--XLIV--
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.
Nightingale
Day #45
Subprocedure Nine
"Who..." I said, then gripping my own neck with my right hand, thinking that just maybe that would somehow help, "...who is 'we?!' Stop, just stop this, PLEASE!" Please? Please was not a word even remotely strong enough to convey how much; just how much I was begging for it to end. I'd seen a lot of ugly stuff, but this was somehow still something else entirely.
Or it felt like it. At the end of the day, abuse was abuse; abusers were made of the same garbage they try to inflict upon others.
I cried out like a drunk hardcore metal band vocalist on fentanyl, the horror of the entire situation gripping me cold like an ice-covered vise. But... but what else would I have said? I didn't really know anymore, did I? "Please! I... I don't have anything you want. I have NOTHING that you want, I don't." I remember hearing shards of glass grind together, the sound of thin ice cracking, the sound of smoke obscuring my every view of anything I ever wanted to look at and sounding like a cathedral orchestra composed of criminals screaming out lies and nonsense and insanity. "Kill me now, please, just do it."
I vomited, blood, and acids, and the cup of yellow crushed pills they forced me to swallow the half hour earlier. It tasted exactly the same going back up: bitter, more bitter than any poison I'd ever imagined. The aftertaste a sour and unpleasant and chilling sensation, before it transitioned into the annihilating headaches and shaking hands and sweating from too much invisible warmth and heat, moments afterwards. The vomit on the floor had tentacles on them. Little black protruding arms and feelers and limbs. Everywhere. My arms and legs, my neck, my tongue. The woman behind my was sobbing, sobbing as though her family had all died, but I didn't know why.
"Just let him go!" her voice screamed. And then, she returned to sobbing.
"I..." I choked down the grit and bile and poisons, and repeated, "I... I don't want a new superpower. Please. Please."
"You know," Jeff said, "If I don't do this test on you... I'll do this to Davenport instead."
"I'll take it," said a voice, female, young, a powerful telepathic voice.
Stolen novel; please report.
Kaylee's.
The small tentacles started to come out of my mouth, working their way up through my throat. They were still small, still thin- but slowly, slowly growing longer, subtly.
Now, now was a good time to die.
Now was a good time to die
die
die
This was all I thought to myself.
This was all that I could think.
"Please!" my own voice screamed of its own volition- and it was a death scream; it was the scream that only a child could make, trembling from one vocal cord, shaking like a fast five-note run from one microscopic part of the larynx to the other to the other and out through the mouth. "Stop-" I don't remember choosing to speak. It was like it just happened. "Stop, please."
There was more sobbing now, though, I think some of it was mine.
die
die
"I know you can HEAR ME!" screamed Kaylee's telepathic voice again. "Experiment on me, do it TO ME!"
Sobs from the woman standing behind me.
Kaylee screamed again, and again, and again, and again.
die
die
die
die
die...
This was all that I thought, until the woman standing behind me ran, ran around and behind Jeff, but not to do what I had hoped- at least attempt to stop him; she ran to a spinning contraption, almost like an exhaust fan- a windmill of some sort- and it blew powerfully, strong currents of air, probably a hundred thousand rotations per minute, or something. I saw this from how her hair blew back from her face, when she shoved her face into it and her blood flew and splattered all over the left and side and front of the impenetrable, transparent glass or plastic or acrylic box that Jeff had me trapped in, with handfuls of wisps of her hair or her tongue or nose cartilage or eyeballs. Her hands, which gripped the broken glass pieces, uncurled as her body slowly, slowly toppled forward, and then slid to the floor, like a very heavy rag doll. The blood poured out like a melted candy bar, in a wrapper broken open by ants, languidly, one pint at a time- from her totally washed, defaced head. As her hands uncurled, I was able to fully see what she held in one of them; in the one hand that I could see from my side. A shard of glass, and... and another thing. Something else; something that took me a moment to fully recognize. It seemed almost vaguely familiar, as my memories returned to me and as my mind returned to me; like a the heart being returned to a small broken body that needs a heart; needs a heart to see, to breathe. As the black fog slowly vanished, and as the walls- two into the floor, and two into the ceiling- retracted, and as the tiny, sinister, upsetting, disturbing limbs and arms and tentacles consumed the blood that oozed from the holes that simply rotted onto my skin from the outside, I understood what it was; it was a contraption- one of the contraptions that the torturers forced into the skin and onto the bones of my left hand.
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