Specimen (13 page)

I’m completely immobilized.  The electric impulses stop, but I’m left feeling disoriented.  My thoughts are disjointed and confused.  There’s only one thing I know for sure—I’ve been captured.

Riley’s voice is no longer in my head.  I’ve never had so many people around me at once, and I feel more alone than ever.

I can’t move.

I’m naked and restrained on a thick, flat wooden platform.  My arms and legs are extended outward, almost as if I were being crucified.  Metal clamps keep my arms, legs, and torso restricted, and there’s also a strap around my forehead.  My hands are splayed out with shards of metal between each finger, immobilizing them as well.  Circular pieces have been inserted into my eye sockets, forcing my eyes to remain open, staring up into a blinding light.

“How many specimens survived the transformation?”

“Where is the medical facility located?”

“How many officers are involved in the project?”

“What do you know about monorail technology?”

I know the answers to some of their questions but not most of them.  Either way, I remain silent.  I can’t identify any of my captors by sight with the light shining on me, but I can identify four voices, all men.

Water is splashed in my face.  It’s salty and burns my eyes, but the pain is easy enough to shake off.  Someone slaps me across the face.  Another slaps me on my balls.  I have no idea how many times they’ve done that.  Normally, my primary implant would make it easy to calculate, but I have no desire to do so.  My head hasn’t worked right since they threw the net over me.

“Time to up the ante, boys.”  There’s a slight accent in the man’s voice, but I can’t identify it.  He’s the one giving most of the instructions.

I feel a hand on my thigh and a slight prick, like a needle.  It’s not puncturing my skin though.  Someone is just holding it there.

“Ready?”

“Go for it.”

A sharp
thwack
hits my ears at the same time the slight prick in my thigh turns into a deep puncture.  I grit my teeth against the pain radiating from the middle of my leg.  I feel the same slight pressure on my other thigh, and I realize they’re hammering nails into my muscles.

Both thighs, both calves, and my biceps are all pierced.  The crucifixion image strengthens.   I wait for them to start hammering in more nails, but they stop.  I can feel tugging around the area where I’m impaled and the scrape of metal on metal.

“Light him up.”

My muscles go stiff as electricity is pumped through the nails and into my body.  I can’t stop myself from screaming.  The net had incapacitated me—messed with my implants until I couldn’t function—but this is nothing but pure agony.

I scream again as another shock is delivered.

More questions.  More screaming.

Questions.

Screaming.

Everything is blurry.  I sense the light still in my eyes, but I can’t actually see anymore.  My arms and legs pulse with pain.  I can smell my own charred flesh where they’ve burned me with the shocks.  My lips are dry, cracked, and probably bleeding.  I’ve been beaten unconscious several times, but the reprieve never lasts.  The shocks revive me, and it starts all over again.

One of the voices—the leader of this merry band of torturers, as far as I can tell—speaks into my ear.

“Found who your doctor is,” he says.  “Riley Grace, right?”

I swallow hard, but say nothing.

“She’s a pretty thing,” he says.  “I bet you would have volunteered for all this if you’d known you’d get to bone her as much as you like.”

I lick my lips, but there isn’t enough moisture on my tongue to make any difference.  For all I know, I did volunteer for that reason.  Either way, I’m not saying anything to this asshole.

Another jolt flows through me, and I bite the inside of my cheek, tasting blood.  The voice is beside me again.

“We’re going to get her, you know.”  He hums the words into my ear.  “I bet she’d be a sweet fuck.  Have you fucked her ass?  I bet it’s tight.  Can’t wait to get my hands on her and find out.”

I try to clench my fingers, but I can’t move them.  I want to wrap my hands around his throat and choke the life out of him for saying the words.  I grit my teeth, wanting to tell him exactly what I’d do to him if he ever laid a hand on her, but the words don’t come.

Footsteps echo through the room.

“You aren’t going to be able to break him like that.”  This voice is new to me.  “He’s too conditioned.  Maybe once the drugs are out of his system, but that will be weeks.”

“We don’t have that kind of time,” the leader with the accent says.  “We need information, and he’s got it in his head.”

“Is there something we can do to flush his system?”  It’s the voice of the man who hammered nails into my legs.

“No, but maybe we can interfere with the implants,” the new voice says.

“How?”

“Get Errol in here.”

For a few minutes, no one says anything.  There are no questions and no added pain.  I focus on my breaths, counting each one as I try to slow down the autonomic systems in my body and relax myself.

Errol.  He had to have meant Errol Spat, the man I had been sent to bring back to the Mills Conglomerate base.  He’s here, and they’re bringing him to me.

A hundred possible ways of escaping and bringing Errol Spat back with me run though my head, each less plausible than the last.  I have no advantage now, but I will find it eventually.  I will find it and exploit it.

Unless they kill me first.

Footsteps off in the distance get louder.

“So, this is the product of my life’s work?”  The footsteps approach the side of the platform, and a face looms over me, partially blocking the light.  I try to focus on his features, but all I can really make out are dark eyes and a long moustache that curves around his mouth.

“Proud of yourself?” the leader asks.  His condescending tone is ignored.

“Looks like it’s all working as planned,” Spat says.  “I assume he hasn’t said a word.”

“Got some screams out of him but only when we hooked him up to the car battery.”  I feel a hand on my thigh, near one of the nails.  He taps it with his finger, and I flinch.

“There’s no way that’s going to work,” Spat says.  “You see, the implants are designed for just this kind of thing.  As soon as the system recognizes the body is being harmed—tortured—it shuts down his verbal output.  He literally
can’t
talk to you.  Run current through him, and the system gets overloaded, so you’ll get some screams out of him, but you’ll never get any intel.”

“You built him,” the leader says.  “You tell me how to break him.”

“No, no—let’s get this straight,” Spat says.  “I didn’t build him.  I designed the cybernetic implants and the interface between them and the implants placed around his body.  It’s the doctors who link them up to his brain and administer the drug treatments that are the real builders.  I can only tell you about the interface and the programming.  I’m a tech, assholes, not a doctor.”

“So, what do we do?  Take the implants out and run them through the computer?”

“If you want to kill him, sure—go for it.  I’m pretty sure Merle was hoping to get him to turn though.  Does he even know what you fuckers are doing out here?”

“He hasn’t arrived yet.”

“You don’t have any authority here, Spat.  Don’t get shitty with me.”

“I’m just telling you how it is.”  There’s a long pause before he speaks again.  “Let me give something a try.”

He places an interface disk to the side of my head.  Though Riley has done this several times, the intent was always to add information.  Whatever this man is doing, it’s not the same.  Instead of bright flashes of information inside of my head, I sense a dull whirring and a brief vibration through my brain.

“Weird,” Errol says.

“What’s weird?”

“This doesn’t look right.  Something’s fucked up.”

I shift my eyes to the right as much as I can.  With the light in my eyes, I can’t see much other than shadows, but it looks like Spat is holding a hand-held computer.  I hear him tap at the screen.  He adjusts the disk behind my ear and then taps again.

“There’s some squirrely shit showing up when I run the diagnostic.  It looks like there’s some leakage.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe nothing, but it isn’t right.  I don’t think they’ve used the usual drug regimen—the levels are all off.  It also looks like the rear implant has shifted.  He’s been through multiple surgeries, which isn’t normal either.  It should be one and done.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It means I can’t really tell what’s going on here.”

“But can you break it?  Make him talk?  Read whatever shit is in his head?”

“It doesn’t work like that.  We might be able to force it to cycle power, but that wouldn’t give you much time.  Maybe if we can disable the primary implant, some of its functioning will be deactivated.  Never actually tried to do that, but it might work.”

“What might work?  Stop with the tech talk, and give me something to
do
here.”

“If you can slow down the implant enough without putting it into torture-resistant mode, he’d at least be physically capable of talking.  Not sure if he will, but at least it’s a possibility.”

“How?”

“The implants operate best at a hundred degrees.  Part of the drug treatment keeps his temperature high.  If we can cool him down to ninety, the implants will be impacted.”

“In what way?”

“He won’t be able to access the information from them.  A lot of his training and programming would go right out the window.  I can’t tell you if that method will work or not, but it would leave him vulnerable.  That’s assuming his body can stand the cold.”

“So, just freeze him?”

“Basically.”

“And he’ll live?”

“He should.  Well, he might.  I don’t know how the drug treatments have been changed.  He’s supposed to be the best of the best and all that shit, so he’s got a chance.”

There’s a pause before the leader speaks again.

“Put him in the box.”

I struggle as they release me from the platform and haul me backward.  My eyes adjust quickly, and I search for an opportunity.  I’m in a large, mostly empty warehouse.  I don’t see anything I can reach to use as a weapon, so I’ll have to rely on my own strength, assuming I have any left.

The man holding my left arm glances behind him, and his grip falters slightly.  I twist my wrist backward, grab his hand, and break two of his fingers.  He screams and jumps back, freeing my arm.  I slam my fist into the head of the man closest to me.  He drops to the ground, but my freedom doesn’t last.

Other men come out of the darkness around me.  There are too many of them, and I am overwhelmed again.  They hold me up, rain punches to my head, stomach, and chest until I slow my struggles.  They continue to drag me across the floor toward the back of the warehouse.

Hands push on my head and shoulders, forcing me to squat as I’m shoved inside a rectangular container.  A barred top comes down, trapping me.  My knees bump the front of the box and my shoulders are pressed against each side.  My back is pressed against the container as well, and I’m forced to keep my weight on my heels.  The box is longer than it is wide, and there is no room to turn or even move my legs enough to sit down.  My arms are trapped between my chest and my thighs.  When I tilt my head up to see the top, I have no more than a couple of inches between my face and the bars above me.

“Fill it up.”

A rumbling comes from behind me—the sound of a generator starting up—and icy water hits my back.  I try to shift, but I can’t turn my head enough to see where it’s coming from.  There must be a hole in the back to allow water to come in over my shoulders.  Within a few minutes, the freezing cold water surrounds me.  It’s up over my shoulders and hitting my chin.  I have to tilt my head backward and push against my heels to keep my mouth and nose above the water line.

I hear a dull click, and a bright light shines down into my eyes again.  I can make out voices, but the water in my ears muffles the sound so I can’t decipher the words.  If I move too much, the water sloshes enough to enter my mouth and nose.  The sound of the generator continues, cycling water to keep it cold.  The chill from the water seeps into me.  Every muscle aches as I struggle to hold my head above the water.

I don’t know how long I’m left there.

My muscles give out on me.  There’s deep, sharp pain in the center of my chest that never subsides, no matter what I do.  I discover that I can hold my breath for several minutes, but eventually I have to raise myself back up so I can breathe despite the protest from my muscles.  I’m able to pull the metal rings from my eye sockets when I tilt my head close enough to my hands so I can finally close my eyes for a while, but I obviously can’t sleep.

Inside my head a battle ensues.  A dozen different ways to escape fly through my mind, but each tactic fails.  I fight against the container itself, but the ache in my muscles, the burning pain in my chest, and the need to breathe all conflict with each other.  Every possible scenario runs through my mind until I’m caught in a perpetual loop of each already failed attempt.

Suddenly, the top is opened and I’m hauled out.  As they release me, I drop to the ground, unable to move.  I’m dragged back to the platform.  A painful grunt is lodged in my chest, refusing to make itself heard as they stretch my aching limbs and splay me out again.  Wires are attached to the nails in my legs and arms, and they shock me again.