Chapter 34 #2
She bent over Alex, checking his pulse, opening his eyelids.
His pupils were sluggish and fogged, his skin pale and clammy.
She pulled out the pressurized IV lines.
His wrists and arms were a dark purple, and his right forearm was severely swollen, indicating the pressurized drugs infiltrated his tissues.
“Get me a fresh line. I need blood drawn. I want fluids in him yesterday. And someone cut the damn heat in this room. He’s overheating.”
One of the techs moved faster than the others, hands shaking as he clipped a sensor to Alex’s temple. The screen lit up with chaotic vitals—oxygen saturation tanking, BP crashing, heart rate like a broken engine.
“He was stable when he returned from the procedure,” the tech mumbled.
“He is dying,” Sybil snapped. “When did he urinate last? What’s his temperature?”
“Last urine was twenty-five ccs yesterday. Temperature is 103.4.” He turned over Alex’s hand. “Dr. Vance, I can’t get the IV,” the tech said.
“Get me a 14-gauge. I’ll try for a line in his jugular vein.” She chewed on her cheek and inserted the needle with practiced precision, drawing blood before taping in the IV.
Bray handed her an oxygen mask, which she pressed over Alex’s face, adjusting the flow. He coughed weakly. A breath shuddered through him.
Alive. Barely.
Monroe watched with disapproval but didn’t interfere. For now.
The two techs exhaled—subtle relief rippling across their tense frames. Sybil Vance had wrested the subject away from death, at least for now.
She stood, blood on her gloves, eyes hard. “If you keep pushing like this,” she said coldly to Monroe, “you won’t have a man. You’ll have a corpse.”
Monroe tilted her head, unfazed. “Then we’ll move to Plan B.”
Sybil’s eyes narrowed. “Monroe, you’ve pushed boundaries since you took over Gideon’s program. Do you even know what the original mission was?”
“You remind me every day. It was to find a cure for the mental woes of pour souls who had tried everything else to cure their depression,” she said mockingly.
“Then poor Gideon was caught…” She pressed her hands together as if praying, her voice sing-song.
“And when you took over,” she approached Alex on the stretcher, “our government wrested it from you and turned it into a program with a real cause. Our subjects will be a perfect blank slate where they can be programmed to do anything.”
“Your subjects either die or become zombies. There is nothing left to program.”
Monroe’s gloved finger ran down Alex’s torso. “A younger version of him would be the perfect warrior. But even now, he fights to survive. Once I wipe away all memory and conscious thought, he will be perfect. Why we didn’t think to take stronger subjects into the study eludes me.”
Dr. Vance shuddered. “Monroe, you were a gifted scientist when you came to the facility. But your lust for power and control has polluted all intelligent thought.”
Under the mask, Alex Marcel drew another ragged breath—alive but broken wide open. His identity was fracturing, his body failing, and the only thing keeping him tethered now was pain and the echo of a voice he could no longer name.
But somewhere deep inside, a flicker still burned. Not memory. Not thought.
Will.
And that... wasn’t gone yet.
“Bray, get him to Med Bay 2. Full isolation. I want all system access firewalled except mine,” she said, already peeling off her gloves and reaching for a fresh set.
Bray nodded yet stared at Monroe. He released the brake and began pushing the stretcher. Alex didn’t stir. His face was ashen, jaw slack, a rivulet of blood trailing from his ear. Oxygen hissed softly over his mouth, fogging the mask.
One of the techs hesitated. “Monroe, should we log the protocol override?”
“Log it under my authority,” Sybil snapped. “And if you have any problem with that, you can explain it while writing Alex Marcel’s death certificate.”
The tech fell silent.
Monroe said nothing. She stood in the shadows of the room, arms folded, unreadable. But her silence wasn’t surrender. It was calculation. She was deciding how and when to retake control.
Bray wheeled the stretcher out. Sybil followed, walking fast, already shouting for cold compresses and a Foley catheter. She didn’t look back. If she did, she might’ve seen the faintest twitch at the corner of Monroe’s mouth.
A smile.
Med Bay 2 was sealed. Dim. Quiet.
Alex lay on the central gurney, doubled bags of fluid flowing into the catheter in his neck. His chest rose and fell in short, struggling intervals. A tiny amount of urine was being produced. His vitals had stabilized—barely. Enough to keep him from dying. Not enough to keep him from breaking.
Sybil stood beside him, monitoring the EEG herself. His brain activity was spiking in irregular bursts. Not seizures—resistance. Flashes of memory, sensory overload. A mind trying to outrun reprogramming.
She leaned in, speaking to him in a low, steady voice, not a clinical voice but a personal one. “Alex… listen to me,” she said. “They’re trying to rewire you. But your mind’s still pushing back. That’s good. That means you’re still in there.”
He didn’t move. Didn’t open his eyes.
But his hand twitched.
Just once.
Sybil noted it and kept it to herself. She reached down and placed her hand lightly over his wrist. “You hold on, Alex. Because if they turn you into something else, they win.”
Two floors above, Monroe stood at a long glass window, watching the surveillance feed of Med Bay 2. Her arms were crossed, her face expressionless.
Behind her, Bray Maddox stepped in silently. “You let her pull him back,” he said flatly.
“I let her think she did,” Monroe replied. “Letting him die now would be a waste. Vance still believes she can save him. That gives us time.”
“Time for what?”
Monroe turned, her eyes cold and sharp. “To finish breaking him properly.” She handled a vial of neon-yellow liquid.
Bray said nothing.
Down in the med bay, under sedation, Alex Marcel’s fingers twitched again—this time curling weakly toward a memory.
A name. Not his own. Charlotte. He was still fighting. And they had no idea how far he was willing to go to win.