Z2012theannexalicewilliams

**Lab Room 302** **September 1996**

“Shhh!” she said in a whisper as she pressed her headphones closer to her ear.

The crying and screams had stopped, although it was not unusual to have pauses, none that lasted more than a minute or so. The silence made her shiver. Only the quick breaths could be heard over the crackling speaker. Since the new installment of the computers this had become more and more frequent. There would be long gaps in-between outbursts. Those outbursts that had become so disturbingly common to her ear. It was then silence that was unusual. The silence that excited her. Then she heard it.

Click. Click. Click.

Someone was typing. A continuous clicking under small fingertips was barely audible. After three long minutes of excruciatingly slow typing, the printer whizzed to life. An orchestra of shudders and couple of ear tingling beeps. In an exuberant effort it spit out a yellow punch sheet. Read by someone who did not understand the program set up by Uniplex it would mean nothing more than a set of numbers with rectangles punched out, but to Alice it meant a breakthrough. Weeks and weeks of research and she finally had something accounted for. Looking down at her own computer she clicked the small red button. The screams let out as the sound of workers entering the room filled her ears. Only for a second did she feel a twinge of sorrow. But none of that now, she had work to do. A minute or so later the punch card was in her hand. “What does this mean?” The worker asked in a confused tone.

“ Get out.” Her voice was stern.

“ Uhh...ok.” The worker backed up without protest. There was no point protesting Alice anyway, everyone, including the patients in the ward knew that.

She signaled for her aids to carefully feed the punch card into the humming computer. Gently she slid the card into it, the paper soft under her hands. She turned to the room of people to make sure that only those necessary to be in the room were present. To others it might not seem such a mysterious process, but to Alice it was all that she had been working towards since that tragic day. Especially because she was one of the only women in charge of a whole unit, success was essential.

It took a minute for the computer to generate the meaning behind the punched out rectangles but after what seemed like an hour the sheet was decoded. This code was used to prevent anyone from understanding what the patients were typing, but it was only a hassle to Alice. Her eyes darted back and forth across the computer screen. She drew in a short breath as she read the last sentence. “ What does it mean?” Andrew her assistant asked as he scanned the screen.

“ What do you think it mean?” She spat spinning her chair around to face the other machines.

Pulling up the documents she scanned the names. There were sixteen in all. Anna, Jamie, Elizabeth, Emily, the list went on. All were brunette, brown-eyed women and girls; about 5’6 in height give or take. And each was certifiably insane. Or so the Navel base said. Some were just women who had fit the criteria of women Alice had set. Alice herself was not any of these characteristics but her daughter who had died five months prior was. Only seventeen years in age and had barley lived. Alice was determined to find out why her daughter had died, she thought most likely it was the frie fever. All other women of this criteria had lived and not contracted the fever. It didn’t make any sense. Alice knew it was unprofessional to do research like this when she wasn’t even sure her daughter died from it, but she had to at least see. The cover the USN had used was that these women were all “mentally unstable” and had been separate from the other patients because they were harm to the others and themselves. Each was diagnosed with different forms of Psychosis, from schizophrenia to extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of which these women had. Alice didn’t care though; she needed to get to the bottom of her daughter’s death.

She spun back to he computer to reread the punch codes decrypted writing.

“Help. I know they are going to kill me. Who ever reads this, tell Lynnie I’m so sorry.”

Alice read the code over and over again. What was the possibility that this girl knew Lynnie? Maybe it could have been another girl she was referring too. She read over the list of women in the Naval base and their characteristics to find these applicants and there had not been anyone named Lynnie, Lynn, nothing that could have made this girl be talking about anyone else. The boys had also been completely read through for other experiments. Her Lynnie was the only one.

“ Andrew, find out who wrote this and bring her to me immediately.”

“ But Mrs. Lewis, it’s not allowed for us to get patients out of the ward…” He said in a nervous voice.

“ Are you going to listen to the Admiral or are you going to listen to me? You’re job can go as quickly as you can be thrown into one of those wards yourself. Bring her to me now.” Her voice was sharp. He scurried out of the room shutting the door with a thud. Alice pulled a picture of her daughter out of pocket. How had it come to this? She had only been brought here to do research on a new cancer drug or so she’d been told, and now she was the leader of a top-secret experiment that would never be accepted by any other company besides Uniplex. And her poor Lynnie, she should have never brought her along.

She thought back to that first terrible day on the Navel Base. This had not meant to be this terrible, she wasn’t this horrid. At that point in her life she had only been a doctor with an opportunity, or so she thought. She should have back out when she found out what was really going on. She hated herself everyday for it. It had been the cancer drug research as she had been told but to such an extreme extent. The patients she worked with went through terrible treatments, causing most of them to die. And it had been at her hands, as had Lynnie's.

The door creaked as Andrew returned, pulling alongside him a small brunette.

**April 1996**

Lynn smiled at her as Alice trotted down the stairs.

“You’re up early!” Alice said to her daughter as she poured herself some coffee.

“ I couldn’t sleep, I had a lot on my mind. Do you have into the office today?”

“ Always, sorry honey. Ill be back around eight. Why don’t you invite Emily over I know you were over there last night but I want to meet her!” Alice said as she kissed her daughters forehead and started for the door, a large wooden door with six evenly spaced glass panes. Her house was small, but it was just the two of them so it was perfect. The small kitchen that surrounded her was cute in a way, pastel walls with white curtains and white furniture. It had all been provided by Uniplex, like the rest of Alice’s life it felt.

Looking over at her daughter she stopped. A strange look had come over Lynn’s face. One Alice had never seen before. Not really a look of anger, but of pure hate. Lynnie was always so positive. This baffled her. Her eyes were in small slits under her furrowed brow. Her mouth was a thin straight line of no emotion. Her friendly lovable seventeen daughter was, for the first time, scaring her.

“ You ok Lynnie?”

Her daughter got up and walked towards her bedroom. “I’m fine, I think I’m going to try to go back to sleep.” Her voice was monotone.

Where is this coming from? Alice thought to herself. Glancing at her watch she grabbed a bagel and ran to the door. Lynnie’s weird behavior would have to wait till after work. Maybe she would go home and check on her during her lunch break. Alice stepped into her office, pushing away the thought of her daughter for the time being. Work was her priority for right now.

**September 1996**

Alice recognized the girl immediately. She had gone over her face thousands of times looking for applicants. Her features were small, reminding Alice much of her own daughter. A small pointy nose poked out of a round face, just like Lynnie’s. This experiment did this to her most of the time. This was inevitable since that was the point, but at times the similarity became unbearable. Sixteen girls, sixteen different version of her daughter haunting her. Of course this had all been her idea and her experiment, but it wrenched her stomach every time she came face to face with the girls. It was like watching a form of her daughter come back to her, if for only a moment.

“ What’s your name?” Alice asked as she walked over to the girl, towering over her. The girl was not very tall to begin with, but as Alice looked down at her slumped body and dropped head she felt a twinge of remorse that had been haunting her from the very beginning of the whole excursion.

“ Emily Smith, Room fifteen, Five foot Five Inches, 6 centimeters. Dark Brown eyes, slight discoloration in left pupil.” The girl recited almost robotically not looking up.

“ Look at me, now.” Alice spat with a harsh tone immediately regretting it.

The girl tipped her head up to her. Alice turned around covering her face, even more than before the girl looked like her own daughter. The same look that had crossed over her face the first day Lynn’s weird behavior had started was plastered on the girls face, a look a hate. Not just a hate that Alice had ever experience before but with Lynnie. A look that was ready to kill. A stare so piercing that even Alice had to sit down.

“ Can you leave please Andrew, I would like a word with Emily.” Alice forced. She pushed herself up from the chair turning to face the girl again.

“ You can just sit her right there please, and if you don’t mind put the restraints on.” Alice said as she directed Andrew to a near by seat.

After strapping Emily down to the chair Andrew left, leaving Alice and Emily.

“ How did you know Lynnie?” Alice voice dropped to a small whisper. At the sound of the name Emily jerked her head up.

“ How did you know Lynnie?” Emily’s tone was rough, almost accusatory.

“She…was my daughter.” The words chocked up per throat, barley making out the last word. “ All I want to know is why you typed that on the punch card, what made you tell my Lynnie you were sorry?”

“ I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Emily’s voice went almost as monotones as Lynn’s had only a few months before.

“ You typed it only fifteen minutes ago, I know you know what I’m talking about!” Alice grabbed the small girls shoulders shaking her.

“ I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The girl repeated.

Alice stood, slamming the chair she had previously been sitting in to the ground.

“ HOW CAN YOU NOT REMEMBER?” She screamed at the tiny girl.

At this the girl began to cry. Not the crying that she was so accustomed to, the crying of fear, this was the crying of sadness. The type of crying that shook your shoulders and took your breath, cries that caused your whole body to tremble. Minutes passed and Alice just watched the girl cry. She didn’t know what to do. Obviously yelling at her didn’t work. The crying had also affected Alice though. It scared her. She was not used to dealing with crying like this, crying that raged your whole body. The crying slowly stopped and only the short breathes filled Alice’s ears, Sharp and cold.

Alice got down on her knees in front of the girl. “ Please just tell me how you knew Lynn. Please? That’s all I ask.”

Emily looked up, her eyes red and swollen. “ She was my best friend. Until two weeks before she died.” Her voice shook, the words were barely audible as the girl spoke in a whisper. “ We were sitting in my living room, just playing cards when she started screaming at me. We hadn’t even been in a fight, she just went crazy. She threw things around screaming something about the infirmary; I knew she had gone down there the other day with Michael-

“Whose Michael? Why did she go down there?” Alice was frantic, she more than anyone knew what happened at the infirmary.

“ Her boyfriend? I told her not to date him but she did anyway.” The girls voice was getting louder, still Alice had to strain to understand her. “ After about ten minutes of screaming she stormed out of the house. I tried calling and going to her house but she had all the blinds shut and wouldn’t pick up the phone. Two weeks later I see an ambulance leaving the house…and she was gone. That is all I know.”

Alice’s mind raced. And then, her heart skipped a beat. The younger children knew the infirmary as a haunted house but Alice and the rest of the members of Uniplex knew.

“ Do you know how long Lynn stayed in the Infirmary?” Alice asked the girl with an almost begging tone.

“ I think the spent the night. I don’t know why though, I never saw Michael after that and I only saw her once after, at my house when she was going insane.”

Alice drew in a short breath. How could she have let this happen? Tears started slowly running down her face, how had she not known? How had she not realized what had happened?

“ Please, tell me what happened to Lynnie” Emily’s voice quivered.

“It was me. This was all me. The day Lynn started acting strange I should have realized it. I can’t believe how stupid I was. I killed my own daughter.” Her voice shook as she spoke.

“ What do you mean?”

“ Two days before Lynn started acting odd I got a call from the infirmary asking me if they could do some test on a couple of non-cancerous young girls. I didn’t think it was odd of them calling me because I was the head of cancer research in teens, I never thought…I never thought they meant my daughter. I never knew it was life threatening, I should have though. I was too busy working on my own experiments I didn’t ask the specifics…this is all my fault. She must have gone to your house right after going to the infirmary with that boy, then came home after the fight with you, I was already asleep by the time she got home so I didn’t notice her come in.” Tears flowed down her face now, dropping down onto her white lab coat.

“ Are you saying, you gave the ok to give a teenage girl a treatment even if they weren’t sick? Even if it was not your daughter how is that ever ok!?” Emily’s voice was even louder now, echoing off the concrete walls. “ You’re sick! You are a terrible person, I hope you don’t only feel responsible for your daughter’s death but the sanity of all those girls back in the that ward! That waste! Lynnie didn’t even have the fever! I hope you feel what we went though!”

“ I’m so sorry. I know that it won’t fix anything. I know. I should have never gotten into any of this, I don’t know how I let myself…” Her voice trailed off replaced with long terrible sobs.

“ No it doesn’t fix anything, you let your own daughter die for what, money? Scientific status? You do test healthy people who don’t even have cancer to see if a treatment is harmful?! That doesn’t even make sense. You people are sick, my parents included!”

As the last word left her mouth Andrew ran in the room. His eyes darted between the sobbing women and the enraged teen not knowing what to do.

“ Please, Andrew take her away. Get all the girls dressed and return them to their homes. I am done.” Alice head tucked between her knees and chest, her words slurred.

“ What?” Andrew’s confused eyes were now fixed on his crying boss.

“ Do what I say and then return to me please.” Alice stood up fixing her hair and straitening her coat. “ Bring Emily home first please.”

As the girl was walked to the door she turned to Alice and said a scowl so horrify: “ I hope you get what you deserve, and I hope it’s terrible.”

Three hours later the body of Alice Williams was found hanging in Lab room 302. A note attached to her lab coat reads as follows: I will never get the horror I deserved and I’m sorry. It is still undecided if the death was a murder or suicide.