Sara shook her head. “Those people, the ones after us, they aren’t from the prison. They’re something else.”
“What are they?”
“Martin called this Plincer’s Island, and the name has been nagging at me.” Sara paused, then said, “But I think I finally remembered who he is.”
Laneesha tried to think about Brianna, tried to cling to sanity by picturing her daughter’s sweet little face, but she couldn’t concentrate over the sounds of her own agonized screams.
Georgia couldn’t move. She thought she might be strapped down, but she didn’t feel any straps. In fact, she felt naked. Naked and lying on a cold table.
Lester’s play table, as that crazy doctor had called it?
No. That had shackles, and was wooden. This table felt like metal.
She tried to open her eyes and, amazingly, she couldn’t. Nor could she turn her head, clench her fist, or so much as moan. Nothing seemed to work at all.
Georgia remembered Lester holding her tight, then the doctor sticking her with some kind of needle. Must have knocked her out. But she wasn’t knocked out any more. She was awake, and aware, and could feel. But she couldn’t move any of her muscles.
Then, abruptly, light.
It took a moment to focus, and then Georgia found herself staring up at Lester, who was leaning over her. She realized he’d opened her eyelids with his fingers.
“Don’t worry, Georgia girl. It only hurts for a little while.”
She stared hard at Lester, imploring him to stop this, to help her get away. He smiled at her, then brought something in front of her eyes.
His camera.
The flash made Georgia’s pupils painfully constrict. Then Lester stepped back, and Doctor Plincer’s face came into view.
“I can’t express, my dear, how excited I am by the opportunity to try my procedure out on you. I’ve experimented on over a hundred people, over the last decade. Not that many, considering the importance of my work. Only about ten a year, average. I’m limited, you see. Not many people visit the island. And those that do, well, I usually don’t have the opportunity to work with them. My, failures, I suppose you can call them, are quite hostile toward strangers. And quite hungry too, I’m afraid. I’m an old man, on a fixed income. I really can’t afford to feed so many.”
She felt the doctor’s hand touch her neck, then smooth her hair behind her ear. From deep within the bowels of the prison, Georgia heard screaming.
“Pardon the bluntness,” Dr. Plincer said, “but you really aren’t much to look at. You do have something about you, however. Something extraordinary. You see, most of the people I’ve had the pleasure to experiment on, they’re normal people. I’ve only had one success with a normal person. True, I’ve only had two successes with sadistic personality types, but the overall percentage is much greater. The military, they used to bring me criminals to work on, but they’ve temporarily pulled the plug on my funding. Busy doing other things, I suspect.”
Doctor Plincer kept his hand on Georgia’s ear. Then he began to squeeze the lobe. Hard. Digging his nails in. Georgia’s eyes teared up, but she couldn’t flinch away from the pain, not even a millimeter.
“The drug used to paralyze you is called succinocholine. It renders you completely immobile. This is necessary, as I’m working with a very precise area of the brain. If you moved, even slightly, you could end up being lobotomized, or having your language center damaged, or your neuron clusters regressed. That would be a waste. Unfortunately, for you, I have to keep you awake for the procedure. The brain is an amazing organ, and it has many different states of consciousness. For this experiment to be successful, you need to be in a beta wave state. Fully awake.”
He moved in closer, smiling. Georgia could smell his sour body odor.
“I’m using a serum. A special serum. It contains, among other things, pluriopotent stem cells. You’ve heard of stem cell research, I’m sure. The bans. The controversy. The ethical dilemma.”
The doctor scratched his chin, and a bit of dried skin flaked off. Georgia felt the crumb land on her lower lip.
“The reason stem cells are so important in research is that they are, in layman’s terms, blank. A stem cell can develop into any sort of cell at all, if properly coerced. Skin cells. Bone cells. Nerve cells. Brain cells.” Plincer shrugged. “Alas, the only continuous and plentiful source for stem cells is unborn babies. Hence the banning and the controversy. But I have an arrangement with a doctor on the mainland, one who specializes in terminating pregnancies. He supplies me with all the stem cells I require.”
Georgia willed herself to move. She had to get away from the maniac. Just a little while ago, she’d been flush with power. Master of all she surveyed. To go from total control to absolute helplessness, especially at the mercy of some crackpot doctor, was infuriating. But no matter how hard she tried, how much she concentrated, her muscles refused to obey her commands.
“Lester is right. This is going to hurt. The only way I can inject my experimental serum to the correct area of your brain is through your tear ducts. My colleagues, the fools, didn’t think it could be done. But it can. I’m going to enhance certain portions of your brain. Make them grow larger. With a little bit of luck, you may soon join my other successes. You may become a Level 6.”
Doctor Plincer held something in front of Georgia’s line of vision. A syringe. A big fucking syringe, with the longest needle Georgia had ever seen.
He can’t plunge that into my eye. Dear god sweet jesus oh no he can’t…
“From what I’ve been told, the first injection is the worst.” The doctor smacked his lips. “The five after that aren’t as bad.”
He raised the needle above her eye, leaning in even closer, the point coming down slowly, methodically, until it rested on her tear duct. It was a minor sting, like a piece of grit caught in her eye. But Georgia couldn’t rub it away. She couldn’t even blink.
Then Doctor Plincer shoved.
The pain was preternatural. Blinding. Explosive. Like her eyeball had burst and her was brain was boiling and it went on and on and ON…
Plincer extracted the needle, sighed, and used his dirty coat sleeve to wipe away some sweat that had beaded up on his bald head. Georgia’s head still throbbed. Somehow, each thought, each sense, had taken on an almost physical manifestation. Words that she cognated felt like stab wounds, each syllable a twist of a knife. Doctor Plincer’s BO smelled like Georgia’s nose was on fire. His hand on her face was a jumper cable attached to her nerves, roasting her alive. Every single sensation, every single thought, brought agony she couldn’t escape from.
Then her vision turned red.
“Good girl. I’ll give you a lollipop later. Let me suction off some of this blood.”
Dr. Plincer held a tube to her tear duct. It hurt worse than a hornet stinging her eyeball, and the sound made her ache like her teeth were being drilled.
“What you’re feeling now is called synesthesia. It’s when each of our senses mixes up its signals on the way to the brain. It’s how someone taking LSD thinks he can smell the color red, or taste a Led Zepplin song. But in your case, every sense you have is activating your pain receptors. And because of that, I’m ashamed to admit I’ve lied to you.”
Doctor Plincer raised another syringe. “These next five injections are going to hurt quite a bit more.”
Tom’s stomach was really making noise now, loud enough for it to be heard above his stomping and crashing through the forest. The smell of cooked meat was intoxicating. The faster he got there, the faster he could stuff his face. Then he could take his meds, go to sleep, and try to enjoy the rest of this mini-vacation before his dumb-ass father sent him to that dumb-ass military academy.