by Quil Carter
As I looked at the mirror, I saw what was in front of us. Half a dozen barred doors with a big glass viewing window in each, all set into the wall.
When I saw movement, I looked towards the imbedded prisons.
A ghastly creature was throwing itself at the Plexiglas, injuring itself as it did. Blood and drool shot from its mouths whenever it lunged, slamming its entire body against the windows. I couldn’t even make out its shape it looked like a tangle of gnashing teeth, limbs, and fur.
My eyes didn’t know where to focus first; they shot in every direction trying to take it all in.
“Don’t be scared, sweety,” Perish purred at me, as he put his arm around me and walked me towards the cages. My feet dragged on the ground and I tried to pull away. I didn’t want to see them. I looked around the room for a place to duck and hide. There were lots of computers in the walls, and labs set up with decanters, wires, and tubes. Further on were even bigger clear windows, with more lab equipment and computers on the other side in large separate rooms. All were protected by the keycards.
“Gianni riled up the babies, I’ll calm them,” Perish said to me over the shrieking. He reached in front of me and pressed a switch that was imbedded on the wall.
A shrill and deafening sound exploded all around us. For a few moments the creatures screamed louder, then they fell silent. Perish took his finger away from the switch and continued to pull me towards the first Plexiglas window.
“Please… let go of me,” I pleaded, digging my socked feet into the floor, but he kept pulling me. As he did I looked into one of the glass windows off to our side. I caught a glance of the cut-open carcass of an arian human, with black insect-like legs growing out of it. It was lying on a slab, a bloodied saw resting beside it.
“You’ll be fine, they’re very fascinating!” Perish said happily. He stopped, and I could see we were in front of the first glass enclosure. The cage smelled terrible.
“Look,” Perish urged. I felt his hand dig into my side. “He’s looking at you.”
I made myself look and saw one of the most horrifying creatures I had ever seen.
It was human, or at least… a part of it was. It had dozens of tiny glistening black eyes in its fleshy hairless face, and four arms on each side growing out of an elongated torso. When it saw me and Perish looking at it, it screamed. A terrible low, buzzing scream. It backed away into the corner of its room, using all of its limbs to crawl backwards at an incredible speed. Its teeth pinchers clicked at me over a vertical mouth, before it looked towards a small door with a plastic flap. I think behind it was the rest of its cage.
It blinked sideways eyelids at us. It looked frightened, and I felt sorry for it. The first thing I wanted to do was kill it and put it out of its misery.
“My little gnasher,” Perish said in the same growly purr. He put his hand up to the cage. The gnasher recoiled and held three of the spindly arms on the left-hand side of its body over its face. I realized that it didn’t have legs; its arms were its legs. “I gave breeding pairs to my master a few years ago, but he was upset it was timid. So I’m trying to breed more violent ones,” Perish explained, before banging on the window. The creature screamed. “I make him fight. He’s getting better. He kills his own food now.”
Perish tugged on my hand and took me to the next window.
“Oh… fuck…” I groaned when I saw it.
A fat, disgusting lump of flesh was looking back at me through slits of small, human-like eyes. It tried to move away from Perish too but it was too fat to move. Its skin was pink and hairless like that of a newborn mouse, with rolls of fat spilling over its naked body. Its nose was snubbed and its ears flopped down like… like –
“It’s a pig-human isn’t it?” I said, feeling sick.
“Boras. We’re going to start canning them as soon as our numbers reach one thousand breeding pairs. They’re full-grown at three years old like your wasteland rats.” Perish’s voice was so filled with pride it was unsettling. The pig-human stared at us, making grunting noises. It started to nod its head up and down. “Want to feed him? He’s hungry.”
“No…” I swallowed and turned from it. Perish noticed.
“You don’t like him? He will help feed people, they breed faster than bosen.” Perish sounded offended but I couldn’t look at these creatures anymore.
The radanimals with their patchy skin and scabby bodies I could handle, the scavers, croaches, all of them, but these things looked… too human, too arian. If they were mindless, mad rats that would be one thing but the pig-human… it looked intelligent.
“It’s just… I still feel sick from earlier I guess.”
“Oh, okay.” Perish put a hand supportively on my side and rubbed it. “Killian, we ate his sister last night, you liked it.”
Did he think that would make me feel less sick? I gagged. I had thought it had just been ham.
“This cage has the babies,” Perish said in a hushed voice. He peeked in and grinned. I steeled myself and looked in too.
This cage had three metal cages on each side of it. Inside were smaller abominations; it looked like there were two different types. Three of them looked like little bears covered in thick brown fur, with a human face and blue eyes.
The next weren’t quite as cute. They looked like fat balls of flesh with tiny sausages for arms and legs. Their faces looked puffed and swollen under two black eyes, like how a drowned person looks after being in the water for several days.
“Those little fluffy ones look almost cute,” I said. One of them looked at me and blinked as I waved at it.
“That’s a baby whipwolf, their eyes won’t stay blue unfortunately. Want to see an adult?”
No… I said in my mind, but I had to behave. “Sure.”
“He’s one of my favourite.” Perish pulled on my lab coat. “Stand back though.”
I turned, mostly to just get it over with, but as soon as I turned something big and furry lunged at the window. I screamed and jumped. It was the same creature that had made the racket when we first entered the room. Perish put a supportive hand on me.
“Back! Back, Gianni,” Perish yelled, banging on the Plexiglas.
The mass of fur retreated, but it turned around and lunged again. I couldn’t even get a proper look at it.
“He would rip me to shreds if I let him out!” Perish laughed, clasping his hands together again. This one definitely wasn’t a cute whipwolf pup; it was more rabid and out of control than our deacons.
Perish banged on the door and yelled at it until I stopped him. He might trust the glass but I didn’t.
“That’s a whipwolf?” I asked, pulling his arm back. “What’s he spliced with?”
The creature took his food dish and chucked it at the wall. Its face was… fuck, its face was like a dog, and it walked on two legs; though its arms were long and defined enough that I was sure it could walk on all fours.
“Deacon-human! I call him Gianni, pretty boy.” Perish beamed. He grabbed onto my shoulder and shook it. “Isn’t he beautiful? Oh, I had to kill so many pups, I kept getting it wrong. Their brains wouldn’t form correctly or they would have hydrocephalus or hip dysplasia from how their bones grew, but look at him! Beautiful, so beautiful. Nero’s taking him soon and his mate. Oh, I’m hoping so bad Master Silas will praise me. Isn’t he beautiful?”
I found myself studying the creature. His nose was extended and black like a dog’s, with pointed fur-covered ears, the same thick fur that seemed to cover his body. His eyes were as yellow as the sun and had a soullessness to them that the deacons’ eyes had.
It snarled loudly and made a mock advance. I jumped and let out a scream. It hung its tongue out and I could swear it was laughing at me.
“Stay still,” Perish warned. It stood up and walked towards me, licking its snout.
“Don’t break eye contact.”
The whipwolf glared at me. I watched as its lips split open, baring rows of pointed, stained teeth. An intimidatin
g growl rumbled to life in its throat, making my chest vibrate like the deacons’ growls did in Aras.
The eyes were piercing and void of any human emotion, but I didn’t look away, not for bravery, but for fear. It growled at me, and raised a human-like hand, though its fingers were thick with fur and clawed. It pressed the hand up against the Plexiglas. Fuck, it had thumbs.
I stared back shaking, I could see every hair on its face and every bit of moisture on its black nose. The window fogged as it breathed a steady stream of hot breath. It looked human, it looked intelligent, it looked like it wanted to talk.
“Enough, get!” Perish suddenly said. I jumped back as he banged on the glass. The whipwolf turned around. It walked away hunched over, like an ape almost. It didn’t turn back to us.
I wanted to leave.
“Perry… I’m scared, I want to go,” I whispered. Now it was my turn to pull on his sleeve. I didn’t trust this place; I would have felt safer in the deacons’ pen. The air was heavy with the abominations’ stink, and alive with their energy. It was overwhelming, I needed clean cold air and some drugs.
I turned away from the cages, though now I was looking at myself in the large mirror. I could see Perish giving me a disappointed and rather pouty look.
“They won’t hurt you, the glass is everything-proof…”
I caught his eye in the mirror. “Please? Let’s watch a movie, please, Perry?”
His shoulders slumped. He looked at the floor for a second and nodded. “Okay, Killian. You get scared a lot, huh?”
“I’m a coward,” I said quietly, turning away from the mirror. “I’m scared of everything.”
He nodded at this. Well, it wasn’t a lie. Without Reaver I think I was in a permanent state of fear and living one minute at a time.
“Do you still like me, even if I’m a coward?” I asked. I felt like asking Reaver the same thing every day. I think in my head this was the only way I could ever ask that. Because I knew Reaver would tell me the truth.
“You have nothing to be… to be cowardly over now, you’re safe inside, but until your brain knows that, when you’re scared, I’ll be there,” Perish said. He started towards the door. “I am scared when I am outside in the greywastes. So they put me underground in labs. I’ll teach you to be a scientist and you’ll never have to go to the surface.”
I gave him a fake smile, and he gave me an all too real one back. I followed him into the living room area, and he turned on a video for us.
“Can I get Reaver to watch with us?” I asked sweetly.
Perish looked nervous but he nodded. “I have the… the detonator, it will be beside me the whole time.”
I sprung up and ran to the surveillance room; he followed behind me with his card.
I ran in, I wanted to dive into Reaver’s arms but Perish was right behind me.
He was sitting on the only chair in the room staring at the surveillance screens. He looked up when he saw me. One of his eyes was almost swelled shut, and he had gashes in his cheek and I could see dried blood in his hair.
I bit my lip. I wanted to hug him, kiss him, but that fucking scientist was right behind me. My poor Reaver, I was his doctor I wanted to help him. I would do everything I needed to do to get that collar off of his neck.
Reaver stared at me; he looked horrible, I didn’t see anything but anger in his eyes.
“Want to watch a movie?” I asked.
Reaver gave a nod and got up. Perish unlatched the chain that secured him to the wall and walked him outside. The scientist walked in front of us, I managed to take Reaver’s hand for a moment and squeeze it. He squeezed back.
Reaver got his own seat and Perish and I got the couch.
Chapter 22
Reaver
I never took my eyes off of the screens. I watched every single feed in the underground lab, nothing got past me. I could watch many at once, the scientist’s comings and his goings, and Killian’s. I watched Killian whenever the feed picked him up. I knew his body language and I knew he was scared, but there was no time for fear now.
Any fear or apprehension I had in this place had gotten beaten out of me. Care of the hands of King Silas’s whore Perish. What reservations I had about letting Killian do what he had to do were gone, now I just wanted him to get this collar off of my neck. It reminded me every second that I was a prisoner. No matter how good the food, how warm and lit the room, I, unlike Killian, had a constant awareness that at any moment Perish could kill us.
Or me… he liked Killian. I had to get Killian out of here, so I could have Perish Dekker to myself. Killian was a liability, a risk… but once he was above us, Perish would be mine.
Sometimes I would lose hours fantasizing about what I would do to him. Every hand on my boy’s side, every smile, every touch, a new string of fates for the scientist would come to my mind.
I had seen his spliced abominations, I had seen the deacon-human. I would entertain my mind with Perish getting disembowelled, eaten alive, even raped by the beast he had created. Or eaten by the pig-human, with its dense, flat little teeth. Killian hadn’t seen him with them but I had. He made the weak ones fight, he tormented them, kicked and beat them. I had seen him beat and kick the little dog babies the first day he had me. Their animal screams excited him. He got off making weaker things submit to him, it was the only way he could feel power. It made sense when Killian told me he was a royal bitch of King Silas.
It almost made what I was going to do with him even better. Because when I fucked him with my combat knife, I wasn’t going to stop until he was dead. He would die how he lived, a worthless piece of meat only created to entertain those better than him.
Rape by combat knife… I would save that one. Though I was really liking the idea of skinning the flesh off of his dick and making him eat it raw. That had come to me when he disappeared into his bedroom with my boyfriend. If Killian told me he had touched him, I would either rape him until I split him in half or let my boyfriend.
My boyfriend…
I could feel my mind mentally breaking me down when I saw him emerge from the apartment we had sheltered in. Perish had made me watch, he had chained me to this room just so he could watch me watch Killian. He had such a sick fun in it, he laughed, jumped up and down and did the rubbing his hands thing. I could see him revelling in the emotional pain he thought he was inflicting on me. Until I told him he was just my friend, that I was his bodyguard in a way because he was weak.
The sick satisfaction drained, and then… oddly, the compliments to my very beautiful boyfriend. I saw my chance and pointed out my favourite features. His eyes, his jaw bone, his golden hair. Perish agreed and I realized I had a gay boy on my hands.
When Killian took a violent turn towards masochism, I made him a deal. He saves Killian and brings him here, I’ll hook him up. Fucking pervert scientist agreed with a boner in his pants and took off, my fucking gun in tow.
I watched Killian sitting with him in the garden, chatting away with him, holding his fucking hand, kissing his lips. I didn’t know why until Killian told me I could come in for their little movie date. He had traded a kiss for my freedom.
When I had first spotted Perish during my patrol, I thought he was well… retarded. They left him behind to feed the radanimals or something. I didn’t know. I didn’t take him serious. His blue eyes kept jerking in different directions and his mannerisms were odd. I, being the cocky fuck I was, didn’t see him as a threat at all, quite the opposite. I saw him as weak and defenceless. I despised myself for that, I had no one to blame for that lapse in judgement other than myself. I would not make the same mistake again.
But he was unarmed for fuck sakes. I had a M16 right beside me. He had nothing on him, nothing! When he offered me soda I said sure. We laughed and talked about Donnely and the greywastes. Always with my gun in arms reach on my back, my knives on me. He was out of his mind, obviously, but harmless. Told a story of how he had found a lab underneath our feet and had been living
there.
Good for him, I told him, I was here scavenging. I drank the soda, always ready to shoot him if needed be.
An hour after meeting him, I stood up to move on. When he noticed, he stood as well.
“Reaver,” he said, even though I had not told him my name. I saw a glint of silver, and looked to see he was holding handcuffs. In a flash I picked up my M16 and pointed it at him. He was unfazed.
“I have Killian, the blond skinny one. Five of my mercenaries have imprisoned him during our conversation. If you do not come with me now, peacefully, we will torture and then murder him.”
I had never been so blindsided in my life. For the first time in my being, I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a way to get us out of it. He knew who Killian was, he knew what he looked like. I didn’t know he knew these things from the cameras. That it was just his fucked up self in these ruins.
I let him chain me and beat the shit out of me, because I thought he had Killian. I let him touch me and threaten to rape me because I thought he had Killian. When that fuck turned on his little TVs and I saw my boy exit the apartment…
I’ll peel his skin off, I’ll eat it in front of him. I’ll pull out his teeth… I could sell good arian teeth to Doc for a pretty penny.
I knew he wasn’t watching me, but I kept a straight face as I looked at the multiple screens. Killian didn’t know what Perish had done, and threatened to do before I convinced him to get the boy. I couldn’t tell him. I warned him as much as I knew was safe, but if he knew the kind of shit this guy was doing under closed doors he would flip out. I had to balance what he knew, and what I needed him to do.
Get the detonator Killian. Give me the detonator and I’ll take care of the rest. I’ll get the password out of him and the key; like I got Killian’s location from the legionary father. I just needed Killian gone. I didn’t care what happened to me, I just had to get the little fuckhead safe.
