The Reincarnation

John got the belt off his wrists. Grey had left his feet untied, figuring the cage would be more than adequate to keep Johnny from escaping.

John studied the bars, the door. There must be some way out of here, he thought, his mind working again.

The doctors had been busy, Dr. Persey found. They seemed to share in his excitement. Almost every room in the Lab was filled with a patient.

Now to wait for the Others, he thought.

Grey couldn’t believe it. The Lab had no desire to get the Golden Child back. Walking the hallways of the Lab, he saw why. There were hundreds of people in the Lab now. Hundreds of Golden Children. They occupied nearly all the rooms. Grey looked through the windows in the doors to the patients’ rooms and thought that Dr. Persey must have gone crazy.

Why would he want this many people to experiment on?

The casket that held Rita “Realtor” Gastrill’s body slid smoothly along the rails, past the fringed, scarlet curtain, and into the furnace. Her family had hardly cried, and was already chattering in the lobby of the funeral home. They weren’t gossiping loudly, but were making enough of a din that they couldn’t hear the noise coming from the other room.

Rita, in the typical hasty fashion she had made her way through her short life, forgot to sign the back of her driver’s license declining that her organs be donated after she died. She hadn’t even noticed when the law changed and you had to sign the back not to get them donated. Most of her organs were useless – damaged too extensively by the crash to be donated – but they had been able to salvage one eye, the one that wasn’t crushed on impact. But even though the eye appeared healthy in every way, it, too, was unusable, somehow as dead as its donor.

Regardless, Rita’s final moments on the planet, at least before she was so much soot, were spent blindly groping in an area that was much too small to get any real movement going, one that was too tiny to make any but the most pitiful sounds as she banged away at the sides of it.