The Secret of Zormna Clendar by Julie Steimle (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

solidly at the window in the door. Her hands remained in her lap. She rocked with anticipation of the next intruder and remained vigilant even as the sunlight in the window lessened. Eventually the room grew to a more pitch-like darkness. Soon only moonlight shone in through the glass, and electric light from the hallway.

Also the room started to reek.

It was a nasty smell, including the odor coming from the bedpan which did not have a cover. In all, it was an unpleasant mess she had made. But it had to be done.

When it was getting near pitch dark, the door opened again.

Sharply narrowing her eyes to see who had come this time, Zormna examined this new intruder. Though the light from the hallway silhouetted his figure, she could at least make out an average sort of man, dark hair, followed by another thuggish orderly. This new man wore a lab coat. He was probably a psychologist, though she wouldn’t put it past them to send in an FBI agent dressed as a doctor. The humongous orderly carried in a propane camping lantern and set it in the center of the blood-stained path Zormna had made with her feet. She eyed the lantern. It could be another resource, if they left it. She never did get that broom.

“It is pretty dark in here,” the stranger in the lab coat said.

Rolling her eyes, Zormna waited. It was a new tack. No food, so far. And the man didn’t seem armed. She wondered what they would try this time.

In the lantern light she could see most of this newcomer’s face. Shadowy though. He was probably in his thirties. He was a fair-skinned, lean sort of man. There was an educated look about his posture and eye contact. He also maintained a smile that people probably took as friendly—though Zormna didn’t find anything friendly about it. After all, his fair blue eyes were way too fascinated with her, like Darren Asher’s hungry gaze.

Something familiar about him—possibly the shape of his nose, or the shade of his dark hair, the frosty blue of his eyes—injected intense distrust into her gut. She clenched her jaw. The man gingerly stepped through the muck on the floor, following her path with a smirk, and he sat right next to her on the bed. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

That intuitive distrust churned in her stomach and swelled up into her chest. She shifted her legs away from him, turning her entire body towards the wall. She stuffed her hands (and what she had been fiddling with) between the wall and the bed as if she could hide in the crack between the wall and the mattress.

“You don’t look too well,” the man said.

Ugh. One of these type of men. So much condescension was in his tone. Of course she would not be ‘looking’ well after the time she had! Captured in a filthy alley, thrown into a car trunk, stripped of all her dignity, left starving in a prison cell…and after all that, in the dark light of a smelly room she was supposed to look thrivingly healthy?

“Let me out, and I will be much better,” she said.

The man smirked. “I was thinking more on the lines of food. Aren’t you hungry?”

Zormna rolled her eyes and turned away from him. “I do not want your food.”

His turn.

The man frowned faintly. With a sigh, he stuck his hand into his coat pocket, removing an apple from it. “Then I guess you don’t want this apple. I saved it from lunch.”

Zormna twisted her neck back with as much dryness in her gaze as she examined him carefully. Her eyes went from him to the small red apple in his hand. Was he hiding something else in his other hand? A syringe, perhaps? A tranquilizer gun, maybe. Or another taser for sport? Though, why bother with this game if he had one?

“I know you don’t trust me,” he said, maintaining a comfortable distance between them. “Here, I’ll take a bite out of the apple to show you we haven’t tampered with it.”

He lifted the fruit to his lips, tilted the apple, and then sank his teeth into one side. The piece he bit out, he chewed with a smile. Zormna watched as the juice dribbled down from the corner of his lips. He licked it away before it could run from his mouth to his chin, chewing pleasantly. Turning his wrist, he grinned at her, offering the apple in his hand.

Zormna hesitated.

But he had bitten into it. And the pulp didn’t look discolored or anything. And she was so hungry. Her stomach felt like it was eating itself. Licking her lips, the saliva already built under her tongue.

Cautious initially, Zormna then quickly took the apple from his hand. She lifted it up to the light and peered at the pulp where he had bitten it. No. Definitely no discoloration. Weighing it in her palm, Zormna drew in a breath and nodded to herself. He had chewed and he had swallowed that piece. It had to be ok.

Her fingers curled around the fruit. She lifted it to her lips. Her teeth broke into the crisp skin. Zormna moaned with pleasure. It was so sweet!

“That’s much better, now isn’t it?”

Zormna did not even look up at the man. The apple was too good. Taking larger bites, Zormna devoured the little fruit.

The man in the lab coat began to smile. He started to talk as if they were old friends. She didn’t pay any attention to what he said, biting off pieces and chewing as juice dripped down her chin. She wiped it off contently. The gnawing hole that had been digging in her stomach filled up, if only a smidgen.

“…of course you really should trust people more. All we want is for you to rely on the help we have to offer. Now we only need you to answer a few questions….”

His voice started to get distant. The apple was so nice. Nothing else mattered anyway. Zormna’s thoughts floated in and out as she chewed. She blinked at the shrinking core, thinking it was too bad the apple was not very big. It was nearly gone. The man in the white lab coat smiled at Zormna as she gnawed on the scrawny core until there was nothing really left in her hand.

She sighed, with the core cradled in her fingers…until it dropped from her palm.

Her bent leg slipped off the bed, flopping to the mattress. Zormna slid along the wall until her head rested against the man’s shoulder. Her eyes could hardly stay open in the darkness anyway, blinking as her vision blurred. It was such a pleasant feeling after such a grueling day. But reason crept back into her thoughts as she sat there.

“Drugged,” Zormna muttered as she fell from consciousness. They had fooled her. “Dirty trick. Stinking roach….”

The man in the lab coat sat up, cradling her limp head to shift it off his shoulder. Glancing back at the orderly, his grin grew bigger. “Come on and help me. She is going to be heavy.”

“Silly girl,” the orderly said, crossing the room over to them. “All that fight for nothing.”

“Yeah,” the man that had given her the apple said, his last words etching into the fleshy recesses of her brain forever. “Stupid test. It’s just too bad for her she never heard the story of Snow White.”

*

So much they didn’t know about her—or her kind. Only suspicion. Now they would get the truth and stop basing things off of superstition and fictitious worries.

“Is she awake yet?” the general asked from the back of the room where he had taken a seat. Several contributors to the project had come to watch, he being only one among them.  

“We’re clearing the drug from her system as we speak,” Dr. Holbrooke said, checking the IV tubes in the back her hand and the bag of solution hanging not far above it.

Agent Sicamore didn’t like Dr. Holbrooke much. The doctor always made the FBI agent imagine a Nazi, except the doctor waved an American flag. Ethics to Holbrooke were like neckties to little kids. People made him wear it at important functions, but they choked him around the neck, stifling the awful things he wanted to breathe out. He was the kind of man that was entirely for reinstating eugenics and dissecting living things while they were still alive. But Agent Sicamore had not been allowed to choose his entire team. And Holbrooke, unfortunately, was an expert in ‘this sort of thing.’ The whole psychological game had been Dr. Holbrooke’s, as punishment for destroying his lab cart and the camera in her room.

Zormna Clendar twitched. Finally she blinked her eyes open. Immediately lurching against the restraints that held her down, the small, pale girl stared at the tubes stuck in the back of her hand. Sicamore had hoped for a less traumatic way to question her. But since she had destroyed the camera in her room and would not submit to a simple shot that relaxed her inhibitions, they had to make this up close and personal. It was regrettable.

But Dr. Holbrooke grinned. “She’s awake. Let’s begin.”

Jerking harder, Zormna attempted to pull her arms free, then her legs. She struggled silently against the strap that held her chest down, blinking and squinting at the white light set a few feet from her sickly and already sweating face. The light would keep her disoriented at least. It was important that she not recognize any faces.

Groaning loud, Zormna continued to press against the straps restraining her, hoping to pull free. It was amazing that she wasn’t screaming.

“Now hold still little girl,” Dr. Holbrooke said, lifting up his clipboard.

Zormna turned her head, narrowing her eyes in recognition at his voice. Dr. Holbrooke jotted down notes, clicking his pen rapidly. That stupid behavioral tick.

“Scrapes.” Zormna’s head fell back against the table. Sicamore could see her eyes rapidly blinking, turning from the blinding light while thinking. She had that calculating sort of mind. Admirable, really. Only it would make things a whole lot easier if she just gave up.

One of the attending doctors lifted the prepared syringe filled with sodium pentotol, making sure the air bubbles were out. Zormna’s eyes whipped to it. The light glinted off the needle. She watched in horror, her green eyes widening more as the attendant carried it over then prepped the crook of her arm. Mixing drugs so close together was a bad idea. This was their only compromise.

The girl tried to pull free, but her forearm was just as secure as her wrist.

Zormna flinched when the needle punctured her skin. She clenched the table top, looking even greener in the face. A fear of needles, possibly? After pulling out the needle, the attendant swabbed up any blood, covering the spot with a cotton ball and bandage.

Zormna let out a sob.

“Be careful with that drug,” Agent Sicamore warned, already starting to worry. She was so small, after all. “You put in enough for an adult.”

“That girl practically is one,” Dr. Holbrooke grumbled. “You saw the way she fought those guards. She could have killed me.”

Pity she hadn’t, Sicamore thought. But he said with respect, as he was also wearing a metaphorical tie, “That doesn’t change anything. She still has the body-size of a child.”

“Indeed,” murmured the attendant who had injected, from the darkness. Yet he placed another full syringe on the instrument table per Dr. Holbrooke’s directions.

“Whatever. Let’s just begin.” Dr. Holbrooke then leaned over Zormna.

Zormna pulled away from his breath and reek of his aftershave. Sicamore always thought it was too strong. But all Zormna could really manage was a turn of the head. Poor girl.

“Let’s start with your full name,” Dr. Holbrooke questioned as he would a soldier stuck in Guantanamo. “Who are you?”

But the little indignant captive, sweating and glaring, clamped her mouth closed.

“She’s resisting,” one of the observing doctors murmured in amazement.

But the agents in the