--XLIII--

My mind was, to say the least, cloudy. They'd injected me five times already that day, and that didn't include all of the substances that they made us swallow.

Nightingale

Day #45

Subprocedure Nine

Jeff.

Jeff- just like one of my social studies teachers, in that one school that I used to go to for a little while. Jeff. Like one of my old classmates, Jeffery Locklear; like Jefferson Smith who worked research and analysis, at one of those desks, at the Webwork; closer to the ground floor, just above the parking spaces. I remembered that one teacher, at that one school. Jeff. Before that school blew up; before he and all of the others died of exposure to actinides and the air pollution which proved to be deadly; pathogens and chemicals gone way out of control. It was just one of the reasons I didn't play with substances.

I crawled out of that rubble and felt nothing. There were only two ambulances for that entire school of hundreds of filthy dead bodies, because it was the Lowdown. That was before Nightingale. I'd say I felt sorry for them; I can't. Half of them were part of a child trafficking ring. I'm the one that finally brought them down.

I didn't kill unless I had to- and I didn't. I just shut them down.

"I'm sure you could be a really great person, Jeff," I said. "And you probably were, once." I coughed blood, almost on his pants- until this blood was stopped in mid-air by an invisible screen. I wiped the remaining blood off my mouth with my less damaged hand. "Jeff, why do you hurt people?"

His smile faded. I, of course, was not sure what expression his eyes wore, when he said anything. I was a master at reading people for the most part. But it was taking all of my cognitive capacity just to look at him. Jeff tucked his shirt collar, even though it was perfectly in place, and then he answered.

"It's all I know."

"Is it?"

Clouds of vapor, a mist of some dark black substance- not unlike the smoke that frequently came out of the mouths of Connor or James or Chaquille or Belinda or sometimes Sam, perhaps just without that same salty, poisoned, toxoid pungency- and yet still poison nonetheless, seemed to slowly distil itself, from the invisible walls to both my right and my left.

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The air... the very air around me started to wrap around my neck. That's what it felt like. Compactly, crampedly. The veins and the skin on my neck actually receded; moved inward, closer and closer, to the back of my spine. It was not the hands of someone bigger than I was wrapping tightly around my neck, not the exact same thing as what I knew I'd already experienced on numerous occasions- and yet in that moment somehow couldn't remember from where or from who exactly- but the tightness had to come from somewhere. Was it the poison? Was it something that they'd forced into my body? Was I suffocating to death and just didn't know it?

Did I care?

I smiled back at him. That's how cloudy and foggy it was in my head- I truly believed that he was killing me, because he cared, because he wanted my pain to end.

And I was grateful.

For all of the poisons this man injected into me, it was somehow still hard for me to even imagine- imagine that he was one-hundred percent, absolute, sheer, complete, pure evil, and nothing else. In that moment, it just didn't feel that way. Sometimes, it still doesn't. Strange as it might sound, especially now, at the time I felt almost as though I knew him somehow. From... somewhere.

As if I was the one that failed to save him somehow. Something tugged at my mind again. Was I being brainwashed?

I snapped out of it. I was twelve; whatever situation it might have been- how is the child expected to save the 200-pound Caucasian adult male?

The sluggishness, the lethargy, the fog. The literal fog and also the mist in my head. It wasn't totally unwelcome. It dulled the pain. The bones in my left hand were still fractured. I noticed the tears in my eyes, but felt less pain.

Four invisible walls. To my left, right, in front and behind me. The first thing I felt I can't describe- not in the way I'd like to.

As the walls around me sprayed chemicals at me, my skin- from top to toe- started to turn blue. I wasn't cold. The shade of blue was exactly that of that cute stuffed animal- a smiling, huggable, soft, blue shark- that I saw once at the toy store, but never ever could afford then. I didn't even believe that I ever would get to afford one. I wanted one so badly. It was an adorable stuffed animal, white and light blue and dark blue and gray. I went inside just to touch it. It was soft, like the only pillow that I had at the time.

"Jeff," I said, robotically, like I wasn't there; like I was a puppet manipulated by every microorganism, every toxin, every virus, every synthetic compound, every hydrocarbon they had injected into us. "What is it that you want from me now?"

My skin, light blue now turned to dark blue from the strange black mist, started to produce little red holes. Blood- but not just blood- started to ooze, seep out from every single one of them. Little tentacles- black, small, like jellyfish tentacles, cuttlefish tentacles, snail tentacles- grew from all of them.

Jeff spoke again.

"I want to try to see if you can acquire this new superpower that we've created."

I reached for the ground, on my knees, tried to steady myself in the very limited way that I could manage- trying desperately, so desperately, to not heave. Despite that there were cupfuls, vialfuls, wine-glassfuls and beakerfuls they'd forced into me- the one slice of bread they let me have that morning was in there swimming with all of the poisons. The amount of starvation I'd been put through was too much; just too much- I was done with it, done with hunger and dehydration and thirst.