The man has been in and out of the freezer all-day. He started to slow down as he messed with the two televisions that hung from the ceiling. Conveniently centered in the circle of our donation chairs, the televisions flickered on to a black screen with a message that read “searching for a signal.” I don’t know what this means, but I don’t like where it might lead.

“What have you been doing in the freezers, dude?” Niel said. “I hope you aren’t ruining the plasma. I’ll get fired if something happens to that plasma.”

“Why are you worried about the plasma right now?” I yelled at Niel, “You won’t have to worry about the plasma if he kills you!”

The wheels on my bed squeaked as I lunged towards Niel or lunged as much as I could with my extremities tied down. I groaned and then whimpered as the metal cut into the raw flesh around my wrists. None of us dared try to get out of our handcuffs like April, but we did try. I felt like I’d lost ten pounds since the man took us, but you can’t make your hand bones any smaller. I don’t know how much weight you need to lose to slip out of handcuffs, but at some point, the cuffs needed to loosen, right?

“Stop fighting like children,” The man bellowed. “I thought you were more mature than this, Ben.”

I gritted my teeth, knowing that the man wanted to provoke me. Keep silent, or he’ll kill you next. But was that fair to the others? The man seemed the angriest towards me. Why not just torture and kill me? The screen in front of me flickered to life, and I saw the three dead bodies on wheeled beds in Freezer Two, which distinguished itself with a black case used to hold units that tested positive for HIV or Syphilis. Frost blanketed Luke so much that I could only tell it was him by the size of the iced-over outline. The others looked less frozen, and the blood frozen to the floor showed a bleeding trail to the door. 

“Let go of me!” Niel yelled. “I don’t know where you’re taking me, but I don’t have anything to do with you.”

I turned to see the man stop moving Niel’s bed as he pushed the cage away. 

“You could have caught the issue,” The man said. “You could have found out that someone switched the labels. And then—”

But then the man stopped and shook his head before he pushed Niel to the back. The screams continued through the thin glass in the window to the lab. They didn’t sound like words anymore, but more like any noise that might draw the attention of someone nearby. I knew better. There hadn’t been a knock on the windows or doors for days. No one searched for us. The screams started to blare through the televisions that showed Niel and the man in Freezer Two. 

Niel seemed to fall silent when he saw his dead coworkers. The man nodded and then tipped the bed over. Niel fell to the floor and screeched in pain. A metal floor held at -30° Celsius caused frostbite on bare skin almost instantly. Niel tried to lift his hand off the ground, but blood began to seep from underneath. I could feel my insides try to crawl outside as I watched Niel hurt himself more with each body part he tried to pull off the ground. Even the fabric of his clothes wasn’t enough of a defense against the cold. The man left the freezer, but the video feed continued.

“Now, it is time for you to eat and replenish yourselves,” The man said. “While I hoped to keep April instead of Kelsey this long, I guess that Kelsey is more responsible for the mix-up than April ever was. April just trusted Kelsey too much.”

The man left the donor floor, and I heard his truck rumble to life. I looked back up at the screen and couldn’t help but watch the figures on the screen as they continued to freeze. Niel’s screams ended, but I could see his chest heave and body shiver as he tried to stay alive. A few minutes later, his body stopped shivering.