The Breaking

“Why isn’t he dead yet?” one of the guards asked.

“Sh-Shadow Spore,” Cole said. While the Nymar was feeding, his attention was too divided to keep Cole down. “Antidote doesn’t work on them,” he wheezed.

The guards were still baffled, so Cole took matters into his own hands by managing to sit up and drive his arms forward with enough power to snap the restraints around his chest. Without the tendrils that had been left behind, he wouldn’t have had the strength to do it. Now, with their innate power and a hunger that had gotten worse over his time in custody, he was able to grab the reinforced collar of the Nymar’s uniform and pull him away from the tech. Rather than drag the Nymar straight back, he eased its mouth away and then wrapped his other arm around its forehead to try and lift its feeding fangs out of the tech without tearing her flesh. Once the Nymar felt himself being separated from his meal, a thicker set of fangs emerged from his lower jaw to try and sink into her for good. If those were allowed to puncture the tech’s skin, Cole knew he might as well let him drink. The alternative would be to rip the Nymar off while taking most of her neck along with him.

“Somebody do something !” he shouted.

Blood sprayed from the tech’s opened vein. The Nymar’s hiss took on a deeper, almost demonic tone as his eyes became solid black orbs. Cole pulled back with all of his weight, forcing the Nymar away from the tech so she could hit the floor in a heap. The Nymar was quick to pull away from him, but now that the hostage was clear, guards surged into the room to turn confusion into chaos.

Cole found himself wanting to dive into that chaos and ride it out until it was over. That’s what Skinners did. Even though he’d managed to break his restraints, there was something stabbing him in the stomach that turned every movement into a lesson in agony. When he reached down to try and pull out the blade that had impaled him, the only thing he found was a bloodstain that was quickly spreading across the front of his hospital gown. Desperately, he ripped the material away until he could see fresh stitches marking an incision that had been cut from his chest all the way down to within eight inches of his groin.

“We know where you are, Skinner!” the Nymar raged. “We’ll know where all of you are! We’ll find you!”

Guards had surrounded the Nymar on all sides. Before he could spout any more threats, all of the guards pulled the triggers of the shotguns they carried. Cole’s ears exploded with the combined thunder of all of those weapons, followed by a high-pitched ringing that filled his brain. The pain filling his wounded belly dropped him back down onto the bed. By the time the scent of burnt gunpowder hit the back of his throat, he was being held down again and jabbed with more needles. This time, however, the darkness didn’t come.

Two more gunshots thumped through the roar filling Cole’s head. When he spoke, his own voice was the only thing that didn’t sound like it was three hundred miles away.

“What happened to me?” he shouted.

Although the guards who approached him seemed to hear what he’d asked, they didn’t reply. Through the bed and floor, Cole could feel the impact of more scuffling, which quickly subsided. Two guards dragged the Nymar away, and the only way he identified the bloody mess as such was from the uniform wrapped around the pulpy remains infused with severed, twitching tendrils.

“What’s happening?” Cole demanded.

But all he got from the remaining guards was a shotgun barrel pointed at him as another one tried to refasten the restraints. Since the padded leather belts had been pulled from their moorings, two guards stood watch over him with their shotguns constantly at the ready.

The tech was alive, but had to be carried out due to all the venom pumped into her system through the Nymar’s fangs. There was no way of telling how the vampire had gotten into the prison, but some of the venom spat into someone’s eyes could have given him enough control over that person to do the trick. By the time most of the mess was cleaned up, the blaring whine in Cole’s ears had decreased to an annoying ring.

Someone entered the room. He was dressed in a cheap brown suit that wasn’t cut well enough to hide the gun holstered under his left arm. Tall, athletically built, and pale, he had the look of an ex-cop or soldier who had been busted down to desk detail. “Is he still awake?” the man asked one of the guards.

“Yes,” Cole replied. “He is. What the hell did you do to him?”

The man spoke to the guard posted at the door in a clipped whisper. He then turned to Cole, smiled in condescendingly lukewarm fashion and approached the guard who stood closest to the bed. “You’ve been entrusted to this facility by your friend, Paige Strobel.”

“She told me to go with you guys back in Denver, so I did.”

“You didn’t have much choice, now did you?”

“There were choices,” Cole assured him. “I could have left like the others who got away from that warehouse.”

“How many others?”

Cole took no small amount of comfort from that question, since it meant that Rico, Prophet, and the Amriany had made it away from there. Changing the subject quickly enough for him to hear gears grinding, he asked, “What did you do to me?”

“We tried to do you a favor, Mr. Warnecki, and had a look at those tendrils that remain inside of you after the Nymar spore attached itself to your heart.”

It was a constant act of willpower for Cole to not dwell on the memory of when that thing was inside of him. Like a presence that never grew tired of trying to break his sanity, those thoughts lingered and whispered no matter how he tried to shut them out. The spore had been removed. He could only remind himself of that. He didn’t need to remind himself of what had been left behind. The constant pain of his body being garroted from the inside did that well enough.

“You cut me open?” he asked. No matter how obvious it had become, he still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it.

“Nothing worse than what was already done to you when the spore was removed,” the man replied. “And much more sterile.”

“If anything’s gonna kill me, infection is the least of my worries.”

“But that’s all that separates a human from a Nymar. A very aggressive infection. Also, as we’ve discovered over the last two weeks, very stubborn.”

“Two weeks ?”

The man nodded. “We didn’t exactly want you to wake up yet, but at least that murderer didn’t get to you before your stitches healed. I suppose we’ve got a more traditional kind of medicine to thank for that, huh? I think you’ve been in this game long enough to be of some use to us while you’re awake. Excellent.”

Cole sat up again, ignoring the pain that came from it. “Paige wouldn’t have signed on for this.”

“That doesn’t matter. She was kind enough to hand you over under the implication that we would do what we could to get those tendrils out of you. In return, we could study what was happening to you and why you were able to be seeded when something like that should be impossible.”

“So …you’re a Skinner?”

The man merely smiled curtly and walked forward to peel the gown away from Cole’s body so he could get a look at the fresh scar. With a few inquisitive prods of his finger against the incision, he brought Cole’s focus right back to where he wanted it to be. “The tendrils can’t be removed,” he said. as if he was talking about a mole on Cole’s leg. “We opened you up …several times and from several angles. You’re quite a healer, by the way. Those tendrils are wrapped around your major organs. Stomach, kidneys, and of course the intestines. Those are the nasty ones. We managed to remove a few sections here and there, but the rest are wrapped around you so tightly in spots that they’ve cut you. The only thing keeping you from bleeding out is that the tendrils also hold you together. That is, until they get hungry.

“You see, like any simple organism, these things develop ways of communicating. Theirs is to cinch in tighter to provoke an anger response that leads to pain and eventually to the conclusion that you need to feed them. Either that or they just tighten as some sort of reflex. I won’t be certain about that until we do some more studying. Of course, we may have to stop feeding them as a way to gauge how their reactions change. Since we seem to have a problem putting you back under, it’s best to keep you from gathering so much strength anyway. Surely you understand.”

“I want to talk to Paige.”

“I bet you do. She was never informed of your real location. Even the press believes you’re still being held in Canon City before being moved to Indiana.”