amanda Biscotti and I.
Even at nineteen I held a thirteen-year-old’s innocence and naivety. I was miles better than I had been, but nowhere near optimal standards. Almost the entirety of the nineteen years I’d been alive, nothing but isolation and deprivation contributed to my ignorance.
It was just something I had to accept.
The lock disengaged on the stall door. I rose to my feet on instinct, the bucket wobbling from the sudden shift of weight. Slowly the door pulled outward, revealing none other than my sister, Angel.
And she looked awful.
The thin white dress hung off her frame like the limp drapes at the safe house. Her slightly longer hair was thrown into a sloppy bun, revealing the gaunt, pale sheet that was her face. Eyes sank into their sockets, her mouth was colorless and thin. Her entire frame was a tangle of bones and skin stretched taut over said bones, trying in vain to add enough padding. She looked on the verge of death.
“Revolting,” she said, voice still sharp as always. “I know.”
The hate and anger weren’t immediate. In fact, they didn’t rise above a dull broil that I could easily overlook. Would Angel be the one to kill me? Would she finally end it all?
God knows I just hoped somebody would already.
“You look lovely,” she remarked, leaning against the side of the stall opening. “How unjust.”
I pinched myself, discreetly, to make sure she was really there and not just playing one big mind game with me.
I pinched until my arm was probably blue and purple.
All of it was real
“I find it rather unfortunate,” Angel continued, “that you appear to be the picture of health while I am clearly wasting away.”
There was nothing to say. She knew of my inward state. It just didn’t surface on the exterior.
“How can you stand there silent while we are both clearly dying?” she demanded, spindly fingers curling into meager fists. It occurred to me, then, that for once, Angel didn’t know something. She didn’t know why we were like that; why we were coughing up blood or losing body mass. She didn’t know what to do, or how to stop it, and for once, we were on the same page.
Enemies, but mutually clueless enemies.
“You’ve kidnapped me,” I replied instead, voice dull and toneless, much like I felt. “What do you plan on doing?”
“What I plan or don’t plan on doing is my own damn business,” she snapped. “I simply need you here as a rat.”
“Excuse me?”
“A rat. A lab rat, Ellie. You’re our experimentation group.”
Experimentation group.
Why did that not sound in the least big good?
“Cheer up, it’ll be fun. And then, when it’s all over, hopefully you’ll be dead and the biggest thorn in my ass will be taken care of.”
I wondered if she knew how close I came to being dead. I also wondered why she needed so desperately to keep me alive, when she clearly wanted to shove the knife in my chest herself. Questions I probably wouldn’t receive answers to; not until it was life or death, which was how it usually played out.
“Rex!” Angel called, voice rasping and breaking off at the end. A familiar brute of a man ambled up beside her.
“Here,” he said.
“Take Ellie to the cellar, basement, whatever this place has, and make sure she’s locked up good and tight. Don’t feed her any serums; I need her ready for tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rex grabbed by arm, but I bore my gaze through my twin. “What’s tomorrow?”
Her lips curled into a malicious smile. “You’re trip into hell, Elle-Belle. And I can hardly wait.”