Chapter 11

The girl is nowhere to be seen, gone. I notice that the door to the generator room is still closed, locked. Grace is lying down where I saw her previously, I see her chest rising and falling slowly. "Grace!" Tom says, now jogging over towards her. I can see her eyes open slightly as she looks to her left, she doesn't have much strength left, it seems.

"T-Tom...you're here..." She says.

And then she sees me.

"Y-You...what the...fu...ck are you doing?"

"Grace, I understand you have beef with him, at the same time, I understand why you left without him."

"To be quite fair, you left too," I pipe in.

"Not the time," he says, walking closer to Grace. "Gavin, I think I remember seeing an extra pair of clothes in your bag. Would you mind if you parted with at least the shirt?" He asks.

"I guess not," I say, taking it out of my bag, tossing it over to him.

He catches it with one arm and turns back around to kneel over Grace. "Now, you've lost quite a bit of blood, but I need you to stay calm, okay?"

"Yeah."

He takes the shirt and rips the collar to effectively unwrap it, and then he applies some pressure to the wound as he ties it around her as if you would a hoodie.

"I don't have any actual bandages with me, so sadly this is the best I can do. The good news is I don't think that what that girl has is a real gun."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"I'm no expert on guns, but the entry wound here looks much too small if an actual bullet that size hit her. I'm thinking it might be like, modded to shoot something like BB's."

"So, she's got a BB pistol?" Grace asks.

"Yeah, if you keep pressure on it you should stop or at least slow the blood flow, you should be fine." he says.

"Now, I don't think you should move quite yet, While it doesn't seem so bad right now it could make things worse," Tom says.

"Okay," she glares up at me.

"And I understand we have some problems. Well, we're going to need to settle those before we do move on."

"Ugh, why?" I ask.

"Because like it or not we were gathered here against our will."

"Chosen," I say.

"Hm?" Tom asks.

"Maybe we were chosen. That girl spoke to me, she said hero. What do you make of that?"

"I don't know, but that's not what I'm talking about. Well, not yet," Tom says. "I'm talking about how you don't seem to want to be with us, Gavin."

"I just really want to get out of here," I say.

"Yes, we do too, but I'm sure we can get out quicker and easier if we team up and work together."

"I just don't like you guys, I'm sorry. Not for saying it, for I guess the bluntness of it? I don't know," I say.

"I'm not asking you to like me. I'm asking you to work with me so we can get out of here alive." He points to Grace on the ground, "And leaving one of us like that isn't the way to do that."

"Okay, okay. You're right. I'm not much for the whole friends thing, so I'm not saying I'm going to be your friend,"

"But...?"

"I'm sorry I left you for dead, Grace. I know that isn't able to cut it, I just want to get the hell out of here."

"It's a start," She moans out as she tries to sit up.

"No, you should rest back, you might make things worse."

"Okay," Grace replies.

Tom turns to me, "Now, you were saying something before?"

I look to him, for the first time I don't completely hate his guts. Well, maybe second. I kinda did give him praise earlier, didn't I?

"I'm thinking that we were chosen to be here. I don't know about you, but I think there might be a reason we're here. Me...I think mine's this," I say, handing him the note I'd found in the room I'd woken up in. Tom reads it aloud to Grace.

"Why would he write all of this information down?" Grace asks.

"And what does it have to do with you?" Tom adds.

"I thought the very same question you did, Grace. Then I started to remember some pieces of the other letters that stuck out to me," I say.

"What happened to-"

"They got soaked in the water when we fell," I explain.

"Oh."

"So, I remember in that second letter there was a bit where Jack was describing Jay by his voice."

"Yeah, I remember that."

"Now, why would he have to do that? Usually unless a voice is like, out of the ordinary I don't make mention of it, personally."

"I don't know, maybe his voice really was memorable?"

"Maybe, but that brings us back to this note here, the one listing all the names. Do you see anything weird about it?" I ask.

Tom looks at the paper in his hands and looks it over once again. "Let's see...Name, height, hair, voice, family...that seems to be the pattern it follows for each of them," Tom says.

"What about their faces?" Grace asks.

"Huh?" Tom looks to her.

"I knew something bothered me, but now I know. Why describe literally everything about someone except for like, their facial features? Nothing at all for any of them?"

"That's what I thought too. Why would he not mention any of their faces? Why stick to everything else? And then I remembered he wrote down this," I clear my throat and stand straight, "I'm still trying to get them memorized."

"Normal people don't usually have to memorize things like that, right? We can just like, understand them," Tom says.

"Yeah, I think our dear friend can't recognize people by faces, that's why he has to list them by their voice and hair."

"I guess it makes sense. And I can kind of get why he felt so stressed to memorize them. How would you tell your coworkers you had something like that and expect to be treated the same?" Grace says.

"I think there's a name for that, the not-recognizing-faces," Tom stumbles.

"Prosopagnosia," I tell him.

He looks over to me, shocked. "How...?"

"I remember reading about it. It's strange I knew something that you didn't, Med Student."

I remember reading about Prosopagnosia when I was in the waiting room of the doctor the staff had taken me to see. There were a bunch of other kids that were ahead of me in priority for seeing the doctor. Kids with measles, kids with hemorrhages, kids without legs. In that time I read that people can either have prosopagnosia from a genetic mutation or from trauma on the brain at some point in life. I wonder which one Jack is? Maybe since he isn't making such a big deal of not being able to see faces he has dealt with this for a long time, maybe even since childhood.

"I have a question," Grace asks.

"Yeah?" I ask.

"You said this had something to do with you."

"Oh, right. That's not a question, by the way, but I'll explain anyway. So, I have reason to believe that my parents worked with this guy," I say.

"What?" Tom asks. Grace merely looks at me with an annoyed and pained expression.

"That letter you're holding Tom, it mentions one of the scientists, Greg. It also mentions his wife, Lorraine. Well, my parents were named Greg and Lorraine, and they worked as freelance workers, just like these people."

"What?"

"I didn't know they were doing this kind of stuff, but I think that might have something to do with why I am here," I say.

"And you think that you were chosen because of that?" Tom says.

"Yeah."

"Well, then I have something to share as well. I didn't want to earlier because I would have thought for sure you guys would have seen me as the bad guy. Mason, the one in this letter with his kid, Kate. That sounds an awful lot like my uncle Mason. Their last name is Radica," Tom says.

I can see why he thought so. I mean, I surely would have pegged him as Leto if he came forward with something like that, but that only leaves one question.

"Who're you related to here?" I ask Grace, turning down to see her on the ground.

"Me? None of these people. My dad's a nut-job reporter and my brother is currently six feet under ground."

"I'm sorry," Tom says.

"He was going to college, you know?" Grace says. "He wanted to be a writer. He had such a way with wording things, and now he's dead."

Probably back in 2013. A lot of people died then, and after, too.

"And your father, a reporter? Who for?" I ask.

"His start-up company called The Freeman's Word, yellow journalism stuff. He had a bit of a mental breakdown back in 2005, so he isn't doing anything as of late except for watching television at home."

"Okay, any uncle Jays or Davids?" Tom asks.

"Nope. I have an Uncle Joe, but he's dead too. He just smoked a lot."

"Okay, uh, I don't have any other leads really. Anything at NASA ring a bell to your normal life?" I ask in desperation.

"Nope."

"Well, maybe you're just unlucky," Tom says.

"Yeah, maybe," she says, moving her hand to her side once more.

"Oh, before I forget Gavin, I owe you one prognosis," Tom says, pulling the medical report out of his back pocket.

"You're keeping to your word?" I ask.

"You're one crazy son of a bitch, but I do believe that you deserve that at the very least," he says.

"Wait a minute, prognosis for what?" Grace asks.

"Our boy here's got himself dementia," Tom says.

I look at him hard.

"What? Nothing is too personal here, Gavin. Especially considering you were trusting enough of me to help you out."

I sigh, "Continue."

Tom continues scanning the back of the page, and he looks up to me, "You've got approximately five years," Tom says.

"Is that what it says?" I ask.

"Yeah. I mean, it doesn't so much say it outright."

"I assumed, I would have seen if it did."

"But the bad news is this is dated five years ago..." Tom looks to me, handing me the report.

"So...it could be anytime then..." I say.

"Yeah, sorry."

I look down at the paper in my hands. "How...how can you tell it says five years?" I ask. "Where does it say it?"

He walks over and looks over my shoulder, "Look there, that's where it says your diagnosis. Based on your specific condition the general prognosis is five to ten years based on severity and malignancy."

"And mine is severe?"

He nods.

I could drop any time. That's scarier than any kidnapping or robed assailant. This is an imminent death to my own body. I feel something rise, I think it's puke. Or maybe it's just the physical manifestation with my inability to process recent events. Maybe it's something so severe it will just remove all the pain—take it all away and leave me alone finally.

"Gavin...Gavin?" Tom shakes my shoulder. I am woken out of my reverie and swallow hard the vomit that rose to my throat.

"Y-yeah?"

"Are you going to be okay?"

"Yeah, yeah I'm good. Great. We need to move."

"I don't think Grace is ready to mo-"

"Nah, I think she's perfectly fine to move, we need to go," I say, pulling her to her feet, not listening to her pained moan. She nearly falls over, but I'm jogging down the corner before they can even react.

"Gavin, where are you going?" Tom says, putting a little too much emphasis on the "where". I stop, but only for a second.

"I'm going to find that girl, it makes sense that she's Leto, come on!" I say, running down to the door I'd found Tom by. It's still locked. Looks like I might finally get some answers. I'm not expecting much but the bare minimum. That seems to be the way to go these days.

Survival isn't much of an option anymore. I need answers. I need to know why my parents left me. I need to know why I was taken here. I need to know why-