The Mindless Man's Paradise

Chapter forty-six

  He was unrelenting, and the whip seared at the hand of my very own brother. Cyrus was kneeling next to me, intertwining his fingers in mine, and squeezing with an insane death grip any time he wanted to scream.

  Some unspoken vow had occurred between Cyrus and I when I had willingly knelt before my brother. It was: Don’t give them the satisfaction of our pain.

  And so we did just that.

  Don’t get me wrong, I was in terrible, unexplainable agony. With each whip, there was a trail of firey pain that followed. And this pain lingered, ceasing to go away. But with much diligence, I eased it away.

  Pain is physical. Physical isn’t forever. This will end. It all will end.

  Something about the fact that it would all be over was comforting to me.

  I was growing weary of this polluted, sick, HQ world that had been created. If I couldn’t change it, than at least I could say that I died fighting for it.

  The whipping seemed to continue on for an hour, until I felt like I was bathing in my own blood. Seeing it all scared me actually, knowing that my body had shed so much blood. I watched as it trickled away, some of it merging with Cyrus’s much darker blood, tainting its color.

  Once I realized truly how severe my condition should be, I got light headed. My world began to spin, and I knew suddenly that this was correlated to the fact that there was probably more of my blood on the floor than in my body.

  I collapsed on the floor, fighting to keep my eyes open. Cyrus had collapsed as well, how long before me, I didn’t know. The urge to go unconscious consumed me, and I let it pull me under.

                                                                          ***

  I woke up in another room. This one had Frankenstein-looking experimentation tables, where they weren’t horizontal, but vertical. Attached to them, were many wires, and I knew this couldn’t possibly be any good.

  I looked down at what I believed to be my injury-ridden body, and was surprised when I was completely healed.

  It took me a moment to realize how sick and unusual this was in itself. They were going to heal us before each new torture? Make us brand new only to tear us up again? I suppose they might also be doing this to make sure that we’d actually be alive on our execution date. I mean, they couldn’t kill dead people, could they?

  Hey… they couldn’t kill dead people.

  The thought echoed in my mind, as the most brilliant of ideas came to my mind.

  What would they have to show the Society, it the Infractors to be executed, executed themselves? It was morbid, I know. Suicide, I mean for god sakes the word even sounded horrible.

  But if there’s one thing I’d die for, it’d be to put this society to shame, and I’m pretty sure me Cyrus and I outsmarting them would do the trick.

  I whispered in Cyrus’s ear, and he turned to me with a sorrow expression.

  He looked down to the floor, and then back to me.

  He leaned into me and whispered something in my ear.

 “We should wait until the last possible second. Right until we’re walking up to the execution platform.”

  I smiled at him, although not for the idea, but for his loyalty to our rebellion and to me.

  I kissed him as soon as our tormentors walked through the door.

  “Bitch Witch.” the man from SHQ regarded me.

  Ignoring him, I got up and walked to the torture devices. I don’t think anyone in the room was expecting this.

  By the time we were strapped in, I felt myself getting frightened. This was going to hurt, I could tell. Wires were being attached all over my body. My head, my legs, my arm, my torso; there wasn’t anything left untouched.

  A few feet to my left, was Cyrus, propped up and getting wired up as well.

  I almost laughed because he looked almost like an alien under such circumstances. And the more I thought about it, the bigger the smile on my wicked face grew.

  Cyrus looked at me and began to smile as well.

  “You look funny.” he said.

  I nodded as giggles spewed from my lips.

  Turns out laughing in the face of death is not a metaphor at all.

  Neither of our tormentors said a word about it, but we could see the annoyance in their eyes, and knew our job had been done.

  This caused us to laugh wildly, and by the time the wires finally had been hooked up, we were still laughing. But what happened next was truly shocking.

  Literally.

  It was as if lightning was suddenly coursing through my veins, extending to every limb of my body, and frying my brain. I felt like my insides were sizzling and cooking like popcorn.

  I grunted, keeping my screams in. The wires; they were electrical pulses.

  “Phase three.” my brother growled.