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Chapter 4
Megan Hart
Collins Creek
Jed doesn’t like the sound of the babies crying. He can hear them even from the other building, wailing inside his head. He’s too big to be one of them anymore. No more diapers. No more crib. No more giant room that always smells faintly of milk and poo. Now he has his own big bed in the dorm with the other kids, and although he misses his mothers, he knows better than to give in to tears. If you cry here in the dorm, you get a beating.
Instead, he clenches his fists tight at his sides and stares up at the ceiling. His cot is hard and lumpy. The blanket scratches his chin if he pulls it up too high, so he tucks it around his belly. The other kids are sleeping, but Jed can’t seem to manage. There’s too much noise, too much going on. If he gets up now, he could go to the monitor, who will give him some medicine to sleep, but it makes his head feel fuzzy and his belly hurt. He tries to fall asleep on his own.
Tomorrow is dedication day.
The fathers have been watching them all since they were babies in the nursery. They already know which ones are special. Who will be dedicated, who will be sent away.
This is Jed’s first dedication time, but he’s heard the other kids talking even when they’re not supposed to. Everyone’s scared about what happens when you’re sent away. The rumor is that you get put into the big fireplace in the barn and made into smoke, and Jed believes it. He’s been able to “feel” everyone at the farm for as long as he can remember. The kids who get taken away after each dedication, well...he doesn’t feel them anymore.
Before he’s even had time to sleep, the lights overhead come on. The other kids shift and squeal, crying out in excitement and fear when the doors to the dorm boom open and the fathers are there in their black robes, their white masks. It’s supposed to make them all equal, but it doesn’t matter to Jed that they all look the same. They all feel different.
The kids are up and in a line, marching into the hallway. One by one, they go into the meeting room. None of them come out. They won’t know until later who’s still left, though of course, Jed will know before everyone else. That’s what he tells the fathers waiting for him in the meeting room when they ask him. He tells them who he can still feel. Who he cannot. They stare at him from behind their white masks, nodding when he points to each and names them.
They feel happy, and that makes Jed feel happy, too. He won’t be burned up into smoke. He gets the special pudding for dessert that makes the world spin around in many colors. He gets to go back to the dorm and his lumpy bed, where he can only lie on his back, laughing and laughing at the funny way everything grows and shrinks.
He’s still laughing when the doors bang open again. More men in black. No white masks. Guns. They kick over the beds, the monitor’s desk. They shout. Most of them feel angry, though one or two feel more scared than anything else, and none of them feel nice.
They take all of the children.
Jed never sees Collins Creek again.
Samantha Janecek had never liked hospitals in general, but she loathed this hospital in particular.
It wasn’t the smells of chemicals and despair, though those clung to her like some stinking perfume she could never quite scrub away. And it wasn’t the bright, unrelenting lights that forced everyone inside to adjust to some artificial internal clock, although they messed with her sleep so much that she hadn’t been able to get more than four hours at a time since she’d started here. More than anything else, it was this uniform.
No scrubs for the nursing staff here at Wyrmwood. Nope, the women had to wear white, starched dresses with Peter Pan collars and a weird belt thing that hit her too high on the ribs to be comfortable. Thick white support stockings, crepe-soled granny shoes. Worst of all, the mesh cap she had to pin into the thickness of her blond hair, which refused to ever stay neatly in the required bun. The uniform was straight out of the late sixties—fitting, she supposed, since the rest of Wyrmwood seemed to have been arrested in that same era. Including the fact there were no male nurses here, only orderlies. They also wore all white, but at least they got to wear pants.
“Morning, miss,” said Nathan through the glass as she showed him her ID card and pressed her fingertip to the panel at the side of the door.
When the green light clicked on, she pushed through the heavy door that slid behind her with a hushed whirr. “Hi, Nathan. How’s it going?”
“Same old, same old.” Nathan shrugged. “Quiet tonight.”
Of course it was quiet. Not only were all the patients on the fourth floor secured in their individual rooms behind soundproof walls, but most of them barely spoke aloud. Some by choice, an elective muteness. Some because they’d lost the capability for speech somewhere along the way. It might’ve been different on other floors, but as she’d never worked on any of them, Samantha couldn’t say.
“Have a good one,” Samantha said as she signed in using the electronic keypad at Nathan’s station.
She paused for the automatic snapshot that would be added to her file, another level of proof that she was who she said she was. That she was here when she ought to be. She’d