CAZADO: BOOK ONE (WATTYS 2023)

Chapter 22

"What do you think happened to Jared last night?" Maverick asked. He turned to Shaki and Carlos who were sitting with him at breakfast the next day.

"Well, that documentary was extremely boring. I would not be surprised if he left to go check out the place," Shaki replied with a shrug.

"Yeah, I guess. He is the type to go off on his own," Maverick replied.

"I still remember that one time we were being taught about Pariah anatomy and he just walked out the classroom and went to his dormitory because he knew the material already. He can get quite fidgety at times," Shaki answered.

"Let us not worry about him too much. We have this amazing breakfast we can focus on for now. We can look for him later," Carlos said as he placed another slice of sourdough bread in his mouth.

~~~

I opened my eyes slowly and turned my attention towards the other humans I could see in the room. I did not recognize any of them. They were not from any village I knew of or my Uncle's gang. They must have been from somewhere else on the continent. I felt a slight tickling sensation on the right side of my cheek and tried to move my arm to brush it off, but to no avail. I turned my head again and realized my arms were tied up above my head. I could feel that my arms were still there somewhat, but I could not move them. I tried rubbing my head against my shirt and noticed a bright red spot.

 Then it dawned on me. I looked myself over scanning my body frantically, searching for any injury and did not find any. I looked up again and something splashed on my forehead. I tried to rub my forehead and could not reach. It was difficult to move my feet as well, most likely because they were also chained to the ground. Frustrated, I tried moving back a bit to see what had splashed on my head, inch by inch, but it hurt. Not my head or my back but my entire body. Everything hurt. But I was still able to move and that is when I noticed it directly above me. Not it, but him. A person! A human. Or at least what used to be a human, I was not sure. The head had been cut open and sealed back up. There was some sort of liquid being poured over the body that was then absorbed into the body. I looked around me and finally realized what was going on.

I, along with the other humans, was not chained to the floor like I initially thought. We were chained to a conveyor belt that led to a larger machine nearby. Every person that came out at the other end of the machine ended up like what I saw above me. Then I noticed something else. For some reason, all of a sudden I could not feel anything. I could not feel pain anymore, or any sort of emotion but I could smell something sweet in the air, something familiar. I continued to take in the sweet smell of the liquid, and I began to feel a little hungry, but I was still confused as to why it smelled so familiar. 

I looked ahead of me to the other humans on the conveyor belt and noticed one of them was familiar after all. The man who I had first seen being dragged across the floor by a Pariah scientist. He was next in line to be pulled into the machine. As he entered, I listened carefully, hearing the loud screeches and hums of the machine. But no, the screeching wasn't the machine - it was the man screaming. I remembered his blood curdling screams from when he was being hauled along the floor. The screaming suddenly stopped, and more blood came pouring out the other side of the machine, along with some.... thing. Whatever had been done to this man left him with the same tell-tale signs of trauma like the other bodies that had come out of the machine earlier.

Suddenly, hoses with long, glistening needles entered the man's mouth and other crevices and began pumping in liquid that poured out all over the place and the room smelled sweet again. This liquid! It was the same one that I had smelled earlier. It was the same liquid that we had learned about in the library, the one that cut off emotions. This was much stronger than the pills I had taken. I felt dead inside. I thought about all the negative experiences I had in the past and nothing happened. No powers, no kind of strength. I was hoping to at least teleport but nothing was working. I had no way of getting out of this situation.