Jo sat straight up, drenched in sweat, dripping with fear, and soaked in sleep. Instantly her head clouded with pain, settling into her bones like a fever. Her eyelids slowly peeled open to reveal the dark shadows curled around the small concrete room like a sleeping cat. Jo pushed herself off the ground with haste. From the buzz in her skull she could tell this day did not want to be faced. But the lights still snapped on and the alarms still wailed. It forced all twenty four of them up off their paper thin mattresses to the front of their cells, up to the glass making up the fourth wall of the cold rooms tucked neatly side by side.
As always she placed her forearm against the glass, revealing the symbol etched black against her dark skin. As always she herd the beep as the glass slid open. She stumbled out, falling into rhythm with the others and making her way through the hall. They didn’t say a word to each other, the fear too thick in the air, but they nodded and grunted and acknowledged that they had survived another day.
It was as it always was, the strict routine the only thing keeping them sane. Jo stood at the front of the line, the example for the others, the shining pupil, the strongest, the one with the most needles in her arm, the one with all the pain. She was the model to which the others were crafted. They could tell from the pain in her eyes, the power oozing from her skin like waves of heat, and the mark on her arm, she was the first to lose everything and the last to heal. In this place she wasn’t Jo, she was Alpha.
After they shoveled trays full of grey sustenance down their throats they each marched out into the lifeless yard of the Institution to the buildings they had been assigned. Jo had no idea what day it was, they were all smeared together like blood on the cold grey floor, but she knew that yesterday was physical testing in Building F, which meant she was going into Building A for more injections.
They burned through her veins like lava. They made her squirm as men in lab coats wrote on their clip boards with ball point pens. They made deafening scratching noises in the column marked Immediate Reactions. Jo locked her eyes to the crisp clean of the men, not quite grey, they were new. The looks of wonder in the place of fear at the writhing form strapped to the rusting table suggested they had volunteered. She could tell that her stare slightly unnerved them, but not enough to make them pity her, not enough to make them care.
By the time Jo made it out, the sun had barely crawled its way above the rolling hills stretching out in all directions. She took her time to walk back to the main building to get her preliminary physical tests. She deeply breathed in the air which smelled the least like blood and death and pain. She soaked up the weak sunlight managing to filter in through the fog that lay over the dip in the thick hills like a wool blanket. She let the sliver of freedom, compared to the claustrophobic walls of impending doom, wash over her like cold water.
But she was still far from free. She knew she was far from civilization when no people could be heard beyond the walls topped with barbed wire. She knew she could not escape when she found she wasn’t strong enough to make the concrete disintegrate before her. She knew she couldn’t be saved when she was called the strongest of them all. And she knew things would be different when she crumpled to the ground and felt the knot in her chest untangle with a burst of white hot power. After all this time, she knew she was finally powerful enough to be the Alpha that could save them.
Jo stood up and looked straight forward, revealing the unnatural glow of her eyes. She could tell that she was burning away, and something else was taking her place. It was made of fire and anger and power. It was exactly what the director of the Institution wanted, but she would not let him have it if it meant her life. She would keep it controlled, she would use it to her advantage. She would save them.
Jo looked down to her hands, to the baggy orange pants and grey tank top covering the strength growing underneath. She let the strain of control slightly loosen in her bones and gasped at the energy that burst from her skin. She felt her insides turning to ash, but felt no pain, only power. She turned to the nearest wall, focusing on the material that formed it, every atom that separated her from the outside, and that separated the others from freedom.
Jo lifted her hand, her long thin fingers reached out with invisible claws, grasping the wall with every ounce of concentration she could muster from her newly-clear head. She closed her hand forming a fist and thick spidery cracks crawled up and down the impenetrable wall. She felt giddy with the ability she now held in her hands. Her eyelids closed in a disbelieving blink and hoped the cracks would still be there when her sight returned.
Shock gripped her when sirens began to blare, shattering her concentration so quickly that dust flew up from the release of stress on the wall. Flashing lights attacked her eyes from all directions, fear swelled in her when the deafening sound of guns loading pounded against her eardrums.
Triggers pulled back by nervous guards ripped through the air, with every intention of hitting Jo anywhere that would stop her. She raised both hands, her fear driving her brain on with nothing more than pure instinct. She felt her body fill up with knowledge of how it worked. It’s all in the hands she repeated quickly under her breath. The bullets stopped, halted in their tracks by immense amounts of pressure forming in the air around them.
Jo’s left hand moved slowly back to the cracks in the wall, testing how much effort it took to keep the bullets at bay. A weight lifted off her shoulders, she had more power then she realized, even as she held the majority deep in her bones. Everything she did, every atom she controlled, took less concentration than the last. The wall easily crunched under her hand once again, this time moving quickly upwards. The concrete went from large slabs to small boulders in seconds, flying outward with a flick of Jo’s wrist to push the guards from their posts, over the wall and holding them to the ground outside the walls.
How little control the walls had over her now, she giggled, drunk with power. It was becoming harder and harder to see her goal, she was burning from the inside, becoming the monster she saw on the clipboards of volunteer doctors with too-white lab coats and scratching pens. Her future clouded with the undeniable allure of absolute power.
She stumbled, suddenly unable to think about anything other than the power she could possess if only she let go. She fought hard for her own aspirations, she had things she needed to do, people she needed to save no matter what. Family may mean something to Jo, but Jo was burning, dying, hurting, crippled by emotions and the need for control. Jo may be the strongest, but she was not the most powerful.
All at once every building was gone, brushed away by a wave of destruction. The people stood, frozen by a combination of fear and claws wrapped tight around their bodies. Every person looked to her, knowing she could do anything she wished. But they did not meet her eyes, for they were too bright. It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t anything that drove her to squeeze them so tight they stopped pulsing with life. She did it all simply because she could.
Jo was long dead, burned away, turned to ash but from the ashes rose another. She was the most powerful. She was impossible to control. She killed them all, but she was not done.
That morning, the director sat up in the queen bed sitting in his house next to the walls, grabbing the ringing phone from its place on the nightstand.
“Hello?”
“Yes, Director Lyle, good morning. Sorry it’s so early. It’s just, well…”
“Well spit it out Wayne! What is it?”
“We got some new doctors in today, sir.”
“Yes, yes, I know, the ones from Arizona.”
“Sir, they say they have this new serum they would like to try out today. If that’s all right.”
“Why not? If they have good credentials and they really think it will help, I approve.”
“Good, thank you sir, I’ll tell them right away.”
“All right. And Wayne?”
“Yes sir?”
“Which one would they be using this serum on? According to the schedule?”
Wayne typed furiously on his keyboard.
“Today would be…Let’s see here…why it would be Alpha”
“Excellent.”
“Alpha” – Greta Tucker
