The Woodlands

The white coats were swarming around her. Completely ignoring my presence. Clara turned towards me, her eyes wide with fear and adrenalin.

Harsh Voice appeared, looking displeased but not panicked, and said, “This is not right, she’s only thirty-six weeks. It won’t do, we haven’t prepared her yet. Take her to theatre five. I’ll meet you there.” She adeptly unhooked Clara from her various machines and ripped a sheet of paper from the frantic, scribbling machine they’d wrapped around her stomach. As she studied it, the other people wheeled her out of the room. Clara screamed again. “Do something about the noise,” Harsh Voice called after them. Mid-scream there was silence. She stormed after them.

I felt pure terror. For my friend and for myself. The pain she was in seemed u

I felt a hand touch my own. I snapped my head around wildly. I hadn’t noticed that Apella had stayed behind. She stepped back a little and said, “It’s ok, Rosa. They won’t hurt her, she’s too important.” This was the first time Apella had spoken to me and I knew she was taking a big risk talking to me now.

“What will they do?” I asked, the pitch of my voice escalating, feeling desperate and unhinged with every passing second that I didn’t know where Clara was.

“I don’t know.” Apella looked at her feet. She looked to be close to my mother’s age. Her neat, blonde hair swung at her shoulders as she stared down at the ground, avoiding my gaze. She seemed to be bracing herself for a tirade. But I wasn’t angry. She wasn’t the culprit. Like me, like Clara, she was probably here against her will, recruited after the Classes and brought to this place. She had already risked too much for us.

A man popped his head in the doorway. Apella quickly withdrew her hand. If he saw it, he overlooked it.

“Semmez is asking for you.”

“Ok. I’m coming.” Apella left the room, her timid footsteps barely seeming to touch the floor as she padded quietly away.

So that was Harsh Voice’s name. I think I preferred Harsh Voice to Semmez.

For two days I waited. Apella never came to check on me and I didn’t hear what had happened to Clara. I hoped Apella hadn’t been reported or discovered. Clara must have gone into labor that morning. Had she delivered the baby? What would they do with her after it was out? I started to think about the possibilities and shut myself down. These people were capable of horrible deeds. Clara could be, no. I wasn’t even going to think it.

I felt the fog rising but it was a fog of my own making, a cloud of fear and hopelessness, blanketing my brain. The problem was there was too much time to think. I kept staring over at her side of the room. I was like one of her dolls, a perfect facade on the outside, wooden and dead on the inside. I wondered how Clara was feeling, if she was even alive. If they had taken the baby away from her, what grief she must be feeling right now. Her spirit seemed so tied to that thing. It nourished her in this hell of a place. Without it, I wondered what would be left of the girl I had come to love.

At night, I felt the leech writhing inside me. I came to think of it as a monster. I dreamed it was tearing its way out of me. Claws scratching at my skin, pulling me apart as I screamed in pain. I woke up in the middle of the night with someone’s hand over my mouth, a hand that smelled vaguely of earth and smashed herbs. “Shhh!” the dark figure whispered. “You can’t be dreaming in here. The others don’t dream.” I nodded my head and he removed his hand. “Who are you?” I whispered into the dark, but he was already gone.

The next morning, they wheeled her in. She was alive, drugged up to her eyeballs, but definitely alive and still very, very pregnant.

I waited eagerly for the people in white to leave so I could ask her what had happened and it seemed like forever. They were fussing over every detail, making sure everything was in order. They brought me my di

Once everyone had left the room, I tried to wake her, to no effect. She was heavily drugged, and would only open her eyes for a second before falling back asleep. Her dark lids fluttering and closing like they were a leaden weight, too heavy to lift. I decided to let her rest and try and talk to her tonight, at lights out.

The day went by uneventfully. Although, again, the white coats looked more stressed than they had been before. They looked tired. Tired and unhappy.

When I got back from exercise, Clara was sitting up but there were people all around her again. I was led back to my bed and given di

Lights out.

Clara’s voice was crackly as she spoke, “I know what you’re going to ask me but I didn’t see very much.” I couldn’t see her face very well but it sounded like it was an effort to speak.

I wasn’t going to ask her that, well, not at first anyway. I held my tongue from saying anything defensive and asked, “How are you feeling?”

She laughed. “Oh, wonderful,” she said with unfamiliar sarcasm. “At least the baby is safe.”

Luckily, she couldn’t see me rolling my eyes in the dark. “Yeah, there’s that I guess. I’m glad you’re safe, Clara.” I gulped and said the words that would give me away, “I was really worried about you. What happened?”

“I don’t really know,” she whispered. “All I remember was that horrible pain and then being rushed out of here. They took me up, Rosa. There were real windows, a real sky, not just pictures of the real thing. I don’t think we are that far underground. We got in an elevator and the numbers read B6 to Ground. They covered my mouth to stop me from screaming and then jabbed me when I got to the top. When I woke up, the pain was gone and the baby was fine.”

I absorbed this new information. Critical information. If we were only six levels underground maybe there was a way to get out. If there were elevators maybe there were stairs, maybe… my mind was ru

“What else? Anything else you can tell me?” I said urgently. I think she sensed my desperate tone when she replied.

“Calm down. There was something else.”

“What?” I was barely keeping my nerves contained. I felt like I was jumping out of my skin.

“There were other girls up there. Most were pretty dopey. But there were two that were out of control, screaming and carrying on. One of them yelled ‘how could you do this to me?’ The other one was just crying hysterically. She was so scared. I wanted to run to her and hold her. Rosa, I think they were the girls that moved into my old room. Someone said that these were the crazy ones from room 112. That was my room.”