Chapter 1
Steele Pack
Darius—Age 14
Something had happened. Something completely out of the ordinary, which was all he knew, was pulling him out of the mundaneness of his life.
For fourteen years, his life had always been the same. Day in and day out, the routine never changed.
He woke up, ate what he later learned to be a bland gruel mixture that just provided him with the vitamins and minerals necessary for him to survive, and then he was taken out to the larger room, which the male, Lucian, referred to as a lab, to have his blood drawn, something that happened frequently in his life.
He was then returned to his room and provided with a book to read. His mother would talk to him some, but as he’d gotten older, she’d grown quieter and distant, mostly sitting on the bed staring at the wall. She’d become withdrawn, not saying much, and he’d learned later on that she was suffering from a very deep depression from being held captive for so long.
But he hadn’t known that until much later, when he was free from that place.
For the last few days, he’d seen things in the lab begin to disappear. The papers and notebooks that were scattered all over one far counter had all been picked up and piled into neat stacks before being removed completely.
The tubes that were used to collect blood, along with the other supplies, were gone, along with the rack that they all were lined up in. The whiteboards that had held copious amounts of notes were clean, their white surfaces sparkling brightly. The microscope that he would give anything to be able to look through just once was now missing.
All of the counters were empty now, the surfaces clean, and a strong smell filled all of the rooms, burning his nose with its sharp, pungent odor. He didn’t like that smell, and while he’d caught whiffs of it in the past, over the last few days, it had been overwhelming, almost choking him with the noxious fumes.
His blood hadn’t been drawn at all since yesterday. Normally, Lucian drew it three times each day, filling one tube with the dark red liquid each time, but he hadn’t for the last few days. The boy had barely seen him. Lucian had only taken one tube from him yesterday.
He wasn’t going to complain, though. He hated having his blood drawn and hated the feel of the tourniquet wrapped around his arm, squeezing it tightly. He’d especially hated it when he was younger, as Lucian had a difficult time getting his blood from his tiny veins. He’d ended up bruised quite often, the black and purple marks decorating his arms, though they’d faded quickly. Hematomas, he’d read in one book. Nothing to really worry about.
He wasn’t upset that it had all stopped.
He could hear Lucian, though, moving around, shuffling things, dropping things, and making what sounded like a mess. A large mess, though the last time he’d gotten to leave his cell, he’d seen that pretty much everything was gone. The counters were cleaned off and wiped down, the refrigerator where Lucian stored his blood samples was gone, and all of the textbooks that he’d spent hours and hours reading were missing.
The lab looked nothing like it had. There was no trace of anything. The only scent he could detect now was the one he’d come to abhor over the last few days. The sharp one that made his nose burn. He couldn’t even detect his mother’s or Lucian’s scents anymore.
He was starting to wonder if he would ever get that smell out of his nose again or if it was all he would ever smell. It seemed that way, like it had been imprinted in his nostrils permanently.
Lucian had come in last night and injected his mother with something. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so, though the boy had no idea what it was. Lucian had turned then, studying him for a long moment. “It’s going to come back and bite me in the ass, but I can’t do it. You’re much too valuable.” He looked down at the syringe in his hand, sighed, and left the room, locking the door behind him.
He hadn’t known what Lucian meant by that, or at least not at first.
The boy hadn’t heard any noise from him after that. And then everything had gone silent, and he realized the one noise that had always been a comfort to him was gone. His mother’s heartbeat.
The boy had spent his entire life in three rooms. The room his mother and he lived in, the lab, and a small bathroom. He’d never been out of those rooms.
His mother was always there as well, either in the lab, their room, or the bathroom. She never went anywhere else.
He only ever went into the lab to have his blood drawn. He hated having it drawn and hated being stuck with a needle, and he’d always fought Lucian, who had taken to strapping him down to a table, which had been incredibly traumatic for him. He’d scream then until his throat was raw and he was practically inconsolable. His mother would hold him after that, helping him to calm down.
Once in a while, an old male would come down and visit the lab. He usually would just speak to Lucian, though he would occasionally look in on the boy and his mother. He didn’t like the old male. There was something about him that was off.
He always made the air feel heavy when he was around them, and the boy didn’t like that. But one day, he had come down to their small room and told him to stop crying and fighting when Lucian drew his blood. After that, the tears wouldn’t come anymore, and the fight had gone out of him. He would sit in the chair quietly and let Lucian take his blood. Even when it hurt, he wasn’t able to protest. All he could do was sit with his arm out until Lucian told him to return to his room.
The boy had no idea of the passage of time. For the first several years of his life, he’d just existed in his cell, playing with random small things and with his mother. He didn’t know that time was a thing or that there was daytime or nighttime. He knew that sometimes he slept for long periods of time, and then he would be awake, and he would read.
He really wasn’t even aware of himself and how he looked. He had no mirror to see his reflection or to know what he looked like. Every so often, Lucian would shave all of the hair off his head after drawing his blood. He wasn’t given a choice about any of it. It was just the way things were.
He had no idea how messed up his life was. It wasn’t until he got older and his mother requested books for him so he could learn that he began to realize something might be off, that his life might not be completely normal, but even that he couldn’t be sure of.
His mother had taught him to read and write, something he had easily picked up on, though his education was mostly of books about DNA and other scientific things. He read a lot, mostly because it passed the time and he had nothing better to do. He knew way too much about those things, as retaining anything he read came naturally to him.
He didn’t know about fiction and stories that could be found in books. Lucian didn’t own any fiction, and none of his other books contained any type of story. His mother occasionally told him stories, though a lot of the time, she was too tired. She slept a lot, and when she did, he’d have to entertain himself.
It wasn’t until much later that he realized Lucian was impregnating his mother, and she was never able to carry the pups. His mother had been pregnant more often than not with Lucian’s experiments, and her body had been slowly giving out. The strain of carrying pup after pup, and then the added strain of miscarriages and stillborn births, had been taking its toll on her body and slowly killing her.
