Manuel is asleep on the one bed in their room. They have been here for two years now, ànd they only leave when a scientist comes with bodyguards who drag them out and take them for medical testing. They know that they are in some kind of medical facility and they have been injected with many things over the course of their bleak stay. Adam is convinced that they are prisoners, and Manuel says they are guinea pigs when he isn’t sleeping. He is paranoid that he will become one of the zombie people they had encountered years ago now.
They are prisoners of Dr. Roy Worthington who assumes that they have special powers like their friends who had destroyed most of the experiments inspired by his work in North Carolina. He’d kept them both drugged in case their powers allowed them to escape and he tried to question them, but they had been uncooperative. He didn’t want to torture them, he had ordered one of their beds removed over a year ago and that was the harshest punishment he could bear to administer; the men seemed unfazed.
Adam is always plotting his escape. They are locked in what amounts to a patient room in what appears to be a hospital, and if not for all of the guards who keep watch on them, he would have already drug Manuel out through a window or something. The guards are armed and quiet and he assumes that they are either very well paid or very afraid of making a mistake, because they are not interested in talking to him at all. He knows that he has to take advantage of his outdoor meetings with Dr. Worthington. He liked to speak with them in the meticulously maintained gardens behind the facility where they were held; he thought it allowed for conversation rather than interrogation. He always asked them how they were holding up and then he would recount some fantastical encounter that had involved a member of the group with which Adam and Manuel had destroyed the zombie people. And then he would ask for information. He does the same today.
“You got faster guns than I hear is natural,” Worthington says. “Two of them on either hip, like a cowboy. And as impressive as that is, you got a friend who can float and turn green. Not to mention the one that gets bigger. If you just tell me about them, we can let you go. Y’all law enforcement, we don’t want to hurt you. We just need to know why y’all were doing what you were doing.”
“I feel like we told you that already,” Manuel says, obviously exasperated. They both wear hospital gowns that tie in the back, one of the guards had suggested it to demoralize them, and Manuel is upset about it. “You are a fucking wacko doctor and we the good guys trying to save innocent people.”
“But where did you come from? How did you all come to know about us?”
“We live in the neighborhood you fucking with!” Manuel yells and he feels the hand of a guard on his shoulder to remind him that he is being watched.
“And everyone you call a friend would say the same?” Worthington asks. He stares back and forth between them.
Adam is plotting. They sit on two benches that face one another in an area of the garden that is enclosed in high, neatly trimmed bushes. There is a clearing and a paved walkway that leads out to the larger garden. There is a guard behind each of the benches where they sit, both armed, and there are two more guards pacing back and forth in front of the walkway. Not to mention that whatever drugs he is on, he feels like he is on a one second delay, sluggish and moving through life like he is under water.
But Adam is plotting.
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