Lost Touch

For what felt like weeks, I drifted. Hands moved me and rearranged my floppy limbs, voices echoed through my hollow mind. I lay on something soft, a change from before—I thought so, at least.

Sometimes I felt a little warmer or a little cooler. But nothing hurt.

Even in my state of partial consciousness, that seemed odd. Very odd, in fact. Because I knew I’d been hurt. Injured, at least, and that should’ve included the other meaning of hurt, shouldn’t it? I had bandages. I was aware of having them changed: unwrapped, ointment, wrapped again.

But I couldn’t feel anything else beyond the very basic fact of being horizontal, or the sensation of touch versus air on my skin.

They’d hurt me. Again and again, they’d hurt me…until it didn’t hurt anymore. And that had been worse.

But it took me a long time to begin to remember.

The memories came back along with my ability to begin to use my own body again.

I’d been in prison. Not the official kind, with a warden and legal procedures and time spent in the yard lifting weights. I’d had a cell, and a thin pad on the floor, and a sink and a toilet. A high slit of a window cut into one thick concrete wall with no hope of real sunlight coming in through it, let alone an escape attempt going out the other way.

When they’d taken me out of the cell, I’d been dragged to a laboratory.

And they’d hurt me. Until it stopped hurting.

Later, weeks or months of more intermittent torment later, the cell door had broken open, wrenched off its hinges by an enormous creature with glowing eyes and monstrous fangs and claws. He’d been holding an unconscious naked man draped over his shoulder with one arm, with rivulets of fresh blood running down the claws of the other hand and spattered on his face.

And chillingly, he’d had blood on those fangs, too.

Someone else came into the cell once the door clanged against the wall, flung aside with a single motion of the creature’s massive arm like it’d been a piece of balsa wood and not reinforced steel. This one had blood all over him, too, and fangs and claws—though not as impressively terrifying as the creature’s. When he picked me up off the mattress, he carefully held the claws away, not so much as nicking me, wrapping strong arms around me so gently I could’ve cried.

Well, I did cry. But I’d done a lot of that in the time I’d spent in that cell, in that place, in the lab upstairs where they hurt me until they couldn’t anymore.

They’d been delighted with that, which confused the hell out of me. Why would people who’d spent so much effort causing me pain be so pleased when they failed? When they cut into my arm and the blood ran down, and I blinked at it, not understanding why I couldn’t feel it anymore.

That memory hit me hard enough that my eyes finally opened. Searing, blinding light, and I gasped and thrashed and winced away from it, and there were hands on me…

“It’s all right! I promise it’s all right, I won’t hurt you, you’re safe, I promise—”

The voice, deep and a little rough, cut off as I opened my eyes again and stared right into—his eyes.

The one who’d come into my cell. The one who’d lifted me off that mattress, whose shoulder I’d leaned my head on as I passed out from shock and blood loss and whatever else my torturers had done to me.

He had dark brown eyes, almost black.

The rest of his face barely registered. Those eyes…I remembered looking into them for a moment before I lost consciousness.

Those eyes meant I was safe. That he couldn’t possibly be lying to me.

I dropped back against the softness I lay on, panting, gazing up at him.

His hands still rested on my shoulders where he’d been holding me, trying to keep me still as I panicked.

My throat felt like sandpaper. “Okay,” I said—or tried to. It came out a hoarse, incoherent rasp.

“Shit,” he said. “Water. You need water.” He let me go and stood up. Off the bed, I realized. Everything blinked in and out of focus around me like I had a strobe light in my brain.

Bed. A bedroom. Blink, waver. My fingers twitched, which felt momentous after not moving any of my own body for…maybe a long time.

Colors started to pop out at me now that my vision had adjusted to actual light. Pale gray walls with a vibrant landscape hung up, trees and a river and a red and purple sky.

And honest-to-God yellow sunlight flowing over all of it like honey.

Tears pricked the corners of my eyes and my vision blurred, clearing after a moment.

My rescuer’s frowning face appeared in front of me again, and now it looked like an actual face and not a watercolor smear with eyes. Largish nose, firm lips, and strong, masculine bones, all perfectly arranged and topped off with glossy dark brown bedhead. I’d been saved from my cell by a guy who belonged on a magazine cover. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it added to the unreality of everything around me and everything in my head.

“How much pain are you in?” he asked, holding out a glass of water. I tried to sit up and failed. “Fuck, you can’t answer that anyway, your throat’s too dry. Sorry, I’m a moron.”

He slipped his arm behind my shoulders and boosted me up, letting me lean against his side and holding the glass to my lips. The water tasted like nothing I’d ever even imagined, like life itself flowing into my mouth and cooling my throat and esophagus all the way down. I guzzled it like an animal, wetting my chin, drops dribbling onto his hand and running down my neck.

At last I’d emptied the glass, and he carefully settled me back down, putting it aside on the nightstand.

I licked my lips, wincing as my tongue caught on the chapped cracks in them. He could’ve been a model, and I must’ve looked like death warmed over. Only not warmed quite enough. Death lightly microwaved?

“I have pain pills for you if you need them,” he said. “Just tell me what you need. And ask me any questions you want. I know you must have a million, but I promise you, you don’t need to ask if you’re in any danger here. I swear, we got out, we got away, and you’re as safe as you’ve ever been in your life.”

We got out. We got away. My mind spun into frantic overload, my vision going all wonky again and my breath coming faster at the thought of asking all the follow-up questions he obviously expected me to ask—all the questions that should’ve been urgently trying to pour out of me.

I’d been in that cell. In those labs.

And I couldn’t remember how long I’d been there.

I couldn’t remember what had come before that.

I couldn’t fucking remember.

His voice came through like bursts of static, distant, barely audible over the pounding of my heart and the rasping of my breath and a high-pitched keening sound…that was also coming from me.

Blackness descended again. I tried to fight it and failed.