Captured Souls (23 page)

“What is the purpose of your experiments, except to fulfill your own narcissistic lust?” she asked me.

“I’m solving the puzzle of the human mind, how we act and react in lust and love.”

“And my brother?”

“Your brother isn’t here,” I said.

“No, he’s not anywhere. I looked through your house and he was nowhere. Just a number in a journal somewhere, I’m sure. An experiment…and that was all he was to you. Not human, just a cock.”

“Each one of my specimens had a purpose.”

“To feed your massive ego and your sexual perversions.”

I laughed in her face.

“My ego rides waves like everyone else’s. And I’m not alone. So many people have no interpersonal skills. So many people use others for horrible reasons, and sex is certainly one of them. I would suggest that nearly everyone uses everyone else for some form of sexual desire and comfort, even if it isn’t consummated.”

She let me continue by being silent.

“Who doesn’t like that heady lust of infatuation, the adrenaline rush from the thrill of the hunt, the conquest? Who doesn’t love that wonderful first fuck and that amazing first orgasm when everything is perfect? Why not capture it and live it forever?”

She stood up and left the room.

My only flaw was not accounting for human nature to grow bored. Disinterest. Apathy. Dissent. I thought I had picked truly perfect specimens, and I had. But the thrill of the hunt dissipated within me. No matter what they did, they couldn’t please me.

The ADD of lust.

No matter how I had tampered with the codes, I couldn’t get past the basic human instinct of the predator. And if there’s no hunting, there’s no motivation, no thrill of the chase.
 

Specimen 5 never ventured into the cage. She wore big netted hats and covered herself from head to toe, in white, including little white cotton gloves. No lab coats for her. She was all frills and layers. Her eyes gleamed from behind her glasses through the net. I feel like I’m in some bizarre movie in a foreign land. Even
Midnight Express
wasn’t this bad. The volume of bugs in my prison, courtesy of rotting Beauty, was disgusting. Flies and maggots, cockroaches and giant water beetles. Millipedes and, I don’t doubt, bedbugs. Because of the itching and scratching, my body looked nearly as bad as Specimen 3’s .

When I see Specimen 5 in her wide-brimmed hat, I’m reminded of Jessica Lange in
All That Jazz
. Lange played the role of Death. There were many times that I figured I was going to die under the hands of Specimen 5 if I couldn’t outwit her. As for the Death outfit, she was protecting herself from all the bugs.

There was no protection for me.

One day, my luck changed.

Specimen 5 took me from the bedroom where I had been kept. I pretended to be drugged and ill when, in fact, I’d managed for three days in a row to avoid taking the drug. Little did she know that I spent a lot of time doing push-ups and planks and practicing my kickboxing and even jogging in place whenever I was free from her shackles.

She stopped to unlock the door and I clocked her good. She fell down and I stomped on her beautiful face. Hard. She cried out some kind of unearthly yelp and I stomped on her windpipe as well. I kicked her several times until she was just a bloody, pulpy mess. No more beautiful face for her. Or brilliant schemes to destroy me.

I ran up the stairs and went into the main floor of the house. It was a bungalow and I found the bathroom readily. I paused and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t go out looking like that. Plus, there was a body or two in the basement. I had to pull myself together in the event anyone spotted me. I quickly took a shower, reveling in how wonderful it was to use soap and wash my hair.

I dug at my genitals and the rest of my body to dig out her implants. It was harder than when I did it to myself because they were larger and I had no scalpel. I broke a razor apart and used the blade to part reluctant skin.

She had so many of them in me I didn’t even know if I’d find them all. At last, bloodied and raw, I emerged from the shower and wiped myself down with all the towels I could find.

I found clothes to wear in the closet and got out as fast as I could. I was tempted to take her car, but instead just grabbed a couple hundred bucks from her wallet and tried to figure out where I was and where I was going.

However, I didn’t worry too much since she was lying dead in the basement, no doubt with Specimen 3’s reanimated corpse cradling her.

Journal

I returned to my home. I didn’t know what I would find there. I wasn’t pleased with what was left. The first place I went was down to the back laboratory to check on Specimen 1 in his tank.

He was gone.

She had taken him away.

Seeing the empty tank was a stab to my heart.

She had destroyed my experiment.

She had destroyed Specimen 1.

The overwhelming shock of knowing I’d never see Specimen 1 again filled me with rage and grief. At first, I could only scream, throwing whatever was near me and smashing it on the ground. When my rage subsided, I collapsed in grief. My sobs echoed through the empty room, a reminder of how alone I truly was.

Journal

I woke in the night to a horrific sight. They were there. All of them. Specimen 1 with glowing blue eyes. The pale-green, pussy, infection-ridden hands of Specimen 3 reaching for me, tugging my bedclothes from me as I slept. Specimen 2 a shimmer, electrical energy circling me. It didn’t matter that I had no implants. My specimens knew me and reached out for me.

There is nothing I can do now, I’m too exhausted and must heal. I’ll let them play with me until I can figure it out. After all, they know all my pleasure zones, so why hurry?

I drifted back to sleep as my phantoms haunted me.

Journal

So if I have no implants, why are they still there? The pheromones and the brain waves perhaps?

They are energy.

Or were they just dreams?

Journal

Life went on for quite some time. I conducted theoretical research on what my next project might be.

There was nothing that really came to mind. I wasn’t sure how much further I could go with the idea of perfection without somehow removing the component of apathy, complacency, being taken for granted or whatever it is. But even if I could somehow do it, it would be too complex to program the specimens and myself to not have those human components.

I went to the clubs and the gym and walked by the lake and went shopping and even attended parties with my colleagues. They re-embraced me, at the usual arm’s length, and I could see in their eyes that I had changed somehow, and I’m sure I have.

I often thought about Specimen 1 and wondered where she had put him. He must still be at the bungalow, but I couldn’t return to the scene of the crime. Although his essence comes to me, I miss him. I miss our conversations. I miss watching him write his book.

Journal

In the night, I felt him. Different this time. I was startled awake in the darkness by the sense of someone standing over me. Yet this time it was not a ghost, an apparition, a rainbow, a vibration, an orb. No, it was him. Specimen 1. His shadow was outlined in the glow from the streetlamps leaking through the curtains.

“Scott?” I sat up. His eyes glowed blue in the darkness.

“Miriam,” he said coldly, the word thick in his lips.

“You came back?” I asked. “Why?”

“Where else can I go like this?”

He fell onto my bed, his body cold. I pulled the covers over him. It was dark so I couldn’t see him, but he didn’t smell very good. I figured he’d likely been sleeping in alleys and dumpsters. In the morning, I would help him wash and get back to normal.

“Miriam, is it you?” he asked, reaching his hands out to clutch at my arms. Instead of his familiar firm grip, his fingers were soft. The sensation was like a pair of soft beanbags enveloping my arms.

“Yes,” I said, my eyes adjusting to the dimness.

His eyes reflected the light, glowing as he examined my face.

“I can’t believe I found you again,” he said. I wrapped my arms around him but recoiled at his texture. I lurched back and turned on the bedside lamp. He was hideous in his appearance.

His flesh was bloated, split open in many places where wounds pussed out. He was dripping all over my bedding.

“Scott… Let’s get you in the shower,” I said as I silently cursed Specimen 5. How dare she animate him before he was ready? He would have been perfect had she left him alone.

I led him to the shower, trying not to gag at his smell.

“Step into the stall but don’t turn it on, I’ll be right back,” I said as I grabbed the air freshener that was on the bathroom counter and sprayed it around the room.

I hurried to the upstairs lab and found several spools of bandages, alcohol and bags full of other equipment, and brought them to the bathroom. I took some sponges from under the sink.

It was a long, slow process to sponge down the worst of the wounds. It seemed that rigor mortis was seeping through him, yet he still lived. Parts of him were still vital, such as his strong, firm legs that didn’t seem to have anything wrong with them at all. However, from his waist up there was a severe problem. It appeared as if he’d been sitting half-in, half-out of a freezer for six months and then defrosted, although that wasn’t the reality either. His face had a mottled green-and-blue pallor, his lips rotted and black, his gums blackened where several teeth had fallen out. His arms were the worst, with splitting skin from his wrist, across his shoulders and along his back. Small nests of maggots squirmed in many of the cracks.

Swallowing down the urge to vomit, I steeled myself into doctor mode. I took his blood pressure, listened to his heart, and made all the necessary documentation about his vital signs.

With a scalpel, and donning a mask and gloves, of course, I set about digging out the pockets of fly eggs from his wounds. He grimaced, but it was more of a reflex than from any pain, I’m quite certain. However, there was no denying the foul pungent smell of death that loomed in the room.

I continued cleansing the wounds and patting them dry. Then began the task of wrapping him. It took a long time, but in the end, he was wrapped from the top of his head to his waist. It was my hope that the antibiotic-laden gauze would hold him together while I considered how to save him. Should I fill him with more fluids through IV or would it be a pointless exercise? I wasn’t certain any of the equipment even worked; she had gone through my entire house, trashing some items, not trashing others.

Specimen 1 was silent throughout the ministrations.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask him but, instead, I let him keep his silence.

It was better just to try to get some sleep. We went to his apartment since my bed wasn’t fit for sleeping and it was already nearing dawn. He walked slowly, wearing briefs on his freshly hand-showered lower body. He walked with a limp and was an odd sight, looking like the invisible man from the waist up.

“How do you always manage to get into my room?” I asked him. “It’s always bothered me, wondering how you did that?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he said.

“I’ve watched you in the cameras and I don’t understand.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Why do you think I’d ever tell you as long as I’m still alive.”

“You’re not alive, Scott,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Of course I am. I’m thinking original thoughts. I’m not a computer program.”

“As long as the battery holds out,” I muttered.

We slept together in his bed, his smell tamed with the perfumes of modern times coupled with the menthol aroma of the medicine. We lay together in the bed, both on our backs, his bandaged hand lightly holding mine. He fell asleep quickly. I was surprised that he would need to sleep. It’s hard to determine how to classify him.

Just as I was drifting off to sleep, that twilight slumber where you’re just about to tumble off the reality cliff and into the dreamscape, the room grew cold. I squinted open my eyes and immediately looked towards the window to see if someone had come into the room.

There was no one there, yet I felt like I was being watched. The black mass began to grow and rise at the foot of the bed. I didn’t say anything to Specimen 1. I just watched in awe as the mass tumbled forth. It hovered over the bed, looming and expanding, a heavy blackness that enveloped both me and Specimen 1. I shut my eyes and didn’t open them again until I felt the warm rays of dawn on my eyelids.

I lay staring at the sun coming in through the window, the creature quiet beside me. I pondered the various ways to reanimate him, but none was viable with the rotting flesh. There may be a way to patch the rot with fresh flesh. There may be a way to switch body parts, but for that there needed to be access to healthy people, healthy flesh. I didn’t have that access.