Next Time Around
I didn’t want to imagine. I’d read enough to have a pretty good idea of what sort of “experiments” she was referring to. Mental images of nightmare laboratories closer to torture chambers than medical facilities flashed through my head.
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She’d even pronounced Buchenwald with the German accent, Buken-vaald, which told me it wasn’t something she’d read in a book, even if she had access to that sort of material. Which she didn’t. We had child-lock content monitoring on the internet, too, so even if she’d been sneaking late night web searches, that shouldn’t have been something she could find.
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“Cadence, what are you saying?”
She smirked.
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“What are you saying?”
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“I’m saying we found a way for them to serve the greater good after all.”
The teacher pursed her lips and produced the second picture. “And this?”
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The drawing depicted two lines of people facing one another over a pit in the middle of a forest. The people in the first line wore matching gray uniforms and held crudely drawn rifles. Those in the second wore rags and held shovels. In the pit between them lay a ghastly tangle of stick limbs spattered with red crayon and faces with “X’s” in place of eyes. In the background, smoke rose from tall chimneys topping squat, block-shaped buildings.
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Cadence looked from her teacher to me and smiled innocently. “The overflow.”