The Ghost Pattern

…23

Adeline Bernard woke up with a start. Someone moved very close to her, and her senses, hypervigilant, caused her to wake up abruptly. She looked around her, a little dazed, until, within seconds, she remembered her reality.

Captive!

Crammed together with hundreds of others, in what seemed like a large, round industrial area or warehouse, with barely enough room to stand, sit, and lie down, for what seemed now like an eternity. The air, stuffy and heavy with the smell of human waste and sweat, was hard to breathe and brought little oxygen to her thirsty lungs.

Food and water were brought once daily, stale water tasting of swamp and rusted metal, and cabbage or potatoes for food, boiled and tasteless. Prisoners rotated through kitchen duty, having to prepare their own food in precarious conditions. They boiled the cabbage and potatoes in huge pots over an open fire, in a smaller room fitted with a massive stove and a chimney of sorts. Every day, right after the meal was cooked, someone came in and took a large pot of it away. That’s how Adeline knew the doctors and Lila were still alive.

The worst of it was not knowing. Not knowing what was going to happen to them. That, and missing Blake. She missed him terribly. Every time she thought of him, her eyes welled up. Don’t give up on me, baby… I’m still alive, and I love you! The thought of him mourning her death was unbearable. She hugged herself, whimpering, as a tear found its way down her cheek. Don’t give up on me, baby, I’m here!

They were well-guarded, at least two armed men watching their every move from elevated positions on the sides of the huge atrium. The captives were hundreds, against just a few men, but the Russians had machine guns and didn’t hesitate to kill. Probably more would pour in at the first sign of trouble, considering the large number of video cameras hanging from the high ceiling, all with their red LEDs on.

She made an effort to snap out of it and got up. She straightened her dress, thinking how uninspired she had been to wear a dress on that flight. She normally wore pants when she traveled. Pants would have been such a blessing now, when she had to sleep on a cold and dirty cement floor.

She walked around a little, looking at the people near her. They were in bad shape. In the days that had passed, a lot of things had run out, from much-needed medication for some, to hope for almost everyone. But she wasn’t giving up. No. She decided to help the best that she could, by talking to some of them.

She saw the Chinese doctor’s wife and child a few feet away. The mother leaned against the wall, holding her daughter tightly, and quietly sobbing. Adeline touched her arm gently.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“No,” the woman replied with a thick Chinese accent. Her voice was soft and high-pitched, almost like a child’s. “I’m — I’m just scared, scared and tired. I’m scared for Wu Shen more than anything.”

“Your daughter?”

“No. Wu Shen is my husband. My daughter is Yun Tsai,” she replied, a little surprised that Adeline didn’t know the difference. “I’m afraid of what he could do, because of us, because he fears for our lives,” she said, sniffling a little.

“I see,” Adeline whispered. “What about your daughter? How is she holding up with all this?”

“She’s running a fever. It’s better now. It’s Wu Shen I’m worried about…”

Adeline encouraged her a little more, then moved away, aimlessly. She saw the idiot in first class, the one who’d sat in the second row on the flight, and decided to avoid him.

“Two weeks,” she heard him say, “two more weeks and none of this would have happened.”

Curious, she turned and looked at him inquisitively. “Two weeks?” she asked.

“Yeah, two more weeks, and I take possession of my own jet. Two more weeks, and I would have been absent from this party,” he added bitterly, gesturing toward the hundreds of people confined together.

She felt a wave of anger and disgust at the man’s selfishness.

“Ah, shut it, for God’s sake! How can you live with yourself?”

She walked away, not waiting for his reply, and approached a group of people huddled together, talking.

“Do we know where we are?” a middle-aged, overweight woman was asking.

“Someone said this is an abandoned ICBM silo,” a man replied. “Missiles,” he added seeing the woman’s confusion.

“Oh, my God! Do you think there’s radiation here?” the woman asked.

The same conversations, heard over and over again, spoken with different levels of anxiety and desperation. The same questions, asked over and over again, in the illogical hope that they could bring a different answer.

The one question she didn’t dare ask concerned their immediate future. On the day of their arrival, while waiting in line to board the trucks, she’d heard a Russian clearly state that they were going to be used as lab rats.

For what?