To be honest, I didn’t really care where he was leading me, though. Neither one of us had much to lose in that case.
I forced my chair forward, listening to the sound of crunching when I rolled across the floor, as I tried to keep my focus on where Larry was going. He had this weird limp, which had him dragging one foot whenever he wasn’t running. Probably why the fucker ran everywhere. He’d say it was because I was slow but I think he was self-conscious about the weird way he walked.
Once again, he didn’t stop until he was turning a corner that opened up to a large room. I stopped too but for a completely different reason.
“Who the fuck are they?” I whispered out the side of my mouth, my eyes glued to the various metal beds and cages. Whoever wasn’t in one of those was chained to the wall, lined up one after the other.
Larry lifted a shoulder but answered me anyway. “The basement patients.”
“What do they do to them?”
“Whatever they want,” he grunted. “As far as anyone knows, these fuckers don’t exist.”
I should have been horrified at the shit I was seeing as a kid. But the thing was, I’d already seen worse. I was as numb to it as the rest of me was to pain.
“Come on. I wanna show ya something,” Larry said. He was moving again, stepping past the clumps of shit on the floor that I had no choice but to roll over.
“This wasn’t it?” I asked, and Larry didn’t answer me again.
My glare caught on a giant of a guy hunched in the corner. So big I was pretty sure he had to hunch to keep from hitting hishead on the ceiling. He didn’t have any clothes on, likely because they didn’t have any hospital gowns or scrub pants large enough to fit him, and he was holding on to what looked to be a stuffed rabbit missing one of its ears.
“Who’s that?”
Larry peered to his left but kept walking. “Oh, that one doesn’t have a name. Most of 'em down here don’t. Just numbers.”
“Right.” The people who worked here found it much easier to treat us like objects when we didn’t have names attached to us. It didn’t work as well when you were able to speak up and remind 'em. Which was why they liked to keep us drugged out of our minds most of the time.
Larry stopped short when he came to another room, this one full of women and young girls. Some curled up on beds and others crying in the corner. “They just showed up one day. No one knows where they came from. But they ain’t like the others. There don’t seem to be anything wrong with them.”
He grinned and dropped his pants. A few of the girls screamed, and Larry rushed over to clamp a hand over one of their mouths. The older women were already doing the same to the others. “Remember what happens when you make noise,” he whispered into the girl’s ear.
“What happens?” I asked, more out of curiosity again.
Larry pushed his chin out, gesturing behind me. Back towards the large room with all the cages. “Your friend in the corner breaks free… and, well, he ain’t as gentle as me.”
He licked the girl’s ear. She whimpered against his hand but she didn’t fight him anymore after that.
PART THREE
CHAPTER FORTY
CASPER
DAY 1
Iswiped the bag off Bellatrix’s shoulder and ran up the stairs. She huffed and puffed behind me. By the time she made it to the door, I’d already dropped the bag next to the nightstand, jumped onto the bed, and leaned back with my hands clamped behind my head.
“What the fuck was that?” she hissed.
“Me being a gentleman.” I lifted a shoulder. “Carried your bag up the stairs for you.”
“Gentleman usuallyaskfirst.”
“And here I thought women liked surprises.” I grinned.
“Yeah? Well, something tells me you don’t talk to a lot of women.”
“Only the ones I’m fucking,” I said. “But I suppose you’re right. We don’t do much talking then either.”
