Jenny Plague-Bringer(97)
Jenny looked around the concrete lab. They hadn’t bothered to provide her with anything to read or a TV, but she had plenty of past-life memories to watch. This place crawled with them. She wondered if she was in the exact same lab where they’d tested her so many times. She looked around at the concrete floor, but she didn’t see any bloodstains.
* * *
Juliana felt a wave of relief as she stepped into the lab. No animals today, just more beige machines full of dials and knobs. They hadn’t made her touch any more animals since the goats, and she hoped they’d decided not to do that anymore, after seeing how much it upset her. She didn’t mind letting them monitor her and swab samples from the gory lesions she summoned to the surface of her body, and photograph her naked as Dr. Wichtmann kept insisting, but she had resolved not to kill any more animals no matter how much they pressured her. They would have to adjust their testing to that. Maybe they already had.
She stood near the exam table and looked up at the windows high above. They’d dimmed the lighting on the observation deck, so the windows looked like black mirrors. She had no idea whether anyone was watching her.
A few minutes passed, and she grew more and more uneasy. By now, the biologists and doctors should have been here in their gas masks and elbow-length rubber gloves, poking and prodding at her. The room felt unusually cold today, too, and she shivered in her light dress and folded her arms in around herself.
A steel door opened, and two uniformed S.S. men in black gas masks entered, rolling a surgical gurney. A man was strapped to it with wide leather belts, his mouth bound with a cloth gag. He lunged his shoulders and hips uselessly, grunting and screaming against his gag. It was hard to tell his age, because his face and head had been carelessly shaved with a straight razor, leaving them cross-hatched with cuts and scrapes. He was stripped to his stained underwear, and deep lash marks were carved all over his body. It was clear he’d been tortured, and starved as well, his ribs jutting out through his skin.
The S.S. men rolled him to the center of the room, then turned and marched toward the door without a word to her.
“Wait! What’s happening?” Juliana asked.
They ignored her and hurried out, locking the door behind them, leaving her alone with the tortured man squirming on the gurney. His head flopped toward her, his eyes wide, and he made some desperate pleading sounds against his gag.
“Please hurry.” Dr. Wichtmann’s voice sounded over the intercom.
“Hurry? What do you expect me to do?” Juliana asked.
“You know what we expect you do,” Wichtmann replied.
“You want me to infect him?”
“Death is preferred.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Do not fear, Juliana.” Kranzler’s deeper voice spoke now. “This man is a convicted criminal. He will die whether you are the instrument or not.”
“He is?” Juliana looked at the suffering man. “What was his crime?”
“Treason.”
Juliana had been hoping to hear he was a raper of women and a murderer of children. “What kind of treason?”
“I cannot disclose that. Rest assured, he is the lowest sort of mongrel, barely a man at all,” Kranzler said.
“We are on a schedule,” Wichtmann’s voice added.
Juliana shook her head, backing away. “I can’t.”
“You can,” Kranzler said. “We are in a war, Juliana, of civilization against barbarians. In a war, you must kill.”
“I’m not at war with anyone,” Juliana said. “And I’m not German, so if you guys are planning a war, that’s your problem. You have to get this man a doctor right now!”
“You do not give orders in my lab!” Wichtmann snapped. “Apply the touch.”
“No!” Juliana folded her arms and walked to the door. “Let me go. Let me go home. I want to return to America, right now. I’m not staying here and doing this.”
There was a muffled conversation, as though someone had covered the microphone, and then Dr. Wichtmann spoke in a resigned voice: “Testing is concluded for today. You may return to your quarters.”
“I don’t want to return to my quarters, I want to get Sebastian and leave this place. And that’s all I’m going to do.”
“Juliana, please relax yourself,” Kranzler said. “We cannot make transportation arrangements immediately. If you still wish to leave in the morning, we will happily put both of you on a train.”
Juliana took a deep breath and tried to calm down, but the bleeding, screaming man wasn’t going to allow that. His face and voice would echo in her mind for the rest of her life.