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CHAPTER ONE
The taste of cork spilling over his clinched teeth was something Micah had grown to look forward to.
Not because of the taste, which he despised, nor the sometimes hours long sessions of what followed the spongy plug being slapped roughly into his mouth—no, that sucked too.
However, of all methods that had been employed on him over the past however many months, electric shock had proven the most effective. Nothing else had produced a result, just a whole lot of pain.
Not like Micah had a say in the matter anyway, but seeing the cork at least gave him an indication of what was going to happen to him that day before he was hauled out of his cell.
“Feels nice to be in control,” Micah thought.
He watched Dr. Dick walk over to a steel surgical tray and drop the cork he’d been twirling in his meaty hands with a clatter next to a syringe that gleamed in the flickering, fluorescent light.
Micah reclined on the stiff metal cot with its paper thin sheets and sighed. It was the only thing in the barren cell aside from a speaker with a black metal grate that was embedded in the floor, a nozzle next to that from which a variety of awful things had been sprayed, and a toilet with a small shelf above it that held a little bar of soap, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. Lucky for Micah, he got the luxury of brushing his teeth and quasi-showering in the toilet, so it was all right there for him.
Micah ran his hand through his blonde hair as he closed his eyes. His body had grown taller and lankier since he’d gotten here and he could feel a few wispy chin hairs along with a mediocre mustache that now prickled beneath his round nose. He’d been 16 when he got here, and felt like his 17th birthday might’ve already passed if not his 18th, but had no way to know for sure.
He wondered how different he looked now, certainly skinnier; then tried to remember when the last time he’d even seen his reflection was.
He had kept count of the days for a while when the man in the ape mask, or Dr. Dick, as Micah affectionately named him later, had first bashed him over the head and brought him here— But he quickly realized it was more demoralizing to know how long it had been than to just dispatch that thought to the back of his mind whenever it popped up.
When he found his inner voice asking, How long have I been here?He’d reply with, Just today.And that was that, until the next time. His inner voice had started learning to just shut up about it.
When home is a stupid, dimly lit torture cage with walls that burn you if you make the mistake of touching them, it’s better just to take it one day at a time.
Across the room Dr. Dick sat with rigid posture at his computer, his back to the cells, clacking away as he hulked over the keyboard like a teenager using a speak and spell. His lab coat hugged tightly against his back as the tails of it loosely flitted side to side while he typed.
How he managed to even see the computer screen while wearing a full faced mask was beyond Micah, but Micah also had larger concerns at the present. Sanity, escaping and getting real food being a few of them.
Micah sat up and looked to his left through the soundproof, shimmering, mostly transparent blue cell wall, and waved to get White’s attention. She was 15 or 16 by his estimate, with a tan complexion, black hair, bright blue eyes and a slightly crooked smile that he thought was adorable.
He wondered if the way she looked at him was just a product of captivity and proximity or if he would’ve had a shot at making a girl like her smile the way she did at him sometimes now, out in the real world.
Micah was good at a lot of things. Talking to girls, not so much. He was actually, by his definition, absolutely awful at it.
Having been literally caged next to a girl had helped him at least learn to hold eye contact and wave confidently. He sometimes wondered if the inability to speak to her was doing him a favor.
Even though she was facing him, Micah realized his frantic waving was pointless because White’s eyes were currently swirling with a glittery, milky blackness as she sat cross legged on the stone floor, her mouth agape, tongue lolling slightly to one side.
He had no idea what she was doing. Micah had been the reigning charades failure at family gatherings for as long as he could remember, and that held true even in desperate scenarios apparently. He hadn’t been able to understand her pantomiming of what the ability was or did after it had manifested.
He didn’t press trying to figure it out to save himself the embarrassment and her the frustration. She likely would’ve had an easier time teaching someone with a traumatic brain injury to recite the preamble of the Constitution. He knew she could produce electricity from her fingertips, so that was something.
Not like it mattered much anyway. Waving and smiling were way less mentally intensive than trying to convey properties of the metaphysical through a game of charades, and until someone displayed an ability with the potential to break them out of this dump, Micah was cool with saving his energy.
When White first showed him her ‘eyes going black’ trick, he had hoped she was going to unleash a fleet of spirits on Dr. Dick, like he’d seen Seer do to Dirty Craig in YouTube videos from the day he’d tried to rob a bullion company’s vault. After which, her, him and the rest of the captives would ride off into the sunset, be reunited with their families and eat something besides the gelatinous gray slop that had been their every meal for longer than Micah wanted to admit.
Sadly, as of yet, White’s newest ability didn’t really seem to do anything in the physical realm at all. Aside from making her eyes turn black. Woohoo.
Regardless of how weak or useless their abilities appeared, Micah knew that people only had one. At least all of the Elite that were known so far only had one. That much was household information.
Micah had exhibited a second ability himself, although he apparently didn’t get to keep his like White did. During a particularly intense electroshock session, Micah ripped the arm off of the chair he was strapped into while convulsing.
The chair was one solid piece carved out of 3 inch thick steel. The arm had sheared off in his hand like he was grabbing a stick of butter. Dr. Dick tried to hide his body language when it happened but Micah had seen it. He had been pleased. Almost giddy even.
Micah inferred in that moment that the nature of his extended, involuntary stay here had something to do with forcing people to manifest more abilities through trauma. Although he by all means had certainly received a lot more of the latter than the former.
Then, he woke back up in his cell. Head throbbing, he reached over and tried to crush one of the legs of his cot, but nothing happened. The strength was gone. He didn’t know why, or how to make it come back— but he knew it had been there, if only fleetingly.
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That had been weeks ago. Even with no new improvements since then, it made it slightly easier to endure the multiple torture sessions that made up his week. Knowing that he might even possibly get an ability he could use to get out of here brought him comfort, something to cling to. Dr. Dick had only used electroshock on him once since his brief episode of enhanced strength. Micah hoped that today it would actually do something again.
Micah practiced using his telekinesis as much as he could without drawing attention to himself. But there wasn’t a whole lot to move in his cell, and his reach was about 3 feet at the maximum. He’d been focusing on picturing translucent hands in his mind and wrapping them around things for a few weeks and had managed to tip his cot up on its side once while he laid on it. It was slow but steady progress, he had noticed.
Micah wondered often if he was weak or just early to the game. How long had it taken people like ColdSore, who could shoot ice projectiles and solid streams of ice from his hands, or Bang, who shot what appeared to be bullets out of her fingers, to master their abilities? They were the first two Elite that had gone to work for the government, followed by a handful of others.
Shortly after the first girl with abilities surfaced, a red haired lady with an awful plastic surgeon named Wanda Simpson wrote a book titled, Questioning the Elite and the name, “The Elite” for people with abilities became pretty well unanimous overnight— you saw it plastered all over social media and article headlines, with people dropping the term in conversation incessantly.
Micah never really got into the Elite other than a quick skimming of an article here or watching a short video there while he took a dump. Not like his brother Max, who had Shifter collectibles by the dozen and had plastered a poster of Hellvis on the roof above his bed so that he could see it as soon as he woke up every day.
Micah liked facts. As far as the Elite went, there weren’t a whole lot of them going around. It had only been a few years since the first Elite was reported but due to how that event had shaken out there was even less information out there than there probably would’ve been otherwise. Most people kept their lips tight.
A few years back, a 10 year old girl named Macy McFay briefly woke up during an arm surgery after being given a light dose of anesthesia and panicked, unleashing a shockwave that ripped through half of the floor she was on, as well as a good portion of the floors directly above and below hers.
The news didn’t show the footage but it made it online eventually. It showed the little girl in a perfectly clean, safe circle, gently dozing in her hospital bed as her heart rate monitor let out a steady beep, beep, beep.
The camera panned and slowly spun to reveal that she was surrounded on all sides by twisted piles of wrecked hospital equipment, glass, and bent metal as shreds of drywall and dust blew through the air over the masses of mangled corpses and moaning bodies.
The people nearest to her that took the brunt of the force were little more than red streaks of tangled guts on the floor with shattered bone fragments dotted throughout that twinkled from within the sea of red as sunlight streaked in from the jagged section of the wall that had been blown apart.
The next video concerning that girl had been posted by her parents. She never made it home from the hospital.
Max’s friend Dylan had told them one day as they were smoking weed in the park that the girls parents went missing too. But Micah never cared enough about stuff like that to follow up on it. It didn’t concern him anyway, he was as normal as could be, then.
“Lucky for us, we’re just regular people. Nobody will ever be coming for us but the tax man. Plus, even if someone did, we’d have each other’s backs,” Max had said with a chuckle as he clapped his hand on Micah’s shoulder.
“Sure had my back alright,” Micah thought.
Micah had replayed that memory in his head a million times since he’d been locked in this boring, barren cell. If Max had actually had his back he wouldn’t even be here. Micah had never thought of his older brother as a coward before he got here, but it’s pretty much the only way he could think about him now. Some days as a villain, a bastard; most days just a spineless, weak, tail tucked coward.
Micah understood why almost none of the Elite were public with their abilities, but he didn’t understand why the ones that were public didn’t do much of anything to help regular people. Though with the way the media glorified the Elite, it could sure be perceived that way.
Every news story Micah had seen was an enticing headline and striking, heroic photos; but the actual story was usually, ‘bad’ guy tries to steal some insured cash or precious metals at night in an unoccupied building, ‘good’ guy comes to stop them, kills them in the fight and gets a pat on the back for it. To Micah, everything they did seemed to be driven by money. Apparently saving a building full of people from dying in an explosion won’t get you a Ferrari as fast as saving a tech mogul’s watch collection will.
Good and bad had never been black and white to Micah, he had always seen the intricacies that wove in between. The more he heard about the Elite though, the more he thought of them as varying shades of worse of the same shitty color, regardless of which side they claimed to be on.
Micah looked to his right, into Blue’s cell. He lay in the middle of the floor, staring up at the roof. Almost as if he felt Micah watching him, he glared over quickly, his lips tight across his face. Micah looked away and felt the heat rush into his cheeks.
Micah wondered if Blue was mean because he was scared, or if he was just a bad person.
He’d tried to pantomime with Blue once, but that olive branch hadn’t resulted in more than a quick scowl and a middle finger in return before he’d resumed his primary activity of staring angrily at the roof.
He did that a lot.
Micah had never been one to try and befriend the unfriendly so he’d left it at that. Blue was about 19 and of middle eastern descent, with a brooding set of bushy eyebrows that hung over his deep set eyes and hooked nose like a cliff ledge overgrown with shrubbery.
His body was draped in thick cuts of muscle which Micah assumed had to be ability related due to how little they were given to eat and how thin the rest of the captives were in comparison.
The other captives, five of them that Micah had seen so far, were in cells further down the line. He could just barely make out the wavering image of Yellow as she paced in the cell next to White’s, but the wall was too opaque from this distance to try and wave to her like he did when she walked by with Dr. Dick. She didn’t wave back either.
He didn’t know the colors of the dull lights hanging above the cells beyond hers, only that there were at least 4 more people housed in them. Stuck here, just like him. For all he knew there could be a hundred cells, just waiting to be filled. He hoped otherwise.
Micah let out a sigh and flopped back on the bed.
“Guess I’ll just get back to it then,” he thought.
He closed his eyes and tried his damndest to lose himself in memories of the track. He envisioned the warm sun beating down on his back as he zipped over the tightly packed red clay on his CRF250, the scent of gasoline burning his nostrils as he rolled back on the throttle and slid through the deep burns, rooster tails of dirt spraying behind him as the bike wrenched itself gracefully through the line he’d chosen for the corners.
He missed the braaaaappp! of his bike and tried to hear it in his mind.
BUZZZZ!!! The speaker situated in the floor of his cell jarred Micah from his daydream with a high pitched shriek. As he had learned to do after many bouts with unpleasant gases being fogged upon him from the nozzle in the floor, he stood from his cot, turned around, and knelt. He grimaced slightly as his bare knees made contact with the icy stone floor and leaned forward to rest his forehead on the cot.
He heard the door to his cell power down and the thud of Dr. Dick’s heavy work boots as they slapped the concrete, he heard the jangle of the heavy steel shackles as the chain clanked against the wrist cuffs and extended his arms a little further behind him.
Dr. Dick roughly grabbed Micah’s wrists and tightly fastened the steel bindings around them, one at a time. He reeked of alcohol and grease and while the alcohol scent disgusted Micah, he couldn’t help but salivate at the thought of how good a nice, juicy cheeseburger and French fries would be.
“Man, I missed you too Dr. Dick. How’s the wife? Oh, I love to hear that. Yeah, everything’s great for me too. The slop, brushing my teeth with the water I shit in, the luxurious king sized bed and down comforter... it’s paradise. How you’re only at 4 stars on Yelp is beyond me.”
Dr. Dick, silent as he had been forever, snatched the chain and wrenched Micah to his feet. He spun him to face the door and shoved the small of Micah’s back, forcing him towards the door of the cell.
“Ugh!” Said Dr. Dick in a low, guttural growl.
“My favorite thing here, by far, the thing that keeps me coming back, is the conversation,” replied Micah with a smirk as he jangled his way towards certain torture, and hopefully some day, freedom.