Chapter 26:
Room 407
The lock clicked twice before the door opened.
Khai Minh heard it before he was fully awake. In the
familiar darkness that had followed him for seven years, sound always came
before light.
The heavy door moved across its hinges with a long creak.
Two people in shoes with soft soles entered, placing each step lightly on the
floor as though checking whether he was awake.
He lay still, trying to remember where he was.
His right side throbbed whenever he took a deep breath, in
the same place where someone had struck him at the villa. Fabric restraints had
left marks around his wrists.
His head felt stuffed with cotton. Every thought moved
slowly and clung to the next.
He knew at once that it was the medication.
The kind that left a person unable to tell night from day.
“You’re awake.”
A woman spoke, her voice calm enough to make his blood run
cold.
“Where am I?”
“Lie still. It’s time for your medication.”
Glass bottles clinked together.
The woman slipped a hand behind his neck and lifted his
head. A pill touched his lips.
“I’m not taking it.”
“If you refuse, I’ll call someone in. It’s your choice.”
Khai Minh fell silent.
He remembered what the man had said the night before they
took him away. Someone would be coming to collect him.
Then a needle had pierced his arm while he was surrounded.
After that came the slam of a medical transport door.
The pieces came together.
Minh Quan had finally achieved what he had wanted for so
long. He had turned Khai Minh into a madman and locked him somewhere that would
make anything he said sound like the rambling of a psychiatric patient.
Khai Minh parted his lips and let the pill slide inside.
He felt it roll toward the back of his throat, then used his
tongue to push it upward and hide it inside his cheek.
“Good.”
The woman set the cup down, turned, and walked out.
The door was locked twice again.
Khai Minh waited until her footsteps had faded completely.
Then he spat the pill into his palm, felt his way to the side of the bed, and
pushed it into the gap between the mattress and the iron frame.
He began counting the steps from the bed to the door.
Seven steps.
He followed the wall, running his fingertips across the smooth
paint.
Four sealed walls.
Not a single window to let in any air.
The room was perfectly still, thick with the smell of
alcohol and bleach, both so strong they burned his nose.
When he tapped the wall, the sound came back short and flat.
It did not travel anywhere.
A concrete box.
It was as though the room had been built to swallow sound.
Even a scream would never escape.
“This isn’t a hospital,” Khai Minh murmured.
The days passed to the sound of the lock.
Morning, noon, and evening, they brought him food and
medication. Each time, Khai Minh pretended to swallow the pills, then spat them
out when he was alone.
He tried to keep his mind clear for as long as possible.
They believed he was drugged into a stupor, little more than
a breathing corpse. Because of that, they no longer bothered to watch what they
said in front of him.
But the nights were what frightened him most.
At night, the people who came were no longer the female
attendants with their flat voices.
There were at least three men. They wore hard shoes that
struck the floor in firm, hollow beats.
They never spoke to him.
They pulled up his sleeve, tied a tourniquet around his arm,
wiped a patch of skin with something cold, then inserted a needle.
Khai Minh could hear his own blood being drawn. He heard the
test tubes being placed on a tray.
On some nights, they attached cold pads to his temples and
read out a long string of numbers he did not understand.
He did not move. He lay as still as a dead man and listened.
Then one night, he heard them talking.
“The antibody level is still higher than the control sample.
MK-2 definitely left something behind.”
“Of course. He was the only one who survived in the Lab
Seven basement, thanks to that experimental antidote.”
MK-2.
The Lab Seven basement.
In the darkness, Khai Minh slowly tightened his hand beneath
the blanket.
So that was it.
They had not locked him in this place merely to silence him.
They were keeping him here because there was something
inside his body that Truong Sinh wanted.
The blood of the survivor.
To them, he was no longer a human being.
He was a biological specimen.
And that was the most bitter part of all.
Minh Quan wanted him dead so he could openly seize
everything that belonged to him.
Truong Sinh, on the other hand, wanted to keep him alive so
they could drain every drop of blood from his body.
Two wolves had sunk their teeth into the same prey. The only
difference was that one wanted to tear it apart at once, while the other wanted
to save it for later.
Khai Minh was that prey, like a fish laid out on a chopping
board. Whether he lived or died was entirely in someone else’s hands.
From that night on, Khai Minh did not waste another second.
He memorized the times when they came.
A church bell could sometimes be heard from very far away.
When it rang once, the staff changed shifts. After it rang
twice, the corridor became almost completely empty, with only one attendant
walking back and forth, dragging one foot.
He memorized the floor.
The section near his door was tiled, and shoes struck it
with a sharp clatter. The middle of the corridor was covered with something
softer that swallowed the sound of footsteps.
The lock on his room turned three times. The lock on the
room beside his turned only twice.
He rebuilt every corner of the place inside his mind, not
with his eyes, but with his ears.
The watch his mother had left him was still ticking on his
wrist.
They had taken everything from him. They had stripped away
his authority and locked him inside four nameless walls.
Yet no one had bothered to remove an old watch from the
wrist of a blind man.
Late at night, when the entire building fell silent, that
faint ticking was the only thing telling him that time was still passing.
That he was still here.
That he was still breathing.
As though he were speaking to the woman who had died.
Mom, I’m not dead yet.
He did not know how many nights had passed when two
attendants stopped outside his room.
Believing the medication had left him unconscious, one of
them lowered his voice.
“They’re moving him tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“To the other facility. The place that doesn’t have a name
in the system.”
The other man was silent for a moment.
“What about the blood samples? The order from above was to
keep him here so they could continue taking them.”
“What order from above? Tonight’s order is different.
Someone has already signed it, so we do as it says. Once he gets there... it’s
over.”
Khai Minh lay motionless, but his entire body went cold.
He understood exactly what those words meant.
A place with no name, where people were taken in and never
needed to be brought out.
Truong Sinh wanted to keep him alive, but someone had grown
impatient. Someone had gone behind even Truong Sinh’s back and wanted Khai Minh
to disappear from this world before the night was over.
He knew who that person was.
The door outside was locked again.
The footsteps moved farther away, then disappeared
completely.
Khai Minh was left alone inside the silent concrete box,
with the watch on his wrist counting down what might be the final seconds of
his life.
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