Of Monsters and Humanity: The Genesis

Chapter 7 - Xander

Sixty-six days before....

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick...tick...tick...tick.... Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The hands of the clock started to go slower now. I groaned and laid my head back on the table. The medicine was working, and combined with the acid in my body, I was in Hell. The idiots probably didn't care that I still had other chemicals in my body so whatever virus they were testing on me wouldn't have as pure of an effect as they would want for perfect results. They just wanted to see me suffer. Damn them.

"Patient X appears to be agitated," the doctor next to me said aloud as he scribbled quickly on a keyboard.

I turned my head and somehow managed to growl out at him without throwing up on the table. My stomach was turning.

"Patient X is threatening staff with murder...."

"Fuck you," I hissed and banged my head against the table, the feeling of the metal against my head indicating that I wasn't even strong enough to cause a dent. My Gods, if I wasn't here and I got my hands on them....

"How are you feeling, Patient X?"

If I had to hear someone ask me that one more fucking time....

I turned my head so that I didn't have to look at him. The muscles in my neck were so weak and my head felt so heavy. The rest of my body ached and burned so badly that I tried to pretend that it didn't even exist. I just wanted to be somewhere where I wasn't in pain. The only thing I had to hold onto was the fact that I wasn't as weak as humans--I could threaten them and they would continue to fear me.

"You know, you keep doing this...but I'm building an immunity to all of this stuff," I groaned through my teeth, forcing myself to keep the contents of my stomach within my body. I wasn't even sure if my words were completely true but I wanted something to say to him other than "fuck you."

"We are aware, Patient X," he said and walked so that he was standing in front of my face again. "We probably know more about you than you do," he remarked, looking up from his clipboard and (I think?) smiling at me under his surgical mask.

That was surprising, but comforting. I closed my eyes and focused on that one good thing as the rest of my body started sweating and shocks started from my core and echoed up and down my bones. I shivered in pain.

I started to groan but then realized that I could feel my left foot. I paused and tried to move it, if anything was there. With great difficulty and to my great surprise, I felt my toes move. As soon as they responded, I started to laugh. The small chuckles then snowballed into giant hoots of howling laughter. The sudden release of endorphins from my laughter caused me to forget that my insides ached.

"You said a couple of weeks!" I screamed, holding onto the edges of the table that now groaned under my hand. I had a new strength. "You threw me back into the Pit after a couple days! I grew my leg back in less than a week!" I yelled with laughter and the doctor dropped his clipboard. "You fucking idiot! I'm getting stronger and you can't hold me in here for long." My head suddenly felt so clear and I looked to the ceiling and found a white, spherical camera in the left hand corner facing me. "You hear that, asshole?" I asked Balcom. "You can't keep me forever. I'll get out. And the first thing I'm going to do is kill you."

The last thing I saw was about ten SWAT members swarming into the lab and one of them yelling, "Shoot, shoot, shoot!"

Machine guns went off and I was filled with the sedative. Before it took me, I looked back at the camera and smiled. "I promise you that," I spoke and then the darkness took me again.

"Good morning, Xander."

My eyes flickered open. I was more out of it than I had ever been before. When I came down from the high of the usual sedatives, I was a little disoriented, but this almost felt like a dream. It could have been, too, but I believed differently.

I couldn't even speak. I forgot how to. I looked to my right and saw a clear, thick needle sticking out of my arm. They were filling me with the sedative from an I.V. so I never came down from the high. I turned back and faced Balcom.

"Do you know why I call you that?" he asked, hopping up from the counter he was leaning on.

I was in a whole new room. This one resembled more of a doctor's office, with filing cabinets on one side near a sink. Jars of cotton balls and wooden sticks sat on the counter and I think that I was strapped very loosely on an exam table. I felt as though I was laying on padding, but I wasn't sure, because my whole body felt like padding and I could have been laying on rocks for all I knew. A soft blue light came down from the ceiling and the bottom of the cabinets above the sink.

"I guess that is more of a rhetorical question. You can't really speak, can you?"

You asshole.

A smile spread on his face and he started to walk around me like he was proclaiming something great. "Well, thanks for asking about why I call you by the name you call yourself," he said, then leaned close to me. "I know you didn't ask. You can't say anything. But for my sake, let's pretend that you did," he whispered as his face hovered closely over mine. "Now," he started again, standing up straight, his voice louder. "I call you by your name so you feel like yourself. When my staff call you 'Patient X,' they are calling you by your name in this experiment. As you are around my staff more than myself, you are called 'Patient X' more often. Then, when you are with me, you hear your actual name. Afterwards, you are back with the staff. You are Patient X. You see the pattern?"

My mouth hung open and I wanted to close it but there was no strength in my jaw, or in the rest of my body.

He leaned in close again. "I want you to know that I own you. And not only as a patient, or experiment, rather. I own all of you. You are only a piece in my game. And I can play you however I want. I will know of your people soon enough, I have others working on that. But you." His lips went thin. "You are mine. You will never kill me because you will die trying."

You piece of human waste....

Balcom leaned over me and pressed a button on the monitor for the sedatives. "Goodnight, Xander. I'm planning something very special for you soon. After that, you will know who you are and who has you captured now."

The darkness took me.