Kevin has been at the CZS for months, maybe a year now, but he has not been himself for most of it. He was unconscious when they took him there, otherwise he wouldn’t be here now, and he is sure that he has spent more time here knocked out than awake and in full control of himself. It would have been easy to think of all of this as a dream with the occasional appearances by his old friend Ivan and an angry black man with a long silver scar on his cheek. But he knows that he is not in a dream when he sees Ivan and the man with the silver scar because he can’t move his arms or legs and Ivan is always in the same position to his right, and the man, whose silver scar he stares at when he sees it, is on his left. When he dreams, Kevin is free under a bright sky, running or swimming, smiling and laughing. It smells different, too, in his dreams, like freshly grown outdoors, warm under a bright sun or damp under a gentle rain. Outside of his dreams, his nose fills with exotic, unnatural smells mixing with the smell of his own body that is rank from neglect.
Kevin can’t form a mental picture of himself in his current environment. It is impossible for himself to see himself or anyone else completely and he mostly knows that it is Ivan to his right because of the feeling that he feels off the man, and he recognized Ivan’s voice straining to say his name, though he doesn’t know how long ago that had been.
All of Kevin’s dreams in their picturesque glory are eventually interrupted and the interruption is always the same; a large worm-like creature crashing the scene and causing him to wake to his hazy vision that makes it impossible for him to really know where he is or who is with him. He doesn’t have the confidence to use his preternatural ability to make real his imagination because he doesn’t know if he will hurt someone accidentally. The fog in his brain and over his vision makes reality surreal and he yearns for the familiarity of dreams even if they will be interrupted by a nightmare worm.
Across from Kevin, is a man who seems to wear a space helmet over his head. The rest of his body is in plain clothes, jeans and t-shirt, but the helmet covers his head all the way around and though he is strapped to a bed, nearly standing and leaning slightly back like Kevin, his head cannot rest inside the helmet; it explodes every three to four hours. This man’s name is Phil and without the helmet, he would scatter his blood, viscera and brain matter all around the room. He would be ok, Phil can regenerate his entire head, but his captors contain the mess with the helmet that drains from the back after each explosion of his head making way for a new one to grow.
Phil is aware when his head has grown to full size but the chemicals being pumped into the bodies of everyone strapped to the beds in this room eventually make it difficult for him to speak or fully comprehend his situation or his location. He thinks he’s in a room that is usually dark, and he can hear something like moaning or screaming every now and then, but he can barely see his surroundings.
He can feel the excruciating pain of his head growing larger than it should and he can feel it explode, and after each explosion, it’s like he is catapulted into another dream. Currently, he is the only customer at a strip club with an unlimited supply of dollar bills and the naked women who fill the club are eager to please him. There is a persistent pounding at what Phil assumes is the front door of the club that he can hear over the music, but he tries with little effort to ignore it and he gets lost in the soft flesh that surrounds him.
Now there are faint screams that accompany the knocking, a panicked female voice screaming “Daddy!” over and over. It lasts a long time as he entertains himself with the naked women performing for him and just as he recognizes the voice, and suddenly feels the urge to break free from his fantasy and find the source of the screams, he is aware inside of his helmet, struggling to understand who he is and where he is.
Also in the room, Ivan and Clay are strapped to vertical beds, and unlike the others, their heads are strapped down over holes where the backs of their heads rest; a leech is attached to each of them where they are exposed. They are the most docile in the room.
A man in a hazmat suit enters the room and flips on a light. It is a cross between a sterile operating room and laboratory; behind the vertical beds in two rows of three are two large lab tables with many chemicals as fluids in beakers or powders on parchment paper. There are needles of various sizes loaded with liquids of varying colors and other scary looking medical equipment. The man in the suit approaches the most hostile of the men strapped to the vertical bed. He stands next to the bed as it rattles and shakes furiously; the man on it has a gag in his mouth and a metal collar around his neck that vibrates so much that it seems to be a blur next to his dark skin.
“Calm down Mr. Jackson,” the hazmat man says. “Don’t you get it that we are trying to subdue you? If you rest, the collar will stop shocking you.”
Mr. Jackson is also known as Desperation and for a time he was a very successful contract killer, until he was hired to kill Clay Franklin, one of the other men strapped to a bed in this very room. Since his failure to kill Clay, Desperation had seemingly disappeared, until the CZS went after him and drug him here. They have been trying to attach the same leech used on Clay, but underneath his layer of skin is another layer of very malleable metal of seemingly alien origin that prevents the leech from latching. The scientists have failed to sedate him in the half year or so that he has been inside this room, and he doesn’t seem to have the same nutrition requirements as other human beings.
Dr. Worthington became aware of Desperation because the CZS monitored associates of Dr. Eakran and Desperation had regular clashes with Ivan and Clay. The strange thing about Desperation is that he has an extraordinary ability, but no close association with Dr. Eakran like the others. Desperation has been completely uncooperative since arriving at the CZS, but they believe that his second, silver skin was most likely the result of accidental exposure to alien technology.
Desperation wants to kill the man in the hazmat suit, and he knows that he will soon. He’s managed to loosen his restraints ever so slightly and he has a little more wiggle room each day that his captors haven’t seemed to notice. He doesn’t know if it is the same person in the hazmat suit that usually comes everyday, but sometimes there is more than one of them. Their torture is fuel to Desperation. The silver substance has altered his body enough to this point to make him nearly impervious to harm, except for his natural layer of skin. And Desperation loves to kill people. He loves to feel the life slip out of a body and know that he is the cause of it. He’s never had to kill someone who deserved it, not since he killed his father as a young child, and it was that murder that seemed to spark his blood lust. No kill had been as good as the first, and he aches to kill this man, this person, and however many others, who deserve it.
The hazmat man shakes his head and goes to check on the others. The shock at Desperation’s neck subsides as the man walks away, and Desperation glares at him with his eyes over a smile that feels discordant.
Soon, he thinks. Soon.
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