CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOPE
It doesn’t take too long after they have left before I start to feel the effects of the liquid. My body seems to turn to ice from the inside, but my skin is on fire. My skin bubbles and bubbles all the way down to the last layers of the dermis and all I can do is scream out in the pain. There is nothing else to do but scream. The heat that radiates from me feels so hot, so intense I’m sure my skin is melting off me but as I try to look around the room everything seems to remain the same. Heat soon gets replaced by pinpricks of pain that grace every part of my skin as the fire remains, joined by an itching that soon takes centre stage. Millions of tiny pinpricks travel up and down my arms, legs, stomach, every inch of me is covered in them and I want to scratch them away as they attempt to cover my body, my whole being is in this craziness. My soul seems to be trying to fold inside me as the drugs take their unforgiving hold. I can’t stand the pinpricks as they grow in strength and take over every touch I feel. I try to move to lessen the intense heat, but I can’t do anything and when I do it seems to make the pain even worse. I feel the tears pooling in my eyes again and again as a new wave of pain takes over and when they start to shed they leave a path of lava in their wake. I feel my skin boiling away under the liquid and all I can do to help myself is to scream once again into the darkness. I scream and scream until my throat becomes too sore to do anything but a low whimper. Seconds feel like hours and hours feel like years as the pain seems to become an extension of my body. There is nothing else to do but allow the drugs to swoop me away and consume me.
I must have allowed myself to go too far into their state of demise because as I come to my breathing wheezes through the agony of my ribs. I try to move but my body no longer feels like my own as it sings with the pain from having my arms up for so long and trying to keep myself steady with just my tiptoes on the floor as I go through torture.
I’m so cold, the heat of my skin seems to have lessened but the shivers I now have only seem to control me and send my body into a state of numbness. I can see no way out. It has a hold of me that as time goes by makes my body begin to feel somewhat normal.
It feels like forever.
It is forever, just strung up like meat going through a pain I never thought existed. I know it must only be a few hours at least but, God, does it feel longer when it’s the only thing you can think about. Forever, it just feels like forever, and I know that it must be a lie because Mark said I have only been with him for a week. A week is such a small amount of time in the real world but for me in this made-up one it just feels like an endless loop of nothing.
Nothing, that’s what my life has been reduced to, a black hole of nothing. Has it really only been a week since the man I loved turned into the spawn of the devil? A week since my world turned upside down? Everything that I once took for granted rips through my heart with need and longing. My family, the feel of the sun heating my body on a hot summer’s day, birds waking me up with their song, a gentle breeze against my skin and so many other things that happen every day, but you never even think about them all. I miss my normal world and right now the only thing I can think of is how I may never see, hear or touch any of it again. The normal simplicity they bring to my world is a cure I can’t reach. I know they are so close and, yet they are so far out of my reach it hurts. Mark has made reaching them an impossible feat. Mark and his father and who was the other man? The man who seemed like an angel compared to the devils that grace beside him. I think Mark’s dad called him Zac. Zac? It seems to suit him so well, the look of him and the sound of his voice just melted into his name. I try to move my legs a little to help with the heat that is building in my stomach and travelling down to my core. It gets intense the longer I think of that man and his chocolate eyes, but I shouldn’t be thinking of him at all.
What does he mean to me, to my future?
Will he hurt me just like Mark?
Is he the devil too?
I shouldn’t be thinking of him, I shouldn’t be thinking about his eyes, his lips, when I’m at the mercy of him and his friends.
No right at all, none of them have, they consume me with their hurt and pain and I can’t allow them to hurt anything else of me. I have no idea what my future holds, how he will be a part of it. He has no right to be in my thoughts, but I can’t deny how attractive he is.
The eyes I can tell would be beautiful.
The lips I want to kiss.
Handsome features that any woman would melt in front of and the image of what could lie beneath the clothes that fit his frame so well.
How different he seemed from Mark and his father.
How he’s not quite the same as them, not quite the same monster, but I’m forced back to reality when I hear something from the other side of the door and the force of it crashes my current world all around me in a pool of bricks and stones, forcing me to remember it all. Mark and his father hurt me, there’s no way out, they have me trapped, just where they want me. They hurt me, and this Zac just stood by and let it happen, he is just as bad as them. Here I am, left hanging where Mark left me, and all I can think about is his friend’s eyes and the way he made my body heat up. How can I think that after everything they put me through? Every agony hurt more than the last and all I can do is cry as I think of home. As I think of a future, a home I could still have. I don’t know if it’s out of sheer boredom, exhaustion, or the pain that my body has been made to endure but at some point I lose my ability to stay strong and I lose consciousness once again as a new blackness claims me.