Lab Rats

Chapter 1

The long, cold corridor was suffocating as I stood still like a soldier at attention in front of the giant steel door to my room. To my right about ten feet away another boy stood in front of his door, our stances mirror images of each other. Two men in white lab coats and wheeling around a cart were with him. Two more boys were to their right, each spaced ten feet apart and standing beside their own steel doors. To my left was one more. There were five of us, all dressed in the same white collared shirts tucked into white pants, and white sneakers. I didn't know because I could see them; we weren't allowed to look anywhere but straight ahead. If we moved our heads, the tiny chip in the back of our necks, just beneath the skin, would send an electric shock through our bodies. I knew they were there because I'd walked down this corridor and spent hours with these boys in classrooms and research labs, stood at attention with them and memorized who was in which room.. Countless times I'd pressed my ear against the wall and listened as one of them was taken from his room and dragged away to some testing center for "research" kicking and screaming and begging to be freed. Of course, that was back when we were younger. we'd all grown accustomed to it by now.

We were waiting for the two guards to come give us our weekly shot. Usually we only got a pill, but once a week we also got a shot in the forearm, and today was our lucky day. None of us knew what it was for, but at this point the lack of knowledge didn't phase us. We didn't know anything about this facility our lives were confined to.

I heard wheels squeak on the floor as the metal cart started to move and knew I was next. The cart with a tray of sterile-looking vials and syringes, all perfectly laid out straight evenly spaced on it appeared in my line of sight, the fluorescent lights glinting off of it as I tried to keep my eyes trained forward and ignore the dull reflection. Only two vials and syringes were left on it; one for me and the other for the boy to my left. The two men wearing white lab coats and masks stood on either side of it. One motioned for me to give him my right arm and I complied. He gruffly rolled up my sleeve and flipped my arm to expose my forearm as the other one prepared the syringe. I closed my eyes and winced as the sharp needle pierced my skin and dug directly into my vein. The area around the injection site felt frozen as the contents entered my bloodstream, and the icy feeling traveled up and down my arm until it died out into a tingling sensation in my fingertips and the base of my neck. No matter how many times I'd received the shot, I could never get used to the pain of the needle or the ice that permeated through my body in the hours that followed.

Once they finished administering the last shot to the boy on my left, the doors behind us opened, sliding back into the left side of the door frame with a grating sound that made my teeth hurt, and I got a glimpse of the three boys to my right as I went in. We were all mirror images of each other; glimpsing at one another with grim faces and keeping our arms at our sides and our backs straight as we'd been trained to do.

As soon as the door clicked shut behind me, I grabbed my arm and grimaced. After cradling my arm for a moment and allowing the sting to subside, I crossed the floor of my tiny, darkly lit room to my bed and threw myself down. "Bed" isn't quite the right word. It was more of a thinly padded cot that had a slight incline at the top instead of a pillow. It was only three feet wide at most and I used to fall off when I was still a kid. I held my arm in front of my face to observe the puncture wound. There was a drop of blood and I wiped it away, but my room was too dark to see anything beneath it. The icy feeling was fading away from the injection site, but I could feel it already traveling through the rest of my body and I tried to mentally prepare myself for the chills that would undoubtedly plague me through the night.

I dropped my arm to my stomach and sighed, wondering again what they had injected us with, wondering how that, along with everything else we'd been through, hadn't killed us yet.

I'd been here since I was six years old, but I couldn't remember anything from before. They wiped our memories soon after arriving. At least, I assume they did, I don't remember. All I'd had left was the ability to speak English and my motor skills. That had been thirteen years earlier, but I could still remember the fear after I woke up. They had even wiped the concept of humans from my head so all the doctors and nurses and scientists seemed just like monsters. I was terrified. They threw me into a room completely except for five other boys around my age, the same four who lived in the corridor with me and one more, all equally terrified. It helped a little when we realized we were all in the same boat, but the comfort of solidarity did little to ease the fear.

I don't know how much time had passed, it could've been hours or days, but eventually a group of men came into the room to get us. They took us down a different corridor, one I haven't seen since, to an examination room where a woman was waiting for us. It was darker than any other exam rooms I've been in since, and all the technology looked older than the rest of the gadgets I'd seen. We were left alone with her and one by one she gave us a basic examination. Tested our eyesight, our reflexes, our heartbeats and breathing, looking down her nose through her bifocals at her clipboard as she made notes for each of us.. When she finished, she lined us up and explained how things were going to be. We were to call the men like the ones who brought us in "guards," the men who would teach us were to be called "teachers," the men who would do what she called "research" were "scientists," and she was "Doctor Terry." She assigned us each a letter and number. I was D-12. We asked why we were called something different and her hard exterior softened. She looked around the room as if checking to see if anyone was listening, then told us we all had names like hers, "Terry," before, but we weren't supposed to know. She said she'd tell us ours as long as we promised to keep it a secret and never use them.

My name is Peter.   

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Hi! I started this story awhile ago and decided to rewrite it and try posting it. This is just a preview of it, but if it's well received, I'll continue posting! So if you enjoyed it, drop a comment! ^^