Extracted

The Chair

~~~

I concentrate hard on what the instructor lectures us on during physiology, scrolling ahead in my text book loaded on the screen, trying to understand the concept of manufacturing people from test-tubes or cloning. With my new and improved brain capacity, it’s not that difficult to understand.

Harvesting eggs and sperm is the easy part. Manufacturing an artificial womb up to par to maintain a living and growing human being is much more difficult, yet the school seems to have mastered it with the tanks and whatever tubes they have pumping nutrients into the pink fluid.

The instructor quiets and I look up. The guards and the lady in the lab coat who came and took Sterling and the others to the lab have come in. Apprehension ripples across the air.

“David. Winifred. Katherine.”

I jolt. It’s my turn. I look around the room at wide scared eyes. Some kids are sloughing back, relief that it’s not their name called out, loosening rigid spines.

At a desk in the front of the room, a short boy stands. The back of his neck is turning blotchy red.

Heart pounding, I rise as well. I’m shaking so hard I’m afraid I might topple over. Winifred follows behind and we three shuffle toward the door. We walk down the hallway quietly. Everyone else is inside the classrooms.

Cecelia claimed the lab was no big deal, just a few blood tests, so why is a cold perspiration coating the back of my neck?

The woman and the guards don’t speak to us, don’t offer any words of comfort, or tell us this is nothing to worry about, just standard procedures.

David and Winifred are just as scared. I wonder how many times they’ve been called to the lab before and if they have intimate knowledge of what to be afraid of.

That thought doesn’t make me feel any better.

We go into a corridor I haven’t been in, the one that leads away from the infirmary. I glance at the door as we pass and wonder if Jeremy is still inside. He wasn’t at breakfast.

We turn down that hallway where there’s a row of elevator doors. The woman punches a button and the doors swish open. Once inside, she has to use a keycard to make the elevator move. Down, basement level. I watch everything she does.

My mouth is dry. It’s hard to swallow. My heart beats louder than the hum of the elevator car, moving downward.

I flinch when the doors slide open.

The basement looks like the inside of a hospital, bright and white with rooms behind windows like the hospital nursery when Dad lifted me so I could see Jeremy wrapped in his tight little blanket. I swallow hard.

These rooms don’t hold newborn babies, but examining chairs with straps and stirrups and rolling carts with drawers and medical machinery, stethoscopes, and blood pressure cuffs beside them.

“David, you’re in here.” The woman indicates the examination room on the left and the kid’s Adam’s apple bounces in his throat, but he turns on his heel and goes into the room. I watch to see if he sits down in the chair, but the woman snaps out my name. “Katherine, this room, please.”

I feel myself walk into the small room, though my mind is screaming to run. My breathing grows labored and the room begins to spin. I have to pull it together. Just some routine tests, nothing more. Nothing sinister. They have to make sure their test-tube bodies remain in peak health, right? This is an experiment after all. Science. There has to be tests to quantify any results.

A team of medical staff descends on me. Surgical gowns and masks and latex gloves. Three women and one guy. Before I know it, I’m stripped bare of my track suit—so much for privacy—wrapped in a loose hospital gown that opens in the front. I pull the two sides together and hold it in front of me.

“Sit,” one of the women says and I climb up onto the examination chair. It has a split down the center where my spine rests. The chair is vinyl and cold on my skin through the thin material of the gown.

My legs are positioned in the stirrups and then the staff begins strapping me in. There are a lot of straps. Two on my legs at ankles and thighs. Two hold my arms on the arm rests at wrists and upper arms. A wide strap runs across my hips. Another above my chest and there’s even one placed across my forehead that holds my head immobile to the headrest. I can’t turn my head to see if David across the hall is getting the same treatment.

I am well and truly immobile, completely vulnerable and scared to death. My chest moves up and down against the strap.

It’s not so bad at first, just as Cecelia said. They draw blood and the bloodsucker is good at it, quick, there’s barely a pinch in my arm. They swab samples from my mouth and roll the x-ray machine over me and a million flashes on all sides and hook electrodes to my head and chest and let the EKG machine roll for about twenty minutes while they leave me alone, strapped down.

I tense when I see one of the nurses lift the duck billed speculum into my line of sight. I’ve only been to the gynecologist once, but I know what that’s for. I try to be brave about it, but I cry out at the sudden intrusion, my feet flexing against the foot stirrups. Would lubrication or warming the equipment kill them? The pelvic exam and swabbing are mercifully quick and before I know it, the examination chair is spun and I’m looking at the floor, held in place by the tight straps.

I watch the nurse’s white-clad legs and shoes move around me, my muscles clenching as I wait for what’s about to come next.

I understand what the split in the chair is for now as sharp white pain stabs into my spine. One side of my body seizes up, going into jerky spasms that rip through my tendons.

I scream. I’ve never felt pain like this. It goes on and on, shooting freezing acid through my spinal column. My body is locked so tight I doubt I’ll ever move freely again.