She moves out of my periphery. The distance makes it easier for me to get myself under control.
I need three conditions to escape. One—a clear head. I have that. Two—the ability to break out of my restraints. The small pair of clippers I have hidden in the mattress is that. Three—some sort of chaos or diversion to take out the guards around the perimeter. I need a disaster, somebody else escaping, a power failure—something. The perimeter guards were my downfall last time.
I don’t make the same mistake twice.
So I wait. I’ll get my chance. It’s a matter of time.
They can never know I have the clippers. They can never know I’m able to work the drugs through my system. The professor who kept me in that cage said I had a high metabolism. Maybe it’s true. The exercises help me stay clear, though. I know that. “Isometrics,” the professor called them when I’d do them in my cage.
I thought the year that the professor kept me in a cage was bad. Wrong.
The professor would at least read to me, trying to educate me. I would pretend not to hear, not to understand, but the things he read and said were always interesting. I would listen hard, and think things over when he slept.
He hope to educate me and get me to understand supposedly important concepts, so that we could have discussions about how I survived in the wilderness, and mostly, how I got a pack of wild wolves to trust me. He’d guessed—rightly—that they’d let me live in their den.
I would not confirm it. I would tell him nothing.
I felt so lonely, caged up like a savage. Missing the pack. My only friends.
Here is far worse.
They drug me every twelve hours. I strain against my bonds whenever they leave—hard enough to get my blood pumping, to break a sweat. Hard enough to stay clear in the head, ready to kill everyone.
She draws her finger along the shiny front of her computer pad. The screen flashes. Then her fingers are back, a whisper on my arm. I fight to keep my expression dull and lifeless.
She squeezes my arm. Nobody ever touches me like this. I think my heart might explode.
Nurse Zara: “Come on.”
She’s gone. I follow her footsteps down the hall. I track the squeak of the cart wheels.
You develop strong hearing in the wilderness. It’s a form of paying attention, of disciplining the mind. That’s something the professor would say, and I always felt he was right, even though I never said so.
Back when he had me in that cage, he would give me sneaky tests on my sense of hearing and my sense of smell, too. Once I caught on that it was what he was doing, and that overdeveloped senses made me different from people who hadn’t grown up wild, I pretended not to hear or smell things so well.
You can never give people anything. They only hurt you with it.
If I listen hard enough, I can hear birds singing beyond these walls. Bird songs can be the most lonely thing of all in here. But on some days, on the good days, those songs help me to get back there in my mind, and I can almost convince myself I’m running through fields and forests with the sun on my face.
Wheels squeak. Her heartbeat grows fainter. Room 39.
Mitchell DesArmo is in that room. A dangerous man. I follow their conversation. I stay with her all the way through the rest of her rounds.
The farther away she gets with the power of her beauty and her gentle touch, the more control I feel.
It’s a trick—it has to be.
Everything has a rhythm, a pulse. This hospital is a system, just like the forest. Things move. Holes appear. I’ll be ready. Nobody else will be ready, but I’ll be ready. Stillness is an effective way to hunt.
Stillness is how I killed the professor. He thought he could write a book on me. He thought he could make a sideshow out of me. He thought he was educating Savage Adonis—he told me that was the name the reporters gave me when I was pulled out of the wilderness.
The professor thought that if he got the Savage Adonis’s head filled full enough with words and concepts, that I would be his loyal helper.
The professor wanted Savage Adonis’s secrets. Instead he got Savage Adonis’s hands around his neck.
I waited for my moment just like I’m waiting here.
Soon.