Vampiric: Chapter Six, Part 6

“She's still resisting,” a man with a clipboard said, his face shrouded in shadows.

“She will cooperate,” an angry voice growled from the shadows. A tall, wrinkled man following the words into the light. “Won't you.” A too long nose and tiny, wide-set eyes leveled with me.

When the lights had come back on, two men in black combat gear collected me from the cell—rather roughly considering I wasn't going to fight them; I could have, but it wasn’t worth the effort or the energy. They dragged me into another black room with one bright light, like where I had been before but different. Here, I could hear the whirring of machines. I was shoved into a chair that looked like it would better serve a death sentence than “research.” Straps were tightened across my wrists, shoulders, and ankles, as if anticipating some thrashing; they had also placed sensors on my temples and either side of my collar bone.

I didn't know how long I had been there, but so far the specialists had thrown objects at me, trying to scare me into submission. Each time, I diverted the object. What they hadn’t realized was I had no intention of fighting them directly, but they were not going to make me lose control.

“What will you do?” the other man asked, a scratching sound coming from his clipboard.

A sneer spread across the cracked lips of the one in front of me before he backed away. He reached for something on the tray—where the knives they had thrown earlier had come from. His face was hidden again in the darkness, but the object in his hand glinted in the light, a biting edge of metal smiling maliciously at me.

The man gaited slowly towards me again, my eyes locked on the long blade in his hand.

“I think we'll have to try something different, James,” he said in a low voice, a perkiness to it that didn't fit the mood. At least, not from where I was sitting. “You see, the other two elements have no choice. They don't have water or earth to come to their rescue. But with her,” he sneered again under the light, “we can't deprive her of that use. She's no good to us dead.”

“So what's the plan?” James inquired amidst more scratching sounds.

“A direct attack,” he replied, as if it had always been so simple. “We take the object we've been trying to scare her with, and make it so she has to acknowledge its existence.” He sliced the knife across my forearm.

I flinched, gasping, jerking my injured arm in an attempt to pull it out of danger and cover the wound. It hurt, more so because I hadn’t expected it.

“There was a spike in her brain activity,” a feminine voice called from the darkness.

The man turned toward the voice; “The kind we want?”

“Affirmative.”

She talked on about something dealing with my mom and the other experiments in progress, but my mind had raced to other things. If that had sparked the start of a reaction they wanted, I was in trouble.  Not just a little bit, either. They were closer to getting what they wanted, and I was fairly certain I was helpless to stop them.