Vengance

Note: As before brackets mean a flash back



For a few moments I stand unmoving as I look at my victim, wondering what new hell I shall visit upon him now. It feels like just yesterday that I used a blow torch to remove all of his fingers and toes before injecting him with a mild acid so his entire body felt like it was dissolving from the inside out…. Really it was three days ago but he has already recovered completely, his body showing no marks from any one of the dozens of horrible things I have done to him in the four and a half months since I had been tracked down after my little break down.

‘Why do you keep him alive?’ the oh so familiar and welcome voice in my head inquires. ‘What purpose does keeping him alive and torturing him serve?’

I chuckle a little bit. “Crystal… he is much to valuable to be wasted by killing him, I can learn so much from his living tissue, I can figure out what exactly the Ricward did to make him like this.”

I hear her sigh, she obviously dose not approve. ‘You’re lying to me Joe, you should know that you can’t keep a secret from someone sharing your brain with you, you have no intention of every figuring out what they did in order to change someone who had injected themselves with an experimental regeneration serum into an almost unstoppable killing machine. I know you are just keeping him alive because you enjoy doing this to him.’

“Then why ask questions you already know the answers to?” I’m not annoyed at all, normally when someone questions me it really bothers me but Crystal was always different, she never was obvious about her questions, if she asked one question it was to get a different answer, often just to see if I was willing to be honest with myself about my motives. “Fine, you got me, I am keeping your killer alive and putting him through hell just because I enjoy doing it, I find it rather cathartic.”

She still does not approve of what I do, I know she never will. ‘So using a red hot metal spike to burn out his eyes is emotionally cleansing for you?’

“Oh!” I mock squeal, sounding excited, “I haven’t done that one in a really long time.” My mind is made up now and I know where I want to start, I look around my lab for where I had put the metal spikes and the blow torch I could use to heat them but I am interrupted by the sound of James’s voice.

“Talking to yourself again Holmes?” His voice is deep, betraying only amusement, none of the fear that I have tried very hard to instill in him.

“Oh good the monster is awake.” I give up on the hot spikes idea, a knife will work just fine, the heated spikes always make the eyes burst pretty quickly and damage the nerves to much for him to feel all of the pain. A sharp knife pushed in a twisted will do enough.

“I find it interesting that you call me a monster.” Still no fear, he knows that I am about to cause him intense pain but he isn’t worried at all… damn him, four and a half months feeling nothing but pain at my hands and he still does not fear me. “I mean I killed a few people and that makes me a monster… but its only one person that matters to you right? That whore Crystal, killing her is what makes me a monster to you. But really, I just killed them, I never locked them away from the world and stuck them full of knives, never peeled back their skin, never sawed off arms… you have done those things though.” That comment about Crystal is meant to make me mad, make me lose my temper so I will loose my cool and just go crazy on him, spend all of my pent up rage in a short amount of time instead of enjoying this like I normally do. He wants to make sure it does not take as long as it normally does, that means he is afraid of the pain… it’s a start.

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” I quote softly, I know that doing this would be called wrong in most cases but I just can’t see how it is wrong to do it to him. “You didn’t just kill her, you tried to rape her, broke nearly every bone in her body and then snapped her neck, you did this while I lay on the ground nearly dead and unable to do anything… and then when she was dead you laughed about it.” Despite my best efforts to remain calm my voice begins to crack and tears form in my eyes, but I take a deep breath and force myself to remain calm, I don’t want him to get to me.

“Yea I did do that.” He is laughing now, no doubt enjoying the pain he is causing me, maybe he thinks I will finally kill him this time, if he does he is mistaken. His next words however catch me by surprise. “You know it is all your fault, you made me what I am.”

I am frozen in place, my breath caught in my throat… it feels like my heart has been gripped by ice. Its not like I have never thought that, in the deepest corners of my mind, on those dark nights after Crystal’s death when I had considered taking my own life. He is referring to my regeneration project, a serum that would in theory bond to DNA of whomever it was injected into, altering their physiology so that they would be able to recover from almost anything, lost limbs growing back, damaged organs repairing themselves, and broken bones mending almost right away. I had tried to keep a lid on it but somehow word had spread through the crew and the only finish batch of it, one does worth, was stolen by James who injected himself with it. But it hadn’t done anything to him, it bonded just as planed but his physiology remained the same. Considering it a failure I scraped the project. But then, years later, nearly a year ago James along with several other SA were captured by the Ricward. For three and a half months they were tortured and experimented on, all but James died within a month… but something they did to him affected him in a way no one could have foreseen, the regeneration serum became active and in addition to granting him a healing factor he grew twelve inches taller and his strength and speed increased ten fold, at least. It also made him mentally unstable, he had been a bit strained before, the reason Crystal had dumped him a long time ago, a few months before we were conscripted, he was obsessive almost to the point of stalking and used to threaten to kill himself if she broke up with him, but what he had gone through in the hands of the enemy had made him a true sociopath. When we first recovered him I had suggested putting him into a holding cell while tests were run to find out how he had survived, even after he passed the initial psychological test I had felt like something was wrong. But Matt had felt it would hurt moral if we locked away a recently rescued POW. And within days of his return people vanished… then he went after Crystal.

I have to try very hard not to think about that night, but I can‘t stop myself, I think of how she and I had just celebrated our one year anniversary with a romantic dinner followed by some down right amazing sex in her room. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, her body wrapped safe in my arms… and then out of the darkness of her room a massive fist emerged from the shadows and connected with my face. That one punch broke my nose and nearly made me black out, a second punch shattered my sternum with a sick crunch… when I came to I heard bones breaking, he was holding her up against the wall with one hand around her neck, his free hand slamming into her over and over again. Then he turned, looked me right in the eyes and as he smiled, reached out and snapped her neck, laughing as he left the room. We had been caught by surprise, no alarm had been sounded.

I snap back to the present, seeing the amusement in his eyes. “No James.” I speak in barely more then a whisper. “What happened just gave you an excuse to act like a monster, a reason to let out what was always inside of you.” I am tired of talking and grab a scalpel off of a nearby table, walking up onto a step ladder so that he and I are eye to eye. “Do you know what I love about what happened to you?” I ask with a grin as I grab a fistful of his hair with my left hand. “You are strong and fast as hell and you will survive almost anything… but it does nothing to help your tolerance for pain, if anything it makes you even more sensitive to it.” Without warning I lash out with the razor sharp blade, cutting him open less then an inch below his left eye, a nice horizontal slice that gushes blood and makes him howl in pain. That scream is all it takes to make me feel so much better, like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, and the best part is I know it has only just started. I slowly twist the blade so it is angled toward his eye. Whistling cheerfully I drag the blade up through his flesh, feeling it scrape over bone and then without even any resistance it splits open his eye, blood and a clear fluid pouring from the ruined orb as I push the blade in deeper, twisting it. Still he screams as I continue to whistle, but I know that if I don’t do something the pain might make him pass out and I can’t have that.

“Computer administer stimulants.” I say calmly, knowing that in a few moments he won’t be able to enjoy blissful unconsciousness no matter how much he may desire it.

I get off of the step ladder and almost skip to a table where a large razor sharp knife is waiting for me, it is time for the part that I enjoy the most of all the playing around. “Guess what time it is shit brains..” I pick up the knife and hold it up for him to see in my right hand while in my left I hold up a flask of lye flakes.

Kicking the step ladder aside I plunge the knife into the flesh of his chest, pressing in hard until it strikes his sternum and then push it in deeper, it slides smoothly into the bone with very little resistance, the knife was a gift from a Kavardian warrior whose life I saved after he was poisoned by a Ricward blade, the knife is a work of art, hand crafted from a unique alloy folded dozens of times, nearly indestructible and will never lose its edge, to use a cliché the bone is little more then butter to this beautiful knife.

James screams even more loudly now as I very slowly carve into him with the knife, carving her name into his chest. It takes just over a minute to complete my carving and after I pull out the knife I open the flask and throw the lye onto the open wound… then the real shrieking really starts as the smell of burning flesh fills the air, the lye reacting with the blood from his body and causing a chemical burn. If you have ever seen Fight Club then you have heard a description of what lye plus moisture does to a person. The smoke coils from his blistering flesh as his body tries to repair the damage as it is being done to him, I have done this to him countless times and there is still no permanent mark on his skin, but I can still see it even when it is not there… I know where it should be.

“Had enough yet James?” I ask cheerfully, put in an amazing mood by this torture.

Surprisingly he has the strength of will to hawk a god of spit at me, he missed but that act of defiance alone really pissed me off. “Oh you are really going to suffer for that one.”

“No he won’t.” A commanding voice shaking with barely restrained anger.

“How did you get in Matt?” This is not what I wanted, him finding out about this was never anticipated, I had been so careful about showing no sign of what I had been up to. I turn slowly and look him in the eye, it is obvious he is just moments away from throwing himself at me, he is literally trembling with rage.

“Your password… ten, sixteen, nineteen, eighty-seven… you think I didn’t know Crystal’s birthday?” Of course, they had been friends since they were in diapers and in my arrogance I hadn’t believed he would ever think to try to get into my lab, and I had never bothered to shut the door to this room when I was inside of it. He looks from my eyes up to James and then over to the large tube filled with blue gel where Crystal’s body is being preserved until I find a way to restore her. “Why is that monster still alive?” As he asked me that he takes a step forward and wraps a hand around my neck, lifting me from the ground so that the toes of my shoes just barely scrape the floor. Of course he wants to know about that, I had told him that I had blown off James’s head and then incinerated the body in the waste disposal unit.

Of course I will tell him why but first I need to make him drop me, those robotic arms could snap my neck like a twig. “Deus ex machina.” I say, no fear in my voice.

The effects of those words are imitate, before he even has time to ask why I mentioned the god out of the machine the arm holding me goes limp and a mild electric shock courses through his body, making him drop to the ground, paralyzed and on the edge of unconsciousness.

“I am sorry I had to do that Captain but I didn‘t want you to lose your temper and really hurt me.” I sigh as I look down at him and then turn to look up at James, it was time for me to end this. “Computer, administer the End Game toxin.” I had developed that in order to kill him once and for all if I ever needed to, the toxin is administered intravenously and it causes the cells of the body to liquefy very slowly, in other words it painfully turns any living thing injected with it into a pile of goo.

Then I look back down at Matt who has recovered and looks as angry as ever. “What the fuck did you just do to me?” He gasps.

“I activated a failsafe.” I explain. “Something I built into those arms of yours just incase you ever did anything that would put either the crew or myself at risk and needed to be disabled… I never intended to use it like this.”

“Why in the name of all that is holy is he still alive?”

“He won’t be much longer.” I glance back at James and see that he is trying to scream but his throat is melting and no noise can be heard. “But I kept him alive because death was to good for him, he deserved to suffer.” He seems to have calmed down a bit by now, obviously his curiosity has over ridden any anger he felt, but I am not so optimistic to think that he won’t be mad about the failsafe later on.

“And is that Crystal’s body in that tube?” Now he is definitely more curious then mad at me.

“Yes it is.” I keep it short and simple, I don’t want to have to explain myself to him.

He tries to climb unsteadily to his feet but because his arms are not exactly working right just yet, they will take a few minutes to reboot. “You are trying to find a way to bring her back aren’t you?” How the hell did he know that. “Britney told me that you might do something like this.”

Ah Britney, a former cheerleader who had become our ships therapist. No one really would ever think that she and I would be friends, the geek and the cheerleader… but when we had met we had bonded over our unrequited loves… at the time I had been in love with Crystal but had been to afraid to act on those feelings while she was in love with Paco, a guy who would never settle down. Britney had always been able to see right through me when it came to how I felt about Crystal. I can’t stop myself from flashing back to a meeting right after her funeral.

[I had been standing at a viewing window, staring out into space and wanting nothing more then to be alone when she walked up behind me. “Just go away.” I muttered, not wanting to be bothered by her.

“Joe…” She whispered softly, obviously not knowing how to say the right thing “The girl of your dreams loved you. That's more than most people ever get.”

I had turned then and looked her right in the eyes, I have no doubt I had looked like a mess, dark bags under my eyes and tears streaming down my face. “I know… but that just isn’t enough.”

“Joe what are you…” She had started to talk but I pushed past her before she could finish her sentence. I hadn’t started to hear Crystal yet, had no idea about how she had cheated death, but I was already thinking that I might find a way to bring her back.]

“I should have known she would figure out that I wasn’t going to let go.” Really I was not all that surprised now that I knew Matt’s source. “I am going to bring her back Matt.”

He looks me in the eyes, by now he is back on his feet. “Normally I would have you thrown in the brig for not only assaulting me with that little trick you did with my arms but for lying to me and keeping a dangerous freak like James alive just so you could play your sadistic games… but we are going to need you more then ever now.”

My curious nature means I have to know why he came in here, why I am not going into the brig for a very long stay. “So what news did you come here to give me?”

He grins now, obviously he is very excited about whatever is going to happen. “Its been about a year and a half Joe…”

There is no doubt more he wants to say but I cut him off. “You mean it is finally time?”

“That’s right… the Empire has finally given the go ahead, in one weeks time the operation to liberate earth will begin.”

Maybe more will come…