Free MirrorWorld by Jeremy Robinson Page A

catches up. Clear fluid from a burst IV bag pools around him. The second, a security guard, twitches madly as the two metal prongs buried in his chest deliver a hundred thousand volts into his nervous system. Before he falls to the ground, I drop him with a punch. It’s a low blow, hitting a guy who’s being shocked, but I need him unconscious, and the stun gun won’t do that.
    His twitching body slides along the wall and collapses. Moving quickly, I drag both men inside the room and shove them in the bathroom. I don’t find any sedatives in the cupboards, so I bind and gag them with spare sheets, take the guard’s radio, and wedge a chair beneath the bathroom door’s handle.
    With so many people around, it must be morning, which means my time is short. I leave the room and move quickly down the hallway. Assuming all the unlabeled doors lead to more examination rooms, I jog down the hall, reading labels as I go. None sound interesting until I get to a set of double doors labeled DOCUMENTUM .
    It’s Latin.
    What the hell? I know Latin?
    Documentum means “proof” or, more loosely, “evidence,” which is the same word etched on my plastic pendant; I don’t think they’re related, but it sounds like what I’m looking for.
    I shove the doors and find them locked. I swipe Winters’s keycard across the panel next to the door. It turns green, and I hear the lock click back. I shove the doors open, rush into the space beyond, and stop in my tracks.
    For the first time in my one-year memory, I’m shocked into silence.

 
    10.
    Dead eyes stare at me. Hundreds of them.
    The vast room is split in two. Both sides contain large numbers of ten-foot-tall, four-foot-diameter glass tubes full of green fluid. The tubes are lit from above and below, exposing the contents while leaving the rest of the room, which is black from floor to ceiling, in darkness. Serial numbers and bar codes are etched into the glass of each tube.
    I step inside the macabre space and let the doors swing shut behind me. On the right side of the room, the hundred or so specimen tubes are empty. But on the left … The remains of tortured men, women, and children are suspended in the green liquid. While I know they feel no shame in death, their naked display is repulsive. But their nudity isn’t the worst of it. Each and every person met with a violent and untimely end. Some have multiple stab wounds. Others were shot. A few were eviscerated. I see broken bones, some protruding from the skin, and caved-in skulls. It’s a menagerie of violent ends.
    That woman I found. Shiloh. Will she end up here, too?
    Will I?
    I shake my head. Not likely .
    The sound of voices pulls me deeper into the room. A rectangle of white light glows, revealing a door on the back wall. Lit by lime-green gore, I walk toward the door, Taser in hand.
    I look at the dead faces as I pass, my anger growing like a supervolcano. Who were these people? Mothers. Fathers. Innocent children with long lives ahead of them. I see different ages, from babies to gray-haired grandmothers. A variety of nationalities are represented. It seems like a perfect sampling of the entire human race, and since we’re in New Hampshire, where only 7 percent of the population isn’t gleaming white, many of these people must have been collected from around the country, if not the world.
    While in SafeHaven, I heard stories from some of the older, higher-functioning patients who’d spent time at the New Hampshire State Hospital, which was basically an asylum for the “insane and feeble-minded”—like SafeHaven, but with a deplorable moral fiber. One of my many counselors, a young woman with high hopes, told me the lurid details, which was against all sorts of rules, but she, like most people there, could see I was “normal,” aside from a complete lack of fear.
    Hundreds of “patients” were sterilized as part of a statewide eugenics program. The hospital carried out lobotomies, electroshock, and