We All Fall Down

|21

     My eyes flutter open, allowing me to see a white ceiling. Slowly, I sit up, not wanting to make any sudden movements that may make me nauseous.

      To my left is Marcus laying there, his eyes fluttering open, and beside him is Tara, her eyes only twitching, not opening yet.

      "Marcus," I whisper, my throat dry. "Wake up Tara, we need to get back to our testing, and we need to establish something here, we need to establish a life."

      "Okay," he says and turns to his left and shakes Tara awake, making her glare at him, giving him an annoyed look.

      "What," she snaps at him, looking around. "Oh," she says and gets off of the tables we are laying on. "Well, don't just sit there, let's go."

      "Okay," I say and get up, Marcus following me. "Let's go,"

      "Follow me," Abby says, walking through a door across the room from our tables. "You guys were only out for about six hours, so we need to start on your tests," she says and motions for us to follow her out of the room.

      She leads us to the room that we were in before, allowing Marcus and Tara to go to their testing places, then leads to me a treadmill with a heart monitor and blood pressure machine beside it.

      "Okay, we are going to hook you up to this, and then you are going to run as long as you can," she says and wraps a black cuff around my right arm, then attaches a stethoscope to my chest. "Alright, now go ahead and run for as long as possible."

      "Okay," I say to her as she turns on the treadmill. I begin to run, looking at Tara and Marcus, then the machine. The machine is quietly beeping, showing numbers that look random to me, but Abby is writing down.

      "You're doing great, keep on going," she encourages me.

      I run for another fifteen minutes before starting to get tired. My legs slow down, Abby writing down everything that I do until I stop running and start to walk.

      Abby turns off the machine before speaking, "Good job, now we need to take some blood samples, and then if you want we can take that red streak out of your hair."

      "Okay and I want to keep the streak," I say to her, remembering the time when I got the streak, when they injected me with that red liquid. I'm still not sure what the liquid was, but it hasn't done me any real harm so I guess its fine.

      "Okay," she says and walks me over to a chair. She wraps a tourniquet around my elbow before inserting a needle below it. The tube connected to the needle turns red as my blood flows through it.

      "Alright, you're done," Abby says after filling up two tubes of my blood. "Take this," she says and hands me a silver pill. "It has nutrients in it, you have to take it every time we take your blood."

      "Okay," I say and swallow it. The pill doesn't have much of a taste besides the fact that it is sweet, almost like honey.

      "I will let you rest now, we will decide what job would be best for you and let you know in the morning," Abby says to me and looks at the door.

     I walk outside of the door and down three hallways until I find our room again. I don't bother to take a shower, instead I just lay down and go to sleep.