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.
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.
“Cadence, what are you saying?”
She smirked.
“What are you saying?”
“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?”
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.
Cadence looked from her teacher to me and smiled innocently. “The overflow.”