Seeing Black (30 page)

“What did you just put into her?” Paul had Rocco’s
arm bent back on the cusp of being broken.

“Who the hell are you?”

Paul let out a little laugh. “Of course you wouldn’t
remember. How many children have you prodded with needles and
failed experiments? But that’s not why I’m here. What. The. Fuck.
Did. You. Just. Inject. In. Her?” With each slowly spat word, Paul
thrust Rocco’s arm further up into a distorted way. Rocco cringed
in pain.

“Ow.” Rocco yelled. “It’s a psychotropic drug to
help open her mind up to further testing.”

“You son of a bitch!” He tightened once again and
Rocco squealed in pain.

“It’s f-for the best.” He was speaking raggedly.
Jill noticed through the cloudiness of whatever she was feeling
that Josef was slowly walking away.

“You’re fucking crazy. You started with a semblance
of reality, but this has gotten out of hand. You think you’re God,
but you’re not. You’re just a crazy lunatic who’s using his
trusting daughter. How many times have you given her this
shit?”

Jill was still immobilized and wasn’t able to do
much. She tried to move, but her hands and legs were securely tied.
With one hand firmly restraining Rocco, Paul moved towards Jillian
and snapped open the restraint on her hand and tossed her his
phone.

“You okay, baby?”

“I-I think so.” Then she remembered her vision.
“Paul. Run. Go. You won’t make it out alive. I saw it. Please.
Please run. Go.”

“Call the police.”

With trembling hands, she fumbled with the phone,
but noticed a shadow move quickly behind Paul.

“Paul!” she screamed. Before he was able to reply,
Josef had punctured him with some substance and dropped the
syringe. Paul released Rocco and haphazardly reached in the
waistband of his sweatpants. He took out a knife and swiftly turned
and stabbed Rocco in the throat. Jill wasn’t sure if it was
purposely or sheer luck, but the place were Paul stabbed Rocco was
a death blow, and Rocco fell to his knees, blood gushing out, and
then to his back.

“Paul!” Jill screamed again. He started swaying and
dropped to his knees. Josef snatched the phone out of Jill’s hand
and dumped it into a beaker full of liquid.

“If you doubt how serious I am, you can sit there
and watch your boyfriend die. It should engrave it in your head.
Rocco tried to do this nicely, Jillian. I told my brother that
nicely was a waste of time. And now look; he’s bleeding to death on
the floor. He tried to show you, but, no, you couldn’t just trust
him. Now, we play my way.” Brusquely, he tied her arms back up and
stomped out of the room, not bothering to glance back at his own
brother whose shallow breaths sounded more like gargling blood.

Sobbing, Jill turned her head to look down, but she
was so immobilized from both the drugs and from the actual
restraints that it was hard to see. “Paul?”

She heard a cough and movement. His hand reached up
to her thigh as he struggled to pull himself up from the floor.

With the tips of her fingers, she grabbed the tips
of his. “Paul, please? Say something.”

He coughed again and made his way little higher so
that she could see his face. “I texted Jacobs when I saw you. He
knows where you are.” She bobbed her head, tears still streaming
down. “I’m so sorry, Jill. I wish I could have saved you. I—”

“No, Paul. Please.” She struggled to try to release
herself, but it was futile.

“He’s miserable.”

“What? Who are you talking about.”

“Alexander. I saw him. I told him everything just as
you told me to. Trust him. He loves you. As much as I love you, he
loves you.”

“Paul . . .” She sobbed, and then there was no more
talking or movement. Both men lay dead on the floor.

She didn’t know how long she lay there, but like a
snap of a rubber band, she suddenly remembered everything. The
haziness was gone, and all the memories of the last seven months
came flooding back. Paul had tried to save her life. Over and over
he had tried to save her life, for years, in fact. He had stood
back and protected her, and now he was dead. And so was her
father.

Luckily, she had been drugged, and the pain of
losing Paul was temporary forgotten when her eyes closed and she
was gone into a sea of oblivion.

Life is
for most of us a continuous process of getting used to things we
hadn't expected.

-Helen

Jill sucked in a breath, and that’s when she felt
something in her mouth. A gag. Then she felt something tied around
her head, holding the gag in place. She couldn’t see much through
her swollen eye as she tried to take stock of the situation. Her
lip throbbed from the cut, and her head pounded, but the worst of
all was the pain around her wrists. Tied behind her back with some
sort of twine, her wrists were chafed raw from, first, her hours of
struggle to untie them and, second, from her basic moving around to
get somewhat comfortable. Every time she moved, the rough twine
rubbed. When dawn finally came and she thought of all that had
transpired that morning, she realized she was still in shock. She
couldn’t even comprehend the severity of all that had happened. One
minute Paul was there, and the next he was dead. One minute her
father was showing his true self, and the next minute he was dead
too. Josef didn’t even flinch at his own brother’s demise, but the
veil of amnesia had been lifted the moment Rocco died.

Paul had proven himself her guardian angel. For
years upon years, he had looked over her, watched her from afar,
protected her, even if she didn’t know he had stood in the wings.
And, now, he had died doing so. She didn’t know who she was angrier
with: Rocco, Josef, or Paul. Paul had died saving her. He shouldn’t
have done that. It was a guilt she would have to live with for the
rest of her life. He hadn’t done it only for her; he’d had a
vendetta against Rocco. Rocco and Josef were seriously deranged.
Paul’s sister, Paul himself, as well as countless other children
would never be the same because of their sick experiments. Rocco
and Josef had stolen, like common street thugs, millions upon
millions by using their abilities. Well, one thing was learned:
Jill would never succumb to such deceit. She was now more powerful
than her father and uncle, but she’d never use it for wrongdoing.
And she wouldn’t let Josef know exactly how much she’d learned from
her father. If there was one thing she could credit Rocco with, it
was that he taught her that her psychic ability was a blessing not
a curse. As such, she would treat it accordingly.

Through the sliver of light that peeked out between
the blinds on the small window behind her, she could see that she
sat on the floor of a white room.
The
white room. The one
that held the stairs that went up to the laboratory. She then
realized her hands were tied against the steel rail of a spiral
staircase. With the throbbing pain coming from nearly every place
in her body, the white floor, white wall, and white ceiling were
almost too bright to bear, especially since she could really only
see through one eye. The room smelled of nothing in particular. It
was as if it had been cleaned then sanitized and then done so
again.

Jill went in and out of consciousness. Her eyes
drifted shut, but the moment that her body slouched even slightly,
it would cause her wrist to pull against the metal pole making the
pain against her raw skin feel as though someone were scrubbing her
raw skin with a sanding board after it had been burnt with hot
coals. Dawn came and went; the hours ticked by. Time seemed to
stop.

She heard a distant noise, and terror set in, but
she was too physically pained to do anything more than flinch. Her
head hung down, and through her good eye, she was able to see black
patent leather shoes and the bottom of khaki pants walk towards her
then disappear behind her. She felt her body convulse into full
body tremors. Then a cold hand removed the thing holding the gag in
her mouth, which she spit out as soon as she was able to. She took
a deep breath, the first in what felt like days. Then, the person
untied her wrists before moving away.

“Get up.”

She slowly tried to stand up. It took almost all the
energy she had.

“Get up!”

She heard a low grunting noise and realized it had
come from her as she made a drastic effort to get up. But it was
more of a crawl forward than a standing-up motion.

“You brought this upon yourself, Jillian. All you
had to do was play nicely. We wouldn’t have hurt you. Well, my
brother wouldn’t have hurt you. But now, the game has changed. My
brother held you captive here through his abilities. He altered
your moods and made you forget. Seeing as I don’t have that gift, I
have to physically restrain you. You’ll now remember it all: the
bad and the even worse. Trust me. It’s better to forget. But he’s
dead now, and I’m in charge, and I want to know what you know. So
you are going to get up from the floor, use the bathroom, have some
food and water, and then we are going to talk.”

Jill remained on the floor, slowly crawling towards
the wall to use as leverage to get up. As soon as he said restroom,
she realized she really needed to use the restroom. And her mouth?
Her mouth was dry and parched, and as soon as she moved her mouth,
even slightly, the crack on her lip open. She cringed at the pain
and then tasted the blood that dripped into her bone-dry mouth. She
needed water right away. She moved a little faster.

“You have thirty seconds to get up, or we’re going
to talk right here, and I’ll bring you a bucket instead of letting
you use the bathroom.”

An eternity later, but obviously less than thirty
seconds, she was up and face to face with her mad uncle. He was
both crazy
and
angry. He led her to a nearby bathroom she’d
never seen before. She quickly used the facilities, washed her face
with warm water, and used some paper towels to wipe away some of
the dried blood around her eyes and lip. She looked at her hands,
which were, as she suspected, pure raw skin. She winced when the
water touched her wrist. A loud knock startled her. “Out of there
now, Jillian.”

She tried to find her voice to tell him she was
coming, but all that came out was an unintelligible croak.

She opened the door to find Josef standing, arms
crossed, waiting. In the last five minutes, she had heard him say
more words than in all the months combined. He led her to another
room, again, a room she’d never seen, with a steel table in the
middle and chairs on the opposite sides of the table. There was a
plate of food and a pitcher of water. Josef pointed to a chair and
nodded to the food. This was clearly her cue to sit and eat. She
slowly and very painfully lifted her hand and began to eat, but
after a few bites of the surprisingly tasty chicken, she stopped.
With the cut on her lip, the throb of her head, and the pain of her
wrist, not to mention the complete fear that shrouded every inch of
her body, she just couldn’t eat. She reached for the glass and
downed the entire glass of water. Josef took the pitcher and
refilled her glass, and she drank some more. She realized that the
more water she drank, the more likely she would need the bathroom,
and since she wasn’t sure when she’d be allowed to use it, she
decided to stop.

“Finished?” Josef asked. Jill nodded. He took her
plate and moved it aside then finally sat down. “Okay, so this is
how this is going to go. You are going to tell me everything you
know. If you do that, I will allow you to live. If you don’t, I
will tie you up again and will repeat this until you finally tell
me. I have all the patience in the world, Jillian. I have been
waiting for years and years, so a few more days will make no
difference to me. But, just so you know, every day you don’t
cooperate will be more painful. You will not be the first person I
hurt. Do not underestimate me. Look behind you.” He pointed to a
table behind her that had some sort of metal instruments. “You
don’t want me use those instruments on you. I promise you it will
not be pleasant, and I’m sure you don’t want me to hurt someone you
love. So game over, niece. It’s time for you to talk. We get this
unpleasant part out of the way, and then we start working on what
I’m most excited about: your DNA.”

Jill’s eyes bulged; she was unable to blink,
paralyzed with fear. She knew that this man was not lying. The evil
in his eyes shook her to her core.

“Understand?”

She nodded.

“I need words. Do. You. Understand?”

A weird croak that she didn’t even recognize came
out, “Y-Yes.” Then gathering up the very little courage she had,
she asked, “If I answer all your questions, will I be able to
leave?”

“No.” He didn’t hesitate. Tears streamed out of her
eyes faster. Harder. “But I will
not
kill your friends or
hurt you. So if you care at all for those twins and that precious
southern girl, you’ll cooperate. Look at what happened to your
boyfriend back at the lab. You don’t want that for your friends, do
you? He really loved you, and he’s dead because of you, because you
didn’t help. Don’t test my resolve, Jill. I will start hunting them
down one by one until you will not be able to tell one brother from
the other. The police will not even be able to identify the
bod—”

Feeling helpless, she said, “Stop!” She sobbed.
“Stop. okay. I’ll help. Anything. Please. Just don’t hurt
them.”

“What do you know about me and Rocco?”

She felt the tears stream down her face. “Y-you are
b-both psychic. I’m psychic because it’s genetic. You both worked
at s-some . . .” Her voice cracked. Every time she opened her mouth
to speak, the cut on her lip stretched, causing more blood into her
mouth and down her chin. The pain was too much, but she continued,
“S-some government research agency, but it didn’t work. You weren’t
able to discover anything. You didn’t make any headway with your
research because you couldn’t. It’s just a genetic thing that can’t
be recreated.” She looked at Josef, who sat a few feet away from
her, arms crossed, listening intently. He gestured with a nod for
her to continue. She used the back of her hand to wipe away the
blood that dripped from her lip. “At some point, the program was
cancelled, but you and Rocco wanted to continue the program, so on
your own, you continued researching but with children instead.
That’s where Paul comes in.”