Free The Soul Collectors by Chris Mooney Page B

the phone to call someone on the outside. They refused to bring her a newspaper (although they brought her celebrity rag mags in droves and said she could read anything she wanted; she had asked for, and was given, Jane Austen’s complete œuvre ). The TV in here had cable but they had blocked out all the news stations. They refused to tell her what she had been infected with and why they kept drawing her blood and shooting her full of drugs. Orders, they said, from the man sitting high on the mountaintop, Sergeant-Major Glick.
    Even more infuriating was the fact that no one would tell her when she’d be released. She was still showing no sign of infection. No nausea. No problem swallowing and no problem breathing. Well, it did hurt to breathe, but that was caused by her ribs. There was a lot of talking about her lying down and resting, and for the first few days she had complied.
    Not one single symptom and yet they were keeping her imprisoned here, and refusing to explain why.
    She wondered what time it was. There wasn’t a clock in here.
    A lot of things weren’t in here. A lot of things.
    That was going to change. Right now.
    Darby yanked back the rough white sheets and scratchy wool blue blanket, sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She didn’t hop off, just sat with her fingers digging into the edge of the mattress, waiting for the dizziness to pass. It always took its sweet goddamn time about leaving, and when it finally did she had to deal with how her head felt afterwards, this throbbing cement block on her shoulders that kept screaming at her to lie back down – a side effect, she assumed, from the pain meds. The shotgun blast had fractured not one but three ribs, tearing a considerable amount of cartilage. Thankfully, the damage ended there. Her lungs and spleen had been spared.
    The dope they were giving her, though, had another, more serious side effect: it clouded her memories. Some were fuzzy; others were, well, black holes.
    She had no problem recalling the details of everything she’d seen and heard inside the Rizzo house. And she remembered, quite clearly, what had happened in the woods behind the old couple’s home and what had happened after she’d been locked inside the mobile trailer’s stainless-steel quarantine chamber, bumping into the smooth, cold walls when the trailer got moving, driving her, the elderly couple and their grandson all the way back to Boston’s BU Biomedical lab. She remembered being escorted inside some sort of plastic-looking tube and into a painfully bright room of white tile, where two women dressed in biohazard gear stood by a gurney. One gave her another injection as the other informed her she had to go through a second decontamination process, this one more thorough. The sedative would make her relax and help with the pain. Both women removed her scrubs and strapped her down into the cold gurney. The last memory Darby had was one of staring up at the ceiling’s humming fluorescent lights, watching as they whisked past her, blurring together, growing brighter and brighter.
    Whatever had happened after that was lost.
    When she woke up, alone, in the hospital bed where she now sat, the first thing she noticed was her skin. It had been scrubbed raw and gave off, along with her hair, some sort of medicinal smell that brought to mind the disinfectant and germicidal solutions used in funeral homes. Nasty odours used in treating the dead.
    She wasn’t dead, or even hovering close to it, and yet they were keeping her locked up inside this quarantine chamber straight out of a sci-fi movie: blue-padded walls, floor and ceiling; stainless-steel sink and a private toilet and shower stall. Anything that left the room – her hospital scrubs, magazines, food scraps and paper plates, cups and plastic utensils – was wrapped and sealed inside a bright red biohazard bag.
    The dizziness, at least the worst of it, had passed. Darby slid off the bed and made her way across the