S. Bodeen - The Compound

“No!” Mom’s face fell as she looked from Dad to the bread. “I mean, there’s another loaf for the kids. Still baking.” She gestured at the oven. “This one’s all yours.”

Dad smiled. “Thanks.” He bit into the bread.

My head started to hurt.

Dad shifted his gaze to Mom. “Yes, there’s always a chance we won’t have to go to extreme measures. But we won’t know until that time and we need to set ourselves up now. We must do what we can. We need to bolster our supplemental food supply.”

She glared at him. “Unless you’ve come up with something to guarantee multiple births, I’m already working at my quota.” But the look on her face showed she regretted her words.

He cut another slice. “Eli, come with me.”

Mom shook her head. “Don’t do this, Rex.”

His voice was low. “Eli, let’s go.”

She dropped the knife on the counter and watched us leave.

What was going on?

Dad walked slightly in front of me as we headed toward the direction of his office. “Eli, I’m going to need your help.” Both his hands started to scratch his face.

All that scratching was uncomfortable for me to watch. And it was making me itchy again. I wanted to grab his hands, make him stop. But I couldn’t. Instead, I looked down at my feet. “With what?”

“Your mother and I can only, well, work so fast, so to speak.”

My stomach lurched. “What am I supposed to do?”

He cleared his throat. “There are other ways to… enhance our food supply.”

I didn’t know where his reasoning was headed. Or maybe I didn’t want to admit it. My mind was so clouded that I missed his next few words.

Dad kept on. “It would be a true experiment, since no one has done it before. But think, if I could pull it off…” He grinned. “I could patent the process and it could be used for generations. It would revolutionize medicine. People in need of organ transplants wouldn’t have to wait. And—”

“I missed what you said. What would revolutionize medicine?”

We reached his office and he unlocked it, ushering me in. Then he walked over to the padlocked door and pulled a key out of his pocket. With a twist, he had the padlock off and his hand was on the knob. “Are you ready?”

As the door swung open, my first impression was a glare of white light. When I stepped inside, I realized it was the whiteness of the room enhanced by the fluorescent bulbs running everywhere overhead. The room was a laboratory, so full of equipment and so big, that it made the other lab look like a low-budget high school classroom.

My jaw dropped as I took a few steps farther in. After all this time, a part of our world that I had no idea existed.

Long white counters ran hundreds of yards in front of me, each lined with test tubes and beakers and enormous, intimidating microscopes. Along the walls sat machines I’d never seen before. A lump formed in my throat. “Dad? What do you do in here? What would revolutionize medicine?”

His tone was matter of fact. “Cloning a human being.”

I backed away from him. The words almost didn’t make it out of my mouth. “What in the world are you proposing?”

Dad picked up a test tube and peered at the substance inside. He jotted something on a nearby clipboard. “We’ve been doing it the old-fashioned way. We need to step it up and make more Supplements the new-fangled way.”

I retched, barely making it to a sink before I puked up all the jerky. As the faucet went full blast, I lifted up the bottom of my T-shirt and wiped my face. My back was to him. “You can’t mean that.”

He grunted, annoyed, “Come on, Eli.”

I whirled to face him again. “It goes against nature! You know that. Besides, none of those animal clones lived more than a short time.”

Dad tilted his head a bit, looking at me. “Eli, Eli, Eli. When are you going to realize you’re just like me? Eddy isn’t… wasn’t, not by a long shot. But you? You are. You’ll do whatever it takes, anything, to make sure you come out on top.”

“That’s not true!” His analysis was akin to that clown’s telling me I was the evil twin. My head hurt behind my left eye and my vision started to blur.

He nodded. “Yeah, it is. You can’t deny what you are.”

My head moved from side to side. “I won’t do it. You can’t make me help you.”

He sighed. “No, I can’t. You’re right.” He drummed his fingers on the counter.

Dad seemed like he’d actually listened to me.

So I offered up an olive branch. “It’s just weird, you know?” I gestured at the scene around me. “Cloning people. And besides, don’t you need a human host at some point? And Mom’s already got a tenant, so to speak.”

Dad shrugged a bit. “There’s Lexie.”

Was he insane? “I know Lexie. She won’t do it.”

He chuckled a bit. “Do you? Do you really know your sister?”

Oh God. No. I probably didn’t.

He set the test tube down and picked up another. “I’ve already spoken to Lexie. She’s waiting for you to get on board.”

I turned, heading out the door and through his office, making it to the corridor mere seconds before I broke down.

Harsh sobs racked my body as I leaned on a wall. Was this what our life had become?

I hadn’t ever loved life in here. Tolerated it, maybe. But hearing my father’s plan for our continued survival caused a major shift inside of me. Any lingering tolerance, any sliver of ambivalence had fled. Gone for good. The space they left in me abruptly filled with hate for everything about the Compound.

I refused to live that way. There wasn’t anything I could do about it by myself. Maybe it was time to take sides.

I hoped I could find someone to be on mine.

I CALMED MYSELF DOWN, CLEANED MYSELF UP, AND HOLED up in my room. I stayed there the rest of the day. Even skipped dinner. I didn’t want to see anyone. But I wanted to pick up my book from the library.

As I left my room, I almost tripped over Mom, who was sitting on the floor, her back against the hard wall. I got the feeling she’d been waiting for me. I wondered how much she had heard of my earlier argument with Dad. Or how much she perhaps already knew.

She looked up at me with gentle, wet eyes. “Eli, come see the babies with me.”

My face must have given away my reaction.

She held out a hand for me to help her up, then pulled back when I did. “I have stood by and watched your father do a lot of things,” she said, inching up the wall. “But this—I won’t give in.”

Her tone told me what I had to do. I went to meet the rest of the family.

How could I possibly have gone that long without seeing them? We were, after all, stuck in the Compound together. But it was a big place. Big enough to be able to avoid what I needed to avoid. But maybe I’d avoided enough: facing life without Eddy and Gram, surviving the worst disaster to hit the civilized world. Hell, I’d become a master at denial.

Then Mom led me into the room with the yellow door.

My first look around made me realize the depth of my father’s preparation for any contingency. Goose bumps covered my arms. I resisted the urge to let my hair down and hide from the truth.

The walls were sunflower yellow, dotted here and there with painted handprints of pleasing greens and blues and oranges. The tone of the lighting was artificial sunlight. Did I imagine my skin becoming warmer? I felt like I was outside on a warm April afternoon. The scent of lilacs lingered, increasing the sensation of spring.