Strong For Too Long Trilogy ✔️

16. Merciless Fear

CHAPTER 16: Merciless Fear

Sleep was always my worst enemy. The vulnerability that gripped my neck because I closed my eyes is what will most likely be the real cause of my death...it's when I close my eyes and I dream of a world I wish I was in, but I leave my real body behind and in the cold...allowing whomever to hurt me in ways unimaginable.

The covers were ripped from my glacial limbs, the bones I had dragged along the dirt covered floor, my blurry eyes screaming, but my lips refused to move at the injection sunk into my skin.

BANG!

My foot hit the metal bar of one of the bunk beds, "MHMM...MMHMMM!" I tried so hard to scream, to tear my lungs apart when I see Candidate Thirteen dead asleep, as if in some sort of simulation and my feet were grabbed, I stare into the unknown eyes of the guard. Only there were no eyes visible, the black mask surrounding his features made me shove my arms out more.

I close my eyes, taking her frail hand and the windows slam shut, the doors creak to a close and darkness disperses like shadows in a foggy forest just waiting to bite in the silence of the merciless wind, "Let's begin!" I screamed, I remember the feeling, the grips of hands snapping me awake like ice cold water drowning me, engulfing my lungs, violating my need to breathe and then I felt it, I felt the pain ridding me off my conscience, ridding me of life and giving me something darker than death.

Making me stay in the darkness.

The mask filled with something I'd never seen in my entire life, slammed against my lips the harder I fought. That masked figure threw me over his shoulder like a tyrant in a storm and I was swung from that shoulder in the brisk night around me, "You need to be stronger, I understand now, why they did this, Eleven. You need to be stronger. You must be stronger." He says to me, to my unconscious form.

"STOP! YOU MUST STOP!"

"RELEASE ME!"

"YOU CAN'T DO THIS!"

"PLEASE!"

"NO!"

Pain is said to be subjective. A pinch of a needle sends a receptor signal in your nervous system...pain ignites like a flesh eating fish, except no water surrounded me, except more blood. Now I had anymore in my body was enough to make any girl scream. But that wasn't it. That wasn't the torment in my organs, it wasn't the shift in my system, it was the girl crying in the lonely corner of a room, pitch black, with her ears ringing and her fingers trembling, her screams roaring before complete silence.

And then...she's dead.

Just. Like. Me.

"Is she ready?" A feminine voice resonates in front of me, my eyes were wide open, they were forcefully open and staring at an old screen, perhaps it was even a new screen, I didn't know, I wasn't sure. I wasn't certain of anything.

"Phase two is complete. Phase three is next. Brainwashing motions to be completed. We're re-organising the software and running a diagnostic on brain scans. Her signals are indestructible now, ma'am. She'll be fully awakened in one month's time. Until then, I must advise we keep her under the simulation, in the cylinders. The systems will stabilise and re-create the enhancers in her DNA. She'll take a while to resurface given her fast metabolism, we need to maintain extraction and secure the DNA altered. She'll be faster, stronger than all of them like you asked." The doctor, maybe.

"That's good. Do what you have to." The female voice I didn't recognise, or if I did, it would have been a pass-by on the street, a brisk small conversation in a supermarket, a smile over a coffee cup, an unrecognisable glance on a bus, never to be seen or heard from again.