The inhuman part of me didn’t like to be coddled or babied.
She needed analysis. Information. Facts. Those are what she understood. Those are what she needed to keep going. To keep doing her job. To keep me alive.
I knew I shouldn’t have so many different parts and pieces of me rattling around in my brain. I knew it was abnormal. But it was how I survived five years of this.
I tried my best to keep all of me together. To at least keep the threads of all my personalities in the same drawer in my mind. Some days I was better at it than others.
“Willow, are you ready?” Ethan asked. He had a bite to his voice. A sure fire way of knowing I’d escaped in my head for too long.
I blinked once for yes.
My chest inflated briefly. I knew my brain was getting oxygen because I was still alive. But that was it. I couldn’t feel anything else but my eyelids and eyes. Not being able to feel my chest lift, but having to watch it do so out of the bottom of my vision made me hate him all over again.
His face brightened. “Wonderful. You’re already responding better.” He chuckled softly. “I knew this serum would yield better results.”
It sure has, fucker. Let me stab you and pump you full of this shit so you can see what it feels like. Make you try to fight the effects of the paralytic and the sedative. You need firsthand knowledge of what a brain can really do.
He stepped away. Headed for the closet with the false flooring panel. The dungeon where he kept his subjects.
It’s horrifying appearance slid through my mind. I’d only been forced down there once. But once was more than enough to etch its picture on my brain. Sear it on my heart. Stamp it on my soul.
Brightly lit, no one could escape the horrors that greeted the eye. Shutting the eyes didn’t help. The stench made it impossible to push reality from the mind. The new subjects were greeted with what awaited them. They got to see firsthand their fates at the hands of a madman who looked like an angel.
The walls were dirt. Hard-packed dirt that he added to in layers. Once, the space had been as big as the main floor. But that was five years ago. Who knew how many layers he’d added to the walls since then. Eventually, he would run out of room.
Each layer of dirt held one round of dead subjects.
Dead girls I’d been unable to save. Dead women I’d sentenced to death because I couldn’t get my mouth to work. Dead.
He came back into the room. A limp body hung over his arms. The small peaks of her breasts identified her as a female. Ethan didn’t think men were good subjects for his testing. They were already too strong. Too able to get to that baser side of survival.
They were too big for him to fight. To drug. To restrain, more like. As delusional as Ethan was, there was a scary logic to his twisted mind.
I would have felt better about it all if I didn’t understand his thought patterns. The fact that I could follow those loosely logical arguments made me fear for my own mind. I’d kill myself before I became like this man.
Ethan dumped the woman on the floor, a careless tangle of limbs and tissue. I wondered how much he actually saw of them. Outside of their neurological activity and the fact that they had beating hearts, did he see them as human? As something other than a bundle of electrical impulses and meat to test and theorize on?
He stepped over what had to be the lump of her body as he made his way to the computer setup he’d installed five years ago. Some of the computers were different, but the basic layout was still the same.
“Let’s begin, shall we?” He double tapped a button on his console of horror. “Subject seventy-three. Obtained from the general population through voluntary meeting. Platform: Tinder. Date of retrieval: September Twenty-Two. Date of testing: September Twenty-Four.”
At least I’d only been gone one day. I just prayed that when I didn’t show up with the cake for Natalie that someone would figure out what had happened. They would find me. They would find me.
They had to find me.
Chapter 37 – Ryker
Water splashed in my face, pulling me from the bottom of the drunken well I’d climbed into last night.
“You’ve