The Death of Wendell Mackey by C.T. Westing Read Free Book Online

turned to the windows, still nailed shut. They may have helped his mother sleep better at night, keeping the street rats at bay, but glass could still break. The apartment door was metal and had a dead bolt, but it was old and sounded weak when it closed, and hinges could only take so much punishment. They would get through that in seconds. Which was why he needed the gun.
    Won’t work.
    He only worried that when they came, his hands might not be able to work it properly.
    Won’t matter.  
    The fingernails weren’t just blackening, they were loosening. If he played with them too much, more would come right off.
    Is that blood on them? It’s gotta be blood.
    Seeing his own blood had always made him squeamish. Seeing someone else’s—like a bloody nose on the playground, or blood drawn from an arm on television—curdled his stomach. He was shy to a fault, every bully’s whetstone, never having done more than stomp an ant, but his eyes weren’t lying, and blood on his nails meant that he had the ability to spill it. Wendell began to wonder how many people he had left writhing on the floor during his escape. He remembered at least one, the lab tech, the last person to speak to him in the institution. He cringed to remember it, his arms moving as if taking instructions from another brain. But had there been more? And had there been blood? No scratching, no tearing, at least not with the lab tech, but still, his eyes weren’t lying.
    Three days out, he thought.Tomorrow there could be changes in his skin, his chest, his skull, anything. Or there could be nothing. Or he might not wake up at all. And the thought of death was somehow comforting. At least in death there was a guaranteed outcome. There was finality. There would be no worries, no pain, no one chasing him. Bliss in darkness. There would be nothing.
    He picked up the pencil from the table. Nothing , he wrote, letting the pencil trail off down the table after writing the g .
     

     
    Wendell stared at the pencil trail meandering down from the g . He heard the clock above the sink ticking as minutes became an hour. Then two.
    Not waking up , he thought, I can’t bank on that . Wishful thinking. Of course, I could…
    No. Healthy people didn’t think about that , didn’t even let that enter their heads. But he did.
    But I could…
    He shook his head. No, it couldn’t happen. He couldn’t let it happen. Still, the idea persisted:
    I could make sure I didn’t wake up , he thought.
    But doing that , ending it all, meant never learning why it had all happened to him in the first place. And it meant no vengeance delivered to those who had done it, duly earned by him.
    Vengeance would come. They would get theirs. But finding the why , the purpose for it all, was almost too difficult to fathom. He snickered, thinking it all ridiculous. Mad scientists had squirming eyes, facial tics, and labored away in dungeons. But Wendell wondered if that was all that separated the mad from his former employers. Theirs was just a different kind of madness. And ultimately, it all led to nothing. There was no purpose.
    Still, would they have invested money, time, and manpower for nothing?
    They, he thought. Unit 200.
    He first saw the title—he assumed it was their title, Scotia and the others that he was encountering daily—while being wheeled on a gurney out of one of the institution’s elevators and onto a new floor. Unit 200. It was printed on yellow signs with black lettering that hung on both sides of the hallway, a hallway that looked too long to have ever fit into the institution’s building, which brought to mind the terrifying possibility that he was now on one of the underground levels. On that first visit, the nurses wheeled him into an examination room where Dr. Scotia and Dr. Thane gave him a once over, peering into his eyes and ears, feeling his glands with their hands, examining and writing on his chart, and then curtly motioning for the nurses to wait