Captured
Death. Torture. Chaos. They are things that people experience throughout their life. Jake however had not experienced any of these. He was sitting on a chair watching a girl chained to the bare concrete wall. Hanged by her wrists and chained to the floor by her ankles. She had black hair, long eyelashes and brown eyes. There were freckles around her nose and had a mole on her left cheek. Her clothes were shredded and wore nothing on her feet. Jake would have called her pretty, if it weren’t for the fact that she grinned at him menacingly through the bars.
“Jake,” the guard ordered. Jake walked over to where the guard was standing, passing empty cells on the way, and looked in. What Jake saw horrified him.
His brother was lying down on the floor writhing around. His left arm was twisted on an angle that isn’t normal and Jake could see the thick white bone sticking out.
“We found him like that about 2 days ago in a library next to a computer,” the guard grumbled toughly. Jake opened his mouth to speak but blank talk came out. After about a minute of the “howls” and “help me!” Jake spoke.
“2 days!” he spoke building up his voice. “2 days and what? You didn’t even try to help him!”
“Nano! Nano! Nano” Jake’s brother Finn shouted. “Nano!”
“No Finn it’s me Jake.”
“Nano!”
“Finn listen to me it’s your brother Jake” (pause) “what have they done to you?”
“One, Two, Three all dead, poof” Finn smiled happily.
“That’s all we get out of him usually” the guard confessed. “And then he-” Finn starts to bang his head against the cold, dried blood floor in an effort of trying to break his skull. “You should probably leave.” The guard noted. Jake looked at his torn brother, then walked away.
After he had got outside he had sobbed, loudly. He shuffled home slowly.
Jake was only 16 he was fairly tall, brown silky hair, dark eyebrows, and baby light blue eyes.
After about 10 minutes or so the streets were deserted. There was a cold breeze, Southerly. The trees on the side of the footpath whispered it’s leafy secrets and the playground on the left creaked hauntedly.
Jake entered the forest with the fresh sense of pine everywhere. It had just started to go dark, halfway between sunset and night time. Then a snap of a twig.
Jake pulled his aching head up to investigate. Left. Right. Left… No one there. He walked on, cautious.
Panting. Not of a dog but a human after a long run. Jake was creeped out and started to run, no he sprinted. He looked back, tripped and fell.
“Argh,” he cried and frantically tried to stand up but was pushed down by a heavy boot. Jake squirmed for his life. No use. He stopped, as soon as he felt the stab of a needle and then blackness.
“Jake, Jake.” Wake up buddy.
Eyelids heavy, and his whole body drowsy, he ignored the voice but was slowly shaken awake. “Jake! We have business to do.”
“What the hell?” Jake croaked as he sat up.
“Hello again, Jake.”
Jake’s eye’s focused.
“You!”
“Yeah that’s me,” she chuckled. “The person in the cell, remember? My name is Ophelia by the way.”
“No time for names Ophelia.” Jake looked to his left to see a man. He had grey hair which was obviously falling out, his face was wrinkled slightly. His lips were bone dry. He wasn’t extremely skinny but wasn’t fat either. He had hazel eyes and long legs.
“Get him up,” the old man ordered to Ophelia.
“Why do I have to do the dirty work?” Ophelia grumbled. Jake saw the needle coming this time and tried to squirm away but his arms were tied. The cold skinny piece of metal inserted itself into his skin. His head lolled onto his chest, and he was carried away into the dark.
Jake stirred awake with so much force that the metal box that they were driving in drove on two wheels, then landed back onto all fours. “Stop stabbing me with needles!” He shouted obnoxiously, at the same time that he fired spit onto the window.
“Calm down,” Ophelia ushered.
“Calm down? Calm down? You are the one who should calm down!”
“Okay, okay I’m sorry.”
“Okay, okay I’m sorry.” Jake parroted. “What do you want me for anyway?”
“We want to test your abilities.”
Jake laughed, “my abilities? Okay you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Nope don’t think so.”
The rest of the trip was cold and boring the sun was rising to the east through the deserted streets. Their car turned into a narrow path, that had half ripped posters and graffiti, perfect fit for the car. Outside was the old man and another girl. The girl smiled happily and Ophelia. Ophelia introduced the others.
“Guys this is Jake. Jake meet Sam and Joana.”
Jake took this in and muttered “So Sam’s the old one and Joana is the skinny bugger.”
“Come with me,” Joana smiled. Jake walked behind her heels, while the other’s followed.
Jake was lead into a room that was eye bulgingly white and in the middle was a chair, tray and screen.
“Take a seat” Ophelia said. Jake sat down and was immediately strapped in. “Don’t try to struggle it’ll just make it tighter.” Ophelia had brought in a tray with a chainsaw on it. The screen flashed on. “Oh and when I said test, that was a bit of an under judgment. Just so you know the consequences, if you don’t complete it in 1 minute the chainsaw will have cut off your leg.”
“What?!”
“Three. Two. One.”
Jake was focused now, he didn’t want a leg chopped off. Who would? His right hand controlled the left screen and his left controlled the right. He had a gun in his left, no right. No left, yeah left. A housewife, dirty and clothes tattered came running at him out of the deserted street with a knife. He turned and shot, the body went down clumsily to the ground. What happened next, he couldn’t explain well. It was a 6 legged creature like a spider, except it’s eyes were human. Human! It had human eyes.
The creature sprinted at him. Jake brought out his knife when it jumped and stabbed. He hadn’t noticed the other creature jump on his back, he was definitely bleeding from it. Jake brought his knife round and dug it through the spiders back. The spider writhed, and fell off. The chainsaw had cut through the leg of the chair now. Sawdust everywhere. He fought off 3 more spiders and a man. Blood trickled down his leg as the chainsaw cut in. Then the screens went blank and the chainsaw stopped. Ophelia came into the room.
“Well done, not as good as your brother though but it definitely runs in the family.” Jake was stunned.
“My brother did this!?” He shouted outraged at the fact.
“Dude you need to stop getting angry. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Jake went to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. His snoring was soft and woke up quickly by a knock of the door. “We need to train you. Up in five.” Ophelia ordered.
His room was definitely not a five star hotel. The walls were tattered and the bed had cockroaches underneath. The stall on the left side of the bed had a leg missing and had fallen over. Jake slipped on his clothes and headed to the door. Waiting outside was Ophelia. “We need to be quick.” And off she went shooting up the stairs. Jake ran after her.
They entered a room with mugs and tea stains on the table. “This won’t hurt a bit.” She said. She injected the needle pressed some weird machinery and it started. The sight of the creatures. They were like on the video game, except he could see it. In his mind!
“Oh god, oh god! I see it.” Jake had just noticed the eyes, his eyes. His very eyes were in the creature.
“What you are seeing now is through another one of the nanobots eyes, well that’s what we call them. There are two inside of you right now. Being born.” Jake couldn’t speak. How could he? Things being born inside of him! Ophelia handed him a bowl, “don’t worry it’s completely normal.”
“What i-” He spewed, chunks of his dinner spat from his mouth like a volcano. He missed the bowl.
“Argh dude, try to not cover me in your spew.” Ophelia warned.
After the mess was cleaned up, Ophelia announced. “What’s inside of you right now are called “Nanobots” but you can call them J-1 and J-2.” Jake nodded understandingly. Ophelia continued, “Nanobots are tiny creatures invisible to the eye and you can barely see them under a microscope. You can control them.”
“How?”
“With your mind, think it.”
Jake tried and J-1 and J-2 both moved. “Argh!”
“Now then We’ve got training to do.”
Jake had never seen a huge hill descending from the sky before, well not exactly the sky, and it wasn’t exactly a hill. After about an hour of trying to move the Nanobots out of Jake he could finally touch them. The hill was his finger. “Jump!” Ophelia ordered. Jake jumped. “No you idiot in the nano.”
“Oh, sorry” Jake mumbled. He squeezed his eyes shut and jumped. When he opened his eyes he was on a surface of the roughest terrain he had ever seen, the terrain was flaky and had tall cabbage tree’s sprouting out.
“Right, welcome to what we call the meat.”
“The meat?”
“Yeah it’s a pretty cool name right?”
“Yeah I guess.”
“Well for now I’m going to teach you the basics and then.” She paused and her expression turned sad, then back to serious. “You are going to tackle the biggest mission yet for all of us.”
“The biggest mission yet! I haven’t even got my brain around all this nano and meaty stuff, and you expect me to go on the biggest mission yet for all of you?”
“We don’t have much time, and we have to do this. It’s either us or the planet that is going to die. So are you going to be a wuss or a kid who saves the planet?”
“I’m not a kid.”
“Whatever!” She continued ignoring him. “The best way for you to get inside and wire someone brain is through the eye.” Jake stuck his finger into his eye. And then made his nanobots jump off. He ice skated along the slippery delicate surface then dropped into the pupil through a massive hole. “After that you follow the nerve to the brain.” J-1 and J-2 moved along the nerve at lightening speed and before you knew it had entered the brain. “Then to wire the brain you stab the needle to a particular emotion through something else.”
“So you can make a person like you?”
“Yeah, or hate.”
“That’s wrong.”
“For some it is, for others it isn’t. I want you to practice that okay? Not to yourself but in your mind with you nanobots.” Jake nodded.
“Good go get some shut eye.” Jake went back downstairs to his disgusting room, and practiced on his bed. Stab. Weave. Pull. Stab. Weave. Pull. It must’ve been an hour or so before his eyes closed and his head fell backwards onto the pillow.
Ophelia knocked the door of his room down with a crack of the hinges. “We’ve been hacked.”
Jake bolted up. He was awake and alert. He stared at Ophelia as she ran towards him. “Get up!” She yelled in a high pitched noise. Jake had never seen her like this. She pulled him out of bed, and was like a coach telling the runner to go faster except she was telling him to get changed!
“Okay, okay, I’m going.”
“Meat out here in 3 minutes with your biots nothing else!” she shouted over her shoulder as she ran down stairs. Jake sat down grabbed his biots under the bed, in the light clear tube.
Ophelia came running up. “Take this she whispered.” She was handing him a gun!
“No way!”
“Now”
“Na ah! I am not going to shoot anyone.” Jake protested. She shoved the gun into his hand.
“Jake! It’s either you kill to get out of here, be killed or go mad. Which one?” Jake thought about this thoughtfully. He sighed. “K.”
“Great, I’ll go first.” Jake didn’t move his legs they felt like led, stuck. “Hurry up!” She shouted. He shuffled along.
He reached the bottom of the stairs behind Ophelia. She had started firing at soldiers men everywhere. Running, shooting, running. The bodies were scattered along the floor. One was not in a uniform like the others. He was crawling and next to him was Ophelia.
“Hurry up and shoot!” Ophelia ordered. He raised the gun and with a trembling hand he shot two bullets straight into the right shoulder of a soldier. The man went down screaming, quickly drowned out by gun shots.
Ophelia was next to Joana now, screaming something pulling her away. Sam was shaking his head. Then… Jake couldn’t watch. He turned his head but was too late he saw the bang. Sam went down. He was spinning. Ophelia dragged Joana and pulled Jake through the bodies of soldiers. He could hear Joana weeping now, hitting Ophelia. Ophelia trudged onwards firing at the same time.
Cold air hit them like a bullet. Ophelia chucked Joana and Jake in the car. They raced down the dark street as Joana screamed and cried. Ophelia’s grip tightened around the steering wheel when Joana screamed, “what the f***!” And “turn the F***ing car around now!”
Ophelia drove on, trying her best to ignore Joana. But Joana finally broke into Ophelia and Ophelia stopped the car and yelled, “I did what I had to do!” Joana stopped whimpering and barking. No one spoke.
Death, that’s what he had seen. Jake couldn’t get the images out of his head. Dead Bodies. Yellow sparks out of the guns as bullets fired out. The soldier that he shot falling screaming like a siren. Falling. The gun jolting back. He couldn’t. Couldn’t get them out of his head.
The car stopped outside an apartment roughly 12 stories high. They entered, paid and started walking up to room 82. Everyone walked through solemnly as if in a funeral and chose their rooms. Jake was on the couch in the living room. Joana was to the left of him and Ophelia to the right. Jake got changed and everyone went to sleep.
When morning rose and the light licked Jakes rosey cheeks. He saw Ophelia up, changed and had breakfast on the dark oak table, next to her was Joana. Joana had red marks around the outside of her eyes, she had obviously been crying. “Good morning lazy.” Ophelia smirked.
“Good mornin.” Jake answered.
“We have work to do.” Ophelia said seriously. “Okay, our first mission is to have something to eat. Then we have to make several hops to get to the twins. Drango (that’s the name of their group) are going to try to take over the mind of the presidents of the big countries. So far we know that they are going after America, Japan, Italy, France and China. Joana hacked them last night.”
“Drango,” Jake repeated, “what about us?”
“We are ca-.”
“lled Infra-Hit.” Joana butted in.
“Oh.”
“Anyway,” Ophelia stared at Joana angrily. “The first jump will be to the head of the twins security guard. He has coffee at the coffee shop at 5:00am.’
“The coffee shop, what a surprise it sells coffee.” Jake said sarcastically.
Ophelia carried on, “Then from there you run to his hand and at 7:00pm the guard goes to the twins and says if there are any disasters. They shake his hand you're onto him and you wire his brain, and make them crazy.”
Jake nodded thoughtfully. “So you want me to make the twins go crazy?”
“Yes.”
“When do we start?”
“Tommorow.”
They were ready and Jake was down at the coffee shop at 4:45am. At exactly 5:00am the guard arrived. “That’s him came the voice out of his earpiece.”
“You think! He’s the only one here!”
“Keep your voice down,” came the harsh whisper. “Now walk over.” Jake walked over to the coffee stand behind the guard, then bumped into him as he turned around. Jake put his hands around the shoulders of the guard, and in that quick second, made his biots jump off. What he saw out of the two screens in his head was a big black mass coming for him. He landed with surprisingly no impact.
“Are you alright?” Jake asked innocently.
“Fine, get off me!”
“Okay sorry.” The guard stormed off.
“You get’m?”
“Yeah I’m on.”
“Great now make your way to his hand.”
“Ahhhhh, which ways his hand?”
“I don’t know choose a way and if you don’t end up at his hand, then go the other way.”
“Okay,” Jake said as he set off down the slope of a crease in his jacket.
Jake had already started to walk away when the guard came after him. He yelled, “what the hell did you do to me!?” Jake looked back.
“Run!” came the voice in his ear. “Run!” He didn’t argue as the guard race after him. He sprinted down the street, barely a car in sight apart from the black ones racing straight for him. Jake ran down an alley way onto another street. He turned left and jumped into a rubbish bin and closed the lid. “Rrrre yuuu llritt?” The voice was scratchy and lagged.
“Can’t hear you sorry,” Jake whispered as alarms drove past, and he chucked the earpiece out. Waiting that was a game not a very good one but at least he could still move his biot. He waited in the rubbish bin a top of banana peels, fish bones and mc donald bags. He could smell the wrench of them. Disgusting! But he knew that if he jumped out he would be caught. He made it to the hand, and waited there. Within five minutes another hand came to the hand he was on. He remembered Ophelia saying, “he doesn’t touch anyone else’s hand apart from the twins, it might seem strange but its true”. He had to jump. He closed his eyes and someone kicked the rubbish bin. The lid opened.
He was on the twins hands now he could see a blurry face, two blurry faces actually. The man shouted “I found him”, he heard footsteps running over to him. Two big hands lifted him out and he was punched into the body bag. Jake couldn’t see, his heart fell when he was dropped into a boot, and with a quick click the boot was locked. The car started up and he was off, probably to the twins.
He had made his way into the the left eye, and was crawling along at lightning speed, across the soft pink spaghetti brain. He made it towards the “kill” part of the brain towards his brother. He was batted around and pulled out of the trunk. He stabbed a needle in and heard a scream as he was dragged up the steps. He raced across to the kill emotion stabbed, another scream. A door opened and he was chucked onto the floor squirming in a black bag. He was kicked, and finally released. But was tied to a chair. Doors locked, there was no escape if he did not kill.
“Hello, Jake.”
To Be Continued...
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