The Lost War (Hectic Series: Book One)

Chapter 16

Eight letters.
Kim kept her sense of time by the letters, and so far there had been eight. The ninth should come any day now.
Mae attempted to explain herself as best as she could through writing, and what it ultimately came down to was this:
1) Mae had been drafted into the army seven years ago, when she was eighteen. She had left her parents behind in order to "pursue the Grace of God," as her father had put it. Kim got the feeling Mae didn't really get along with her parents. And then, Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, ages 92 and 89 respectively, died of cancer. Mae would have quit the army then and there, if it weren't for the fact that the army would kill her.
2) America, as this land was known, had been powerful before Earth's fall and only fed on the chaos. For the first few years after the war the President tried to rule the entire world, but his empire fell. America closed its borders. It was completely oblivious to the outside world. Max Carver rose to power. The military controlled everything.
3) The humans were hoping to take over her world and move in. At first the goal had simply been to convert the Alliance to Christianity, but now they cared more about wiping the "witch-people" out.
4) Kim was kept alive solely for the purpose of curiosity. They thought maybe they could learn a thing or two from her, and use her as a bargaining chip when the time was right.
5) Radiation, a concept which Kim only grasped a basic understanding of, was killing this planet, thus the need for the humans to invade.
6) Dr. Gregor was an even bigger skra than she had originally thought. Even after the rats.
The last eight months had been painfully repetitive. It went like this:
Kim saw Gregor once a week. No more, no less. On her off days the assistant-Mae- would bring her food, water, and then the metal box, which Mae had described as a "television", would flash on.
Kim's wing had mostly healed; her body had absorbed the stitches and she could flex it slightly, but couldn't get it to move at the base. She'd attempted to fly a few times and seemed to be able to, but she had to flap her bad wing as hard as she could to get any lift.
She'd lost a lot of weight. She seriously doubted the nutritional value of a slice of bread and an apple. Often times she couldn't even keep it down for long before it all came back up.
Gregor had neglected to bring out any more rats, and Kim's stomach had healed relatively well, thanks to Mae. No infection, and only a slight slash of scars across her stomach.
Mae had slowly weaned her off of the sedative, substituting it for a vitamin shot, which thankfully gave Kim the energy to stand and walk down the hall.
There were times where she almost wished for the liquid fatigue to be rolling through her veins. Being subjected to Gregor's torture was bad enough. Having to withstand it and pretend to be drugged was near impossible.
Trapped in her cell all day in this dead world, knowing that her world was dying, it would be a lie to say she hadn't considered taking the coward's way out.
Her sleep was plagued with nightmares almost as scary as the one she was living.
The nights with Gregor were the hardest.
Her last visit kept replaying in her mind before she went to sleep.
She had done it. She'd finally cracked.
The humans had logically assumed that something caused the hole to open up, and they thought that Kim knew what it was. Gregor had been trying to pry it out of her all these months, stepping up his tactics the more she resisted.
It hadn't even been that bad. He'd pried off all her fingernails, nailed her fingers to the table, the usual, nothing she couldn't tune out.
And then he brought out the brand, a metal stamp in the shape of a cross, just like the one on his-and presumably all of the soldiers-necklaces. Red hot, he had stamped it into the inside of her forearm, and she blacked out. When she awoke the air was heavy with the stink of burned flesh and there was a cross seared into her arm.
Staring at the cross as blood bubbled beneath, she whispered one word, her voice dry and hoarse. "Reaper."
But Gregor leaned forward, pressed his hands next to her, and demanded more. And she gave it to him. She told him about the necklace, the war, Marcus, Mortemsusiri. She opened her mouth and sang like a canary, to borrow a phrase from Mae.
Gregor had never looked so please.
"Well," he said, "looks like I have no need to torture you anymore." And then he picked up a hammer and pounded the nails in her fingers down harder. "Oops." He cringed in fake sympathy. "I lied. I tend to do that. Once you start it's quite hard to stop."
It wasn't that the pain was excruciating, which it was, that made her talk. Being branded wasn't simply a torture technique-it was a tag. Property of Messiah Corp., Your Friendly Local Torture Chamber.
It made her skin crawl. She wasn't one of them. This was not her world. And yet here she was, right in the middle of it.
She would see Gregor in the morning, and the cycle would begin anew. Just another week of time crawling by, the line between desperation and insanity growing ever thinner, until the next week. And the next. And the next. And the next.
She was beginning to doubt Mae's promise.
Even if she got out, it would never end.
She would still have to go back to watch her world die, watch the embers die out.
That night Kim succeeded in chipping a piece of cinder block from the wall, sharp and jagged, and she slept with it underneath her pillow. Not for protection, but just in case things got to be too much.