Part of Me

By Terry Agold

“Do you remember your name?” A woman’s voice echoes in my mind.

My eyes open.  Fluorescent lights stare back at me from the ceiling as my surroundings begin to register. I am lying on a steel gurney, wearing a dingy set of medical scrubs.

“Nelson. Nelson Duran.” I cock my head at the sound of my own voice. Is that right?

I try to remember something else. The memories are there, but fuzzy, indistinct. Like remembering a childhood Christmas through photographs years later.

“Do you know how you got here?” the woman’s voice asks.

I think for a moment, then shake my head. “No. Where am I?”

She looks at the floor, shaking her own head. “I don’t know. I woke up a few minutes ago. I can’t remember much, either.” She makes eye contact. “My name is… Anna. I don’t remember my last name.”

Half a dozen more people lie on gurneys. They look like corpses, and I find myself involuntarily watching to see if they breathe. One of them does.

The man in the corner gasps, as if coming up for air. His eyes flutter open. I ease my bare feet to the floor and shuffle over to him. “Time to wake up, buddy. Do you remember anything?”

He yawns, looks at me, then Anna, and shakes his head. “No.”

I pat him on the shoulder. “Me neither. Well, my name, but not much else.”

Others are beginning to stir. Anna and I circle, trying to let them know we’re all in the same boat. One man awakes angry. “Why can’t I remember anything?” He grabs my shirt and screams. “Why can’t I remember anything?”

With more calm than I feel, I tell him the truth. “I don’t know.” I glance at the others. “None of us can remember. Just… shadows. Fragments.”

I move on to the next person, a woman whose tears won’t stop. “I had a family. I know I did. But I can’t remember them!”

I nod, hoping my look is somewhat reassuring. Then an ironic realization hits me.

I don’t know what I look like.

I notice a door and head for it. Answers are out there, not in here.

The angry man calls after me, “Where are you going?”

I don’t slow down. “To find a mirror.” I fling the door open. “Or a doctor.”

Anna follows, trailing Sleepy and Grumpy behind her.

We enter a long hallway, easily a hundred yards in either direction. A pungent haze fills the air. Mentally flipping a nonexistent coin, I head left. The doors are labeled with strange signs: DERMAL. OPTICAL. GASTRO. NEURO. CARDIO. I try the door marked OPTICAL. It opens into a huge lab, with row upon row of clear flasks.

Something is suspended in each of the flasks. I step closer to get a better view, then recoil in horror. Anna walks over to the row of flasks before I can stop her. The look on her face confirms that I saw what I thought I saw: hundreds of liquid-filled flasks, each containing a pair of human eyes.

We burst out of the lab into the hallway, trying other doors. They’re locked. We turn around and head back toward the lab where we woke up. The door is labeled INIT. The others from the gurney room join us as we head down the right half of the hallway.

“Come on.” I urge them, and we come to a door marked SOFTWARE. It opens and we all pile into the room. Several computers line the walls. All are locked, except for one. I sit down at the machine to see what I can learn about our situation.

I scroll through a long list of names, then I stop cold as I get to a familiar one: DURAN. I swallow hard. I open the file.

Pictures. Things I almost remember. Parents, two brothers, college… This is my life. Was my life. How could they know so much about me, things even I don’t fully remember? There is a photograph labeled Nelson Duran. I look at my reflection in the monitor. We don’t look the same. Not even close.

Two faces, one name. Which of us is really Nelson Duran? Time for more answers.

“Let’s go.” We make our way out and down to the end of the hallway, opening the last door.

The next hallway is littered with piles of debris. I stop cold as my eyes widen. They are not debris. They’re bodies.

Anna vomits.

Dead men and women in charred lab coats lie randomly in the hall, burned beyond recognition, incinerated in mid-stride. Some bodies are dressed in black jumpsuits.

As we turn a corner, I stop short. The burned body of a man in a lab coat lies with his hand on a switch marked EMERGENCY DESTRUCT. Several bodies clothed in black jumpsuits are stretched out toward the man at the destruct switch.

We follow the trail of bodies down the hallway to a massive double door. Grumpy shoves it open, and we all step into blinding sunlight.

Outside the huge building, more bodies, all of them clad in black jumpsuits. Each of them has been shot multiple times.

One man is still alive. I ask him the questions we all want answered. “What happened here? What is this place?”

He grimaces, coughing up blood. “This lab… It’s an organ bank. They grew people from organs to farm more organs, to grow more…” His voice trails off. “We were trying to rescue them. We failed.”

I look around at the people who woke in the lab with me. The plastic memories, the labs full of organs, the face that wasn’t my own…

“No,” I tell him. “You didn’t.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terry Agold is a Christian, husband, father, son, pilot, motorcyclist, and consumer of strong coffee. By day he works as an engineer building weird airplanes in the desert. By night he writes words and music, usually not at the same time.

---

More Stories