Page 32 of Milk
“What the fuck did you do to me?”
“I injected you with something,obviously,” I said evenly.
“More truth serum? You fucking coward.”
I gently cleaned up the blood rolling down his face. “No, no. Something far more interesting.”
“What? What will it do to me?” Jason demanded.
“I don’t know. It’s very experimental.”
“You fucking bastard!”
As I watched Jason’s body contort in pain thanks to the mutations from the serum, I couldn’t help but smile, remembering that exchange. His body was reshaping itself. Organs consumed other organs and produced new ones. His skin ripped. Muscles were breaking bones with sickening cracks, as they grew. It was hell; a hell of my own design. It was a fate worse than death.
Still, it wasn’t enough for a fucker like him. Jason’s body warped and blood ran into the drain in the middle of the cell. Then his monitor flatlined. He collapsed, twitching, slowly dying. That was too easy for him.
The crash cart hurried in, bringing the defibrillator paddles. The scientists tried to reanimate him once. Then twice. Nothing. It was too much for his body to take. I wasn’t going to let him get out that easily.
“Inject him with the stimulants and try again,” I said. “Triple the voltage.”
“Sir, the specimen-”
“He isn’t allowed to die,” I said, short and simple, “Not yet.”
I left no room for argument. My team injected him with more adrenaline, amphetamines, and blood thinners. They used the defibrillator again and again. Three, four, five times. Far beyond what was medically recommended. By the sixth time, it worked. The monitor beeped with his heartbeat again. I sighed.
“Good,” I said. “Keep him alive. I don’t care if you need to hook him to seven machines. He isn’t allowed to die until I say he is, understand?”
“But sir-”
“If he dies, you’ll take his place,” I told the hesitant men. That did the trick.
“Yes, sir. Understood, Sir.”
I nodded and watched Jason start mutating again. He was brought back from the dead. The devil could have what was left of him later, but that son of a bitch would wait until I was done.
No way to tell what was a dream and what was real. Were the two even separate? Memories swirled like reflections in a filthy puddle, all ripple and blur. I dreamt about my family — my awful, fucked-up family — and those last twisted moments before I finally broke free. Sometimes Jason was there. Sometimes, it was Carter.
Nothing was right. Carter would help me kill my father, or he’d pull me out of the farmhouse, but the house was underground, like Carter’s farm. Sometimes Carterwasmy father, creeping in at night to force himself on me, again and again. Except in those dreams with Carter,I liked it.
There were flashes too; waking up under bright lights, cold metal under my back, being rolled like luggage. Susan was there. Or Carter. One of them would be standing over me, touching me, whispering, vanishing. Was that real? Was any of it?
I walked out of that white room and found myself naked in the middle of a strip mall. People stared. Pointed. Laughed. My bell kept ringing. They kept finding me.
Thensnap,I was back at the farmhouse. Or my apartment. Or that little cell. Wren showed up. Then she didn’t. Carter was there. Then gone. The only thing that stuck was that background hum, that buzzing fakeness of everything Just static dressed up as thought.
So when I opened my eyes again, finding myself alone on a bed in a room soaked with light, I didn’t think much of it. Another dream. Another thread in the endless tangle. I tried to move, to push hair off my face, groggy and slow, not sure if I was waking up or just bleeding into the next broken memory. My arm was restrained to a medical bed. I knew I was naked, lying under a very thin sheet in a warm room. I tried to remember my dreams. That dream I had where I had stumbled upon this weird farm-like factory, where women were treated as cows. With a handsome man. Carter Hill. That part had to be a dream, right?
“Finally, you’re up.”
I couldn’t see him, but I knew that voice. Carter’s voice. So, was I still dreaming? Or was the human-cattle farm real? I closed my eyes and felt the slightly tender spot on my ass bloom with pain as I shifted. The brand. The brand I’d gotten for Carter. I sighed; that felt real. Too real. This wasn’t a dream.
“You’ve been in and out for a couple of days now. I thought it was best to avoid suffering through the healing process,” Carter said.
I turned to the side and found him standing right next to my bed. My head was at crotch level with him, but there was something missing.
Why wasn’t he hard? He wasalwayshard.
