THE GAMES OF POWER

THE GAMES OF POWER: Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10:

I remember coming to for a few seconds. Just a few flashes here and there. Like the flashes of lightning that night I’d gone to look for Lucas at the salvage yard in Avon.

How long ago had that been? A day? Two days? I wasn’t sure. I mean, when I was on that plane, the only light I could take in was artificial. I had no idea what time it was at the time, and with all the poking with needles and shoving pills down my throat, loading me up on some unknown drug, relying on my body’s internal clock was near impossible. I felt like I had jet lag to the max.

It almost felt as if time had somehow stopped around me. With the screwed up sense of time, and the lack of inartificial light, it was like there was no more day. No more night. Just something in between. Still and stagnant.

In the few brief moments I came to, I’d had enough coherence to see and feel that I was being dragged, my feet scraping the floor behind me like the thugs hauling me were lugging a too-large sack of unmixed concrete. My thugs didn’t talk in those moments, and I really couldn’t tell you what they looked like. That stuff they were pumping me full of really messed with my vision. Made everything blurry. Kinda like those drunk goggles those police officers brought to my school when I was like in the sixth grade. They were showing us the harmful effects of too much alcohol, and the different ways it could impair you, one of those being sight.

Through my eyes now, that’s what I would have likened it to, though I’m sure those police officers that day didn’t have anything like this in mind. The cops don’t cover cases of kidnapped kids with freaky superpowers. At least not a force I’d ever heard of.

In another brief moment of half-coherence, we passed a group of people. Young. Kids. Some my age, and some as young as six, I’d guess. Each of them was wearing similar jumpsuits to the one I was wearing, some sporting the same blue and others colored differently.

What were these creeps doing with kids? At that moment, the memory of the girl who refused to fight me in that metal room flashed behind my eyes. She was just a kid. Just a little girl…I shuddered at what might lay behind that door they’d drug her through.

As we passed, I met eyes with a boy. He looked to be about my age, more or less, but much taller and much stockier. e He l;aksdjfal;kdjfHe had thick shock of black hair cropped closely to his scalp. Though the image of him was blurry at the time, I didn’t miss the harsh, condescending glare that knitted his thick eyebrows together in my direction. His scowl shifted into an amused grin, and he blew a puff of dismissive air.

“Looks like we got ourselves a fresh Waterboy,” he said, each syllable coming out more belittling and demeaning than the last. Just before I could reply, I fell back into the darkness.

Another two or three moments out of the blackness greeted me after that, but nothing in my surroundings jumped out at me as a red flag. Other than the whole being kidnapped and forced to fight killer robots and murderous electric freaks thing, but nothing that really said “Escape.” Everything was more or less the same claustrophobic grey. Sealed and stagnant.

I roused out of the darkness one more time to my body being chucked into a dark, dank-smelling room, my face scraping against the floor. My heavy eyes and aching body collapsed just as the door behind me clanged shut.

I don’t know how long the darkness had me. It was really starting to seem like I was there more than I was in the real world. That really scared the crap out of me. What kind of drugs were these deranged people pumping me full of?

I groaned as I ebbed away from the darkness, trying to stretch my body against what felt like cold concrete, and flinching at the hurt when I did. I tried to open my eyes. Maybe there’d been plenty of time that passed to let the effects of whatever it was to drift away. I opened my tired lids, peering into the dark. There was just enough light from the slit underneath the door behind me to make out shapes in the gloom.