"PATIENT ZER0"

"Drain"

Chapter Five

"Drain"

"The small burst of energy that came from the device Ms. Bao has created has burst, the extraction team should prepare for extraction," Cameron heard a muffled voice order from outside the small room she had been confined to. Her ears were ringing, and already she felt weak and nauseous. Slowly crawling off the metal slab they called her bed, She made her way to the smaller room in the corner that was a bathroom. She stumbled to the toilet, sensing her lunch was coming up. Her whole body felt like jello, her head pounding. She heard the door of her cell open up, and felt herself being lifted away from the toilet and strapped back down to her bed while they removed the remnants of the tiny charge from the wall. They were all wearing hazmat suits, poking and prodding her, taking samples of her blood, testing her body's responses to multiple things. She felt so weak she couldn't tell what they were calling out to Caspian - but he was eagerly scribbling everything onto some paper. Weary eyed and tired, she found herself passing out - like she normally would if she had a really bad fever. As she drifted, she found herself terribly afraid - missing things she hadn't yet known like the sway of tall weeds in the summer...

Would she never see more than this cell ever again?

If she did make it out of these tests alive, could they ever just let her go?

They'd never....

They'd sooner kill her, and everything she knew. Her mind soon wandered to the family she'd never see again, and she felt something moist slide down her cheek before she finally drifted off into sleep.

*****

By the time we had completed all our tests, Cameron had long since fell to the clutches of sleep. All our tests proved all that we expected, her white blood cell count was down and her immune system was weak, but her room was sterile and none of her organs were failing. The exposure had her looking ghostly pale in color, giving her a dead feel as she slept. The results were not as promising for her father. He was stronger than I had anticipated, so his white blood cell count seemed higher than his own daughters'... it was troubling, and means I may have to expose him to twice the amount of grays his daughter was exposed to, leading to the possibility he'd have inaccurate data. Sighing, he strode back to his work station and thought of what to do. He couldn't risk inaccurate data, the men and women above him would legitimately have his head if he screwed up again. He had hoped the results would be the same if given the same doses, but he would have to deal with the differences for the sake of his data. Maybe the levels of the effects will eventually meet at the same place for both of them, who knows??

My assistants waited till they had both fallen victim to sleep to remove their restraints, leaving clean water and some food on a bedside table after their rooms had been easily decontaminated by a filtration system another renowned scientist had invented with the hopes to aid china and india with their severe smog issues. The water and food was therefore safe to eat for when the two woke. Thinking back to the way Cameron had acted earlier, he couldn't help but feel guilty.

His parents would be disappointed, that much he knew - but he was doing this all for Elizabeth. Each encounter with the two subjects he was provided, he had to convince himself in some sick way that what he was doing was right. It had to be, he needed to convince himself in order to guarantee Elizabeth's survival. And to him, absolutely no one mattered more. That was all it took, all it took to bend him back into shape. Some stupid naive little girl was not about to change up his entire life - he wasn't about to risk everything for her. He couldn't put himself through that, not when he was sure Liz was alive...