American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,226

in her shoulder. She barely has time to look and see the hand holding the syringe that’s buried in her flesh before things go—

“Motherfu—”

—dark.

Mona sees light. It is a dull, flat, soulless light. Her eyes don’t work immediately—the general feeling she has is akin to what it was like directly after she had dental surgery in high school. Her body’s so numb it’s hard to tell, but it feels as if she’s sitting upright in a chair with her hands behind her. Then she feels someone massaging her left upper arm.

“So she has to be alive for this?” says a voice.

“Well… I can’t say.”

“Then what can you say?”

“I can say that there is no added risk to her being alive.”

“And you feel there is added risk if she isn’t?”

“I would say so. But I am just a doctor. I do not specialize in these matters. Please remember, this is your idea. But if this should fail, then we will need to attempt… with more material. Provided she’s secured…”

Someone shakes her hands. There’s the dry gasp of rope, and she feels something around her wrists.

“She’s secure,” says a man’s voice.

“Then I do not see a problem.”

“Go ahead, then.”

So she’s tied to a chair, and since they didn’t check any other bonds, it must just be her hands. Before she can think more on this, something sharp bites at the inside of her elbow. She sits up sharply and shouts, “Fuck!”

She blinks, and sees the blurry forms of many people standing around her in a dark room, but her eyes still aren’t working that well.

“See?” says a voice. “I told you she was strong.”

“Will it matter if her blood has sedatives in it?”

“I do not believe so. We only need an amount of her matter to form a connection to one of the alternates. Same to same, if that makes sense.”

“Like red to red and black to black when you’re jumping a car?” asks a voice. Mona recognizes this one: it’s Mrs. Benjamin, and she sounds like utter shit.

“Shut up, you. I didn’t bring you here to talk.”

Mona’s eyes manage to focus further. She’s surrounded by a dozen or so people, men and women: the men wear sweaters with collared shirts and ties, and several of them are either holding pipes or are actively smoking them; the women wear poofy-sleeved dresses and high-heeled shoes, and some of them even have aprons on. Their faces are white and bloodless below the overhead lights.

“The fuck is this?” Mona asks in a slow, slurred voice. “Fucking… Leave It to Beaver casting call?”

“What does she mean?” asks one of the men softly. His eyes flutter. Mona grows a little more alert, and realizes all their eyes are fluttering, of course. But there’s something huge and shining behind them, something hard to see…

“She means nothing,” says a voice beside her. “She’s drugged.”

Mona successfully makes her head loll to her left. She sees a man attaching a tube to a catheter in her arm, right on the cubital vein. He’s definitely a doctor: not only is he wearing old-fashioned OR scrubs, but he also has a moustache, small glasses, and a black pipe. Every part of his appearance is meant to suggest I am a doctor! Yet when he looks up at her, just the briefest of glances, she sees his eyes fluttering too.

“Motherfucker,” says Mona, “I hope you know something about human anatomy.”

He averts his eyes. Standing behind him is the woman who looked in on her in the trunk of the car, but now she looks queerly androgynous in a powder-blue suit and a white panama hat.

Something in Mona’s drugged brain sputters. Remove their bodies like clothes…

“You’re that asshole I shot on the highway, aren’t you,” she slurs.

The woman in the panama hat looks at her dispassionately, then turns to look down the room. “Is it ready?”

“Ready enough,” says one man, who looks a lot like a Hardy Boy all grown up. He’s standing in front of that shining thing Mona had trouble making out… but now it’s a lot easier to see.

It’s the lens. She’s in the lens room at Coburn. She can see their reflections in the lens’s surface, somehow cleaner and purer than they are in reality.

“Oh, shit,” says Mona. “What the hell are you going to do with th—” Mona’s arm goes cold. She hears fluid falling nearby, almost exactly the sound of someone pissing in a bucket. She lolls her head back, and sees that the tube snaking out of her