SPECIMENS

1
“Is the specimen in cell eight ready for testing yet?” The voice came over the loudspeaker that fed into Cole’s cell.
A specimen. Is that all he was to these people?
2
Three weeks ago, Cole Porter had been your average twenty something guy. He was fresh out of college with a bachelor’s in entymology and trying desperately to find a job. He was having very little luck and it seemed that his future was growing bleaker with every failed interview. He was sure that he would be spending the rest of his life in the basement of his mother’s house.
Then he saw the ad in the newspaper:
Test Subjects Wanted
$250 a week for 3 months
Call to set up an interview
Three thousand dollars wasn’t much but it was more than Cole was making by not having a job at all and it would make for a nice little nest egg to help him get out of his parents’ basement. He called the number in the ad and was delighted when they asked him to come in the next day for an interview and to run a few tests. 
The building seemed legitimate. From the outside, it looked like every other building on the block. It had tall windows encased in huge, white blocks that stretched up as far as he could see. The double doors that led into the lobby were glass framed in the shiniest silver that Cole had ever seen in his life. It made him feel like an executive when he walked through them.
The interior was a great bit more dazzling. The marble slats on the floor were arranged in a diamond pattern and were buffed so thoroughly that Cole could see his own reflection in them. The lobby had leather chairs. Cole was sued to the plastic and cloth chairs I other interviews and these made him feel important and insignificant all at the same time. Cole walked over to the little slide away window and let his hand fall onto the bell that was marked ‘ring for service’. 
Instantly, one of the glass panes slid open and a Cole was face to face with a beautiful woman. Her long, blonde hair fell in curls around her porcelain skin and she reminded Cole of the china dolls that his mother collected when he was younger. Her eyes were a deep shade of green that captivated him and made him forget all about his interview.
“Name?” The words fell out of her mouth like silk.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your name. What’s your name, sir?”
“Oh! Uh, Cole. Cole Porter.”
The receptionist handed Cole a clipboard through the window and pointed to one of the chairs across the room. “Sit there, fill this out, and someone will be right with you.”
“Thank-“
The glass door slammed in his face and Cole began to think that beauty really was only skin deep with this woman. He turned and walked over to the other end of the lobby and sat down on the shiny, brown leather. It made a loud squeak that sounded obscene and Cole couldn’t help but smile childishly.
He looked at all of the questions on the paper in front of him. Most of them seemed pretty standard—asking him what his blood type was, if he’d ever had any surgeries, previous illnesses. Cole had never been really sick a day in his life. For years he had jokes about how he was invincible.
Other questions seemed a bit more invasive and, sometimes, downright uncomfortable: Do you have any children? In the event of your sudden and unexpected demise, is there anyone who could identify your body?
What the fuck kind of experiments are they performing here?
Cole was starting to worry whether or not the five hundred dollars a week was actually worth whatever was behind the doors of this place. He stood and walked back to the receptionist’s window and rang the bell. Once again, the window slid open with a loud clap.
“Name?”
“Cole Porter.” The receptionist’s charm was already wearing off. “I was just wondering what kind of-“
“Someone will be with you in a few minutes, sir.” The receptionist grabbed the window to close it again and Cole grabbed it.
“Hi. I don’t mean to pull you away from slacking off but could you tell me what kind of place this is?”
The receptionist stared at Cole for a few minutes before saying, “Sir. I am going to ask you nicely to please take your hand away from the window. Someone will be with you in just a few minutes.”
Cole was getting angry. “And I am going to ask you nicely to please suck my-“
“Mr. Porter!” A voice came from Cole’s right. He turned to see a short, chubby man in a white lab coat smiling at him.
Cole released the window just long enough for the receptionist to slam it shut again. “Prick.”
“Cunt.” Cole said under his breath.
The short man was holding the door and his hand was outstretched towards Cole. “Please. Come this way. We are all ready for you. I see that you have finished the questionnaire.”
“Well, yeah, but I wanted to ask you a few questions before I went any further with this.”
“Sure. What did you want to ask?”
“Well there are a few odd questions on here. Why do you want to know about who is going to identify my body if I die?”
“Ahh. Those are just survey questions, really. Pay them no attention. Everything will be explained later. Will you come with me?”
“I don’t know. I mean, the money would be nice but I am not sure how comfortable I feel about all of this.”
“Yes. Well, what if we quadrupled it? Say a thousand dollars a week for three months?”
Twelve thousand dollars. That was over half of what Cole expected to make his first year out of college. He thought about it for a few minutes. “Ok. I’m in.”
***
It was stupid. Cole knew it then and he most certainly knew it now. Now that he had been in this cell for over three weeks without food. There was plenty of water but how long could one live off of just water? Not much longer.
The guy that had been in the cell next to Cole had died two days ago. His body was gone but the smell of his vomit and feces still lingered in the air. He had been fed rotten fruits and vegetables, dead animals, and other things that Cole didn’t even want to think about. How the guy—Daniel had been his name—had survived as long as he had was mystery to Cole.
There were others at the start of the experiment. Most had died already but a couple of them were still alive. Cole looked around at the other cells and saw a woman directly in front of him curled up in a ball, her knees clasped tightly to her chest. She was pale and her hair hung in strands in front of her face. She rocked back and forth and moaned gently.
At first, she had been just as lively as the rest of them—beating her hands against the walls and bars and screaming obscenities at the men behind the glass. Now Cole could see that she was fading slowly. Soon she would be carried out of her cell and put with the rest of the bodies.
Another failed specimen.
There was only one other person left out of the ten that had originally been chosen for the experiment. A man of about forty stood staring at the wall in the back of the cell. Of all of them, he had been treated the best. Three meals a day and an endless supply of water to keep him hydrated. Cole wondered if he was what they called the “control”.
The voice came over the loudspeaker again and broke up Cole’s thoughts. “Mr. Porter. How are we today? Are we feeling well? I hope so because today is a very special day. Today you can become a hero and gain your freedom or you can become a villain and sentence one of your cell mates to death. The choice is yours.”
Cole looked up at the men behind the glass. What was going through their twisted brains? A hero or a villain? Gain his freedom? They really were fucking psychotic. Nevertheless, Cole was out of options. It would only be a matter of time before he was dead.
“Mr. Porter? Your answer.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Excellent! I am sure that you have noticed the other two specimens, yes?”
Cole nodded his head. His teeth were clenched so tightly that he thought his jaw was going to break.
“Good. You have two choices. One of them is going to die. There is no way around that. The choice you have to make is this: Will there be only one more death or will there be three?”
“Motherfuckers!” Cole screamed.
The woman in the cell across from Cole started to sob. She rocked back and forth faster now, her face buried in her knees.
The man still stared at the wall.
“What do I have to do?”
“In order to save the girl and yourself, you must do something you probably never thought you would have to do in your entire life.” One of the men behind the glass stretched out his hand towards the man in the other cell. “You must eat Mr. Banks.”
3
“It’s okay.” The voice was frail and sad.
Cole looked up at the face of the man who was no longer staring at the wall but looking directly into his eyes. “What?”
“It’s okay. I am going to die anyway. I knew they were feeding me for a reason. Besides, I have nothing left. They killed my wife, my children, even my dogs. I’m dead already, anyway.”
“No. I-I can’t.” Cole was crying now.
“You have to.” Mr. Banks slammed his hands against the bars in front of him. They clanged loudly. “You have to save your life and the life of that girl. Look at her. She can’t be more than seventeen.”
Cole looked at the girl in front of him whose eyes were now locked on his face. Mr. Banks was right. The girl couldn’t be more than seventeen, if that. He guessed younger. “I-“
“Can and will.” Mr. Banks eyes were pleading with him.
“Ok.” He said quietly.
“Excellent!” The voice came over the loud speaker again.
“But you kill him gently. He does not suffer, you understand me?” Cole was standing and screaming at the men behind the glass. “You sick fucks!”
“Very well, Mr. Porter. You really are in no position to make demands but I guess we can grant this request for you.”
A door to Cole’s left slid open and in walked a big man in a black suit carrying a .45 caliber pistol. Cole turned to Mr. Banks whose eyes were wide and frantic now.
“Close your eyes. Just close them. Now!”
Mr. Banks closed his eyes and started saying a prayer under his breath. Cole pressed his palms against his ears and watched as the man walked to the front of Mr. Banks’ cell and raised the pistol. First there was the click of the gun being cocked, then only the sound of Mr. Banks’ whispers. For what seemed like an hour, the man just stood there pointing the gun at his forehead.
It was a test. There was never any intent of killing Mr. Banks and there was never any intent of Cole having to eat the body. Cole let out a sigh and pulled his hands away from his ears just in time to hear Mr. Banks say, “Amen.”
Suddenly, a thunderous clap filled the room and Cole watched as brain matter spewed from the back of Mr. Banks’ head and smacked thickly against the wall. He then watched the man’s knees buckle and his body drop to the floor. For a few minutes, all he could hear was the ringing in his ears. When that finally died down, it was replaced with the shrieks that poured from the throat of the girl across the room.
The man opened the cell and grabbed Mr. Banks’ legs. He pulled him through the doorway and dragged him down the hall and out through the door that led in. Cole’s stomach was doing flip flips and if there had been anything in it he was sure it would now be on the floor at his feet.
Minutes later, the door slid open again and the man in black was walking towards Cole’s cell again. He now carried a silver tray that held what looked like a gourmet meal, complete with a glass of what he hoped was wine and a napkin folded over a fork and knife.
When he reached Cole’s cell, he slid the tray through the small, horizontal slot at the bottom of it and handed him the glass through one of the vertical spaces between the bars. Cole grasped them and carried them over to the cot that had been supplied for him. He looked over the meal and his stomach turned again.
“I know that this is not going to be easy for you, Mr. Porter, but I must remind you that you will be here until you fulfill your part of the agreement. After that, you and the girl will be released as promised.” The voice came over the loud speaker again.
But would they? The question rang in Cole’s mind. Did he really believe they were going to let him and the girl go? Did he really think that they would keep their part of the bargain and let them back into the world with the knowledge they possessed? He had to hope they would. He didn’t have any other options.
He looked over the items on the tray and even though his degree wasn’t in anatomy, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure them out.
“The brain, Mr. Porter, holds all the knowledge that we gain over our lives. Whether we have access to that knowledge or not, it stays there, imprinted upon its walls. The heart is the center of our beings. It allows us to feel love, anger, and a great assortment of other emotions. The genitals are where new life is created.
“The experiment is simple. Eat these items and tell us if you gain any new insight into your life. Tell us if you know anything that you didn’t know before. Tell us if you have any feelings that you didn’t have before. Urges, desires, memories, all of these things are essential to the experiment. After you have successfully completed the experiment, you and the girl will be free to go.”
Cole looked down at the tray and took a deep breath. He had to focus. He had to put it out of his mind that these things were his food. He couldn’t think about Mr. Banks lying on the tray in front of him. Mr. Banks was gone. This was dinner. Nothing more.
But this wasn’t just dinner. But this was a person. This wasn’t a three piece meal from KFC. It had been a living, breathing person. Cole tried to push the thought out of his mind but it was near impossible. Finally, he decided that the chances of him getting out of this alive were next to zero if he did what they asked but they were exactly zero if he didn’t.
He looked at the girl in the cell across from him and put a hand over his eyes, signaling her to do the same. She didn’t need to see this. She was going to have a hard enough time dealing with this situation when (if) she got home and there was no need to make the nightmares she would suffer any worse. He watched as she slid her hands over her face, knelt down, and began sobbing again.
He grabbed the knife and fork and cut into the brain matter first. It was soft and pliable and the knife cut through it more easily than he had expected. It was almost as if it weren’t a brain but a fresh piece of cake. The fork punctured it easily and the texture of it kept it in place as Cole lifted it to his mouth. He stared at it for a minute then turned his eyes up to the girl. When he knew that her eyes were still covered, he turned his gaze back to the brain matter.
Fuck. Here goes nothing.
The texture was unlike anything Cole had ever experienced in his life. It was as if he had bitten into a rotten apple. The taste of copper still clung to the meat and filled his mouth with a flavor that Cole knew he would never forget. He chewed the soft, fibrous flesh, choking back tears and the need to immediately expel it and finally swallowed. It hit his stomach like a stone.
Bite after bite ate away at not only Cole’s hunger but his sanity as well. He powered through the brain, trying his best to forget that it was once a part of someone’s anatomy. When it was gone, he turned to the heart.
The heart was tougher and he had to chew harder and longer than he had with the brain—which had almost seemed to melt in his mouth. Every bite was like eating a sponge that had been used to clean a crime scene. The taste copper was even more prevalent in this organ and the contents of Cole’s stomach were really threatening to evacuate their new home.
Finally, Cole looked at the genitalia. This, he thought was going to be the hardest part of the entire process. It’s just sausage, he told himself. This thought did little to help him get past its chewy, flavorless meat.
When the meal was over, the voice cam over the loudspeaker again. “Well done, Mr. Porter. How do you feel?”
Cole looked up at the men behind the glass. How did they think he felt? He felt sick. He felt angry. He felt like bashing his head against the wall.
But, of course, Cole thought, he felt full.
2
He was cold and tired. The events of the past few days had played hell on his stamina, emotional and physical. It had been two days since the experiment had taken place and Cole felt nothing. There were no new ideas, thoughts, feelings, or emotions. There was only the desire to go home. To crawl into his bed and cry for days until there was no moisture left in his body.
He looked over at the girl across from him and saw that she was now sitting on her cot, looking at her hands. He could imagine what was going through her head because the same things were going through his.
“What’s your name?” Cole asked.
After a few minutes, the girl responded. “Kate.”
“How did they get you?”
“My mom. She is really sick and she needs surgery to remove a tumor on her brain. So I was… entertaining men in order to get the money to pay for it. I know it’s a shitty way to make money but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.’
‘Anyway, one night I get a customer who says that he can help me make more money than I have ever made in my life. I knew that they were going to ask me to do something gross but I had no idea it was something like this. If I had…”
“Yeah.” Cole said, looking desolately at the ground in front of him.
“They better fucking pay me. That’s all I know. After this, they better fucking pay me.”
“Mr. Porter,” the voice came over the loud speaker again.
Cole looked up at the glass with a hatred that burned in his veins. “What?” he asked.
“The experiment is over, Mr. Porter. You can go now. It was a complete failure but I think we’ve learned a lot over these past couple of weeks. What about you? Have you learned anything?”
“I’ve learned that there are people walking this earth that do not possess a soul.”
The man behind the glass laughed. “That could very well be, Mr. Porter. In any instance, I promised that you and the girl would be free to go when the experiment was over and I am a man of my word.”
White smoke began to pour from the crevice that surrounded the walls of the cell and Cole heard the girl across from him screaming. He pressed himself against the bars of the cell as the smoke began to envelop his feet. It climbed up his body and began to fill the entirety of the cell.
Cole turned around to face the girl, to offer some sort of solace but he could see that she was now sliding to the floor as the gas took her over. The gas began to burn his nostrils and his head began to swim. Unconsciousness was closing in around him as the man in black walked back through the door.
“You bastard!” Cole tried to scream. It came out weak and choked. Cole tried to hold onto the bars but his strength was waning. He slid down the bars and crumpled on the floor.
Then everything went black.
3
The walls were pulsating and Cole was running as fast as he could to get away from the man behind the glass and his tool, the man in black, but it seemed like the faster he ran, the closer they came to grabbing him. They wanted to lock him in another cell, to run more “experiments” on him. He wasn’t going to let them. He couldn’t. The door at the end of the hall seemed farther and farther away but he had to get to it. The big red letters above it spelled his only escape from this hell.
“We have more work for you to do, Mr. Porter. There is another person we need you to attend to.”
“Fuck you!” Cole screamed as he ran, his heart pounding in his chest and his lungs burning.
The man behind the glass was laughing now. Tears were streaming down Cole’s cheeks and sweat was soaking his shirt. The hallway seemed to be getting more and more narrow. Arms were now reaching out from the walls, staining his clothes with bloody handprints and trying desperately to grab him.
He finally reached the door and put all of his weight into it. It opened to a cliff and Cole lost his balance and fell into the darkness. He screamed until his throat was raw.
***
“Cole?! Cole, wake up!”
Cole jerked upwards in his bed. The nightmare had been so fierce that his bones were still shaking and his hands were cold and clammy. The hands that had been grabbing at him in the hallway now belonged to his mother who was shaking him out of his sleep.
“I’m awake,” he said, the visions now slowly seeping from his mind. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, praying silently that it had it all been a horrible nightmare.
“Good. Come on down for breakfast, would you?”
Cole’s stomach turned over. Breakfast was the farthest thing from his mind right now. “Okay. I’ll be down in a bit.”
His mother walked out into the hall and Cole fell back against the pillow. He stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes before pulling himself out of bed. The floor was cold beneath his feet and immediately he thought of the cell floor. This caused a strong chill to travel up his spine.
He walked down the hall, unconsciously pulling his arms close to his body, and into the kitchen. The smell of bacon and eggs would normally have been mouth-watering but this morning it made him sick.
“I think I’m gonna skip breakfast this morning, Ma.”
“I don’t think you are. You look terrible and you need to eat something.”
“Mom…”
“Cole. Sit.”
Anger started to boil up in Cole’s stomach and he had to stop himself from lashing out at his mother. You didn’t tell people to sit. You told dogs to sit. Cole wasn’t a dog. Nevertheless, he sat down to the table and his mother brought over a plate that held two eggs, scrambled, four thick slices of bacon, and a stack of pancakes.
“Eat up,” she said. “It will make you feel better.
Cole doubted it. The eggs tasted flavorless and gritty, for some reason. They traveled across his pallet like sandpaper and it hurt to swallow them. When they hit his stomach, it took everything he had in him to keep them down. He looked down at the bacon and thought of Mr. Banks. He could hear his mother talking in the background but all of the sudden her voice was muffled by another.
“Mr. Porter?” Cole gripped the table in both hands as the voice echoed in his ears. “Mr. Porter, that looks quite unappetizing, doesn’t it?”
“Cole?” His mother’s voice snapped him back to reality. “Cole, what’s wrong with you? Are you feeling okay?”
Chris waved his hand at her gently, “Yeah, Ma. I’m okay. I just don’t feel…” Chris suddenly noticed the vein in his mother’s neck. It seemed to be pounding violently, almost calling to him.
“Mr. Porter…” The voice sang to him. “Looks good. Doesn’t it, Mr. Porter?”
Cole couldn’t hear anything his mother was saying now. He could only hear the man behind the glass’ voice and the pounding of the blood in his mother’s neck. Suddenly the world began to close in around Cole and his vision began to blur. It was as if he was in a tunnel and his vision was focused on her throat. Everything around it was black now and the urge overtook him.
Before he knew what was happening, he had lunged over the table, tackled his mother, and ripped her throat out. The blood soothed his dry throat unlike the eggs that had gone down like a dust storm. The coppery taste of his mother’s flesh sated his screaming stomach. When it was all over, he stared down at her bulging eyes which now stared up at the ceiling in horror. He watched as her mouth moved in a way that made her look like a fish that had been taken out of the water and left on the banks of a river to die. She struggled for air for a few moments before becoming completely still.
Cole came to his senses and scurried to his feet, backing away slowly. What had he done? Had he really just done the unthinkable? Had he really just killed his mother and… eaten her? What had they done to him at the lab? He backed out of the kitchen, never taking his eyes off of his mother’s body, and fell back against the wall.
“It seems I was wrong, Mr. Porter. It seems the experiment was a complete success after all,” the voice laughed.
Cole sat against the wall for an eternity with all kinds of thoughts flooding his mind. The most important, though, was that he had to go back to the lab. He had to find out what they had done to him. He wanted to see the man behind the glass. He stood and walked down the hall to his mother’s bedroom, opened her nightstand, grabbed the .22, and slid it into his pocket.
He definitely wanted to see the man behind the glass.
***
“Sir you need an appoint-“ her voice was cut short by the sound of the bullet exploding from the barrel of the .22 and lodging itself in her skull.
Cole walked to the door through which he was led the first time he had shown up at this dreadful place. Behind that door was a long hallway with another door at the end of it. He started walking towards it, holding the gun tightly. The man behind the glass had to be on the other side of that door. Cole would talk to him and find out what they had done to him. And how to reverse it, if there was even a way.
He kicked the long, metal bar that stretched across the door and was greeted by a large oak desk, two chairs, the man in black, and the man behind the glass. He raised the gun and pointed it directly at the man in black’s chest. He then fired off three shots. The man convulsed for a few moments, then went still. The man behind the glass, who was now the man behind the desk, stayed motionless with his fingers interlaced in front of his face.
“You have about five seconds to tell me what the hell you did to before I put the rest of these slugs in your brain.” Cole said, calmer than he would have thought he’d be at a moment like this.
“Mr. Porter!” The man said, excited. “Glad you could make it. Won’t you sit down?”
“Talk!” Cole shouted.
“But, of course. What do you want to talk about?”
“What did you do to me?! What, did you make me a zombie or something?”
“A zombie? I have never heard of a zombie being so cold and calculated, have you? Could a zombie formulate a plan? Even a plan as faulty as this one?” The man turned in his chair and stood to his feet.
Cole’s eyes studied his, not finding a hint of fear or dread in them. Something was off.
“No, Mr. Porter. You are not a zombie. We merely… enhanced you.”
“Enhanced? Enhanced how?”
Suddenly, the man in black sat up and looked down at his chest and at the lack of blood. He then turned his face towards Cole’s and smiled menacingly.
“What the hell is going on?” Cole asked.
“Mr. Porter, what we did was an experiment in human enhancement. We wanted to see if we could make a person stronger, faster, less-” the man behind the glass’ eyes darted over to the man in black, “-susceptible to injury.”
Before Cole knew what was happening, the man in black was on him. With lightning speed he grabbed the gun, twisted it out of Cole’s hand, and placed the barrel against his forehead. In the blink of an eye, the tables seemed to have turned.
“You see, Mr. Porter, the experiment was a complete success. Right now, my associate could empty the rest of the bullets in that chamber into your head and the most that would happen was that you woke up with a headache tomorrow. We’ve made you invincible, Mr. Porter!” The man behind the glass laughed.
“You’ve made me a monster! I killed my mother, you fuck! And then…”
“Yes, there are a few drawbacks, of course, but the pros greatly outweigh the cons, I promise you.”
The door behind them opened and another man walked in wearing black dress pants, a white overcoat, and carrying a metal tray. On it rested Kate’s head. The top of her skull had been removed and the handles of four eating utensils protruded out of it. Instead of turning over, Cole’s stomach began to grumble with need. As horribly disturbing as the scene was, the “dish” seemed appetizing.
“I meant to thank you for taking care of our little problem. And don’t worry about dear old Mother. We have arranged for her to be taken care of.” The man behind the glass looked at the other two in the room and a simultaneous laugh erupted from their mouths.
Cole felt hopelessness setting in. The man in black put the gun in his back pocket and backed away from Cole. The man behind the glass walked over to Cole, put his arm around his shoulder, and led him to the metal tray that now sat on his desk. He then picked up a spoon and handed it to Cole.
“Now, Mr. Porter, let’s enjoy our snack, shall we? The next experiment is about to begin.
Cole watched as the curtains behind the desk opened to a large glass window that looked down on a room full of cells. One of which was the same exact cell that he’d been in. He raised the spoon to his mouth and looked at the new specimens.

THE END