Chapter Text
Prologue
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” ― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
He knew that there had to been a life before what he was currently experiencing. The torture that he lived through day to day was not a life. All the others that were imprisoned here, wherever here was, had had lives before being caught or taken and deposited like trash in this encampment. But whatever life he had had before hand remained out of his reach. His mind was blank when it came to people he knew, the city he lived in, what age he was. Even his own name; all that information was gone, or perhaps, stored so deeply within a box that he compartmentalized that he simply couldn’t find it. At least, not consciously anyway. The only memory that drifted to the surface of his mind when he focused was a memory of a very cold, dark place and even that felt very vague and fuzzy.
Along with wanting to know where exactly he was and why he was there, he also wanted to know who he was. He was more than the number that was burnt into his skin and stitched onto the clothes they’d given him; everyone had a name, but why the hell didn’t he remember his? The more he thought on the lack of his memory, the more he wondered if perhaps what they were doing to him physically caused him some type of brain damage that destroyed the memory banks in his mind. For all he knew, the other prisoners around him also struggled with remembering their identity, however he couldn’t exactly hold conversation with any of them; their native tongues all seemed to differ since he never heard a lick of English. He wouldn’t be surprised if they were having similar problems as they too were dragged out from their cell every now and again in the down a hall that dead ended to a large, ancient looking operating theatre.
What they did to him after they put him under anesthetic he had no control over; he’d been strapped down and knocked out twice already, and each time he’d woken up to find new scars to add to the one he already had which took up most of the space on his torso. Although he didn’t know the purpose for these surgeries, the scars they left were minimal when compared to the scar on his chest; this scar was disfiguring and raised and gnarly looking and spread out against his skin like a some deformed spider web.
In regards to whatever the hell they were doing with him, he suspected that perhaps the daily injections they received were also to blame if there was blame that needed to be placed. He didn’t know exactly what said injections were for, he was clueless when it came to most things they did to him, but he didn’t ask a second time since the first time had resulted in a harsh slap to the face before the scientist had held his arm to inject the syringe into the crook of his elbow. After the dozenth or so time of being injected with the mysterious liquid, he started to get exceptionally cold. The cells weren’t the warmest to begin with, neither were the clothes he was forced into wearing, but this was as though his blood had been replaced by ice water. All day and all night, he trembled and shook like the last leaf stuck to a branch of a tree in the fall. Eventually, after some time, he started to get use to it.
A day came where all of them were taken from their cells at the same time. They were marched down a long, poorly lit hall to a that led into a very large cell. On the far side of the cell, the wall that faced the hallway, were small doorways that made him think of doggie doors, if they were made of cement. The guards herded them like cattle into the larger cell and made it so they were all standing in two separate lines, facing each other. The guards vacated the room and went to stand in the hall where there also stood several professional looking individuals, all dressed in smart looking suits and lab coats. The head of this experiment, whoever they were, stood closest to the cell door that separated them, an eager expression upon his middle aged face. One guard stood near a turn crank and began to turn it which lifted the cement doors inside the cell. Confused, he and the other prisoners turned to watch the door lift.
There was a silence amongst everyone in the room as strange, animalistic noises came from the other side of the small door. Strange white spores drifted through and he was suddenly hit with the same type of cold that filled his veins. The cold embraced the entire room and more spores floated started to float about in the air. Everyone's eyes were fixated on the small opening as gangly finger digits wrapped around the edges of the door and some strange monstrosity pulled itself into the cell.
This creature was strange in the sense that it was humanoid in its figure other than its head. Although, as he got a closer look at it, even humanoid wouldn’t be the correct word to put to it. Its limbs were much too long, its fingers spindly and gnarled. It’s legs reminded him somewhat of a satyr, minus the fur and skin. Its entire body seemed to lack a proper skin, since it looked slimy and revealed spindly muscles on the outside of its body. If flowers were slimy, its head reminded him of a flower that hadn’t yet opened its petals.
The other prisoners all had similar reactions, all of them bristling with uncertainty as the monster crept closer, curious. In the blink of an eye, it lunged at the man that was closet to the small door, it’s flower like head blooming, revealing many sharp teeth and a gaping hole of a mouth. The man screamed and attempted to run away, only to have the creature pull him closer with one of it’s long, thin, gangly arms.
The rest of the prisoners stared, their jaws dropping in shock and then in a blink of an eye, they all seemed to snap out of it as they surged toward the cell door, some of them screaming in terror. Their fingers slipped through the chain link like material, trying to grab at the scientist as they begged for help. The creature, finished with the first man, pulled away from the remains and hissed. It seemed irritated at the sudden motion of everyone around it, and the noise of over a dozen people yelling in different languages clearly didn't help either. The creature hissed again and started to creep forward to the mass of moving bodies.
But, unlike the others, he just stood there, scared stiff, as the creature stalked towards him. Its head swiveled from side to side, the petals of it’s head peeled back slightly as it tasted and sniffed at the air. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck as It continued to stalk forward until it lumbered over him like a giant. His heart skipped a beat as his muscles tensed in anticipation, dreading the moment in which it would bite into him and end his miserable existence. But it stood there, its petals pulled back slightly, as though it were sniffing the air. Whatever it was sensing, and whatever the smell told this creature, it did not see him as a meal nor as an enemy. In fact, it stepped around him before lunging at the small mass of people up against the door, as though he didn't even exist.
His heart flipped as it tried to regain a regular rhythm. As though being woken from a spell, he steadied his suddenly wobbly legs and backed off to one side of the room, a part that was mostly untouched by the spray of blood as the creature feasted upon the others happily. And even though he was out of the way for most of the blood shed, clapping his hands overs his ears did nothing for the anguished, pained screams of those dying before him.
He opened and closed his eyes, wondering for the faintest of moments if this was all some sort of hallucination. But each time he opened his eyes, the monstrosity was still there, still gorging on the people that helplessly scurried about the room, searching for an escape. It devoured quickly, eating with a ferocious intensity. All too soon, the screaming had died down and the beast knelt over the second to last individual, slurping at their intestines. The eyes of the dead man stared directly at him, haunting and empty.
The lead scientist snapped angrily in Russian. There was an affirmation from another man in a lab coat as he pulled something from his pocket and pressed a button. The creature whined and hissed, irritated by some noise that he couldn't hear and it retreated back to the little door it had come from.
Why had it left him alone?
His heart still pounded in his chest and the sound of blood rushing through his body filled his ears. Most of the scientists and the guards stood on the other side of the cell door looking completely unfazed by the event that had just unfurled in front of them. The head scientist-at least the man he’d labelled as the head scientist since he seemed to always be a central figure in any of the procedures he was forced into- folded his arms over his chest and smiled. Or rather smirked. Was he impressed by what had happened? Was he impressed with the results of this experiment? Whatever it was, it made his skin crawl uncomfortably; he didn’t like how the man’s snake like eyes looked at him as though he was about to become a helpless mouse stuck in the jaws of a cat.
The question still stood; why had it left him alone?
One guard turned the crank wheel that lowered the door back into its original position, and the spores that had been floating about the air fell to the ground and the cold that had appeared slowly started to dissipate. The sound of keys rattled loudly as the cell door was unlocked and one of the guards tossed a mop at him and pointed to the puddles of blood and dismembered bodies that were scattered about the large jail cell. The guard slid in a bucket of water that stopped just a foot away from him.
“You clean!” he snapped in a heavy Russian accent. The cell door was slammed shut and the guards and the other Russians, whether they were scientists or doctors, all vacated the area, leaving him sitting in a room full of the dead.
With a shaky hand, he wiped off the drying blood that had splattered his face as the man closest to him had been ripped apart. On his hands and knees, he snatched up the mop and clutched it tightly in his hands. Slowly, he got to his feet and did as he was told, knowing well enough what would happen if he were to disobey.
It wasn't an easy job, and it certainly wasn't a clean job. It must have taken over two hours until the blood had been wiped up, leaving only a rusty colored stain on the ground, and the remainder of the bodies had been piled up. Still bloody, he was escorted and shoved back into his cramped little cell. For the first time ever, the area in which he was held was quiet. The cells around him were empty. All of them were dead. Had he cleaned up over a dozen bodies; he hadn’t been keeping count of all the appendages he had to move and dispose of, the primary issue at that time had been making sure he didn’t slip in a one of the puddles of slowly drying blood. Just having his hands bloodied was enough to stab at his heart with guilt.
He curled up in his cell, knees to his chest, and fell asleep to the sound of his crying echoing off the concrete walls around him. When he next woke, it was to the sound of keys jingling. A small group huddled around the mouth of his prison cell, eyeing him like some fine prize. They were muttering something in Russian, to which a small man that stood off to the side jotted it down in the notebook he held. The supposed lead scientist, a tall, slender man with brown hair that was peppered with some silver stared down at him over a pair horn-rimmed glasses. The man grabbed the needle and tapped it several times to clear out any of the air pockets and then motioned for one of the guards. The cell door was yanked open and he was pulled from the cell and held firmly by one of the guards.
"все идет хорошо," he said. He smiled, although it did not reach his eyes; it just looked down right evil. The scientist stepped forward and the older man grabbed at his wrist, forcing it to straighten out so he could inject the mystery concoction into his bloodstream. Out of all the injections he’d been given, this was far by the most painful. As soon as the plunger had injected the mysterious liquid into his veins, his bloodstream exploded as a fiery, white hot pain ran through his entire body until it hit like an adrenaline shot to the heart. His screams of pain echoed off the wall as the scientist threw him back into his cell, slamming and locking the door back into place.