The Regeneration Project

~11~

If anyone likes to make book covers, hmu and make one for this book. I will give you credit for it if I use it! Thanks, and enjoy yet another chapter...

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Nick—

I just shot them. I shot my cousin, and some girl that he loves. What have I done? Slowly the control returns to my body as whoever is using me releases my motor functions from their grasp. I collapse to the ground and look at what I've done. No, I didn't do it, they did. I'm not really sure who they is, but I am furious with them; beyond furious. I can't believe someone would be so messed up to treat this like a sick joke. The last thing I remember was standing in the street and about to get run over by a hovertrain. Aspen was there with me too. He yelled at me, telling me to move, but I was paralyzed by fear. But maybe it wasn't fear; maybe it was them. I blacked out before it hit and the next thing I knew, I was strapped onto a table and having some gray liquid injected into my veins. It burned like the hottest fire that could ever be made throughout my entire circulatory system. I thought I was being incinerated from the inside out, but turns out, it just renders me useless as someone else controls everything my body does, or at least that is what I have gathered so far. Who knows what else it can do to me. Hence why Aspen and some girl, I think he called her Risa, are laying unconscious on the ground about to be experimented on or whatever these lunatics have in mind. They used me to do it. I shot them; I practically handed them over to death. I don't know what is worse: me having to live with that fact for the rest of my life, or me dying and Aspen thinking that I'm a terrible human being for the rest of his miserable days. I have to do something. But what can I really did when someone can take over my body at a moments notice? I sob on the ground and wallow in my misery as I wait for something to happen. As if on cue with my thoughts, there are seven people in dark blue uniforms walking towards the two slumped bodies about to take them to God knows where. I see a pair of combat boots stop in from of me on the ground and I slowly raise my head to look at the figure. A tall thin woman in a white lab coat with her blonde hair neatly tucked into a bun, not a stray hair out of place. She looks at me with a smile, but hidden behind it is satisfaction at seeing me break apart. 

"You did a good thing here today, Nick." she says in a surprisingly soothing voice. I don't know what I was expecting, a gravely sound followed by an evil laugh? She continues on before I have time to point fingers or blame. "We will reward you for your service, but you will have to continue to cooperate with us."

"I will never cooperate with you!" I spit back at her with malice.

"Now that isn't a way to thank me. Don't bite the hand that can ruin you." she sneers at her own joke.

"I don't need to thank you for anything. You ruined me already. You used me." I say with equal conviction.

"In time you will come to see things through my eyes. A visionary. You will cooperate." she assures me although I won't believe it for a second. "Well, if you won't be grateful then I guess you need some more time to think." she motions to a guard and he walks over obediently. "Take him back to the brig and give him more serum." she says with a flick of her wrist motioning in my direction.

No, no no, I think to myself, not the serum. The serum is the one thing I don't know that I can take much longer of. They inject you with it and it sends shooting pain through every nerve fiber in your body. All you want to do is scream in agony but you can't. You can't speak; you can't hear; you can't see. Then after what seems like a few hours beyond forever, you gain your senses back, only to wish you hadn't. That's when you start experiencing the nightmares; not just in your head, you feel like you are in them. It's almost like they took your worst fears and put them into reality. You are really there. It happens. I don't know how but it does. After what seems like years inside your worst fantasy, you awake. But not like waking from a normal nightmare, no. Everything that happened did happen. If you tore your shirt, your shirt is torn. If you gashed open your calf, you still have the gash with blood seeping from it. I don't know how it happens, but it does. It's real in every sense of the word. But I will not lose my dignity. I will not fall down on my face at her feet and beg for mercy. I will take it like a man. I will fight it. I will survive. I tell myself these things over and over as the guard hauls me to my feet.

"Let's go buddy." he says. "Time for your daily fun." he says cheerily laughing at his own humor. 

"There's nothing fun about it." I mumble so he can't hear.

"What was that?" he asks as he stops our forward motion and turns to look at me. "What did you say?"

"Nothing." I say submissively.

"Oh really?" he says craving some daily drama, "I would like to know what you said, Nicky."

That's it, I think, no more of this. I take my free arm and curl my hand into a fist as it connects with the side of his jaw. "No one," I roar with rage, "Calls me Nicky!"

The guard stumbles back a few steps and lifts his hand to his mouth where blood is already starting to pour out. He turns to me with fury burning through his eyes and takes a running charge at me. He tackles me to the ground and starts battering my face.

"No one," he growls, "Touches me. Especially not a piece of trash like you." He continues to pound my face and I let him as the world starts to fade away gladly accepting it's peace. I can finally have a unconscious sleep without running for my life from something horrid. I can finally really sleep, for the first time in two years.