Escapism - A Fantasy Romance

Chapter 1: Prey

I'm starving. I haven't been fed in 30 days. This is the longest they have ever waited to feed me before. About five days ago, I stopped being able to get out of bed and move around. I just don't have the energy anymore.

Times like these, I am grateful that I don't really need food or water to survive. Otherwise I would have made a huge mess of myself lying in bed this past week and I would have been tempted to drink out of the small toilet that sits in the corner of my room.

This 12 feet by 12-foot room has been mine since the US foster care system left me in the care of the Ashton Corp 28 years ago. My life was a bit of a mess growing up. From what I remember, I was told that I was left in front of a hospital at only a few days old. I was then placed into a 'loving' foster family that had been unable to have children of their own. Five years later, the police receive a 911 call from my foster mom Judie in hysterics. Apparently, finding your beer bellied husband dead in your 5-year-olds room with his pants around his ankles is enough to send any suburban housewife into a full on mental breakdown. It didn't help that she saw me literally suck the energy from his body before he collapsed to the floor stone cold dead. The officers on the scene seemed to think a bit more critically about her hysterical explanation of how I had killed her husband with a touch of my hand, blatantly ignoring the question of why he was in his daughter's room in the middle of the night. The police officers seemed to be more understanding of my situation. I was quickly escorted away, listening to my foster mother's incessant screams to "take the devil away from her house" and to "burn me." I was put back in the system. Sometimes, I wonder if she was able to put herself back together of if she was also sitting in a room just like me, surrounded by four white walls.

Unfortunately for me, there was someone out there- a group of someone's out there- that gave my foster mother's ramblings a bit more consideration. Only a few days later, I found myself in a car on the way to my new forever home, and I have been here ever since.

You might wonder how the Ashton Corp got away with this and basics are that they lined the pockets of the right people and that most people don't give a shit about a single foster child lost in the system. Aside from my first five years of life, I have lived here in this room going through a number of experiments. Apparently, Ashton Corp was very much interested in Supernatural beings and was funded by some very high up people to find out our secrets.

I have been here for about 28 years or so based on my rough math which is pretty difficult to be accurate with considering I don't have a clock or a window. I base my count on the routine of my guard shifts. A new guard is posted outside my door every 6 hours which does make the math a little easier. You think I would at least be grateful for the privacy of the walls and a closed door, and I would be if it wasn't a lie. I figured that out around 8-years old when I had taken to exercising in my plentiful free time. I wasn't long before I overheard some of the scientist talk about punishing me for increasing my muscle density during one of my routine blood draws. Heading back to the room, I looked at the ceiling of my room and sure enough in the corner was a cleverly disguised camera. I think I cried that night. Realizing that someone is always watching can do that to you.

When I turned 18-years-old, I started eating and drinking less and less which got the scientists into quite a tizzy, worried I was trying to starve myself to death. But when that data came back that I was not losing or gaining any weight for the last month, they realized this was part of my supernatural status. And can I say, they literally lost their shit when I completely stopped eating food and water as well as stopped aging. That set them off on another round of endless experiments before they got as much data as they could, mostly trying to crack my anti-aging ability. Can you imagine how much dough they would rake in if they figured that out?

These last few years have been pretty slow for me, but I have also noticed an increase in other unwilling participants. Sometimes, I'm grateful to know that I am not alone, but then I hear the screams and feel selfish. The ones that scream the loudest never seem to stay for long.