AIQ

Part 4

It was nearly six hours later that the first test subjects arrived. The Lopezes. They came in a large gray military Jeep, with a soldier driving in the front and a second soldier in the passenger seat. Neither strayed their eyes from the road, nor focused on the people in the back. This greatly off put Mrs. Lopez – she was a great hater of silence and unfamiliar places, and this situation was a terrible mixture of both. But Eugene couldn’t be happier. He loved the silence. He loved looking at things, thinking to himself about things, noticing tiny holes or imperfections around the environments he lived in. The ceiling looked like leather, though there were scuff marks that Eugene assumed might have been caused by the tips of gun rifles brushing against it. He looked out the window, which was very clear, giving you a perfect view of the outside world. Nature. He had never seen so much green in all his life. Tall grass and verdant vegetation lived in the foreground of the great forest scene, as sky scraping pines and burgeoning blue spruces stayed in the background. Eugene smiled as he watched the moss sprout off of the variety of horizontally sticking stumps, staining while also improving the look of them. He could recall many of their names – you read a lot of books when you are imprisoned in a small apartment room. Each one was almost perfectly distinguishable from the other in some sort of apparent way to Eugene, though sadly, to nobody else. But the forest and all it’s graceful movements comforted Eugene, and made him feel like it knew he recognized its beauty.

Then it all stopped once his mother started touching his hair, making sure he still didn’t have any food at the corners of his mouth, trying to force his spine to be straight and erect. On the outside, Eugene was a marble statue, unmoving, not showing any problems with this. But on the inside, although he couldn’t say it the way he so desperately wanted to say it, his mind raced with raging images, with curses and words he had held in for far too long. He wanted to tell her: I’m not a baby! He wished he could remind her that he could do this himself, that his hands could still function, that he could straighten and clean and do it all at the same rate of his mother’s picking claws. But he knew that if he tried to push her away, she would just fight harder, and a fight with a woman as stubborn and unapproachable as his mother was an argument nobody could win. So he let her do it to him. After all, the soldiers didn’t even seem to realize there were people in the backseat. Why even try to act embarrassed?

Then one of the soldiers spoke. “We’re almost there. Just a few miles away.”

“Thank you,” Lopez said. She waited, words on the tip of her tongue, hoping a conversation would arise. It didn’t. So she started one.

“It’s a very… secret facility, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So… do any people besides you two know where it is?”

“That’s a positive ma’am.”

“So… then who’s running everything?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t tell you that. Please stop asking so many questions.”

A large metal pole suddenly appeared in the side window, and the car stopped. The man in the driver’s seat pulled out a grey card, opened the door and approached it. At the base of the pole was a glowing red eye. The soldier showed the eye the small piece of plastic, and after a few seconds, a loud monotone beep resounded from it. “Welcome, Sergeant Bass,” the pole said, and on all sides a million laser detectors poised and ready to fire shut themselves off to let the car through.

Bass got back in the van, and started to drive through the long alleyway of trees. Eventually the road lead to a clearing, a small space of empty land where a small, unsuspecting cabin stood. The van came to a lurching stop and the soldiers quickly turned around in the front seat. “Here are your key cards,” Sergeant Bass said. “You cannot lose them, otherwise you won’t be able to enter or leave the facility. Do you understand?”