The Monster Who Never Forgot Her

It took me ten years to claw my way out of the subterranean black site where theyd been running their augment experiments. Ten years to finally break free.

Only to find that while I was buried in the dark, the world above had ended. The outbreak had swallowed everything.

And my best friendthe only anchor I had left in my fractured mindwas currently being backed into a corner by her husbands survival crew, ordered to surrender her meager rations.

"Everyone else chipped in, Rachel. Why are you being so selfish? Youre really hoarding a couple of candy bars?"

Rachels voice was small, defensive. "I wanted to save them for Tommy."

A teenage girl standing nearby let out a sharp, mocking laugh. "Oh, come on. Every time you want a sugar fix, you use the kid as an excuse. Its pathetic."

Under the judgmental glare of the entire scavenging party, I unslung the heavy canvas backpack from my shoulder and hurled it.

It caught the sneering teenager squarely in the back of the head.

"Is that enough?"

My voice came out flat, stripped of whatever inflection normal humans used. "Say one more word to her, and Ill kill every single one of you."

I hadn't zipped the bag all the way.

Dozens of foil-wrapped chocolate bars spilled out, scattering across the cracked asphalt like glittering debris.

"What the hell?! Who do you think you're talking to?"

The teenage girl spun around, her voice shrill with shock and rage.

Nobody answered her.

Every pair of eyes in the vicinity was glued to the dirt. The collective sound of dry swallows echoed in the dead air.

"Chocolate... that's a whole fucking bag of chocolate..."

"I'm sweeping it with my kinetics. It's real. It's not a mirage."

They surged forward. A desperate, scrambling frenzy broke out as hands clawed at the dirt.

Nobody cared about the teenager's bruised ego. She bit her lip, grabbing the arm of the tall, broad-shouldered man beside her, shaking it.

"David, look at them!"

The man furrowed his brow, his voice dropping into a low, authoritative rumble. "Stand down. Don't touch it."

He looked over the group. "All scavenged supplies go to Kelsey's tether. She inventories and rations. Did you all suddenly forget how this crew operates?"

The scrambling stopped. The survivors froze, hands hovering over the candy.

The girl, Kelsey, giggled. She strutted forward, confiscating the chocolate from their unresisting hands. A faint, pale blue light pulsed against her palms.

A spatial tether. A pocket dimension.

Through the entire chaotic display, Rachelher face ashen, stripped of all colorhadn't even glanced at the food.

She was just staring at me.

Her voice trembled, thick with a disbelief that seemed to crack her chest wide open. "Margo? Is that you? You're alive?"

She slammed into me.

I stood there, slightly paralyzed by the sudden impact. My arms felt heavy, but some deeply buried, vestigial instinct forced my hand up to awkwardly pat her back. "Is that... my name? Margo?"

"You don't remember?"

She pulled back, her hands frantically roaming over my shoulders, my arms, checking for broken bones, crying and laughing all at once.

"The director at the group home said you got adopted. I begged him to tell me by who, but he wouldn't say a word. I spent years looking for you, Mags. I searched everywhere..."

I let her rapid-fire words wash over me in absolute silence.

Of course she couldn't find me.

For a decade, I had been locked inside a classified, subterranean labyrinth, subjected to extreme human-limit augmentation trials. I couldn't even count how many times they had cracked open my skull, how many microchips were threaded into my cerebral cortex, how many synthetic serums had burned through my veins.

My memories and emotions were a blurred, static-filled wasteland. I didn't even remember my own name.

I only had one fragile, lingering fragmented image from the "Before." I had a friend. Her name was Rachel.

And she... loved me.

"Who are you? And where the hell did you get high-tier rations?"

Rachel was still running her hands over me, checking my pulse, my temperature.

The tall manDavidstepped forward. His eyes were cold, sweeping over me with practiced, paranoid scrutiny.

I accessed my limited social-response protocols. "I passed through the city. Picked it up on the way."

David's eyes narrowed into slits. "You just picked it up? Do you have any idea what's out there right now"

Before he could finish the sentence, Rachel stepped between us. She spread her arms, shielding me with her own body.

"David, this is her. This is my best friend. The one I told you about. The most important person in the world to me."

She turned back to me, her eyes wet. "Mags, this is David. We got married five years ago."

She looked back at him, her voice desperate but firm. "Shes coming with us."

David didn't say a word.

Behind him, Kelsey, the spatial-tether girl, stepped up, crossing her arms.

"Look, Rachel, no offense, but we're an elite runner crew. We're already dragging you around, and you're a Baseline. No augments, no nothing. You're dead weight."

"If we drag your stray friend along too, we might as well just give up on reaching the Portland Safe Zone."

Rachel's face hardened. Her voice dropped an octave. "Kelsey, if you're not taking her, then empty your pockets. Give her back her food."

"Excuse me?!"

Kelseys face flushed an ugly, mottled red. She immediately turned to David, her tone shifting into a whining drawl. "David, are you hearing her? Why is she taking a stranger's side over her own crew?"

"Enough. Both of you."

David delivered the final verdict. "She surrendered a massive haul to the communal pool. That buys her our protection. Rachel, your friend walks with us. Thats the end of it. I don't want to hear another word."

Rachels eyes curved into a brilliant, relieved smile.

Beside her, Kelsey's face went stone-cold. She shot me a venomous glare, rolling her eyes.

I let my kinetic senses bleed out, sweeping over Kelseys body.

Her internal energy signature was pathetic. Less than three cubic meters of spatial capacity. The most rudimentary, entry-level tether I had ever seen.

I could snap her neck with a single thought.

But I looked down at Rachel, who was still holding onto my sleeve like I might vanish.

...Id let her live. For now.

We walked for two days before making camp in a gutted suburban town.

Just like when we were kids, Rachel couldn't stand the silence.

As we walked, she filled in the ten-year gap. After my "adoption," she got into college, started dating David her sophomore year, and married him right after graduation. Two months ago, the contagion hit globally. David woke up with a rare Ferrokinesis augmenthe could manipulate metal to tear through the infected.

Kelsey, I learned, was David's stepsister. No blood relation.

"They're incredibly close. Honestly, sometimes I was jealous of how much they had each other's backs. Especially after you left. I was always just... alone."

Rachel let out a soft, tired sigh.

"I have a son, Mags. Tommy. He just turned four. The day the outbreak hit, he was at a summer camp down in San Diego. I begged David to go get him, but it was pure chaos. He couldn't find him. We finally got a radio signal from the camp counselors laterthey evacuated early and flew the kids up to the Portland Safe Zone."

"That's why we're heading there. It's a massive military quarantine zone. Once we get inside, you can meet him."

Rachel rested her chin in her hands, looking at me with that same warm, bright expression from our childhood.

"He knows all about you, you know. I always told him his mom had the bravest, best friend in the world named Margo. I told him how much you loved paper cranes when we were in the foster home. He folded hundreds of them. He said he's saving them to give to Auntie Margo."

I stared at her smile.

Deep inside my skull, behind the titanium plating and the synthetic neural webbing, something shifted. Like a glacier that had been frozen in darkness for a decade, just barely beginning to weep water at its edges.

"Okay."

I opened my palm. Sitting in the center were three untouched chocolate bars.

Rachels eyes went wide.

I tried to mimic her smile. "For Tommy."

That night, we camped in the rusted shell of an old auto factory.

Rachel sneaked over to me, clutching two stale dinner rolls against her chest. "Here. You need to eat."

After countless surgical modifications, my biological shell barely required caloric intake to function.

But looking at the fierce, protective gleam in her eyes, I took the bread.

Rachel bumped her shoulder against mine, taking a bite of her own roll. "Where were you, Mags? These last ten years... where did you go? How did you suddenly find me?"

I sat in silence, staring at the slightly warm, squishy bread in my hands.

The sterile, blinding white of the underground lab flashed behind my eyes. The hum of surgical machinery. The endless parade of white coats blurring past the reinforced glass.

"Inject Subject 09 with the latest serum compound!"

"Increase the neural-chip current!"

"Code Red! She's breaching! Subject 09 is breaching!"

The deafening roar of shattering glass. My kinetic output had been so massive it atomized the containment tank. When the red haze of my rage finally cleared, the sector was dead quiet. The pristine white floors were painted crimson, littered with severed limbs and broken bodies.

I had grabbed a discarded lab coat, stepping barefoot over the corpses, staring blankly at the metal blast doors.

"Rachel... I need to find Rachel..."

...

"I was in a... specialized facility. I wasn't allowed to contact the outside world."

It was the most sanitized version of the truth I could offer. "When I finally got out, I just wanted to see you. So I tracked you down."

"Oh, Mags."

Rachel threw her arms around my neck, burying her face in my shoulder.

"I knew it. I knew you still loved me. David kept saying you probably got adopted by some rich family and forgot all about the trashy group home kids. But I never believed him. I told him he just didn't understand us."

She was right. Who could possibly understand?

For ten years, not even the world's most brilliant neuroscientists understood. The sheer volume of neuro-stimulants they pumped into my spine should have killed a human being purely from the pain. But I survived hundreds of injections. Out of the one hundred children brought to that black site, I was the only one left breathing.

Through the one-way glass, I used to hear them whisper: "Subject 09 is a gift from God."

There was no God down there.

There was only a faded memory of a little girl holding my hand, saying:

"Mags, we're gonna be best friends until we're a hundred years old."

I had to live to be a hundred.

I couldn't break my promise.

Sometime after midnight, Rachel fell asleep, her head resting heavy on my shoulder.

I carefully shifted my weight, easing her into a more comfortable position against a duffel bag, and stood up.

Across the dark factory floor, David was awake. His eyes were locked on me, heavy with suspicion.

He started walking toward me. In the palm of his hand, I could sense the sharp, deadly hum of kinetic energy molding a spike of solid iron.

A second later, a shrieking siren shattered the dead silence of the night.

"INCOMING! WE GOT A HORDE!"

The rusted iron doors of the factory, barricaded by two abandoned sedans, groaned and gave way. A tidal wave of infected bodies poured through the breach, rotting limbs scrambling over one another.

The crew snapped awake, instantly deploying their augments. There were six "gifted" in the crew, but aside from David's mid-tier ferrokinesis, the rest were pathetic, entry-level parlor tricks.

Within minutes, their stamina gauges hit zero. The defensive line collapsed.

Three infected broke through, their jaws snapping wildly as they lunged toward where Rachel and Kelsey were huddled.

"DAVID!!"

"David, help!"

Over the chaotic screaming, David didn't even hesitate. The iron spike in his hand flew across the room, impaling the zombie leaping at Kelsey, pinning it to the concrete. Only then did his head snap toward Rachel, realizing he had left his wife exposed.

He turned just in time to see it.

Squelch.

The heavy steel rebar in my hands pierced flawlessly through the eye sockets of both infected attacking Rachel. I pulled it back in a smooth, sickening arc, and they dropped like heavy sacks of meat.

Rachel was gripping the hem of my jacket, her face ghostly white.

"Mags, are you hurt? Did they scratch you?!"

"I'm fine."

I reached up, wiping a smear of black blood from my cheek with my thumb, my eyes scanning the perimeter. More thermal signatures were swarming the breach.

"Get in the vehicles. I'll hold the rear."

David gritted his teeth, his voice straining. "Move out! Get the engines running, now!"

For hours the next day, Rachel didn't say a word.

We had managed to outrun the horde at dawn, barricading ourselves inside an abandoned suburban house to catch our breath.

Rachel sat on the floor, obsessively picking at the fraying thread on her sleeve. I reached out, gently covering her trembling hands with mine. I looked her dead in the eye. "I will protect you."

She looked up at me.

The image from the factory was burned into both our retinas. In the split second where both his wife and his stepsister were about to be ripped apart, David had made his choice.

"All our food and meds are in Kelsey's tether. Tactically, she's the VIP. I know that. I understand the logic, I do. But..."

Rachel choked back a sob, tears finally spilling over. "Does that make me a horrible, selfish person, Mags?"

I shook my head.

"You're the best person I know."

And she was. To me, Rachel was the only good thing left in the world.

My biological parents dumped me at the steps of the group home when I was four because I didn't speak. The state doctors stamped "Severe Autism" on my file. In the system, I was easy prey. The older kids used me as a punching bag.

Until Rachel, three years older and half their size, charged at them with a literal cinderblock, chasing them across the yard.

"Don't you touch her! You leave her alone!"

When I was nine, the home's director called me into his office late at night. He said a special doctor was there to give me a checkup.

I went.

There were two strange men in the room. They told me to take off my dress.

The director stood in the corner, laughing softly. "She doesn't talk. It's perfectly safe."

That was the exact moment the heavy oak door to the office was kicked off its hinges.

Rachel came screaming into the room, wielding a rusted iron spade from the gardening shed, swinging it like a battleaxe at the director and the two men.

"Get away from her! I'll kill you! I'll kill all of you!"

Over their screams, the spade connected, splitting open scalps.

The fallout was massive. The cops came. The director and the men were taken away in handcuffs.

That night, shivering in the dark, Rachel held my hand, her fingers constantly smoothing down my messy hair.

She whispered, "Don't be scared, Mags. If the bad things come back... you just scream my name."

...

Sitting in the dusty living room of the safe house, I clumsily tried to mimic her cadence from all those years ago. "Don't be scared, Rachel. If the bad things come... you just call my name."

She stared at me, stunned. Her lower lip began to tremble violently.

"Mags..."

Before she could say another word, the light from the hallway was blocked out.

I looked up.

David, flanked by the rest of the crew, had us boxed into the corner.

Rachel immediately stood up, stepping in front of me. "What is this?"

Kelsey stepped out from behind her brother. "Rachel, I get that you want to blindly trust your childhood bestie, but are you really that dense? Have you not noticed anything wrong with this picture?"

Rachel frowned, her muscles tensing. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Kelsey gave David a loaded look.

David remained silent, but his hand flexed. A vicious, serrated blade of solid iron materialized in his grip.

Beside him, a wiry man with a rat-like face spoke up. "Think about it, Rachel. The world's gone to shit. Finding a rusted can of beans is a miracle. And your 'friend' here wanders out of the wasteland, untouched, carrying a twenty-pound bag of pristine chocolate? Surviving solo for two months in the red zones? Claiming she's just a normal Baseline girl? It's bullshit."

Rachel gripped my hand tighter.

"Make your point."

David took a slow step forward, his voice a low, dangerous gravel. "Rachel, I know what she means to you. But we can't afford blind spots. We've been moving for a month. Sticking to the backroads. We barely saw a single roamer."

"Yesterday, she joins us. And twelve hours later, a massive horde magically zeroes in on our exact location."

"The military broadcasts have been warning us. The virus is mutating. There are Variants out there that look perfectly human. Alphas. Things that can mind-control the swarms."

He raised the iron blade, pointing the jagged tip directly at the space between my eyes.

"I think your friend is an Alpha."