Whiteout (Book 4): The City of Light, page 14
part #4 of Whiteout Series
Tendons in my arms twanged, bones crackled, muscles ripped, and—
The light came back. High above, it burned brighter than before.
It had stopped rotating and now settled onto us. Even from a couple hundred feet below, its beams warmed my skin.
Before us, the gates rattled on their tracks, making a sound like a screeching beast. When it opened wide enough, what looked like a speedboat drove over the white surface. My eyes expanded and, shaking, my arms locked into place.
Please don’t be a mirage…please don’t—
Two people emerged from the vehicle. They wore heavy suits, and their voices sounded like they were being filtered through a breathing apparatus.
“Shine ‘em!” said one while the other pointed a light in my face. I closed my eyes and tilted my head away.
“They’re good,” said the other.
“P-p-p-puh-please,” I whispered. “She h-has a b-b-baby. She has a b-b-baby!”
They floated along the snow toward us. Was I dreaming? Pinching myself was out of the question because I had no free hands.
They took Mia from my arms and set her inside the boat-thing.
It’s real.
“Are they dead?” one asked in its echoey voice.
“She has a baby… She has a baby… Please…” I continued, my body convulsing. I was going into shock, I thought.
Either that, or I was dying.
“Leave him,” the other man said.
“What?”
“Leave him. He isn’t gonna make it. Bringing him in ain’t worth it.”
Please, I mouthed, no longer able to force the frozen air in my lungs to form words. Please… She has a baby…
She has a baby…
“Nah, I don’t want that on my conscience.”
“Then fuckin’ grab him. I’m freezing!” This figure turned and disappeared into the boat, mumbling, “Berretti’s gonna be pissed.”
Please…please…please…
The other person looked my way for an eternity. I could practically hear the gears turning in his head as he weighed the positives and negatives of saving me.
Then, finally, he moved…only the snow likes to play tricks on you—especially this snow—and I wasn’t sure if he was moving toward me or not.
I collapsed before I found out, and something other than the usual dark that came with losing consciousness swarmed my vision.
I saw not darkness, but an endless white.
7
The City
Although I came close, I hadn’t died.
I woke up in a windowless cell with no shoes or socks on. My inner arm was sore, along with the rest of my body. A bandage was wrapped around my elbow. Beneath this bandage was a cotton ball. I ripped it off.
Someone had drawn my blood while I was unconscious. I didn’t like that.
A lone light bulb hung above my head, buzzing faintly. I got up from the bed I'd awoken on (not much in the comfort department, that was for sure), and approached the bars. I leaned forward and grabbed them. They felt as cold as ice, but after what I’d gone through getting here, the temperature of the steel was a breath of fresh air.
Pressing my face into the small spaces between the bars, I tried to look around. Unfortunately, the angles were no good, and other than a dim glow to the right, I saw nothing but darkness.
“Mia!” I tried shouting. My voice was hoarse and scratchy. I needed some water, and, at the very least, a blanket. I cleared my throat. “Mia!”
No answer.
My legs felt heavy, and my chest burned. I limped back to the bed and sat down, hitting the thin mattress like a sack of bricks. The sudden movement sparked a flare of agony in my midsection. Then I became acutely aware of how bad off I really was. It was kind of like when you notice a paper cut on the tip of your finger for the first time; once your brain knows it’s there, it sends all sorts of pain signals to it. My grandma always said a paper cut was worse than a wound in need of stitches specifically for that reason, and I thought she was more right than wrong.
I sucked in a deep breath of the cool (but not icy) air, and I grabbed the bottom of my shirt. It wasn’t frozen like I had expected, but it was still wet from the snow. Slowly, wincing, I took it off.
Parts of my stomach were beet red, as if I’d been burning in the sunshine and not freezing in the snow. Other parts had taken on a darker, almost purple color. Namely around my lower abdomen and obliques, where the ice had packed under my top. The beginnings of frostbite.
I ran a finger over the darkest part and felt nothing. My hands were red too, but that was mostly dry blood from when Mia reopened the burn scabs, and I still had most of the feeling in my fingers.
I sighed with relief, letting a slight smile spread across my face. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I was out of the snow. I scooted back, intent on resting against the cell wall. This sudden movement, however, reminded me of another body part in desperate need of checking. A trio of body parts, in fact. My shaking hands now went to the button of my jeans.
“Oh God,” I whispered. My neck creaked as I tilted my head downward. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”
You have to do it.
That internal voice was right. There are very few things in this world more precious to a man than the things that get him in the most trouble. If you don’t know what I mean, I’ll tell you. I’m talking about the family jewels, the twig and the berries, the ol’ sausage and eggs.
So, my fingers undid the button, then they made their way to the zipper and pulled, but just as I started stretching the elastic band of my underwear, someone cleared their throat.
I jumped, hastily set my hands in my lap, and twiddled my thumbs. I felt like I’d been caught masturbating or something. In reality, I didn’t even know if I still could masturbate.
A woman in a winter coat stood on the opposite side of the cell door. She held a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other. She couldn’t have been more than forty, yet her eyes—a bright green color—possessed the tired look of someone who’d seen too much in too short a time. Everyone still alive shared that same feature, I think. Her hair was a sandy blonde, and her cheekbones were sharp.
She smiled shyly. There was a small gap between her two front teeth. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything…Grady, is it?”
Seeing her as fit as a fiddle, dressed in warm clothes and smiling from the other side of the cage, provoked a fresh rage inside of me. The whole frozen genitals situation dissolved from my mind. I didn’t even have a chance to ruminate on how awkwardly funny it was until later.
“What the hell is going on?” I said, voice no longer hoarse but demanding. “Where’s Mia and her baby? And why am I locked in a cage?”
“Yes, yes, I understand you have many questions.” The woman tapped the clipboard with her pen, clicked it, and peered up at me. “I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability, but I need to ask you some of my own first. Please be honest. Being caught in a lie results in automatic banishment, and sometimes, in extreme cases, death.”
I stood. My legs were still weak, but I didn’t let that stop me from marching to the door and slapping my hands against the bars. “Fuck that! You answer my questions!”
The woman shuffled backward, eyes wide. Her shoulders slouched like she was trying to turn inward on herself to escape, reminding me of the monster who had taken on my mother’s likeness in the tunnel. A sudden flash of pity stole through me. I was angry, yes, but I wasn’t like this. I prided myself on the ability to keep calm in the roughest of situations, and if this wasn’t a rough situation, then I didn’t know what was.
I took a deep breath. “Okay. Just answer the one: Are Mia and the baby okay?”
“Y-yes, they are in stable condition for now. But for the time being, they remain in quarantine.” I opened my mouth—more questions—but she talked over me. “Don’t worry, they are receiving the best care we can provide.”
My tensed muscles relaxed a bit.
“May I ask you my questions now?”
I turned and raised my arms, rested my palms on the back of my head, and peered up at the concrete ceiling. There was a dark stain up there that looked like Jesus. “Yeah, go ahead.”
“Your name?”
“Grady Miller.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Height?”
“Geesh, I don’t know, close to six feet. With shoes, I guess I’m—”
“This isn’t an application for a dating app, Mr. Miller. I need your best estimate.”
“Six feet.”
“Weight—”
“A buck ninety before all this. Now? Probably one-seventy, one-seventy-five. Do you need my social security number and mother’s maiden name too?”
She smiled again. “No. Have you been in contact with any of the entities outside?”
“Entities? That’s what you call them? That’s very…proper. But no. If I had, I wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with you, would I?”
“Not always the case. Our studies show that—”
Footsteps echoed down the dark corridor, cutting her off. She spun around, the clipboard clutched against her chest, and stiffened—in fear, it seemed.
A small figure emerged from the shadows. This man had the face of a fifty-year-old, a few wrinkles, but the white hair and salt-and-pepper beard (mostly salt) of a man much older. His skin had an olive tint.
“Now, now, don’t go spilling all of our secrets, Dr. Hart.”
Hadn’t Ramsey mentioned a woman named Dr. Hart? Something about bright green eyes…yeah, I remembered him saying that, and her eyes were the greenest I’d ever seen.
The woman, Dr. Hart, sidled away, and the man advanced before stopping inches away from the bars. I thought of asking him what the iron smelled like but thought better of it. He studied me like I was an alien specimen. He then turned to Dr. Hart and grabbed the clipboard from her limp hands. Squinting, he read what she had written before he interrupted our little powwow.
“Grady Miller.”
“Yeah,” I said. The man’s face was punchable, and judging by the crookedness of his nose, he was no stranger to a swinging fist. I fought my anger back down to a manageable level and met his dark eyes without flinching. “Are you the one that needs my social and mother’s maiden name?”
He chuckled without humor, the sound almost robotic in its delivery. “That’s quite a good one, Mr. Miller. Were you a comedian before all of this? We could certainly use some entertainment around here.”
“I’m afraid I’m not much in that department. My friend Stone, though—he was voted the funniest boy in our eighth grade class back in the day.” I raised my eyebrows. “Is that why I’m locked up, because you’re gonna force me to be the town fool?”
The man shook his head slowly. “No, we have plenty of those already. But I assure you, this is just precautionary. We’ll get to that later. For now”—he stuck his right hand through the bars—“I believe a proper introduction is in order.”
I stared at his hand the same way he had stared at me. When he saw I wasn’t taking him up on his offer, he withdrew it.
“All right… Well, I’m John Berretti, the man in charge around here. MIC for short.”
Berretti.
I knew that name. Ramsey had warned me about this guy, and he was the reason the men who'd rescued us from the snow almost left me behind. Now I guessed he wanted me to thank him, and I might’ve had I not been locked in a cage. It’s hard to be polite when you’re held against your will, half-naked and suffering from frostbite.
“Well, I’m not being totally honest here, am I, Dr. Hart?” Berretti said.
Doctor Hart shrugged, never meeting Berretti’s eyes.
“I guess you could call me one of the men in charge here.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Now let me out so I can go see my friend.”
Berretti’s smile faltered and fell into a frown. “Unfortunately, I can’t do that yet, Mr. Miller. We still have to run a few tests on you for confirmation.”
“With my permission, right?”
“Yes…and no.”
“And if I don’t want to do your tests?”
“Then, I’m sorry to say, you’ll be banished, Mr. Miller. We had an…incident here about a month ago that has caused us to up our safety protocols.”
I smirked. “Yeah, I heard about that. You were the one keeping the monster in a cage, right? Were you the one who let it out too?”
I can’t say Berretti ever had much of a sunny disposition throughout our first meeting, but if he had even a hint of one, it evaporated as soon as my words left my mouth, and his frown changed to a snarl.
“If you wanna stay alive, Mr. Miller, you’ll go through with the tests. If not, then your ass is back out in the cold where you belong.”
With that, he performed a whirling about-face and left. A few seconds later, he snapped his fingers, and after offering me a pitiful smile, Dr. Hart followed.
There wasn’t much else for me to do but wait. So I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
An entire day must’ve passed where no one spoke to me. Every few hours or so, a young man brought me food and water, ointment, and fresh clothes. At first I refused to do anything with the items, thinking I was making a stand, but then the hunger and thirst caught up to me, and I stuffed my face full of whatever happened to be on the plate and gulped down whatever was in the glass.
Besides a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I didn’t know exactly what it was I ate. The last meal I had in there consisted of a brown slop sprinkled with bits of mystery meat, dull-colored vegetables, and two pieces of stale bread to sop it up with. Prison food is what it was, but hey, it was steaming and appeared semi-edible, so I ate it. I didn’t care if the mystery meat was chicken, beef, or rat. Hell, I would’ve chowed down on some tofu if that was the only thing on the menu.
Having given up, I decided to go all in. I stripped naked and examined the ointment. It came in a gray tube with no markings on it. I sniffed at it, thought it smelled like paint thinner, and hesitated. The guy told me it was for the frostbite, but that was all he said.
Currently, the frostbitten parts of my flesh were already starting to blister and peel. It was bad and I hoped it wouldn’t get much worse, so I figured I had nothing to lose. I smeared the gunk all over. It burned like fire, and I had to fight the urge to wash it off with what remained of my water, but then it stopped.
After a few hours with the ointment on, I noticed an improvement. A minor one, yes, but with what my lower abdomen looked like, minor improvements went a long way. The worst part of all this stretch of time was not knowing what happened with Mia and Monica.
And the loneliness.
Stuck in a cage, hearing nothing but the howling wind, I wasn’t only a prisoner of the City—I was also a prisoner of my own mind.
Then maybe half a day later, the door rattled open and jerked me awake. Through bleary vision, two large figures approached in what looked like spacesuits. One wore a gas mask, showing only his eyes; the other wore a helmet with a tinted visor. I didn’t recognize their voices as human when they spoke. They sounded like twin Darth Vaders.
“On your feet,” Gas Mask said.
“What?”
“Stand up!”
“What’s going on?” I was more surprised than angry, though believe me, the anger eventually came.
Gas Mask turned toward Tinted Visor. “He’s not going to cooperate. Let’s get this over with.”
Before I was able to get another word out, each seized one of my arms, ripped me from the bed, and shoved me against the cage door. I struggled, but it did no good. Cold steel closed over my wrists. Handcuffs, two pairs. The unoccupied end of the bracelets then went around bars.
“I’m not infected! I told you!”
“Can’t take your word for it, brother,” Tinted Visor said. “Nothing personal. Sometimes the blood tests are wrong, so Berretti wants to make certain you’re clean.”
Bullshit. Berretti wanted to torture me, and I wasn’t having that.
When they started ripping my clothes off, I slammed my head backwards. I hit Gas Mask too. The pain exploded at the point of impact and traveled down my spine, but the resulting grunt and cursing from Gas Mask made it worth it.
“Bastard broke my nose! Aw, fuck…hold him, Larry!”
Larry, AKA Tinted Visor, grabbed the nape of my neck and pinned my face against the bars. I heard the air whistle as Gas Mask swung his fist. He connected with my already-sore ribs. I felt them give, but I held my scream of pain back by biting my tongue. I wouldn’t give these guys the satisfaction.
“Keep fighting, Miller, and I’ll break one of your legs. Got it?” Gas Mask seethed.
“Fuck you.”
Larry laughed. “He’s a lively one, isn’t he?”
“Berretti said he would be. You know what? I got a better idea.” Gas Mask grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled my head back, and slammed it against the door. My skull rang against the steel. Warm blood cascaded down my brow and into my eyes. I closed them, but not by choice. All the fight had left me. Now no longer able to stand, I began sliding toward the floor, the darkness edging along my vision.
Their laughter followed me into unconsciousness, and that same laughter echoed around my head when I awoke I don’t know how many hours later. The wound on my brow was patched and I was wearing a ratty hospital gown.
The anger I felt forced me out of bed, but the headache brought me back down. So I slept.
On the third or fourth day—I’m not sure which—I met another man. He knocked on the bars, can you believe that? He knocked on the bars like a house guest knocking on the front door.
I said nothing, only glared at him. The pounding in my head had eased, but it lingered enough to stop me from picking fights.
The guy was tall and skinny, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. I pegged him to be in his sixties. I could take him, I thought. Probably. Then again, he also looked like he had a mean streak, like he was once a great athlete back in the day, and if needed, he could call on that dormant ability and use it against me.
