Tethered Twins Saga: Complete Trilogy (Twins, Souls and Hearts)

by Mike Essex

  My instinct was to scream out for help but I knew it would be futile. Trapped inside a prison cell I was unsure who could help. Grace had the last earpiece on her so she was our best hope of being saved. Unless our mysterious captor had smashed it, in which case rescue was looking even less likely.

  The walls of the cell were a murky grey colour, their original black paint falling away in my hands as I ran them over it. I moved the broken pieces of wood from the floor and stacked them in one corner to help me see the room better. The floor was covered in dirt and flakes from the paint, that I brushed to one corner with my hands. It revealed a stone floor but there was no obvious structural weakness or means of escape.

  I ran my hands over the walls as the sound of a drill buzzed angrily. As it scraped and burrowed through its target the drilling sound grew muffled, the sounds of screams overshadowing everything else.

  If this was anything like the last victim they would now be losing their eyes or tongue. My mind tried to fill in the gaps of that which it could not see: I imagined the drill piercing his eye, breaking through the soft outer layer and collapsing in on itself. The image became distorted in my mind and the person being attacked was replaced with my own face, my own eye being ruptured.

  To stop myself imagining the worst I focused on the walls and hoped for freedom. I chipped away at the paint with my nails, taking off small sections at first but quickly finding larger sections that could be peeled away with my hands. I pulled away at the crusted paintwork and revealed the wall beneath, all worn with two large cracks running down from ceiling to floor, breaking off into other sections.

  The drilling stopped and the man begged for his life, promising to never do drugs again. On hearing his voice I was thankful that it wasn’t Tom being operated on, and that the man still had his tongue; as for his sight that was likely long gone. The freedom that he so desperately cried out for was met with only silence from his captor. He continued to beg until the sound of the drill was all that could be heard, until his own screams pierced through the sound of bone being torn apart.

  In amongst the cries of agony I tried to focus back on the wall and the part that seemed to be structurally weak by kicking against it and trying to break it down. The prison had been abandoned for twenty years, and had clearly seen better times, but the wall did not budge. I continued to kick against it until I heard the sound of the drilling stop altogether. With my own sounds no longer covered by the loud machinery I stopped what I was doing and backed away from the wall.

  The silence continued until the absence of screaming became the most terrifying sound of all. If there were no more screams then that meant the suffering was over and someone else would be next.

  I sat in the corner of the cell, trying not to make a sound and wracking my brain for a way to escape without making noise. In the silence I could hear a shuffling coming from the cell next to mine. Was it Grace? Tom? Someone else had been captured with me. Whoever it was I vowed I’d offer myself in their place. They’d sacrificed enough for me already. I wanted to do anything I could to buy them a bit more time to escape.

  Another unexpected sound was carried around the cell walls: I could hear the light sobs of someone crying. Had my friends given up hope as well?

  “Dammit!” from the outside of my cell a voice cried out in anger. I could hear the clatter of metal thudding against a hard surface as our kidnapper shouted out again. The sound of sobbing was replaced with a dull throbbing sound, spliced with grunts of agony.

  “Emmie?” a voice whispered to me.

  “Yeah?” I whispered back, sliding my body towards the front of my cell so I could hear them better.

  “Are you ok?” I recognised the voice now as Grace. She must have been in the cell next to my own, with her face pressed up against the bars like mine.

  “Yeah, you?”

  “Yeah. Pissed off, but I’ll live.”

  “Did you get help?” I asked her.

  “No. He smashed the earpiece,” Grace confirmed that help wasn’t coming. “But we’ll get out. We always do,” her words didn’t reassure me. Trapped and abandoned with no hope of rescue. Grace had a funny way of always staying optimistic.

  I pushed my face through the bars and tried to look at her, a smile from Grace could make even the bleakest of situations seem better. As I made out the slight edges of her face, the bars of my cell were rattled angrily and I backed away from them in fear.

  “No speaking to the other prisoners,” a voice barked at us. I looked back towards the bars and saw a golden mask pushed up against them, hiding the face of our captor and distorting his voice. Here he was, the purple hooded man, the snatcher, Will.

  Through the eyeholes I could see him watching me and examining me carefully. “Why did you have to follow me?” he asked.

  Could it really be him? My brother?

  “I tried to save you. I gave you a chance to live and this is how you repay me?” his voice grew angry and he banged on the bars, sending shards of rust flying from them. The loud ringing sound ran through my ears as the shock of what Will had become finally registered with me.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked him. “Why are you hurting these people?”

  “They deserve to be hurt. They will serve a higher purpose,” was all he offered by way of clarification.

  “You have to stop this!” I begged him. “It’s not too late. If you let me go then I’ll get you out of here, we can find somewhere else, somewhere safe.”

  “Safe? You think there’s somewhere safe?” he laughed, the golden mask shifting as he did so. “Those soldiers will not stop until we are all destroyed, every last have-not out there. There’s only one way out of here and time is running out.”

  “Then let me help you.”

  “Oh no, you’ll be the last one to undergo my treatment. Your friend on the other hand,” he moved towards Grace’s cell and out of my vision. “Where is your twin?” he asked her.

  “Go to hell,” she replied.

  “Oh, I will. But, I want to enjoy my last days on Earth before I do. So you will tell me, where is your twin?”

  I heard the cocking of a gun.

  “You think I’m scared of you?” taunted Grace. “If it wasn’t for Emmie, I would kill you right now. She’s given you a chance to escape and you should take it.”

  The purple hooded man fired the gun and it echoed out in the small walls of Grace’s cell. I pushed my face up against the bars and placed my arms through them trying to grab him. “Stop!” I shouted.

  “That was a warning,” he explained, “if you refuse to answer me again I will take out your senses one by one.”

  “Fine. You’ll never find my twin and do you want to know why?” she let the words linger. “Because his body rests with my mother, stripped from this world by people like you.”

  “You’re lying,” he replied.

  “And now, even my mother’s body is gone, the place where she died turned into something new. It’s like she never existed. So you may as well kill me because I have nothing left.”

  “As you wish.”

  “No!” I shouted out. “Take me instead. Just don’t hurt my friends.”

  A key ratted in the lock as he made his way inside Grace’s cell. I heard the grunts as she put up a fight but he was able to restrain her and drag her out into the walkway.

  “Take me instead!” I cried. “Will!” I repeated his name several times but he ignored me and dragged her away. No longer caring about how much sound I made I ran shoulder first from the end of the cell and into the cracks in the wall. As my arm crashed into the wall I saw the dust move and heard the wall strain from the force.

  I ran in to it three more times, each time with more determination to break through as the desperation set in. All I could think about was helping Grace; knowing what he had done to the man before her. As my arm slammed against the wall the fourth time I heard a crunching sound and felt pain shoot from my shoulder to my fingertips.

&n
bsp; This time my arm was broken for sure.

  I lay on the floor tears streaming down my face. The pain from the breakage had given me an icy clarity, the world filled with light that only reminded me how hopeless things were.

  Staring at the wall I wanted to run at it again but saw how little damage I had really done. I could break my other arm and then what? I’d be stuck alone in a cell with no way to fight back. Frustrated I rested my head against the wall and listened to the sound of the purple hooded man preparing Grace to be tortured.

  “So do you get off on this?” she asked. “All these wires, knives and restraints. What’s the monitor for, filming it all? You’re an S&M guy right?”

  He didn’t respond to her.

  “Oh I see,” Grace continued, “the strong silent type. Always the crazy ones.”

  I stared at the wall and ran my finger down one of the cracks, wishing I was stronger. “Ouch,” I looked at my finger and saw that it was bleeding. On the wall a speck of my blood ran over the crack and when I wiped it away I could see a tiny hole in the wall.

  Returning to the pile of dirt on the floor I found a screw from the wooden bed and poked it through the hole, twisting it around to force it through the lose concrete. When the hole was big enough I placed my eye towards it and looked out, the purple hooded man now directly in my sights.

  With all my strength and all my power, all I had succeeded in doing was getting a front row view for the torture of my best friend.

  FIFTY FOUR

  The torture chamber was surprisingly low-tech, especially considering what I’d expected from Will and his years working for TethTech. Medical machines, chipped and rusted, were positioned next to bloodied knives, whilst twisted metal vices sat on top of glass vials filled with thick disgusting looking liquid.

  A large medical bed lay in the centre of the room, stained by the blood of those who had died in it before. The body of the previous test subject lay broken on the floor, his clothing torn. His face was turned towards me, blood running down his cheek, a dark pool of it starting to harden around the hole where his eye had once resided. The victim’s body twitched, the last echoes of life leaving him.

  He pushed Grace onto the bed and bound her limbs to the side of it with chunky leather restraints. This only encouraged more comments about S&M from her which he refused to reply to. He was completely focused on the task at hand, which only made Grace more frustrated.

  Although anger was running through my body the heat did not fire up inside of me. I ran my finger along the scar on my stomach and willed it to work. But, the fire did not flare up. Perhaps it was my fear of hurting Will or just my lack of control over the monster inside. Whatever forces made it work they were not playing along.

  Powerless I turned back to the hole and looked through it. Next to Grace’s bed, the snatcher was playing with a large white box turning various dials on the front of it.

  “What are you doing?” shouted Grace.

  “Be quiet or I will cut out your tongue first,” he snapped, his concentration waning.

  The black rings on the top of the white box started to glow a faint red colour and the air above them began to blur. They looked blazing hot, the white box now revealing itself to be an oven, the cooking rings on top clearly turned to their highest setting.

  A high pitched sound rang through the air, hurting my ears. The snatcher reacted even worse to the sound and recoiled from the shock, letting out a scream which he followed with the words. “There isn’t much time!”

  “Time for what?” asked Grace.

  He pulled a knife from underneath his cloak and held it towards her lips. “Your tongue,” he demanded.

  Grace kept her mouth shut, preferring to keep her tongue in place. He removed one of the restraints from her wrists and held the knife towards her chest to confirm that this was not freedom being granted.

  The disks on the oven were a dark red colour now, their black shade obscured by the glow of the heat reaching its peak. He held the knife to her chest and dragged her right wrist towards the oven. She tried to fight but he cut the knife through her jacket, moving it closer to her flesh.

  “No!” shouted Grace, as her fingertips felt the rising heat of the plates.

  “This time it will work,” he muttered as he drove her hand down on to the metal ring.

  Grace’s body went into shock as she tried to curl her fingers away from the heat that was burning through her flesh. He placed his hand on top of hers and held it flat, forcing it down on to the lightning hot metal.

  “Stop!” I screamed out.

  “Will!” I shouted, begging for him to stop this.

  “Take me instead,” I pleaded.

  But all of my requests fell on death ears.

  Only when he was satisfied did he relinquish control, skin tearing from her fingers as he pulled her hand away, bits of flesh sticking to the oven top. He held her hand tightly, examining it carefully and picking off bits of burned skin from her fingertips.

  Grace lay there, breathing frantically, her chest pushing up and down towards the knife. Her eyes were filled with tears from the shock, her face a deathly white colour.

  A sudden beeping sound came from one of his monitors and he turned to face it. Various blue and orange lines fluctuated wildly on the screen, carrying readings from the wires attached to Grace. “Incredible,” he remarked. “What are you?”

  He let go of her hand but kept the knife over her chest and looked at a printout from the machine, engrossed in its results.

  Grace held her hand up to examine it. From the gap in the wall I could see the dark red marks where she had been forever scarred. Her hand looked like something from another world, like it had emerged from the fires of hell and been grafted on to her body. She stared at the hand in disbelief. When she tried to move her fingers the pain caused her to flinch and cry out.

  He turned back towards her and grabbed her hand. “I don’t know who you are, or where you came from but you are everything we have been searching for.”

  “Get away from me,” she replied weakly. “Just make it stop.”

  “No. No. No! We have to move on. Now give me the tongue,” from the nearby table he retrieved a gum shield, which was connected to a black vice like contraption. “Open wide,” he asked in the fakest nice sounding voice he could manage.

  She bit tightly on to her lip, desperate to protect her body from further ills.

  “Why must we do this the HARD WAY!” he screamed out, his hands reaching towards her as she clamped down further on her lip, a trail of blood seeping from where she had bitten in to it.

  As he tried to force her mouth open, he was pulled backwards and tumbled to the floor. His knife circled in the air, and Grace shifted her body to avoid it cutting into her as it pierced the bed. The vice clattered onto the ground and I watched as the earlier torture victim used the last echoes of his life to fight back.

  The snatcher grabbed the vice from the floor and jammed it repeatedly into the victim’s skull, until he had taken the fight from him completely. He pulled the vice free, sending a trickle of blood across the floor and then kicked the man back to the floor, a large hole in his head revealing the broken skull beneath.

  Gripping the vice tightly in his hand he started to stand. “Stop wasting my time!” he shouted. As his eyes met Grace’s he saw that she had freed herself from the restraints. With her free hand she’d fought through the pain and undone the ties that trapped her to the bed and she now aimed his own knife towards him with her un-burnt hand.

  “Remove the mask,” she demanded as she lowered herself down from the bed. When her feet touched the floor he swooped towards her, swinging the vice in a strong arc angled at her face. She ducked underneath the swing and drove the knife into his side.

  Another screeching sound rang through the air and he grabbed at his ears, trying to block out the sound. Although the sound was loud I didn’t feel the same need to cover my ears and neither did Grace. She looked at him c
onfused but used the opportunity to her advantage.

  Show us who you really are,” she swept down and grabbed at the golden mask on his face, pulling at it tightly. He shook his head to try and break free but the sound continued to ring out, disabling him. With an eventual tug she pried its grasp from his face and the golden mask tumbled to the floor.

  The burned and scarred face beneath stared back at us weakly. All he could say was “I did it for my twin. I had to save my sister.”

  FIFTY FIVE

  “Stay back,” said Grace to the newly revealed man beneath the mask. Beneath the scars that ran across his face and the blistered skin that was tainted a dark red, I couldn’t recognise my brother any more.

  “Will?” I questioned him, hoping for some clarification but he didn’t reply. The tiny hole I stared through didn’t give me a good enough look at him and my mind raced through the possibilities. Either this was Will and he’d been tortured beyond all recognition or it was another force altogether and my brother was lost to me.

  Either outcome was unthinkable.

  “Where is our stuff?” Grace demanded.

  “It’s gone. Dropped down one of the maintenance shoots,” he replied.

  “Dammit,” shouted Grace, knowing our weapons and the earpiece were gone.

  She forced him to hand over his pistol which she promptly held towards him after she had pocketed the knife.

  “It’ll all be over soon anyway. I’m sorry, sister,” with his mask gone his voice was much clearer but still had a raspy tone. As I listed to his voice and looked at the scarred face and burned hands I could see that the rituals he used on other people were all things he had tried on himself. He’d already tried to numb his senses; weakening his voice without removing the tongue and scarring his hands to dull his sense of touch.

  What could be so important that he’d do all of this to himself? Was this how Will had broken free from me? By breaking off each of his senses in order to destroy the Tether?