Vitality In A Wasteland

18

Ace shook his head and pulled back. He dug his fingers so tight that his palms started to bleed, but he couldn't feel anything besides the massive anchor just dropped upon him. She was dead, very dead. He couldn't look anymore. He turned away and ran to a corner, falling into a ball and his tears came out like a waterfall. He never felt so much agony in his life before. Nothing hurt so much before, it broke through his skin and pulsed through his mind. He tried closing his mind, but her image kept coursing through. He wanted to see his cheerful little sister, the girl who loved bedtime stories and space. The innocent smile was now replaced by the image of a stained corpse that never went way. He wanted to rip his hair out, he wanted to tear his eyes out. The voices ran through his mind, all at once. His sister was still there along with everyone else in the bunker who went missing, now turned up in a mass grave. He wanted to grab a nail and stab his ears, anything to get rid of their screams. He was so blinded by their agony that he didn't even notice he was screaming, subconsciously trying to block them out. Yet they never left, they got louder until he heard a loud ding back in reality.

Someone in the shadows where a hazy light couldn't touch stepped forward. Her voice was familiar yet... alien.

When she came into the dim light Ace shuddered.

"Ace?" Said Cait. Yet her whole appearance was completely different. Her once proud red hair looked wild and half of it cut off. Her face shown through a mask with tape was bruised and had a nasty cut like the one Ace had upon his face. Her clothes, a simple shirt torn and covered in soot, her paints also torn and ruined. She held onto a pipe even after recognising Ace, her resting watchful stare confirmed it was her and that nasty looking frown she always wore.

"You can't be alive!" Her hands were shaking, the great Cait was nervous. She held tighter to her pipe and said, "everyone is dead. Everyone! How have you survived!"

Ace was too shocked to answer. Cait cursed and swung her pipe at the ground. "Answer me!"

Ace's lips quivered. He pulled himself up and stammered, "I escaped. I watched everyone die and they took everyone else... how did you survive?"

"Those bastards took us and threw us in darkness. No way you could have survived, they promised to have killed all the men!"

"Cait... what happened?"

"They took us go damnit! They found me in the library and knocked me out, I barely opened my eyes to see them dragging me by my hair and into the outside world where the air burned my lungs. I almost died before they threw me into a truck with everyone else, Jessica, Margarete... little Sammy."

Ace swallowed. He felt dizzy and nauseous, unable to think straight. When Cait continued, he knew he was in hell. "They did things to us... those bastards they called saviours. They are a cult, bent on the destruction of this world. Their base... full of machines unimaginable and what they did to us with them... I can never look at my lower half again without seeing what they did." She was crying too, tears of trauma and agony unimaginable to even Ace. "They said it was the only way for a better future, taking what was ours and using our insides for test tubes, making things... monstrosities." She shook her head and kicked the ground. "I want to die! What they did after that... well you can see the proof before your eyes if you have the stomach for it."

Ace shook his head, none of it was real. He was certain. Yet it was Cait standing before, her alive while everyone else was dead. She seemed to have read his mind when she said, "they grabbed us when they were done with their inhumane experiments and took us here. Some of us tried to resist and were shot in the heart. The rest waited in a line... and they shot. And then they stripped us, almost all of us. They threw us into these heaps, but I guess they didn't check our pulses because I survived." She reached for her abdomen. "Luckily there was a mask lying around and some stitches before I could have bled out."