The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [99]
I returned more seriously to LeBov’s request that I change work assignments.
“And is one medicated for this work, poking around in that hole?”
LeBov registered this shift in my resistance. I saw the shit in his eyes, the shit that appears when he knows he’s getting his way. It filled his eyes and some of it spread onto his face, and even though he had blackened teeth and a festering wound on his neck and his cough seemed like the worst, scariest cough I’ve ever heard, he beamed with pleasure.
“Sometimes, in theory, you’d be given the serum, but it’s going to depend on some issues surrounding supply. Supply and priority.”
“Well, count me out of these medical trials. I can do my work without speaking.”
“But you can’t,” said LeBov. “Seriously, are these really the conditions that will allow scientific progress, working mutely in a mute room with mute fucks wandering by who can’t tell you what the mute loser down the hall is even doing, or even how what you’ve just done, what you’ve tried to pass off as adequate research, is more mute loser work that is only a setback for everybody? Don’t you find it hard to be productive when you can’t communicate with anyone?”
LeBov paused, pretended to think.
“Oh, right. You’re not productive at all.”
The chemical from the child serum left a taste of berries in my throat.
“I won’t be fed this liquid,” I said.
“Won’t you? Without this liquid you wouldn’t even be able to tell me you don’t care for it. You see the problem, I’m sure.”
I remained silent.
About this liquid, LeBov remarked that the children were not too pleased to part with it. What resulted, after enough of this liquid had been withdrawn—I got no specifics—was a person not quite a child, not quite anything. LeBov said that there might be abilities, or talents, for these children post-procedure, but that these were still, and here he paused, undiscovered.
“Maybe you can write stories for them. They can still read. I mean, we don’t take away their immunity to language. But their comprehension levels are quite low. What we’ve found, though, is that people with very low comprehension levels, people who fail to understand things, did not get sick so readily when the toxicity first hit. If your wife got sick faster than you, it means she understood more. Does that ring a bell? Some pretty smart people died instantly. It was nice. It cleared space for lots of less intelligent people to take over.”
“Can’t you duplicate this liquid in a lab?” I asked. “Make a synthetic version?”
“Have at it,” he said. He winced, gently touched the bandage on his neck.
I wished he meant it. Instead, I was having at something they had all agreed was futile. I didn’t want that anymore.
I asked who else was using this liquid, what the other side effects were.
“What are you, on the team now? Part of the inner circle? Do you think you can really be a LeBov? If you want access, and information that doesn’t even fucking concern you, then do what I’m asking, fix the motherfucker for me. Get some secrets out of that hole before I rip someone’s face off.”
The exertion triggered something in LeBov and he fell to the floor, coughing. Around him crowded his technicians, and by wagon one of them dragged in something covered by a blanket. It wriggled under there, groaned. A wet spot soaked up through the wool.
I thought of Claire waking up tomorrow morning thinking This is the day, stepping over the badly slept bodies of her cohorts, and then getting led down hallways and corridors and through rooms and out, finally, into the sickening light of the courtyard, where she could finally, she just knew, run to Esther and hug her close, and even if they could not