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LYDIA
The long, tortured scream of Prisoner 2098 ended on a choking, gurgling sound before rising again with renewed agony. Sitting on the frozen floor of my holding cell, my knees hugged to my chest, I rocked back and forth as another wail assaulted my ears through the door. The scientists had been working on Quinn—my sister in pain—far longer than usual today.
Once done with her, they would come for me.
My stomach churned; the coils of dread overtaking the pangs of hunger. Dr. Sobin never fed me before an experiment. She wouldn’t want me puking all over her or choking on my own vomit. At that point, I’d welcome that death over what awaited me.
Another hot flash set me on fire. Beads of sweat erupted over my bare skin. I unfolded my legs and leaned my bare back against the cold metal wall behind me. Arms stretched, legs spread, I waited for my body to cool down. Even though I wasn’t going through menopause, at twenty-four, the constant hell of its worst manifestation had made me its bitch. Growing up, physicians had failed to explain my condition.
Since my arrival on the space penitentiary, the Concord, Dr. Sobin’s experiments had only increased the symptoms. On a good day, I’d only burn up five or six times per hour. Lately, it felt more like once every five minutes. Although I could regulate my temperature, doing so expended a lot of energy and left me famished. Starved as I was, my only remaining option was to ride it out.
With my average body temperature of forty-two degrees Celsius, well above safe levels for a human adult, the prison guards kept me by myself in this cold room. It suited me fine since most of the inmates on this prison ship were deviant freaks; the worst criminals from Earth, condemned for life.
For a short while, I’d begun forming a friendship with three other inmates, Quinn, Zoya and Preta—the rare decent people in this hellhole. One by one, they’d been taken away to be experimented on as well. I had no idea what became of Zoya and Preta. Quinn, I could hear...
I heaved a sigh of relief as the hot flash faded, the sound echoing loudly in the otherwise deafening silence.
Silence?
Oh God!
A whimper escaped me, and I hugged my knees to my chest again. Rocking back and forth with greater intensity, my back thudded against the wall with each backward motion.
They’re coming for me... They’re coming for me!
Bile rose in my throat and a shudder of fear coursed through me. My gaze fell on the patient tunic still neatly folded on my cot propped against the wall across from me. I crawled over and slipped the tunic on. Sobin wanted me naked for her twisted experiments but forcing them to strip it off me would delay my torture by a few more seconds. When you had no hope left, every little mercy counted.
My stomach clenched and my nails dug into my calves when the deactivation beep of my cell’s security lock resounded. Gaze flicking around the white room like a trapped animal, I looked in vain for a place to hide. God only knew why I did that, every single time. Besides a sink, a toilet, and a small shelf, the room lay completely barren.
The door slid open with a faint swish, letting in the scent of antiseptics and chemicals. The glaring light from the lab stabbed my eyes. I flinched and squinted as Jonah’s bulky silhouette stepped in. Scratching his blossoming beer gut through his grey prison guard uniform, he stopped inches from my bare feet. His pale, baby-blue eyes promised a world of pain if I made any kind of a fuss.
How could anyone with such pretty eyes be so cruel?
I swallowed past the lump in my throat and willed myself to get up, to accept the inevitable. I knew better than to give him any excuse to brutalize me...
He’ll get me anyway...
And yet, as soon as he reached a hand toward me, my sanity snapped.
Stomach roiling with pure terror, I screamed and scrambled away from him. Begging... Pleading... He grabbed my wrist in a bruising hold and yanked me forward. I struggled, the need to flee overriding any logical thought. My skin flared, burning so hot that my tunic blackened. The scent of scorched fabric and plastic stung my nose.
Despite his protective glove, Jonah yelped and released me. I fell, my hip striking the hard floor with a violent thud. Pain radiated down my leg as I scrambled back, but I ignored it, my focus on one thing: getting away from him. He shook his hand before looking at his gloved palm as if expecting it to be on fire.
“You fucking bitch,” Jonah hissed, pulling his shock-baton from his belt.
“I... I’m so...sorry... I’m sorry... Please!”
I pressed myself against the wall, wishing it would swallow me whole. With morbid fascination, I watched the light blue head of the dark stick close in on my exposed skin.
Lightning struck.
My muscles tensed to breaking, followed by spasms that clawed at every nerve ending. Vision blurred, I lay helpless on the floor, my limbs flopping like a fish out of water. As the tremors subsided, a cool metal collar clasped around my neck.
“Get up, you stupid cunt, before I stick my boots in your ribs.”
Jonah yanked on the pole attached to my collar, the hard metal edge chafing the skin of my neck. Dizzy and further weakened by the energy expended in my flare-up, I struggled to get back up on my feet. Dragging me after him, he led me like a rabid dog on a catch stick to the operating table in the center of the lab. I followed on wobbly legs, my hands clasped around the stick to prevent it from jerking my neck too hard.
Dr. Sobin watched us approach with an annoyed expression on her long, horsey face. She stood on the other side of the operating table next to her assistant Lucinda, ironically nicknamed Lucky. Behind them, a few shelves were embedded between the sets of white counters that ran the length of the light-grey wall. Their glass doors hid nothing of their contents; countless vials and a bunch of jars filled with unidentified organs floating in liquid.
Lips pinched in displeasure, the doctor gestured with her head for Lucky to assist Jonah in getting me ready for the procedure.
“We have too much important work to do, 2012, for you to be wasting our time with your childish tantrums,” Sobin said.
May you burn in Hell...
The crazy bitch didn’t seem to understand that I never agreed to be her guinea pig. But then again, I wasn’t a person to her. I was Prisoner 2012, a number, a tool for her science project.
Jonah held me still in front of the operating table. Lucky circled around it to rid me of my burned tunic. I didn’t fight, feeling both drained and numb. Her dark eyes peered at me with compassion as she removed the ruined fabric covering me. I wanted to claw at her face and tell her where she could shove her sympathy. Rumor had it that, like me, she’d been brought here against her will, under false pretenses and coerced into collaborating with Sobin. Yet, I felt none of the kinship with her that I did with Quinn, Zoya and Preta. Victim or not, Lucinda helped them hurt me. For that alone, I hated her.
Jonah jerked the stick forward, causing more lancing pain in my neck. I couldn’t even turn to glare at him.
“Get on,” he snapped.
“We don’t have all day,” Dr. Sobin added.
I half-climbed, half-flopped onto the cold, hard surface. Jonah released my neck from the collar but held the shock-stick near my face, in case I got any funny ideas. I didn’t even get a chance to rub the raw skin of my neck before Lucky strapped my wrists to the table. Fear crept back in as Dr. Sobin placed neural nodes on my body and her assistant picked up a huge syringe, the type normally used for spinal taps.
Tears pricked my eyes and my lips quivered.
“Now, now,” Dr. Sobin said, as if addressing a misbehaving child, “there’s no reason for that. Today should be the consecration of all our hard work.”
She stuck the last node on my leg then checked my vitals. The beep of my erratic heartbeat sounded like the warning chime of a ticking bomb about to go off.
“Dr. Craig achieved total success with her experiment on 2098 today. She left us this wondrous serum, the missing ingredient for our own project. So, you be a good girl and don’t deny us a similar success.”
Us?
Who the hell was ‘us’ anyway? I could never tell if the crazy woman was using the royal we or if she genuinely thought we were all in this together.
“Lucky, if you would do the honors,” she said, stepping aside so her assistant could approach me.
A heavy weight seemed to settle on my chest, choking the air out of my lungs. My pulse raced with accrued intensity while Lucky disinfected the skin in the crease of my elbow. I whimpered and strained against my restraints. The assistant gave me an apologetic look before sticking a needle port in my arm. Picking up the giant needle she’d been fiddling with previously, she turned back to me and approached its tip to the insertion point of the port.
My ragged breathing echoed loudly in my ears as I stared at the fiery red liquid in the giant needle. It was supposed to be a mix of Sobin’s mad scientist concoction and a healing serum derived from Quinn’s samples. Combined, Sobin believed it would turn me into a human torch. At the snail pace it had to be administered to me, I never understood why they didn’t simply use a drip.
Lucky slowly pressed the plunger. Searing agony radiated through my arm as the first drops entered my system. It felt like acid burning my flesh, consuming me from within. I shrieked, my body writhing against the straps holding me down.
A deafening boom drowned out the scream tearing from my vocal cords.
The room lurched. The needle, still ninety percent full, tore out of the port with a stabbing pain as Lucky stumbled back. Through blurred vision, I watched Lucky and Dr. Sobin crash against the wall while fire continued to course through my veins like molten lava devouring everything in its path. They yelped, looking for something to hold on to. The room pitched again, tossing my persecutors around. Even while holding me securely to the table, the straps bit into my flesh.
Despite the pain fogging my mind, I realized something terrible was happening to the ship.
Are we under attack? Did we hit something?
The alarm blared as Dr. Sobin and Jonah shouted words I couldn’t process.
Another violent tilt sent my tormentors flying through the room. Lucky screeched. I couldn’t see what had happened to her and didn’t really care. Her gut-wrenching screams mingled with mine when another wave of agony speared through me. Objects toppled to the floor in a cacophony of broken glass as the prison ship rocked as if tumbling in a free fall.
We’re going to die...
The violent tremors rattled the teeth in my head. Searing pain shredded my spine to pieces and I knew no more.
* * *
I REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, coughing the acrid stench of smoke as it burnt my lungs. More screams pierced my ears, but not Lucky’s this time. Dried tears—or God only knew what else—glued my eyes shut. I pried them open and they watered, stinging from the smoke.
Biting back a moan as my battered body complained, I turned my sore neck in the direction of the tortured wails. Chaos reigned in the room. Bent and broken walls revealed the bare skeleton of the ship. Dr. Sobin lay on the floor with both of her legs shattered, the bones protruding through the blood-soaked, ripped fabric of her green scrubs. She clawed at the debris littered floor to crawl away from the still form of a body engulfed in flames. Lucky’s, I assumed. The fire, spreading quickly, was already climbing the doctor’s scrubs and licking at my operating table.
Sobin’s not getting away.
Poetic justice if there ever was.
I couldn’t dwell on the doctor’s fate, however. Despite my heightened resistance to extreme temperatures—both warm and cold—sitting in an open fire would kill me. And so would inhaling too much smoke.
Half of the straps shackling me to the operating table had been torn off. Through another bout of coughing, I unstrapped the remaining ones with my free hand. The vivid marks the restraints had left on my skin made me cringe. I rolled off the table, grinding my teeth through the painful sting of blood rushing back to my extremities, and tried to block out Dr. Sobin’s gurgling howls. Willing my stiff muscles to cooperate, I tiptoed through the broken glass and toppled vials.
Vials containing what? Damn it...
I needed to cover my feet—the rest of me too, while at it—because God only knew what kind of twisted things those vials contained and what they’d do to me once they entered my bloodstream.
Not to mention if I inhale too much of it.
Coughing and wheezing, I limped toward the lab’s door. Along the way, I snagged a laser scalpel amidst the debris and a clean surgery blanket which I pressed to my nose to breathe through. The lab’s door stood partially open. The motion detector didn’t respond to my approach. Not surprising. Tapping the opening switch on the wall didn’t help either.
As I turned sideways to squeeze through, my gaze snagged on Jonah crumpled in the corner of the room, his neck set at an odd angle. I contemplated going to him to grab his shock-baton. However, in my current state, I wouldn’t have the energy to move his massive body to retrieve it from underneath him. Sucking in my gut—not like I had any—I slipped through the opening, my butt and breasts scraping against the wall.
My jaw dropped as I took in the extent of the devastation of our pod. Large sections of wall had been torn off and entire cells were missing. This had not been some ship malfunction. We had crashed.
Did Quinn make it? Had Zoya and Preta also been in our pod?
An explosion from the lab snapped me out of my daze and spurred me to get out through the gaping hole in the outer wall. I stumbled outside. The warm rays of the sun and a gentle breeze caressed my skin. I inhaled deeply but another bout of coughing rocked me. A quick look around revealed no other survivors nearby.
I didn’t particularly want to meet any either. With my luck, it wouldn’t be my girls but one of the other scientist freaks, some psycho guard, or a serial killer inmate.
Crouching by the pod’s wreckage, I used the laser scalpel to cut two strips from the surgery blanket. I wrapped them around my feet and made a toga out of the remaining fabric. It barely covered my lady parts, but it beat streaking in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.
Where the hell am I?
To my right, far in the distance, the silhouette of a mountain loomed. The reddish tinge below the dark clouds above it, hinted of volcanic activity. I’d had my fill of fire to last me a lifetime. To my left, a field of high grass ran in a straight line as far as the eye could see. I suspected it hid a body of water. Up ahead, a woodsy area held the promise of food or game to catch. Behind me, a trail of the interstellar prison’s wreckage covered a barren flat land.
With a determined gait, I headed for the woods.