Chapter 8 c Cured

Unable to look down at his own arm or the nearby side table, Iggy heard metal lightly clank against metal followed by a short rattling noise. Jim grasped the needle pen from the side table and flipped the switch. It buzzed against the skin on Iggy’s forearm as Jim drew an X at the beginning of the existing label, making the tattoo read XIF17.

Maria stood next to him and peered down at the change. “An ‘X’? For generation X?” She chuckled under her breath. “That’s original. Will you go back and mark BF15 with an ‘X’, too? Since they are from the same family?”

Jim whipped his head and scowled at her mildly, like a Chihuahua with no teeth. “No! They might be family, but they definitely aren’t the same. Haven’t you learned anything?” He grumbled something else under his breath and turned back to the monitor.

Maria looked up at him passively. “Whatever you say, Doc. All I know is that I’m starving.”

“Alright. Go ahead and put him out. We’ll take him to the rehab room right away, and then you can take a break.”

Unsatisfied with the work that still needed to be done, Maria dragged her feet to the side table from where she pulled out a syringe of thick milky fluid. She drew closer to Iggy until she was in reaching distance, then she swung fast and carelessly, stabbing the needle right into his thigh. The rattling noises from the plank and restraints were loud in Iggy’s ears at first, but then they quieted little by little. The ceiling lights doubled, then quadrupled, and then vanished into silent darkness.

It seemed like he had only blinked, but before he knew it, he awoke even thirstier than before, and in another white room fastened onto a gurney. His body had been washed and redressed into paper thin white clothing without undergarments. To his side, light shimmered off of metal bars that lined the only exit to the small white room. Beyond the barred wall, there was a hallway running crosswise with identical holding cells lined left to right. He could slightly hear the neighbors.

The walls around him seemed to be completely flat; any lines looked like shadowy smudges, except for the wall directly across from him. A large sheet of black glass was embedded into the cinder blocks seamlessly. When he lifted his heavy head up to see, the glass on the wall became illuminated, exposing the fact that it was a television screen.

It started pure white, but then it flickered to pure red.

That was all that there was at first… the red. That was all that he could see. His entire vision was absorbed in it. His clenched muscles crushed his organs, the heat simmered in his throat, and the glass scraped away the inside of his stomach. He breathed in, but there weren't any smells or tastes in the air. He extended his tongue, searching for the only thing that he wanted, but there was nothing to lick.

The red flickered into a scene. A long masculine arm stretched across the screen with full muscles and pulsating arteries. A sharp blade entered the frame and pressed firm onto the forearm. It dragged downward, slicing the flesh like butter, and the blood ran down after it, puddling in the palm.

This scene was visually appetizing, but after the thirtieth time of watching it on repeat, his desire for it lessoned. His eyes were red hot and aching, too, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t force them to close. If they wavered from the screen only once, the picture would change into something even more gruesome than the video before it, therefore stealing his attention right back. The new images never ceased. Only more and more came. Hours and hours’ worth. He could imagine the screaming. The blood, oh, such a gorgeous mess! Wounds. Shredding. Dismemberment. Beautiful brutality. Time became nothing more than the gory clips playing on the screen, a way in which to measure the length of his captivity.

Exhaustion and his unsatisfied thirst were killing him. His limbs were clenched so tightly that he felt as if he had gone back in time to the night that Baine infected him. Then with a little more time, his muscles became solidified. His mouth and stomach cracked from dehydration, and he lapped at the bleeding crevasses on the inside of his mouth, uselessly. Salty, it made him thirst even more. The only way he could stop the progression was to drink, but there was nothing to drink and no escape.

Now, he couldn’t smell, blink, or swallow, but only lie against the gurney, as good as dead. He hated himself for not concentrating all of his strength and will to escape while he still could move, but he couldn’t have known that the concoction of drugs dancing in his system made him as weak as a normal man, either. In this time with just a shred of conscious thought, he vowed that if he got out of this, that he would live, and not only live, but also die and when he chose to die it would be him who called all of the shots. Not these doctors or his brothers or his friends or anyone else, except for him.

Jim and Maria returned and observed him through the barred wall. Maria’s voice seemed to be trapped behind her pessimistic lips. “Hmmm… Not looking too good,” she said. “We should do vitals to make sure he isn’t dead.”

“Let’s try this instead.” Jim reached to the wall for a small control panel on the side of the cell. With the press of a button the images on the screen vanished. The black sheet of glass reflected Iggy’s horrid image back to him, an image that he’d fight to forget. But finally, he shut his eyes for the first time since the experiment had begun, and the hot grinding between his eyes and eyelids made most of the liquid in his head collect there. Water moistened the dried spheres and dripped out of the corners of his eyes. He gasped with relief.