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1 - Before
Kali is five years old when she meets him for the first time.
Kindergarten has begun, and it is one of those things she spends weeks upon weeks dreading. The first week, her mother walks her to school, gently holding her hand and pointing out frequent high-traffic areas to avoid. The walk from her house to school is only five minutes long.
After that first little while, she is practically left to her own devices. It is her first official taste of independence, and she intends to do what she wants with it.
She spots classmates on their own respective walks to school, the building is almost impossible to miss, but it doesn’t take her long to wander away from the beaten path.
At first, its because she wanted to pet a strangers dog. The only time she will ever interact willingly with someone she doesn’t know if its for an animals sake. She has rehearsed the words, “may I pet your dog, please?” in the mirror countless times.
The second time, its because she spots some flowers in the woods, and thinks of picking a few for her mother. They end up wilted and smushed by the end of the day, but her mother still smiles warmly at her and places them on display.
The third, is because she sees it, peeking just out of reach and beyond the threshold of the woods.
Its the ghost town. She can only see silhouettes of abandoned houses, the rich expanse of the mountains in the background. Between her kindergarten class, the place is a hot-spot for gossip, and it is endlessly fascinating to her. The adults don’t like talking about it, which makes it more of a tantalizing topic, whispered words of just what are they hiding there? She’d never wander towards it alone, but she does like looking from afar, and making up her own ghost stories about the place, too.
She stays longer than she’s supposed to, and her mother receives a call that she hadn’t made it to school, and a police officer finds her and drags her out of the woods within the next couple hours. She gets chastised pretty heavily by her mother the next day, so much so she assigns one of the neighbourhood boys to walk her to school the following day.
“You both live close to each other, so get along nicely, okay?” Mrs. Matthews is a kind woman. Her face is framed by brown hair that matches her son’s almost exactly, and she thinks they have the same smile, too. John, because the boy’s name is John, greets her with a smile and an over-enthusiastic wave. He falls into step besides her, and his attempts of conversation are met with silence until they reach the point where she can see the ghost town, and she stops in her tracks.
“Whats so exciting over there, anyways?” His face is dotted with barely-there freckles from time out in the sun, his hands are holding tightly to his backpack straps.
“Can’t you see it? The ghost town?”
“My dad says you can get tey-tanus there,”
“It’s tetanus.” She corrects lightly, and the boy next to her shrugs. “I already got my tetanus needle. I’m not scared of it.” The boy looks conflicted then, emotions she can’t place flashing in his eyes, but she thinks she sees fear.
He leans close to her then, cupping his hand around his mouth to whisper into her ear.
“Um... but there’s ghosts.”
“Ghosts aren’t real,” Kali says indignantly, even if she isn’t quite as confident in that as she seems. “Have you even seen one?”
“No but-”
“If you can’t see something, then its probably not real.” John seems briefly scandalized at this, opening and closing his mouth before blurting out,
“What about air?”
“I said probably.” She defends, and this seems to sate the both of them. The rest of the walk to school passes in relative silence.
He moves houses the next year, and Kali starts walking to school alone.
-
Kali Aimes is twelve years old, and her thirteenth birthday is just a few weeks away.
Thirteen, for all she is told, is something of a big deal. In all of the books she’s read, in all of the movies she’s watched, there is usually a party, decorated with streamers, cakes, gifts, and most of all, there are people there, friends. And it’s not like she has many of those, just people she vaguely knows.
They’re people she’s known for her entire life, yes, it is a small town after all, although she has only ever been referred to by name a handful of times by classmates she’s known since kindergarten. She has been to their birthday parties, when they were too young to begin drifting apart from each other, before friend-groups were formed, and before they started to change, and grow, and get mean.
There is one boy she’d maybe consider her friend, who is kind to her when her classmates are not. Sometimes, if she’s lucky, he’ll say hello to her in the morning, and if she has courage to spare, she will say hello, too.
They used to walk to school together, before John moved to that big manor on the edge of town. She wonders if he still remembers what they talked about before school started. Sometimes they’d take detours just to talk longer. Most of the time it was the ghost town that caught both of their eyes, they’d sit side by side on the ground and discuss one of the many rumours circulating the place, although John was always stuck on ghosts. It was called a ghost town after all. She’d never been able to bribe him into getting closer to it, John always spewing an excuse of dangers, although Kali just thought he was scared.
Even now, without anyone to walk besides, something seems to lure her away from the safety of the sidewalks. The ghost town continues to draw her gaze, although now, she knows its better not to talk about. The adults in town get cagey when it is brought up, and she’d rather avoid the awkwardness. She still likes to wander, although now she does it alone, and she knows there will be places forever off-limits.
She was younger then, before she learned of easier ways to ditch school than simply wandering off. She shouldn’t be clinging onto these kindergarten memories, which surely make her childish. After all, she’s turning thirteen soon.
Her mother asks why the boy doesn’t come around anymore, and Kali is a little too embarrassed to tell her that he has a girlfriend now, even if the both of them try to hide it.
She doesn’t really like it when the two of them together, even if the blonde one, Julie, seems makes John happy. Sometimes she catches her looking at him like something to be eaten instead of cherished, and she feels a little sick. Maybe it’s just Julie she doesn’t really like.
From what she understands, Julie only recently moved into their little town, and she became instantly popular, and Kali thinks it might be because shes pretty. She isn’t particularly nice, but she slotted in right next to John and made herself known. Besides, Kali is much more interested in the little dog she sometimes spots the girl with.
It’s a scrappy thing, she doesn’t know its name but she hopes its something cute. It’s more fur than anything, tiny and barely reaching the top of Julie’s shoe. If she had to guess, it must be some kind of terrier, although she can’t be sure. She likes dogs, even if she doesn’t really like people all that much, she even has a book from the library on them, even if its overdue, and the cover is creased from her backpack, and she doesn’t have much interest in returning it, anyway.
School doesn’t really interest her, neither do her classmates, even if she knows more about them than they do of her. She’s learned its easier to slip away as unnoticeable as she can, making sure she’s in class for attendance before she can leave and roam town as much as she wants to. Its simple for her to sneak into the library and stay in the corner until the sun goes down, then she knows she’s safe to return home without the prospect of one of her classmates spotting her. It’s better that way.
She has dreams of getting away from her town, and moving to a much larger city where getting lost in a crowd isn't a near impossibility. She needs to grow up first, age beyond twelve years old and stop ditching school in favour for the patches of wildflowers and places far out of her reach.
She crouches to pluck a dandelion growing between cracks in the asphalt. She thinks she will ask for a dog for her birthday this year.
-
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Kali Aimes is thirteen years old, and all she can smell is blood.
There are things wedged in her back that sprung out from her flesh like bound wings, writhing and twisting in the air. She couldn’t turn around even if she wanted to, her limbs are moving of their own volition, and her body isn’t hers anymore. One of the appendages in her back makes contact with something, and Kali can hear the crunch of bone amidst the cacophony of screams.
Mrs. Matthews was the first to go, in a shower of blood and viscera, there one minute and then gone the next. She doesn’t know how it happened, but she knows it was her fault. The sounds of pain from her classmates haven’t stopped, and Kali knows there are survivors.
Despite the pain, the smell, and the sounds, she sees her in the middle of it all. Julie Rowe is crouched in front of their teachers desk, head clutched in her hands, but eyes wide open at the carnage. Mrs. Matthews headless body slumps on the ground in front of her, dyeing the ground underneath a red that leaks into Julie’s shoes. The girls eyes are alight with pure, unadulterated glee.
Another classmate's body falls to the floor, and Kali Aimes is no longer herself.
2 - During
She wakes up dead in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar body, with no way to tell what time it is. There are no windows, only a blinding white that stings her eyes.
She doesn’t know how old she is, not anymore, but when she glances down at her hands and limbs, she thinks they’re too small for such a sterile environment. Her hands are coated in red, nails stained pink, and no matter how hard she scrubs at the blood, it clings. Asides from the blood, her hands are unblemished, free of scars and porcelain-like in their purity.
She sits up slowly, shakily. There is a weight against her back keeping her down, foreign in its heft, and she knows what they are now. Chains spill from her back, creaking and jingling with every slight movement. They lay around her like a ring, cold and impersonal, achingly heavy.
She doesn’t remember who she is, or whether she was much of anyone in the first place, but there is a panic that seizes her chest and refuses to let go. Everything is so bright it almost hurts. Has it always been this way?
She thinks there was something important about this day. Or maybe it was yesterday. Something claws at the echoes of her memories, but it is just out of reach.
A coldness spreads its way through her limbs, a heavy numbness. More blinding light leaks out from a crack in the doorway. She closes her eyes, and curls up into the bare-bones mattress she is laid on, and she still sees white. It is just her in there, there is nothing outside, no people, no movement, no sounds. It is the kind of quiet that makes your ears ring.
She thinks of golden retrievers, so gentle and caring that they have been known to take care of other animals, and she cries.
-
She can no longer close her eyes. They’ve been pried open, stapled firmly to keep her eyelids away. She wants nothing more than to reach up and rip them out, although she knows how this will end, and she is a trained dog now.
-
For all intents and purposes, her name is 12. It is what the scientists and doctors bark at her, and it’s what is imprinted in neat letters on the hospital gown she has been dressed in. She is here for a reason, but one she cannot grasp yet, despite her prodding of whoever will listen to her, whoever will let her talk before she is interrupted. All of her words are met with a firm glare. The only familiar face is that mans. He is always dressed in white, like the walls around her. White lab-coat, white mask to obscure his face. The only splash of colour is the brown facial hair she can spy from underneath the mask. The name Matthews is on a tag on his chest, but he will never be anything other than that man to her.
The name strikes a chord in the halls of her memories, but it is too fractured to recall fully. These days, she is too busy imagining his head exploding to think of whatever came before now.
Her days are a blur of injections, drugs, tests, over and over again. She is handled with a clinical coldness that scares her.
She fights back, at first. But that is trained out of her through even more injections that burn, tests that leave her reeling, she is dissected and ripped apart only to reassemble seamlessly hours, days, later. She is too used to her own shade of blood now, but at least it isn’t white. There is no use trying to scrub the blood out, to tear it from beneath her nails.
Her arms are no longer porcelain, they are marred with thousands of little white lines, stretching over her body like needles.
Scatter protocol are the words the doctor loves to use around her. 12, engage scatter protocol. And she does, again, and again, and again.
Even when her body knits itself back together, flesh, sinew, muscle, bone, he is never done.
-
There are days where he grows tired of her. Where she is left to her own devices for hours upon hours.
These days, she finds, are a mercy.
The room continues to be blindingly white, but after so long it fades into normalcy. Everything is white here, the same clinical coldness. If she is lucky, she will spot a flash of pink hair from a girl who follows another doctor around. It is never enough.
She has taken to carving her nails along the concrete walls of her room, shaky lines in the shape of things she thinks she knows knows. If she squints, that one kind of looks like a dog.
-
She was no longer a girl. She was a weapon to be wielded and commanded, a tamed animal that snarls and bites on command but never, ever begs.
How old was she now? Did it matter anymore?
She looks down at her limbs, and wonders when she grew to be this height. When her hair got this long.
Another round of bullets are fired, and they are directed seamlessly, until she reaches her threshold, and her body is torn apart within seconds.
-
“Subject 12,” its that man again. Beard, face, everything, well-kept but oozing with an ugliness just below the surface that she knows is there. He gestures towards her, although he is looking elsewhere. “Its main purpose is bullet redirection, would you like a demonstration, Dr. Dahmer?”
There are two other people next to him, one of of them is an older woman, looking right at her with cold eyes. Her arms are crossed, unimpressed in her gaze and stance. Her hair is cropped short, streaks of grey losing themselves in sandy blonde. She looks bored, hiding behind those silver rimmed glasses are eyebags that have eyebags.
“And just how many bullets can 12 redirect? I really think you’re wasting your time and resources with this pet project of yours. Just terminate it and move on. I get you’re keeping it around because of your little vendetta but its nothing more than a kicked puppy.” The girl next to the other doctor, Dahmer, she surmises, is much younger than the other two. She looks enraptured by the doctor’s words, wide eyes looking a little manic as she writes down something on a clipboard. Her hair is a bright cotton candy pink, and 12 recognizes her from her shoddy dye job and nothing else.
“I assure you, this pet project will all be worth it in the end.” He turns to someone she cannot see and commands, “fire the rounds!”
She does as she’s supposed to until she cannot anymore.
-
The thirteen year old girl inside of her died the day whatever monster inside of her woke up.
She has been trapped here long enough to recognize that a part of her will never come back. There is something inside of her, curled around her spine and alive, granting her things she never even wanted. The chains don’t help either.
Facility members come and go, staff personnel all dressed in white, but that man remains as the only constant she has. Her violent daydreams continue to grow and grow, until whenever she sees him, her vision clouds with red. She wonders if she had this capacity for cruelty inside of her before, or whether she learned that from this place, too.
Memories are elusive things. She can never be sure what is a hallucination or a nightmare, what is real and what is not.
She learns things she probably isn’t supposed to, but at some point she is recognized as more than a thing and not a girl, nothing more than an obedient animal to these people. So what if she hears something personal?
The name Refinoc comes up multiple times, Dr. Matthews, of course, even a quiet mention of Director Maxwell and Dr. Dahmer. She is already intimately aware of what scatter protocol is, and has heard it too many times to count. She learns she is something referred to as a Left Hand, but within her own eyes she is nothing more than a parasite to be snuffed out. She hears too many technical turns of phrases that make her head throb.
She also hears of a scheduled blackout, and the gears within her drug-addled mind begin to turn.
-
Its shockingly easy, all things considered.
She’s outside of her room in record time to see an endless expanse of white hallways, and then its only a matter of time before she is outside. She feels no remorse when the chains attached to her back slice facility personnel in half, ringing with heat and warping the air around her. The stench of blood follows her and 12 revels in it. Their bullets cannot stop her anymore, it has been trained out of her.
She catches a single glimpse of a thick expanse of trees, stretching taller and taller towards a sky filled with smoke. Then the floodlights kick in, and she staggers to the ground.
Her hands come up to weakly block the harsh lights, her limbs forcing her up before she can tell them otherwise. Her eyelids remain firmly open despite her attempts to force them closed, and she cannot see. She can hear and feel the chains tearing themselves through the air like anxious snakes. She picks a direction, and she runs.
3 - After
The woods are loud, 12 learns.
Shouting voices and sirens from what she can only assume is facility personnel ring out from the distance, and despite her current blindness, she steers as far away as she can.
The grass beneath her feels like heaven, and everything around her is so deliriously alive. Her hands trace shapes along what must be trees, and even if she cannot see them she can feel them, prickly and sharp, but not cold and impersonal like the facility walls.
She wouldn’t mind if she died like this, at least she would be away.
-
The voices of shouting quickly drowns into silence, before it is replaced by two, much quieter voices. Ones she doesn’t recognize.
The chains anchored to her back are impossible to keep quiet. Even if they were lifted with distortions, they would still jingle with every slight twitch. So she stops trying to keep quiet, and stalks forward towards the sounds.
“Penny no-” The words sound like they’ve been punched out of him, voice squeaky and whiny. “That’s not, that’s not Sarah.”
“You still don’t trust me?” The other one sounds distant, quiet and not completely there anymore. They’re said in the same tone her own words come out as, when she is permitted to speak. “After everything, you don’t trust me?” A sound of desperation is ripped from the man’s throat, strangled and scared, sputtered reassurances pour from his lips but it is not enough, and the girl continues to approach.
“I know what Sarah looks like.” These would be the last words the girl ever says. She steps a little too close, and she hears the sounds of flesh being torn, the impact of a body hitting the ground with a dull thud. She feels the hot blood splatter against her face, whatevers left of her clothes, and turns in the general direction of the first voice.
“You’ll die out there.”