The New Generation

Chapter Two - Killing Joy

       Lucas screamed loudly in his sleep. He dreamt that his room was melting. The bright red numbers that read 6:34PM on his digital alarm began expanding as they slid off the face of the clock and dripped onto the floor. His body sank into his bed. If was as if he was drowning in his blankets. Frantically, he rolled off the bed before it swallowed him whole.

He stood up and recoiled when he noticed human presence beside him. A naked woman stood in the middle of his room. Her skin was blue and her eyes were vacant and lifeless. She clutched the bloody mess of her stomach. Lucas recognized her as one of the corpses he took to the morgue yesterday. The doctors had called him up before she had even died, and that made it all the more worse for him. He sensed all of her emotions as her mutant child tore up her body. Fear. Anger. Confusion. And the pain, it surpassed excruciating by a long shot. The saddest part was that she loved the thing that was destroying her.

Lucas looked at the woman now. She had her head tilted to the side. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought they were going to make my baby healthier.” She began crying. Her tears were dark like old blood.

Lucas couldn’t stand it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know either.” He put his hands over his head and tried hard to block out her misery. He ran from his room, but the hallway wasn’t much better. He saw Raymond standing there with his skin flayed so deep his cheekbones were poking through. “Lucas, I need your help. I’m dying. You have to help.”

            “I can’t. I don’t know what to do.”

He felt the sadness, anger, and helplessness associated with all of the patients in the building. The emotions swept over him. He felt warm tears slide down his cheeks as his own past experiences arose.

“Someone is going to come and save us,” he said to his little sister, Leanne. She blinked and barely registered his presence. “They can’t get away with this. Someone will take us away from here. They have to.” Lucas grabbed onto his sister's shoulders and shook gently, trying to get her to understand the importance of what he was saying. Her head bobbed up and down limply like a ragdoll. “You can’t give up,” he whispered. Leanne took a deep breath, and Lucas sensed no emotion in her. Her thoughts were blank. It was like reading the mind of a Monitor. They were indifferent to everything. She had given up.

For the last month of her life she became mute. Lucas kept telling the doctors that she’d snap out of it. However, they said they couldn’t continue wasting resources on a lost cause. Lucas persisted, saying that she was simply sick from the testing. Lucas insisted that he be present during her testing even though it was excruciating for him to watch the doctors torture his sister. The doctors used electroshocks to induce more brain activity, so that she could pick up other’s thoughts from a farther distance than Lucas. It worked for several weeks too. She was the prize patient of all of her doctors. Leanne could hear the thoughts of patients from across the building without even trying. That’s where the problem began.

She couldn’t control what she heard. For hours she huddled in her room and rocked back and forth, trying to tune out the world. But it was all in vain. The thoughts poured into her mind. It soon began to strip her of her own identity. She forgot who she was. Her own mind became swamped with everyone else’s.

Some days she woke up as a completely different person. The doctors took great interest in these personalities. They ranged from a quiet, timid little girl to a loud, proud man. It didn’t end there. During one of her examinations, she fell to the floor. Lucas was watching with two Monitors from a two-way mirror. He pounded on the glass and yelled for the Monitors to let him in the room because he could tell that something was wrong. Leanne’s limbs began jerking into unnatural positions. She bent her spine almost in half while her arms curled into little claws against her chest. Pupils dilating to almost fully black, her jaw clicked when she opened and shut her mouth. A dry, rattling voice sounded from deep inside her.