by Mike Essex
I heard the rustle of keys at the door to my cell and saw the purple hooded man in front of the door setting me free. He looked down at the lock and his face was mired by shadow.
“Look at me,” I asked.
He continued to look down at the lock.
“Look at me!” I demanded.
He tilted his face upwards until it caught the light. From this distance I could make out the scar on his right eye, another sense that had been tested. As I took in every imperfection I could see that this was not Will.
My brother was not a killer.
My mind was filled with a moment of calm. I’d rather never find my brother than learn he was as sadistic as this man.
“You look just like her. Like my sister Suri,” he explained. “That’s why I saved you.”
With Grace dragging him along, he moved to Tom’s cell and released him. I walked out of my own cell to find Tom sitting in the corner of his, holding his face with his hands, daring not speak a word.
I ran to Tom and pulled his hands away from his face, desperate to see what the snatcher had done to him. He lowered his hands and I was relieved to see that his senses were all in working order, even if he himself was still terrified.
Without Chris to help him, Tom seemed a broken man, lost in a broken world.
I stared back at the man who had caused all of this trouble.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is not important. This city will fall. The soldiers will see to that,” he tossed the keys to the floor and walked towards Grace, pressing himself against the gun in her hands. “End it for me now. I’ve run out of time anyway.”
“No,” said Grace, pulling the gun away. He moved away from her and back towards his machinery. Reams of paper continued to be printed by the machine that had been hooked up to Grace. He picked them up and palmed through them.
“You really are incredible,” he told Grace. “Like no-one I have ever had on my table before. I wonder what your friend will be like,” he reached for the vice, still bloodied by the fallen soldier.
When he turned around he was left facing an empty space, the three of us already making our way towards the room’s exit. He gave chase but we slammed the door to the room closed behind us. With a newfound determination Tom held up the keys he had gathered from the floor and we locked the purple hooded man inside the room.
“You think I can’t break free from here? This is my home. This is my prison!” his words carried down the hallway, followed by a loud banging on the door.
“Just keep running,” said Grace as we left the madman behind us.
“You’re sure it wasn’t Will?” asked Tom.
“I’m sure,” I replied, knowing that I was back to square one as far as my brother was concerned.
“Where do we go?” he asked and we realised we were completely lost.
Another high pitched noise rang out and we heard a girl screaming from the sound, much like the snatcher had. We knew it could be a trap but we were running out of options. Our instincts took us towards the sound and we found a woman tied to a wheelchair.
Her hair had almost all fallen out, except for a few faint strands of blonde hair that poked through her scalp. Both of her eyes had been gouged out, her skin burned, her tongue removed, her ears bloodied and dark red blood clogged her nose.
“What has he done?” I ran to the woman and looked for signs of life. She was still breathing. All of her senses had been disabled but somehow she survived. I tried to talk to her and offer some form of kindness but there was no way to reach her, not through sound, nor touch or anything else. “What kind of sick bastard does this?” I asked.
“I think you know the answer to that,” said Grace, holding up her burnt hand towards me. We searched the room and found a sink but there was no water to wash her burns with. Under the sink we found a medical kit and I applied antiseptic gel and bandages to her hand, which she endured through gritted teeth.
We freed the woman in the wheelchair and I placed my good arm around her. Her body relaxed and although she was too weak to hold me back I could tell that some form of touch still ran through her body. The purple hooded man could burn her fingers but he couldn’t remove her sense of touch completely. That was a feeling she’d always have.
She couldn’t hear me, or see me, but she knew I was there. She knew that someone was there who could help her.
“She must have been one of his first test subjects,” said Grace. “The cut marks are messy and the burning doesn’t seem very focussed.”
“He learnt his attacks on her? That’s sick,” said Tom.
“We have to get her out of here,” I replied.
The piercing sound shrieked through the air again, the gaps between the sounds getting ever shorter. The injured girl opened her mouth wide and the stump of her tongue formed the weakest of screams. I placed a hand onto her shoulder to try and console her but heard another sound that made me quickly remove it.
From the hallway outside of the room came another scream. The snatcher was closing in on us.
“We have to get her out of here,” I told Grace and Tom and they didn’t argue. Tom pushed her wheelchair out of the room and as we left the room we saw the snatcher shouting into the sky. Before we could make it around the corner the screaming stopped and was replaced by his cries for us to stop running.
He gave chase after us, through the broken corridors of the prison. We had no idea where we were running, only that we had to get away from him and save this innocent woman. Hopefully Jacobi could fix her like he had helped the soldier. We had to try.
We reached a staircase, its broken steps revealing only a narrow walkway upwards. We’d never get a wheelchair up there in time. “There has to be a lift,” said Grace and we ran past the stairs continuing our search.
A door to my right burst open and hit me in my broken arm, sending me crashing into the wall. Tom was startled and let go of the wheelchair, sending it forwards several steps until it lost momentum and stopped a few feet away from us.
“Stop right there,” said the purple hooded man, who emerged from out of the door. He grabbed Tom by the throat and pulled his keychain back towards him. “I’ll take those.”
With one motion he tossed Tom inside the room from which he had emerged and locked the door, trapping him inside. As he swung back around he held out a rifle and pointed it towards us.
“It’s you who shouldn’t move,” Grace held her gun in her left hand, unable to hold it in her right and pointed it towards the injured girl’s head.
“What are you doing?” I shouted to her.
“If you come any closer I will kill her,” said Grace. “Your first experiment will be gone forever.”
The gun shook in her left hand.
“I knew I should have burned both of your hands. I just couldn’t wait to cut out your tongue,” the snatcher responded. “How good a shot are you with your left hand?”
“Good enough to kill her from this range, that’s all that matters.”
I was glad the injured woman wouldn’t know what was happening, how her life was being bargained with.
“So what’s it going to be?” Grace questioned him. “You either let us go, or I’ll kill her and you won’t have your sick little memento any more. She will be free of you.”
“Don’t hurt her,” he demanded. “She is precious to me.”
“As a trophy?” shouted Grace.
“No. As my sister. Suri.”
FIFTY SIX
“You did this to your own sister?” Grace motioned to the girl’s burns and cuts. “Why?”
“Self-preservation,” the snatcher responded. “Every day she slips closer to death and I will not be taken with her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The curse of being a Tethered soul. The curse we all face.”
Grace couldn’t understand that curse; having never being born with a twin, but it was one I understood very well. A curse that s
hould have taken my own life.
Although I understood what he felt: the fear of knowing someone else’s death would result in your own, I couldn’t approve of what he had done. “So you operated on her to try and break the Tether and save yourself?”
“It was the only way,” he explained. “When Suri got cancer I tried everything I could to save her but what type of medicine can a have-not get? Nothing. I stole for her, I found us this home, I protected us but I couldn’t heal her. She was always going to die.”
“So this was your solution?” I asked. “To kill innocent people until you found a way to break your own Tether? What about them and their families?”
“They were never innocent; just soldiers who would have killed me in a heartbeat.”
“And the other people who lived here?”
“A drug dealer and his coked up brother? Trust me; I was doing them a favour.”
“And what about me?” Grace held up her burned hand, keeping her other hand gripped firmly on the gun to Suri’s head. “What about us?”
“You tried to stop me and I couldn’t let that happen. There just isn’t any time left.”
“Until Suri dies?” I asked. “You are meant to die with her, that’s just the way the world works. Didn’t you learn anything from the horrors that happened in this prison all those years ago?”
“I learnt everything from them,” he replied. “Were it not for the research and technology left behind in this place, I would never have found this solution. Thanks to the Separationists soon I will be free. It’s what Suri wanted.”
“You’re crazy. Do you think she wanted to be tortured? You really are messed up.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore!” he aimed the rifle to his head. “We will all be killed if this signal doesn’t sto...”
He started to scream again and his sister did the same, the humming noise cutting through the air and stopping him mid conversation. Watching the two of them scream out into the sky I knew what was happening, all over again.
The Rapture.
“It’s the sound wave,” I said to Grace. “Someone is trying to destroy all the twins.”
“That’s insane. Why would anyone do that? Tobias has been killed. For anyone else to do it would be suicide.”
“Not for the soldiers. They’re all wearing earpieces that connect them together. They could be immune.”
“But why would they do it? They’ve just rebuilt this city, why kill everyone?”
“Not everyone,” the snatcher had regained control of his body and was very interested in our conversation. “Just the have-nots of this city.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t give over the city willingly so they left the soldiers with no choice. They needed a way to flush out all of the rats that hid underneath their new utopia and then they found this place. The Separationists led me to my experiments and they led the soldiers to their own. This place gave both of us our salvation.”
“So they’re going to restart the same experiment that killed a billion people?” said Grace. “Don’t they know what they are playing with? They could kill everyone,”
“They are confident that won’t happen. If anyone is within the limits of London and they are not wearing an earpiece their Tether will be broken and they will be killed. That’s all there is to it.”
“And you know all of this how?”
“I’ve told you, I know this prison inside and out. I have been watching the soldiers from the second they invaded my home. I’ve told you the truth.”
“You’re lying,” said Grace.
“Fine. I’ll show you,” he replied. “Promise not to hurt Suri, then I will show you proof.”
“You have a deal,” I told him and held out my hand.
“If you hurt her then I will make the final hours of your life incredibly painful,” his leathery palm gripped my own and he shook it tightly.
Grace kept the gun held to Suri’s head whilst the snatcher freed Tom from the cell. We agreed that Tom would watch Suri and keep her safe from any soldiers with the rifle, whilst the snatcher would lead myself and Grace to the signal’s source.
He led us up the broken staircase and three floors of stairs to a pitch black hallway. The windows had been blocked up, only the tiniest rays of light breaking through their small cracks.
“Your cloak, what does it do?” I asked, trying to understand why he and Will had the same outfits.
“It’s a primitive version of the innocent blocking device. It lets me help Suri, without her illness stopping me,” he replied, which could explain why I’d not felt connected to Will in all this time.
“Another gift from the Separationists,” he elaborated. “Now follow me.”
We walked behind him into the darkness. For a moment I could see nothing but the swirls of light cutting through the shadows, my eyes trying to form pictures from nothingness. I heard the sound of a gun being cocked and heard Grace say; “Don’t go anywhere.”
His large frame emerged from the darkness and into the light as we followed behind him. Grace was holding her weapon outwards to remind him that she was in control.
He led us into a room that looked out of place in the prison. The greys of the stone walls were gone and we were now standing in a room of wooden browns. On the wall hung a large painting of a balding man with a messy grey moustache. Underneath it, ran the words “Warden Spencer.”
“This is what I wanted to show you,” he motioned towards a large window, which easily took up the entire wall and I looked outside. Grace refused to look, preferring to keep her weapon aimed squarely on him.
Out of the window I could see into the prison courtyard and the grounds beyond it. My friends were out there, the tiniest outlines of bodies hidden amongst the cars and long grass, waiting for my signal. A signal I couldn’t possibly give them now.
“This is how I knew the soldiers were arriving to take my home and how I kept track of their activities. Over twelve days they’ve bought in endless supplies and now they seem to have just stopped. Whatever they were building they’re using it now.”
“You have to show us where it is, so we can stop this,” said Grace.
"Well you see there was one bit of cargo they bought in which was more interesting than most. A pretty integral part of the machine if the specifications I found are anything to go by.”
“Tell us,” Grace started to walk towards him, her gun pointed towards his chest. He backed away slowly towards the warden’s desk with his hands in the air.
“I’d rather show you,” he started to bend down towards the desk, reaching his hand underneath it.
“Don’t try anything,” she clicked the safety off her weapon. “I will shoot you.”
“I have the schematics in this desk. Ok?” he bent down and his head disappeared beneath the desk. “It’s just right here.”
The alarm rang out throughout the room, echoing down the hallway. I looked down at the courtyard below and saw the citizens of Q-Whitehall start to notice the sound and take up arms. The gunfire quickly followed, soldiers rushing out of the prison to stop their attack.
“No!” I shouted as I watched a body fall to the ground as bullets ripped through them. Seconds later I saw his twin clutch his chest and collapse, the impact of the bullets taking his life from him as well. From the distance I couldn’t make out who the two figures were and I could only hope that they had not been R&R.
“It’s ok, R&R were told to stay at the back,” I reassured myself, although when had R&R ever been ones to follow my instructions?
“What have you done?” asked Grace, grabbing the man by his hood and pulling him upwards.
“I’m ending it,” he replied. “The pain. The suffering. I can’t allow you to stop the soldiers.”
“Why?” she replied as I watched out of the window, spotting the unmistakeable shape of Jacobi’s sword as he cut his way through two soldiers. Its glistening steel caught the light as it carved through their tors
os.
“Suri can’t be saved and neither can I. I’ve tried everything, so you may as well kill me.”
“You’ve just killed all of us. They’ll kill everyone outside and search every inch of this prison now until they find us.”
“Do you know what it’s like to have an endless need to save a loved one?” he tossed a folder onto the floor where bits of paper fell out and settled beside me. “To try every day to heal them and yet fail over and over? That’s my hell that I’ve lived through every day. It’s time I faced the fact that I have failed her and that my punishment has always been my death.”
“We could have found a way. We would have helped you,” I told him.
He walked towards Grace, who placed both hands on the gun, using her burnt hand to steady herself. “Just end it,” he grabbed her hands, squeezing them into the gun, causing her to grimace from the pain. He thrust her gun towards his head. “I’m sorry Suri. It’s easier this way.”
“Believe me I would gladly kill you,” said Grace, “but not at the expense of your sister. She doesn’t deserve to die.”
“Then you leave me no choice,” he grabbed Grace’s hand and pushed a finger hard into the burned flesh. Blood rushed through the bandages and as she cried out in agony, he tried to free the gun from her grasp.
“Wait,” I shouted out. “Use me.”
“What? No Emmie,” said Grace.
“Experiment on me. Cut me. Hurt me. I don’t care. Just help us stop the soldiers and I’ll do anything you want.”
“I’ve tried!” he backed away from Grace. “I’ve tested every type of twin and breaking every sense they had but I can’t make it work.”
“You haven’t tried me. If you thought my friend was different then wait till you see what I can do. I’m not connected to my twin.”
“You’re lying. That’s impossible.”
“Then let me prove it to you,” I tossed a schematic onto the table and pointed to a diagram scrawled upon it. It was an image I recognised all too well; a metal chair, a tight chest plate and wires sprawling out from around it. In the centre of the diagram a faceless man was drawn sitting in the chair. “Take me to this place.”