glasses magnified the size of his eyes. He reached into the breast pocket of his white lab coat and produced a long glass tube. This he opened, showing me its contents. The tube was a quiver for three-inch needles. The man selected one. “This will not hurt,” he said.
Smiling kindly, as if to reassure me, the man stabbed the first needle deep into my right bicep. I flinched, but the restraints prevented me from moving my arm.
“Don’t move,” the man said, pressing the needle deeper into the muscle. “You would not want to break the needle. Then we might have to dig it out.” His head ticked up and down as he counted to twenty. When he finished counting, he pulled the needle from my arm, wiped the blood off with a cloth, and examined it under the light. “Good. Good.”
“The needle turns green if the compound has dispersed properly,” the man said. He held the needle over my face so I could see it; but of course, the light engulfed it and I could not see anything.
“You’re in excellent shape, Colonel Harris. Sometimes the compound bunches up, especially when a patient has bad circulation. With you, it’s spread through your upper extremities perfectly.”
He placed the needle on the table beside me. I twisted my neck and managed to get a look at it. The shaft of that needle had turned jade green. I imagined myself sticking that needle into the man’s eye, stabbing it into the eye and pushing it all the way through until it jabbed into his brain.
The man held the tube so that I could see it. He wanted me to know what he was doing. I could tell this by the slow way he selected the next needle and held it up for me. “Now let’s be sure that the compound is spreading through your lower extremities,” he said cheerfully.
“Get specked,” I sneered.
“Don’t take this personally, Colonel Harris. I’m just doing my job. Besides, this is nothing. This is just a small pin-prick. Don’t get worked up. In a minute it will all be over; and I assure you, you will forget all about the pin test.” With that, he stabbed the needle deep into the calf of my right leg. This was not like an injection where the medic presses the point against your skin, then neatly slides the needle into place. This man jabbed his needle in as if it were an ice pick. I winced, but the straps held my leg still. The man repeated everything, counting to twenty, pulling and cleaning the needle, and then showing me the results.
“Excellent. Now, let’s just be sure the compound has dispersed properly throughout.” He selected another needle, then paused. “This one may hurt. I assure you, you will forget about it soon enough.” And he plunged that third needle into my stomach.
The pain was brilliant and clear, a flash of silver lightning that shot from my stomach to my brain. I grimaced as he counted to twenty. I took short, panting breaths, feeling the stitch that the needle created between my stomach muscles.
“Get specked,” I hissed between gritted teeth. “Get specked you goddamned son of …”
He clicked his tongue at me. “There is nothing personal about this,” he said.
“Oh, yes, there is,” I sighed as he pulled the bloody needle out of my gut. The muscles in my neck relaxed and my head clunked back against the metal surface of the table.
“You won’t believe this, but we created this compound for humane purposes. It lets us communicate pain to your brain without inflicting physical damage,” the man said. “What you will feel is a very amplified version of the damage your body is taking.”
“Get specked,” I repeated. The hormone had not yet kicked in. I was weak and tired and scared. Would it be Freeman who came for me, or would it be Yamashiro? I would not be tortured.
“I will give you a brief demonstration of pain. Then, perhaps, we can discuss the information I am looking for before we proceed much further.”
It would be Freeman. If I could smuggle myself aboard a transport, so could he. He was seven feet tall and black-skinned, which might make him easy to spot, but he would find a way in and kill this bastard.
The man held up a harness that reminded me of a bit for a horse. He showed it to me. “Colonel, I suggest that you take this voluntarily. If you don’t wear this, you may bite your tongue, and that would not be good for either of us.”
“Get specked,” I said again. I could not think of anything else to say.
“Suit yourself,” he said. Then he held up a five-inch chrome-plated wand. It looked like a fancy pen. There were no wires hanging out of it and no lights built into it. It was just a plain, silvery shaft. He held it a few inches away from my face, giving me an opportunity to take a good look at it.
“Generally we like to start out light, maybe a couple of hundred volts, but since you’re a Liberator, I think that would be a waste of time.” With this he ran the wand over the left side of my chest, along my ribs, and down to my naval. For an instant I felt nothing but the smooth warm surface of the wand on my skin. That pleasant sensation might have lasted one tenth of a second. Then the pain shot through me.
The pain was like a blaring noise that engulfs everything else around it. My thoughts turned into a silver-white flash, possibly a visualization of the electrical jolt splashing out of my blood and into my nervous system. Every muscle in my body contracted. I would have arched my back, but the straps across my pelvis and shoulders held me in place. Somehow I managed to arch the area of my spine that was between the restraints.
My hands balled into fists and my shoulders tensed and bunched. My jaw clenched so tightly that my teeth should have shattered. Had my tongue slipped between my teeth, I would have sheered it off.
Then, as suddenly as it started, the pain disappeared and my body dropped to the table. I lay there on that cold metal, my back no more rigid than a wet rag. And, for the first time since I had been brought into this room, I felt the hormone flowing through my body. It had probably been released during that jolt as the shock of the electricity overwhelmed my brain.
“My, you Liberators are tough,” the man said. “Normally my patients start to sob about now.” The man looked down at me. “Still, you did mess yourself. That’s something.”
It was true. During the jolt, my body had let go of all the waste it was holding. Far from sobbing, however, I would have broken this man’s neck if not for the restraints. My thoughts and head were clear. My desires were violent, and this time I knew my bloodlust was not just a response to the endorphins flowing through my veins.
I chanced a glance at the biofeedback monitor and saw something interesting. My readings had flat-lined again. Calmed by the hormone, my brain activity and stress level were normal. My heart was beating a bit fast and I found that I could speed up my pulse by fighting against the restraints—isometric exercise.
“In the old days, they used to kill people with the voltage you just experienced,” the man said. “Did you know that? You just experienced twenty seconds of two thousand volts. Well, actually, it was ten volts …the wand only has a ten-volt charge, but your neural receptors believed they were taking a two thousand-volt shock. That was the voltage they used to use in electric chairs. They would electrocute the condemned for thirty seconds at two thousand volts to make them pass out, then they would drop the voltage and finish the job.
“Now you know how those old outlaws felt just before they died. The only difference is that this won’t kill you. This won’t fry your brain or damage your vital organs, so we can keep you riding the lightning for a much longer time. The only thing we have to worry about is having a fear-induced heart attack. Judging by your readings, Colonel Harris, I don’t think that will be a problem.
“So, think you could hang on to your sanity through a ten-minute jolt?”
I wanted to tell this asshole to go speck himself, but I did not want to show that I was in control of myself. More than that, I did not want to make him angry.
“You know, the first time I tried this procedure I killed the man. The guy died …my fault entirely. I had him on a table just like this one, only it had electric restraints.
“It was just a little shock, just a disabling shock. It shouldn’t have hurt the guy at all, but, you know, with the compound increasing the voltage …Anyway, the restraints had a two hundred-volt charge, so he got the equivalent of forty thousand volts nonstop. His heart burst.
“I don’t know if that would happen to you. This is such an excellent opportunity. I never imagined I could ever work with a clone of your make. You have no idea what an amazing specimen you are, and to think, they can mass-produce you.”
I was not sure how to act, so I lay in place shaking my head and moaning softly. I acted as if all of the
