They Killed Me in the Lab, So I Woke Up Early novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Saw
Maren wakes screaming in her own bed, unmarked, nine months before she died, and the Institute's first call comes at the minute she remembers. She picks up and says yes.
Maren Teague woke up screaming with both hands clamped to the top of her skull.
The saw was still in there.
She could hear it, a high grinding note that ran through her teeth and down her spine.
Her fingers found hair.
Dry, tangled hair, and under it skin that was whole.
She pressed harder, searching for the cut, and there was no cut.
The white lights had hung over her for hours. Straps had held her wrists to the table.
A man's voice had counted backward from a hundred, slow and steady, while the blade worked into the bone.
They had kept her awake on purpose.
The drug stopped her from moving and left her feeling everything.
The pain lit up the paths in Maren's brain that her ability ran along, and the machines drew them.
Dr. Quillan had held her hand through all of it.
"I'm right here, Maren," she had said. "Nearly done."
Maren had died on that table with blood filling her lungs.
She was still screaming when she saw the ceiling.
It was her own ceiling, with the water stain and the long crack over the window.
Gray morning light came through the blinds. Somewhere below her a radiator knocked twice.
Her scream ran out. She sat there shaking, hands still locked in her hair.
Her phone lay on the nightstand with the cracked corner she had never fixed.
She grabbed it. Monday, March 10, 6:52 a.m.
The last thing she remembered was a December night, nine months from this one.
She said the date out loud to hear whether it would change.
It didn't.
Her cotton gloves sat folded in a pair beside the phone. She put them on before she did anything else.
Someone knocked on her door, hard and fast.
"Maren? It's Ruth. I heard screaming through my ceiling."
Maren opened it.
Ruth Tolliver stood in the hall in a quilted robe, holding a mug of tea in both hands. She was sixty-three, retired from thirty years of night shifts, and she had the spare key to Maren's apartment.
"Bad dream," Maren said.
"That was no dream, honey. That was a person being killed."
Ruth set the mug down on the hall table and took Maren's bare wrist before Maren could stop her.
Maren had pulled one glove off to open the door.
A hospital room came up behind her eyes. A man's hand lay slack in Ruth's hands, and a monitor drew one long flat line.
Ruth's voice, forty years younger, said, "Stay with me. Please, stay."
Maren pulled free and the room went away.
She stood there breathing, and she understood that she still had it. The ability had come back with her.
"You're white as paper," Ruth said. "Sit. I'm making you eggs."
"I'm fine."
"You're not, and I'm making them anyway."
Ruth went downstairs. Maren heard a pan hit a burner.
She went to the window and looked down at the street.
A few people were walking to work in the thin light. A tall man sat on the bench across the road with a paper cup in his hand.
His lips were moving. He tapped the lid of the cup with one finger, slowly, before he stood.
Then he crossed the street and walked away without looking back.
Maren watched him until he turned the corner. He had been there since before she woke, and he had looked at her window once.
She let the curtain fall.
She knew what happened next. She had lived it.
At nine o'clock a woman with a warm voice would call about a paid study. In the first life, the call had come when Maren was drowning in her brother's hospital bill.
The study had sounded easy. A few sessions, a few tests, four thousand dollars a week.
Then a locked room under the building. Then the saw.
She sat on the edge of the bed and made herself think it through the way she thought through a bad night shift.
She could hide. She could change her number, move, never answer.
But Dr. Quillan had a drawer of files and a basement full of rooms.
Maren had heard other people screaming through the walls down there. If she vanished, the Institute would find someone else.
Maren was the only person alive who knew what was under that building.
She went to the kitchen and drank Ruth's tea standing up.
At 8:58 her phone lit on the counter with a number she knew by heart.
It rang. She let it ring three times, her thumb over the screen, her heart going hard.
Then she picked up.
"Maren Teague? Hi, I hope this isn't a bad time. My name is Hester Quillan." The voice was low and friendly, the voice of a woman who remembered your birthday. "Your brother gave us your name, and I think I can help with that hospital bill."
Maren closed her eyes.
She had a plan, and the plan started with walking back into that building.
"Yes," she said. "I'll come in."
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