The Farm

A Preface of Sorts

The room was cold today. Colder than most days she noticed but, that wasn't really a surprise. Fall was coming and no one would dare to waste money on trying to keep their cellar warm. She breathed a long light breath into the air and watched as it formed into a pale white cloud. She smiled just a little, remembering how she use to watch her breath in the cold as a child. She didn't have a lot of fond memories from her childhood; hers, just like all the others, had been cut short when they were abducted. No one there knew why they had been taken the way they had. In fact most of them didn't even remember being taken in the first place. One night they'd be kissing their parents goodnight and the day after they'd wake up with a needle in their arm and strange men flashing lights in their eyes.

Kiran was seven when she found herself in the labs for the first time. Since then she'd been poked, prodded, stabbed, injected, and patched up again more times than she could count. It didn't even bother her anymore though, for the past ten years this had been her life. She didn't feel pain anymore, just numbness. The numbness was a type of unbearable all of its own, but what the hell was she could to do about it. Everyone was under constant watch meaning there was no way to get out and even if someone could manage to pull an escape off Kiran doubted that anyone would really be able to get that far.

Most of the patients were one skipped meal away from being bone thin. It wasn't that they weren't fed well - Kiran had heard at some point that malnourished subjects were bad for tests - the issue was that the tests that "The Doctors" ran on them were exhausting. Kiran knew of subjects that had to run up to ten hours a day for weeks at a time. Kiran felt sorry for them but considered herself lucky to not be part of that group. Thankfully The Doctors only ever seemed interested in her blood; every once in a while they would just have her stand as they doled out physical punishment on her body but she felt like it was better than any of the alternatives.

On top of all of that Patients disappeared all the time. Kiran assumed these were the ones who decided to act up during test or even considered that maybe it was a scare tactic. The point is that they never came back and it did terrify her, obviously The Doctors had ways of keeping everyone under control so why would she try to run?