Chapter 1

 

     He never saw it coming.  How could he?  The black sack they had stuck over his head blocked all his sight, so when the blow came, even though he was expecting one…or something painful…it still came as a shock.  But that wasn’t the worst of it, because the big fist had caught him right on top of his left ear, when it hit, it burst his eardrum.  The pain from that was worse than the punch.  He screamed for all he was worth as the sharp pain brough tears to his eyes.

     There had been no avoiding it.  He was tied to a chair.  At the mercy of men whose only purpose was to bring him as much pain as they possibly could.  As bad as things had been, the pain in his ear was by far the worst.  So far.

     “You took my Angel from me, and now I’m going to make sure that you spend as much time in absolute hell as possible…for as long as we can keep you alive!”  The words rang through his head once again.  He didn’t know what the man was talking about.  He had no idea at all.  But it didn’t seem to matter.  Nothing he had tried to say was even listened to.  Not only didn’t he didn’t know what the man was talking about, he didn’t know who the man was.  He didn’t know who any of these men were.  And now, all he wanted was a quick death.  But according to the way things seemed to be working, a quick death wasn’t going to happen.  They only wanted to torture him for something he knew nothing about.

     The blow to his abdomen took the breath right out of him.  For a moment, it almost made him forget the pain in his ear, but nothing could overshadow that.  Three more blows to his chest, one after another.  It was all he could do to keep breathing for a moment as the man beating him seemed to back away.  He prayed the man was done for the day, even though he was afraid he wasn’t.

     When was it?  Yesterday?  Last night?  It seemed like a million years ago now.  Men had broken into his house and taken him.  Men he had never seen before.  Men he didn’t know.  The black bag had been thrown over his head and his hands had been tied behind his back.  Then they had thrown him into the trunk of a car and brought him here.  Wherever here was.  As far as he could see, it was a simple shack.  Maybe a shed.  It was just empty.  Except for him and the men.

     In his pain, he sensed the man walking around him.  He certainly couldn’t see him, but he could sense him.  The blow to the back of his left shoulder felt more like he had been hit with a board, even though he knew he had only been hit with the man’s fist.

     “Don’t kill him!  The boss wants him alive!”

     He barely heard the words, and he only heard them from of his right ear.  His left ear was not only in total pain, it seemed like it was completely clogged.

     “Don’t worry,” the man beating him said.  “I’m just softening him up.”

     Softening him up?  He felt done for.  Completely.  He could still sense the man behind him.  He was expecting a blow to his right shoulder next, so he wasn’t the least bit prepared for the punch that came to the right side of his head instead, right over top of his right ear.  The pain in that ear seemed to explode through him as much as the pain from his left ear.  He cried out at the pain again…and realized he could barely hear his own desperate scream. 

     He screamed again at the top of his lungs, the realization that he could barely hear anything at all made the pain so much worse.  Bad enough, that when another blow came to his abdomen, driving the air from his lungs, it had been another total surprise.  He gasped desperately for air.  The sound of his gasping never reached his ears.  He blacked out then as his body still fought for air.

     That had been the first day.  The first of many.  And unbelievably, the easiest of any.  Sometimes they threw a bag over his head so he couldn’t see.  Sometimes they didn’t.  It was usually just the same three men, but once in a while, the boss came by to watch too.  But one way or another, they came for him twice a day.  Every day.

     On the morning of the fourth day, they started something new.  He was tied into the chair without the bag over his head.  He could see the boss leaning against the wall, watching.  With his hearing now so bad, and completely gone on one side, he barely heard them when they told him what they were going to do, but tied as he was, there was nothing he could do to stop them.  Then one of them stuck two different needles in his arm.  The first containing LSD.  The second a methamphetamine drug.  Both drugs designed to do nothing more than heighten the pain they wanted him to feel.  The drugs worked.  Too well.  The first time he was punched, the pain made him scream at the top of his lungs, and keep screaming.  The drugs had him to the point where they could do nothing more than flick him with a finger and he would scream.

     From then on, the drugs were administered every morning, their affects never fully wearing off for his beating later in the day.

     He could only hear just a little from his right ear.  Almost totally deaf, he struggled to hear anything of the world around him.  He desperately tried to listen for the men coming back, but his hearing wasn’t good enough anymore.  They kept him chained to the wall by one of his ankles, while his hands were cuffed in front of him.  He got water, and scraps of food to eat.  Enough to keep him alive, but that was it.  He spent his time lying on the wooden floor, trying to sleep.  Praying, that they would kill him soon so his torment would end…while the remnants of the psychotropic drugs kept strange nightmares running through his head and in front of his eyes.

     On the fifth day, when they started hooking him up to a car battery, the combination of drugs and the electrical shock nearly made his eyes bulge out of his head.  He screamed harder and louder than ever before.  And his screaming seemed to go on, and on, and on…until something in his throat gave way, and despite the electric current running through his body, he coughed up blood.  And his voice went silent.

     The electric current was turned off, and the men made sure he was still breathing.  He couldn’t hear the boss telling them to make sure they did the same thing to him tomorrow.  But when tomorrow came, and the drugs were administered, and the electric battery was hooked up, he writhed desperately and screamed at the pain, except his screams could barely be heard.  All that came from his throat now was a desperate whisper of a scream.  His voice box had been damaged too much.  His whispered screams only seemed to make the men laugh.

     But something happened in his desperate state.  Something he barely noticed at first.  Nature has a way of compensating when something is taken away.  And something inside him began compensating for his lack of hearing.  Maybe it was the drugs, particularly the mind-altering LSD.  Maybe it was one punch too many to his head.  Or maybe, it was just his own incredible need.

     The first time he realized it, he was getting beaten again instead of getting the far worse electric shock treatment.  The black bag was over his head so he couldn’t see when he was going to get hit, but he realized he could still sense everyone in the room and where they were.  As the man punching him circled his body, his mind followed every step the man took, as well as being aware of where each of the other men were.  It was by far the strangest thing the drugs had made him feel yet.  He found himself focusing on the strange new sensation, unable to even try to let go of it.  When the blow came to the back of his shoulder, he knew it was coming.  He screamed his silent scream as always.  Unfortunately, the new sense couldn’t do anything for his pain or his predicament.  All it seemed to do was allow him to sense where everyone was, and with the man giving him the beating, he could seem to sense what he was about to do.  But the pain and the beatings still came.

     There was no way of knowing how long he had been there.  The men came every day.  But after a while, sometimes it was only once a day instead of two.  Sometimes they forgot to bring him food.  But he still lived, and he still got beaten every day.  And one other thing seemed to happen as well.  His strange new ability to sense everyone grew stronger.  It was only a few days before he could sense the men coming from outside the shed.  Then he could sense them coming from much further off.  He couldn’t read their minds, but he found if he concentrated enough, he could feel their emotions.  And the one thing he noticed the most about their emotions, all of them were bored with giving him the beatings every day.  All of them wanted to do nothing more than to kill him and be done with it.

     The drugs and the beatings continued, as did his whispered screaming, as did the waking nightmare from what the drugs did to his mind.  But in the middle of it all, he couldn’t help but concentrate more firmly on the minds of the men.  Even getting beaten, even getting the car battery hooked up to him, his mind remained focused strongly on those men in front of him. 

     It came as a surprise when he concentrated strongly on the men and their emotions and they began complaining about getting splitting headaches.  Learning that, in his desperation to end the torture, he started concentrating even harder on them.  But that was when the men came in with a new toy to torture him with.

     They hung him by his manacled hands from a hook coming down from the ceiling.  His shirt was removed, leaving his battered and bruised chest naked.  He couldn’t hear them, but he could see and sense them laughing when the blowtorch was lit.  He started screaming before the deadly flame even came in contact with his body.  Between the drugs and the flame, the pain was even worse than the car battery.

     They burned his face, they burned his chest, his back, his arms, and his hands.  And he could do nothing but whisper his nearly silent screams.  It was so bad that his new sense was totally focused on the man with the blowtorch.  He was desperate to somehow read from him what he was going to do next with that thing.  The other men were standing back, laughing and admiring the way he had burned stripes into his entire body. 

     He sensed the man getting ready to do something more to him again, something to his face this time.  No!  His fear of getting burned again was so great that instead of trying to read what the man was going to do, his panicked brain tried to push him away instead.  To his surprise, the man suddenly stumbled backwards, away from him.  His frightened mind continued to push at him, and then into his mind.  In his desperation, he suddenly ripped himself away, tugging as hard as he could at the feeling of the connection he had made.  To his complete surprise, the man dropped to the floor.

     The other men rushed to him, one of them grabbed the blowtorch and stamped out the bit of flame where the floor had caught fire.  “He’s dead!” the other man said.  “What the hell happened?”

     “I don’t know, the man with the blowtorch replied.  “Heart attack?”

     “Must be,” the first man replied.  He looked up at their bound captive.  “Get him down, we gotta tell the boss.”

     He had killed the man.  Somehow.  With just his mind, he had somehow ripped the life right out of him.  As the man started lifting him to pull him off the hook, he did his best to concentrate as hard as he could on the other man.

     “Oh God, my head,” the man suddenly said as he put a hand to his aching head and stumbled a bit at the pain.

     When he thought he was ready, he tugged the same way he had done once before and the man dropped to the floor.

     The man pulling him from the hook dropped him and turned around.  He saw the second man lying dead behind him, but by that time he was already feeling a splitting headache, just before he no longer knew anything at all.  He was brain dead before his body began to fall.

     He looked at the three men he had just killed.  He tried to sense them, but he couldn’t.  It was like they weren’t there at all.  He didn’t know how, but he had just killed three men without lifting a finger.  He had murdered them with his mind.

     Panic set in.  This might be his one and only chance to get away.  He wasn’t chained to the wall and he knew one of those men had a key to his handcuffs.  He quickly searched the first man, but the key wasn’t there.  He found it in the pocket of the second man.  His burned fingers made manipulating the key difficult, but a minute later, his hands were blessedly released.  He grabbed his shirt and pulled it on.  His burned fingers painfully buttoned it up the front.  His fingers were in agony, but at least they worked.

     Cautiously, he opened the door of the shed and looked out.  Old wooden buildings.  A farm.  Seeing no one, he slipped out.  From the side of the shed he could see trees and hills behind him.  He headed that direction.  Worried about being caught, he tried to use his new senses to let him know if anyone was following him.  Trying to get away, he did his best to sense as much of everything around him as he could.  He stopped still for a moment when he realized that he wasn’t just sensing humans anymore.  He was now sensing many other things.  He turned and discovered that some of what he was sensing were cows.  And back toward the barn, he could feel a few goats, and over there, some pigs.  He stood still, realizing that if he tried, he could sense every living thing around him, even the birds in the air.  He concentrated harder, worried about being caught, and he could just feel a single man inside the house.  As far as his new senses could tell, the man wasn’t chasing him.

     He didn’t have time to dwell on it.  He needed to get away.  He needed to hide.  As much pain as he was in, as much as the drugs were still making his head swim, he headed for the trees and the hills behind him.  Hide!  It was the only thought on his mind.  Get away and hide.

     His mind briefly thought about the men he had just killed.  Murdered!  Three of them back in that shed.  It bothered him, even though he wasn’t sure why.  But what he didn’t know, what he wouldn’t realize for some time yet, was that those three dead men weren’t the only thing he had left behind in that shed.  He had also lost every memory of his life from before the torture had started.  He didn’t realize it yet, but the only part of his life that he would be able to remember, was from the time he had lost his hearing.  Everything before that, was gone.