Hijacked

Chapter 8 (Sad and graphic)

After yesterday's trauma, I don't feel like getting out of bed. In fact, I wouldn't, if not for the message from the woman watching my surveillance camera.

"A peacekeeper will be here in a few minutes." She says, as she did a few days ago before I had my mind and memory messed with.

Those few words strike fear into my very core, make my heart race and my stomach clench with terror. I get out of bed, the room spinning with the sudden movement mixed with starvation. I pull on some clean clothes and I'm just about to put on some socks and shoes when two peacekeepers burst in. I jump and cower as they grab me out of my room. They start to head down the stairs and I recognise the familiar hallway. The basement.

"NO!" I scream. "Please don't take me back down there! PLEASE!"

I start to sob uncontrollably, thrashing around in the peacekeepers' grasp. One kicks me in the back of the knee so I fall to the floor. They then pull me to my feet roughly and take me down the hall.

As I scream they push me into a room and force me into a chair. One locks my wrists into cold metal restraints on the chair's arms. Opposite me is a glass window separating me from an electric chair. Are they going to kill me like this?

"Bring in the redheads." One peacekeeper orders the other and they both leave the room.

The peacekeepers disappear and I writhe my wrists about in the restraints until I hear a gurgling wail. I look up to see Lavinia being tied into the electric chair behind the glass. It is apparently not soundproof, as I can clearly hear her choked cries.

"Lavinia!" I yell and her gaze falls on me as the peacekeeper who dragged her in walks over to her and connects and electrode to her shaved head. He then turns on the chair and she dies instantly, her eyes still on me.

"Damn!" The peacekeeper says, pulling a walkie-talkie from his belt. "Hello, it's 504. I've administered excessive charge to Avox 70091. She has died instantly, unfortunately."

Tears roll down my cheeks as the man leaves.

Minutes later the same man brings in Darius, his red hair shaved, like Lavinia's was. The peacekeeper drags her dead body from the room and I call out to Darius the second the door closes.

"Darius! GO! RUN! They'll kill you!"

He nods, as if to say "I know". Then the peacekeeper comes back and secures Darius to the electric chair, but they don't shock him. They get a whip from a cupboard on the wall.

"What do you know about Katniss Everdeen?"

Darius shakes his head, his eyes saying he knows nothing. They whip him and it cracks across his jaw. He screams, a choked, gurgling sound.

"You're from 12. What do you?"

Darius shakes his head and braces himself for another blow. When it comes it slices at his bare arm so it bleeds scarlet.

This goes on for days; whipping and hurting and questioning. By the time Darius dies, in agony with all his fingers and toes cut off, I've lost it. My knees are drawn up; my wrists are bloody from fighting my restraints. My throat is raw from screaming and throwing up and my face is red and dripping with sweat and tears.

They take me back to my room and tell me to sleep, but how can I? My childhood nightmare of peacekeepers chasing me returns. But this time they mercilessly torture me and when they take their masks off they all have the face of President Snow.