Voodootown

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Shaunice

The damn things wouldn't die, at least not enough of them.

Shaunice stared down at the mice.  Her father had given her a moderate budget to test median lethal doses of sucrose on the diabetic mice, but they just didn't die fast enough.  After she dosed one and it lived, she took it out of her testing rotation for at least a week to make sure she wasn't polluting her results.  That meant she had to have more mice and the cost was adding up quickly. 

She frowned at the little things, tapped one with a fingertip.  If she didn't show good results, then her father wouldn't support the next two stages of her research, where she would try to replicate proven treatments and finally move into testing new methods of keeping them alive.

But it wasn't working right.  As she watched the mice, she felt the tightness in her shoulders that she knew would spread to her head and be a migraine by dinner.  She hadn't slept at all the night before, and didn't want to sleep, not after that boy Ash had stood in the hallway and talked to her.   He had told her exactly what he had said in her dream.

She tried to focus on the mice and on her results, but the ache made it hard.  Instead, her mind kept returning to Ash.  Two days ago, his nose had been broken in a fight and she had set it.  He had gone on then about how he had a friend that no one could see, that everyone had one, even though they couldn't see it.  He had said he would make sure that she saw his friend set things right for the broken nose. 

That night, she had dreamt about it.  And not only had she remembered the dream, which was rare enough, but it had been vivid, much more so than any she had experienced in years.  In it, Ash had fought James, with the two of them throwing things at each other.  Ash had trapped James into something that was some kind of transparent cage and then everyone had gone to a large meeting.  In the end, Ash, not looking quite like himself, had looked at her and said, "I want to believe."  And in the dream, she had wanted to.

When she woke in the morning, she had thought the whole thing was an example of the power of suggestion, that his strange assertions had provided fodder for her subconscious brain.  But then she had walked by him in the hallway and he had repeated the phrase exactly as she had heard it in the dream.

She knew of shared delusional disorders, but didn't think she was open to the influence of a possible schizophrenic, especially to messages about belief.  Shaunice didn't want to believe.  She didn't want to believe in shared dreams or in boys who could plant ideas in her brain. 

The mice waddled around in their cages.  They held what she wanted: knowledge about something certain, something measureable and repeatable. She wanted nothing to do with belief, no matter how she had felt in that dream.  And yet the mice weren't dying like they were supposed to.  She had already exceeded the established median lethal dose and didn't know what to do next.

The biology room door swung open.  She looked up, saw it stand open a long moment, then swing in slightly as the janitor backed in with his wheeled trash bin.  "Hey, Shaunice," he said.

"Michael," she said as she looked back down.  Normally, she'd try to shoo him away.  He checked in on her mice for her before he left at night, but he also liked to talk and she didn't want to get caught in a conversation with him.

"How are the mice today?"  He left his cleaning gear by the door, walked over and looked over at the mice.  Shaunice leaned back and frowned at him as he drew in close.  She saw his finger move over the animals, pointing as he counted.  "All still here, huh?"

She didn't answer and, after a moment, he looked up at her.  He frowned.

"Research not going well?" he asked.