At Dawn, in the Forest

Chapter 6

The days after the experiment went agonizing slowly by. Dawn barely slept and felt almost every bit of pain in her body for every hour, for every minute, for every second of the day. For a moment she thought her pain would never stop. 

With the last bit of energy she had in her she tried to imagine the forest she grew up in surrounding her. It was a mixed coniferous forest. So you had elements of both a temperate forest as a boreal forest, meaning you had oaks, maples, and ash trees as pines and firs. In her mind, the words of David Attenborough explaining where these forests were found and what their flora and vegetation contained echoed through her head.

She saw how squirrels fought with each other over food, how the deer cautiously maneuvered through the trees, and how butterflies flew through the peering sunlight at the end of spring. Dawn lay on the forest ground, she could feel the leaves, the moss, the earth. 

She could feel everything as if she was really there, she could even smell the fresh pine scent that spread through the forest. She was content for the first time in a long, long, long while and she was fine. Dawn was fine. She wanted to stay there, forever. She didn't want to go back. Let me go, Dawn thought. Let me go. I am fine.

And then...

The door burst open with a loud bang. The ringing sound echoed through the room right through Dawn's eardrums, waking her up. Her eyes shot open and shut right back by the sudden bright light. 

Then a groan of pain. 

She couldn't comprehend what was actually happening. Suddenly she was lifted up and Dawn screamed in pain. A foreign object was stuffed in her mouth, silencing her. Dawn was put in a wheelchair and a flaming, burning stab of pain shot from her arm. Making her scream again but now behind the foreign object, which she suspected to be made of fabric. Maybe a rag or socks? She hoped it wouldn't be the latter and that whatever the object may be, it was clean.

Dawn's senses couldn't keep up with what was happening. First, she was slowly slipping away in her cell and then all of a sudden she was tucked away in a wheelchair in some storage room. One of the guards and Jack were with her. 

She tried to ask what was happening, but she couldn't because of that annoying object in her mouth. Her irritation woke her up and slowly she came to her senses. Dawn could hear uproar in the building. Were they under attack? And if yes, by whom?

For some reason, the guard left the room and then it was just Dawn and Jack. The awful man stepped in front of her and leaned down on the armrests of the wheelchair. He whispered almost sadistically, "Don't worry sweetheart, even if they tear down the place, they won't take you. Dr. Willow gave me special orders to make sure you will stay safe with us."

Dawn couldn't give a flying fuck what Jack had to say, what kind of threat he would spew at her. She just blinked at him, and when Jack didn't get the desired reaction from her he stood up and looked out of the tiny window of the door. Jack only stood there for three seconds when he quickly turned around and shouted, "Oh Shit!"

The door flew off its hinges and a tall muscular man appeared in the broken doorframe. A very muscular woman stood behind him. Their eyes were fixated on Jack who was by now begging for mercy. 

What a pathetic man, Dawn thought. 

Not that she already knew, but this just confirmed it. In a split second, the man had Jack by his throat, up against the wall. Jack started to cry and beg more. Dawn didn't know what to think of this. She wasn't afraid they would hurt her, she didn't feel fear anymore after the pain and torture she went through these past two weeks. 

But she also didn't know if she liked this. If she liked Jack being in the state he was. Dawn wanted more of this before he would die, but she didn't get it.

Jack was strangled by the big man and slowly Dawn saw how the life seeped away from his body until he was nothing but a shell. It was a disappointing death. Jack deserved more, more pain, more desperation, more cruelty more of everything you could imagine on your worst enemy. He deserved more! And this guy, this random guy took it from her. He took that opportunity away.

Dawn was furious, she screamed behind the foreign object that she now had identified as a rag. Her volume increased as the tall guy came up to her. He tried to console her, but he didn't know. He didn't understand. Angry tears rolled over Dawns cheeks. 

The pain, the exhaustion, the injustice fumed her anger only more. She kept screaming at the guy when they took away the rag. Both the man and woman didn't know what to do. They thought they had helped this girl, and of course they did, but not in the way Dawn had liked to see it.

They rolled her quickly through the building, through hallways Dawn wasn't familiar with, through corridors that brought them to the exit, a place she never thought she would get to see, other than through a body bag. Her screams lessened the closer they got. 

And then they were finally outside, really outside. Not in some closed off courtyard where you had to pull yourself up to see the top of a tree. Then the smell of trees, dirt, plants, flowers, grass hit her in the face.

Dawn couldn't believe it. She was outside. After all these years, she finally got to see beyond the walls that kept her. The building she was kept in was on some abandoned industry terrain which sided with a thick forest, hence why she could see the tree, but only one.

Cruel, wicked, evil, these three words Dawn used often to describe their actions, of Dr. Willow, Dr. Klein and Jack. But they didn't do justice. It was more than that. It was brutal, inhuman, barbaric, merciless, unrelenting, cold-hearted and blooded, it was fucking vile. 

All these years she was so close to nature and they kept it from her. She was so close! The distance between the building and the forest was maybe over a hundred feet.

The trees. Were. So. Fucking. Close.