Scribe Inc.

Scribe Inc. wasn’t privy to giving information about their experiments they were running on living humans, especially with what they disclosed to those coming in for their $20,000 reward. There were plenty of nondisclosure agreements and even more discretionary practices. It wasn’t too distasteful for me; I was going to stay quiet anyway.

Scribe Inc. paid in advance for their test subject’s sacrifice in case they didn’t make it out alive. While I waited in the sanitized, white-walled room, I transferred the $20,000 to the unnamed bank account Jude and I accessed to get away from any danger. It mattered less that I would make it so long as Jude used the money to get out of the country. There wasn’t much I could do now, but it was better than nothing after our “honest” job turned sour.

“This will only take a little of your time, Ms. Crowe,” said a pristine woman wearing a long lab coat.

She tightened a tourniquet around my arm until a vein rose that looked like it might burst from my skin. The needle she used was thick, and creamy liquid sloshed in the syringe as she pushed it through the barrel. After she cleared away her medical equipment, she set down a black notebook about the size of my hand and a pen.

“It takes hours for some,” she said. “Minutes for others. Just be sure to write down everything.”

“Everything?” I asked.

“Everything.”

She left me alone in the room, but I just stared at the notebook. I opened it and scribbled on the first page when I noticed a thin, black line creeping up my thumb. Over a few hours, it spread and spidered up my arm. Fear tingled in the back of my mind.

Half a day passed before they released me, marking my case as “inconclusive.” By that time, the black infection had spread to my shoulder. When I asked if I would die from the substance, Scribe Inc. marched me out the door with the notebook and asked me to contact them if any new data were to come of the injection.

“And the side effects?” Jude asked. She sniffled through the speaker of my phone.

“Just use the money, and get out of here,” I said as I leaned back into a dusty recliner in the motel room I had checked into for the night.

“But I wanted to get out with you,” she cried. “You helped me when no one else—”

“Jude”—I sighed—“I wasn’t meant to make it through the night. Go while no one knows you have the money.”

She held silence for as long as she could. She thanked me, wished me well, and hung up. She would need to get rid of that phone soon. Calling her back would’ve been futile, even if the pain of losing her stabbed at my heart. It would be the last time I heard her voice, and she was crying.

The infection was neither painful nor pleasant. It left me feeling weightless—almost numb—so I wrote how I felt while I could still feel my fingertips.

“N-u-m-b,” I said, just able to get the letters to come to my mind.

My lids felt heavy as my vision splintered into blackness, and I thought I would close them to let the end happen. My mind sank back, but the pen moved along the pages. Words inked across the paper, but I wasn’t the one in control.

When I woke, the notebook was lying open on the floor. As I reached for it, I noticed the infection receded down my hand. I ran to the mirror to find that it had disappeared from my neck and shoulder, too.

It took far too long to dredge up the courage to open the notebook. When I finally managed it, the notes were like the scrawls of a madman. What I could make out was about a man named John Palamine. He was in hiding for embezzling from a company he had been associated with, and he was in a town nearby.

I—however briefly—thought about giving Jude a call but grabbed the remote to the outdated TV that sat on an old stand instead. I flicked through channels, landed on a popular news station, and held my breath. I hoped not to see Jude or a helicopter’s view of an alleyway where her body might have been dumped.

“John Palamine, the former CEO of Flash Pharmaceutics, was found earlier this morning,” the newscaster said as she stared unblinking into the lens. “He went missing after the discovery of his involvement with a former senior financial manager for Flash Pharmaceutics, where they transferred money from the company into foreign accounts.”

Her voice faded as I scrambled for the notebook and read over what I had written the night before. There it all was in the notebook—verbatim.

I reasoned, rationalized, and denied knowing anything about him. I tried to write more, but nothing came. It had to be a coincidence that I knew anything about John Palamine. As I struggled to write, the spider-like infection started back up my arm. For a moment, I considered telling Scribe Inc. that it had receded but figured that wasn’t what they were looking for in terms of their search.

I tried to sleep to keep the infection at bay. For hours, I watched it ink my veins in the same pattern as before. It took most of the day, but when it got to my neck, I could feel it pulsing like it was reaching out of my throat.

The numb sensation tingled behind my eyes, so I hobbled my way to the mirror. The infection made a mask that formed a nightmare of crow’s feet and cracks. Even the whites of my eyes looked like they might turn into webs and attract the flies that buzzed around the room.

I grabbed the notebook, and my hand took over to write about another unfamiliar name. I resisted the sleep that I had wished for to see what my hand was trying to reveal.

There were a few iterations of names, but it was “Katherine Hall” that was the clearest. My hand wrote how she became a senator in less than a few years of being on the political radar. It became clear she paid off “supporters” and used less-than-ethical means to skew votes in her favor. By the time I could make out how she pulled it off, my vision blurred into blackness.

When I woke, the notebook was still in my grasp. I jumped to turn on the news and waited as the newscaster went through her stories. Minutes passed and breaks ensued, but there was no mention of Katherine Hall.

Overnight, the infection receded to my hand. I ached for answers. I was hesitant to return to Scribe Inc., but I thought they might be willing to answer a few questions now. I explained to the receptionist what happened after my injection, and her eyes widened. She hurried me to an examination room where I was surrounded by white lab coats.

“The notebook,” one hummed.

I had hardly pulled the notebook from my coat before they ripped it away and took it to another room to examine. The room was quiet and stale in that doctor’s office kind of way, and coming back felt like a mistake. It wasn’t until the pristine woman in the lab coat wheeled a small medical table into the room that I felt some sense of ease.

“Investigations are being arranged for Hall,” she said, her voice calm. “As for Palamine, your foresight was late but accurate.”

“Foresight?” I asked. My body went white with heat. “It’s fever writing. I don’t know where I came up with that stuff.”

“‘That stuff,’” she said as her nose pinched upwards, “is the result of our experiments.” She held up a vial of the same, creamy liquid from my first injection. Its label read X1-Pr36. “This formula is being developed to find those who act against the betterment of society. It’s a foresight to avoid any messy situations.”

I scoffed. “It’s for politicians and billionaires to keep their places before ‘society’ finds out their real practices.”

“More or less,” she said, more nonchalant than I expected. “It’s also for those who commit crimes against the state. Forgers, thieves, murderers—former and current.”

She spoke, but the white noise of the room turned deafening and drowned out her words. Jude rushed to the forefront of my mind.

“The effects don’t last long,” she said as she loaded a syringe with X1-Pr36. “But, we’ll keep you medicated to help.”

“No,” I blurted. My muscles tensed as she halted the pull from the vial.

“The documents you signed state if the effects of our first experiment succeed, you would be subject to further testing.” She wrapped a tourniquet around my arm and tightened it. “You will, of course, be compensated.”

She injected me with the serum and allowed me to rest for the day. I struggled to keep control of myself, but my hand moved without my consent. As I wrote, my body would start to give, but I would stay awake long enough to see the names. If I didn’t see Jude’s name, I wouldn’t fight it any longer. The next day, I would wake without the notebook.

A week passed. Scribe Inc. was true to their word about compensation, so I transferred it all to the account Jude used. After a few more injections of the X1-Pr36, I suspected the crimes were located within the country. I hoped Jude left with the $20,000, but if she hadn’t, the extra money would at least get her there.

Anna, the pristine woman from the first day, rolled in the table as usual, but this time, she had a vial with an opaque, blue fluid. She started the procedure as normal, but when she moved to inject me, I jerked back.

“A new formula,” she said as she stuck my arm. “Thanks to you, we could refine X1-Pr36 to the point that maybe”—she plunged the liquid into my arm—“you won’t pass out when you write.” She pulled the syringe and wiped the blood pilling where it had punctured. “And, it should be more precise.”

Soon after she left, the infection began. It was much faster than before, and I could already feel the urge to write in the little, black notebook. My chest tightened as I drew pen to paper.

The beginning started far too familiar. It was the hit-and-run and the debt with the mafia for accidentally offing one of their members. “A life for a life,” they would repeat; Even that wasn’t safe from X1-Pr36. My hand wrote about the escape, deals made with crooked cops, and paying off individuals to railroad us out of a few cities.

My hand trembled. I wasn’t sure if it was from X1-Pr36 or my own nerves eating at me, but the lettering crumpled across the page as “Jude Bennett” appeared on the paper. Violent shudders wracked through me as though I were suspended in icy water. I fought to stop my hand, but every time, it overpowered me just to repeat her name.

I screamed at it to stop as it drew closer to revealing her location. The locks on the door moved as the white coats frantically tried to get inside. I tore at the pages with my other hand, desperately trying to destroy the evidence of Jude’s and my last mistake.

My hand hovered over a blank spot on the page. The door swung open, and a crew of white coats stood with a quiet air of anxiety. Still, nothing came from the pen.

“It only knows where they are within the country,” I whispered as my hand wrote the two best words I had ever seen:

“Location: Unknown.”