"My fear was not of death itself, but death without meaning."

-Huey Newton

What woke me up was the heat, at first. It could have started out mild, but by the time I was conscious it felt like someone had dumped hot coals on my body. I gasped for air, and my lungs filled with it greedily until I could take no more in before they let me breathe out. I wanted to scream, but the pain of the heat and the inability to breathe right left me speechless like a gasping, desperate fish cooking alive on a skillet. I opened my eyes to see nothing but darkness and a pattern of tiny orange lights trailing from above my head to down past my vision.

I felt cold, but at the same time that damning heat made me sweat, and I was in a place of shivering, sweating torture where I could feel every inch of my body wake from a frozen slumber, only to ignite and set ablaze every part of me. My mind raced and I struggled to make any sense of where or who I was outside of my own personal hell.

Where... Where... Where... The thought screamed in my head but I couldn't speak more than a hoarse whisper and my breath hit a wall just inches from my face. I tried to move my arms, and after a few painful spasms I reached out and felt a thick cloth. The orange lights held a hard, cold ridge in the center of the fabric. I felt it for a little while before realizing what it was and reached up toward the top of the metal until I felt a tiny opening between steel teeth. I wiggled two fingers, then three, then my whole hand out of the bag and twisted my wrist to grab the tab of the zipper. With every movement, I felt my muscles strain and go rigid, but it wasn't enough to keep me from opening the black bag I was in and pushing either side away from me, leaving me hatched from the burlap void and into a room glowing with the light of an open flame.

The room I was in was small, with one metal door on the left wall and a large, open furnace on my right. I looked at the door, and saw that it had a lever for a doorknob and a deadbolt. The furnace on the right took up most of the wall, and it looked as though the inside of it fell another few feet before reaching the flames roaring within it. It seemed like there was a whole room down there, dedicated to burning things. It didn't take much thought to learn what it was made to burn. I was high up, and after a second or so I realized I was sitting on long, black bags similar to the one I had just pulled away from myself. I thought about seeing if anyone else was awake, but I knew better than to try. It was pointless.

I woke up. Step one, complete. I had to stick to the plan. What was the plan, again? Fuck, my head hurt. 

I jumped down from the pile of bodies and went to the door. I turned the handle and it gave way, moving the bolt free from the socket  and allowing me to pull it open. Outside of the room I was in was darkness, with a few fluorescent lights illuminating slabs and hallways. Not surprisingly, it looked like an every-day morgue, with large windows showing rooms with coolers sealed with little pull-open doors in a grid-like pattern on the far wall. There was a low hum that echoed throughout the corridors and seemed to grow louder as I tried to hear for any other noise in the building.

I stepped out, and noticed my toe dragging something across the floor. Looking down, I saw a little piece of paper attached to a white cotton string. I bent down and pulled it off, reading what it had typed in faded ink: M-X-157. 1950 F.

157.

"That will be how we identify you compared to other subjects." He tugged on the restraint holding my left wrist to the metal table, tightening it a little more. 

"Why not just use my name?" I stared at him, my words hitting with a bitter edge.

The Doctor only smiled. "People have names. Subjects have numbers."  

I tasted copper, and realized I was biting hard on the inside of my cheek. I spat the blood out and started moving, hearing the slap of my bare feet hitting the linoleum floors. I gripped the little slip of paper tight in my hand as I followed the bright red EXIT signs, turning corners and moving faster as I neared the end of the path. There was a large, reinforced door with a push bar for a handle, and in bold lettering it said: TO DISENGAGE ALARM, ASSIGN KEY CARD.

Shit. I wondered how long I would have after the alarm sounded before I could find the door to the outside. By memory, I knew this was the bottom floor, but I wasn't sure if it was a ground floor, or the basement underground. Judging by the burning bodies and empty halls, I guessed that it was the latter. It left me with few other options except to try and find another way through the door without being noticed. 

I looked up at the vents pumping air into the building. The slotted grate on the ceiling had no bolts, but was placed on the grid of metal along with the tiles and light fixtures. Pushing it up would give me a way through the rest of the building without being seen by any cameras. 

Oh, fuck. I forgot about cameras, too. 

As I thought it I looked around and saw one fixing itself on me from the corner of the wall where the door blocked my way. I was already caught.

I pushed the door open with all my strength and it swung open, the alarm immediately blaring through the halls and red lights flashing brightly down the halls that I ran through. I could hear shouting from behind me, and I pushed to run faster, faster down the red tiles. I could hear the click of doors locking remotely and metal slamming onto metal. Whoever had seen me, or whoever set the system up for the alarms, was putting the whole place on lock-down. I cursed at myself as I kept on running, hoping to keep distance between me and the mob looking for me.

If there was a place they couldn't lock down, it would have been the air- at least, that was my best guess, so I used my running speed and made one large leap before landing into a tight crouch and hopping up to the nearest grate, pushing it up and forward into the duct in the ceiling, giving me space to climb in and replace it. I followed the source of the air,  feeling it push my hair one way or the other as I crawled on my belly and pushed with my feet to launch down whatever straight duct I was sent through. The noise from crawling echoed through the chambers of thin plated steel, leaving a ringing in my ears as I neared a vent that showed a set of lights casting obscure shadows on parked carts and pavement.  Angeline had told me there would be rain tonight, but it seemed the rain had already passed.

I turned my body around and kicked the grate in, knocking it out of the wall and sending it crashing onto the asphalt. I judged the time it took to make contact and braced for the fall, leading with my feet and landing ungracefully on my ass. 

The rain had left a chill in the air, and the fog was a cerulean color against the dim, grayish blue of the early morning sky. It was a thin mist that stuck to the cheap shirt and pants I was wearing, and kept visibility only for a good twenty feet. I could barely make out where the grass at the end of the parking lot began.

With nothing broken from the fall, I got up and made a break for the grass and kept going, toward the treeline I knew was hiding in the fog at least two hundred yards away from where I had started.

"How fast do you think you could run, after death?" Angelique had asked, turning her body to face me while laying down. Her hands were pressed together under her cheek, like a posed, porcelain doll, with some of her golden curls falling around her face and shoulder.

I thought about her question before turning my face away from her and shrugging. "It depends on what they kill me with, I guess." I replied.

"So, a poison would make you slower, right?"

"Maybe. Honestly, I don't know if they're making a poison." I had my own hands folded and behind my head while I lay on my back, staring up at the perfect square tiles on the ceiling. The tile that held the light for our room was a little darker than the rest, and the only source of light was the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door. "When I saw them working on that kid, they didn't seem happy that their experiment killed him."

"So you think you'll be stronger?"

"Ang, I dunno. You said so yourself; there's a chance I'm gonna die in there."

"I said you would fight for your life. I never said you were going to die."

"Same fucking thing."

She was quiet for a while, and I felt a pit in my stomach. "Listen," I said, "it's just weird to talk about stuff like death. I didn't think I had a chance of being killed when they took me from the orphanage, y'know? I thought I was gonna be safe."

"What was the orphanage like?" She asked.

"It was run-down, but it had beds and food. Everyone there was scared shit-less about not being good enough, failing the tests and getting the Code."

"Code W.A.R.D?" 

"Yeah."

"It sounds scary."

"It is, but it's not that different from being here."

"What do you mean?"

I could still hear the sirens from the building,  and there was a flashing white and blue that reflected on the dew sprinkled on the grass. I could hear the shouts getting closer, but I was only halfway to the safe haven of tall oaks and branches. I could feel stray branches from past storms rustling and bending under my feet, too wet to crack under my weight. Some loose bits caught me mid-run, sticking through the bare skin and causing me to jump and tumble down a small, steadily declining hill. My body rolled until it finally stopped at a tall, chain link fence, and I looked up at the barbed wire coiled at the top. I pushed myself from the ground and took a deep breath before beginning my ascent.

When I reached the top, I took the cotton string from the toe-tag, folded it, and wriggled it in-between the loops of the tie wire, using it to pull the tie open enough to remove from the fence. I had the first one done and used the loose fence to pull on the next one when the first shots were fired, narrowly missing my left shoulder. I could hear orders to 'disable the target' and I knew I had seconds to get to the other side of the fence before they'd fire again.

The second and third tie wire came undone faster than the first and I slid through just as a rubber bullet made contact with the left shoulder blade, leaving a splash of a strong burning sensation just before an uncomfortable numbness took over my entire shoulder, disabling my arm completely. The pain mid-flight ruined my landing and I fell forward as soon as my feet hit the ground, but managed to get up with the one limb I had and started running into the trees. I heard the rattling of the fence and the sound of gunfire behind me, bullets hitting bushes and trees on either side of me while I made myself disappear in the cover of the foliage.

"Get a team on the other side!" Someone shouted, and the sirens went off into another direction while I put more and more trees between me and the demons far behind.

I don't remember how far I had run before the adrenaline finally wore off and I collapsed in the middle of the woods, crawling to the nearest burrow-like space underneath a large oak tree. I grabbed as much moss and mulch from under a bush as I could and covered myself with it while taking shelter in the little cave I had found.

"Do you think they'll kill you if you run away?"

Angeline was laying on her back, staring up at the same ceiling I was, laying in a bed identical to mine.

"That'd be sort of a waste," I muttered, "destroying their own property when they could just disable it and bring it back."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, wouldn't it make more sense to take out the legs and-"

"I mean, why do you call yourself 'property'?"

"That's what I am, Angie. I'm a product. So are you."

"I don't believe that." There was a sleepiness to her tone that was contagious. "I believe that we deserve to live as people; we weren't given the choice to be born, so don't they owe us the right to live?"

"Try telling The Doctor that."

We both let the dark and the silence fill the air. I shut my eyes and let my dreams take me to a sleeping world far away from where I lay.