Savage Genesis, part 4

"If you call that speaking. It sounded like a tape recorder vomiting."

"When they talk to themselves it sounds like chirping."

"Have you figured out what they're saying?"

"Nope. They don't really talk too much. And when they do..." Lucas trailed off. Adam had been so relieved to see another human face but all that comfort washed away with the vague ending to that sentence.

Adam looked around the room, he still couldn't make out much of the room. "We are we? What the hell is this place?"

"It's where we're going to die."

The cold desperation in Lucas' voice worked further to disillusion Adam. He slowly lowered himself to one knee and lowered his voice. "What did they do to you?" Lucas remained quiet and Adam worried that he had offended or scared Lucas. As he realized that whatever horror had befallen Lucas was no doubt about to happen to him. The silence grew within Adam.

"I... I don't know," Lucas finally stuttered. He continued, gaining some confidence as he went. "They make you kind of black out so all you get is fragments. A twinge of light, a whiff of something burning. The only thing that you have with you is the pain. It's all you've got to hang on to." Lucas stopped abruptly and looked away from Adam. Adam kept staring at him. He knew that he shouldn't but he couldn't help himself. He hoped Lucas would say something else, something to put this whole experience into perspective.

"What do they want with us?"

"I've no clue. But if they brought you in it means that I ain't giving them what they were looking for. And since they got about a dozen more cages in here, I guess they're willing to keep looking until they got what they want." Adam looked around, he could just barely make out two cages besides the ones that he and Lucas were in. He guessed that his eyes hadn't finished adjusting to the darkness yet.

"Do you think that they--"

A rattle makes Adam stop mid-sentence. Lucas put his hands over his ears and turned away.

"They're coming," he muttered.

"Lucas, how do they--?"

Adam's words are cut off as his body becomes rigid once more. He fell to the ground, limp. "Lucas," Adam muttered with great effort. Lucas didn't respond. Adam began to feel the familiar tingle begin in his feet. With difficulty, he managed to turn his head enough to look over at Lucas. All he could was Lucas' back. "Lucas," he muttered again. Again, Lucas didn't respond.

Adam's body disappeared from the room, leaving Lucas alone with his tears and prayers.

---

Adam's body rematerialized in another darkened room, this one had a gleaming metal operating table sitting in a pool of light in the middle of the room. Dark figures moved around the table. Adam looked up and could see the faces of these figures by the light reflected off the table. All the figures looked similar to Rohm and at first Adam couldn't tell the difference between any of them. Adam's eyes frantically searched the room. He began wiggling, trying to get off the table. His chest rose as he tried to sit up.

On of the aliens placed a thin blue hand on his chest and gently pushed him back down onto the table. Adam found himself amazed at the strength in that hand. Adam began to notice differences in the faces, slight differences in the slope of the forehead, the shape of the eyes, et cetera.

A deep wet sound echoed through the room followed by a ripping pain in Adam's belly. That's when Adam blacked out.
---

Lucas lied on the floor of his cell. He was doing what he did most of the time over the past seven weeks, trying to remember who he was and those who were close to him. He'd once read about how Holocaust survivors had spent most of their time either remembering or fantasizing. He'd spent the first few days fantasizing. At first, his fantasies were elaborate; he killed his attackers, returned home where his ex-wife was glad to see him. The whole town had felt an absence in their lives, the drugstore where he used to work begged him to come back. After a few days of that, he found his fantasies becoming simplier and simpler: a picnic in a field, sleeping in his own bed, his son's laughing at one of his bad jokes. Soon even that became too much for him He was aware that he'd probably never leave here alive so he felt that it was cruel to imagine something that he knew could never happen again.

He turned to memories. His favorite, the one he turned to the most often was the birth of his son. He was at work when his wife called him to tell him that her contractions had started. He ran home and picked his wife up and then scurried to the hospital. He was a month and a half early and the entire pregnancy had been fraught with difficulty and even a scare when the baby showed an anomaly during an ultrasound. He and his wife had spent the entire pregnancy waiting to hear something had gone wrong. When the baby was born after only a few hours of labor and was healthy, Lucas was relieved. In fact the baby was the healthiest premature baby that the doctor had ever seen.

That wasn't the only memory he visited. The day he proposed to his wife, the day he bowled a perfect game and the day he lost his virginity were also in heavy rotation.

His reminisicing was cut short when Adam rematerialized on his cell floor. He lied in a lump, his body occasionally twitching and jerking. Lucas looked over at Adam, his eyes full of sympathy and compassion. The jerking continued growing in intensity. Lucas wondered if this is how he had looked when he came back from the first operation, did he look so vulnerable and weak? Adam began making a low moan.

Shhhh. Shhhh. It's okay. It's over." Adam's body continued to jerk despite Lucas' attempt to comfort him. "Don't worry, Adam. It'll be alright in a little while. You just got to tough it out."

As if heeding Lucas' words, Adam's body began to calm, the twitching became less violent. Lucas watched as Adam lied still on the floor, a small puddle of drool forming by his mouth. Adam's eyes stared off into space. Lucas stared at the incapacitated Adam.

"Christ, I need a cigarette," Lucas grumbled.
---

Britney knew the law. You can't report someone missing for forty-eight hours. The police have that rule to try and keep superheroes' identities secret as well as not to clog the missing persons department. Ever since the police department started hiring empaths to help out on certain cases, most particularly on missing person cases, the success rate of finding runaways and kidnapped victims skyrocketed from 38% to 96%.

Originally, the police had brought in telepaths to help in interrogations but after the ACLU raised holy Hell about the invasion of private rights and the Supreme Court agreed, telepaths were banned from doing any police work. Many were curious a few years later when police decided to try empaths, wondering if the police were following the letter of the law but no the spirit. Unlike a telepath who can read a person's mind, an empath can only read a person's emotions. Since the empaths were only used for missing person cases and for working crime scenes, the Supreme Court this time found that "as emotions are visible to the naked eye and can be read by a trained psychologist, empathic investigators are not directly violating anyone's right to privacy." With the Supreme Court's blessing, police forces across America began soliciting empaths to come and work for them.

Britney was aware of all this and that's why she waited. She tried to distract herself all day. She started watching television but found her mind wandering. Books, magazines and movies didn't get her either. She jogged for a while but when she came back to the apartment and Sean was still missing her heart sank. That night she slept fitfully. She kept dreaming she was stuck in amber, unable to move, frozen in a sticky prison that she couldn't get out of. She felt impotent.

She called in sick to work the next day and sat at home, watching the clock. She figured the last time she saw Adam was at ten o'clock before she went to bed (she'd decided to use that time instead of when she woke up and noticed he was missing) so she was counting down until then. At five o'clock something inside her snapped and she realized she couldn't wait another second. She grabbed her coat and car keys and then headed out the door.

The station was full that night. Apparently, Captain America had broken up a drug ring. He'd personally defeated two dozen drug runners. He'd called the police and they'd come and picked everyone up. Now they were bringing them in droves and slowly pushing them through central booking. Despite Britney's desperation she was going to have to wait. After several hours of waiting, she was finally allowed to go to the desk where the desk sergant should've been sitting. Of course, the desk sergant had decided to take a cigarette break after booking so many people in such a short time. Filling in for the desk sergant was Officer Chris Gillman.

Officer Gillman had been an officer of the law for the past six years. He'd joined the force fresh out of high school because his father had been a police officer and he lacked any direction in his life. He took to the job well enough and soon came to hope that he'd make detective when the time came to take the test. His mother was proud of him and had hoped to see him do well. Unfortunately, she never got to. Late one night driving home from a friend's house, she got into a car wreck and died.

His mother's death, however tragic, was not why Officer Gillman was in a bad mood that night. He'd just spent the last two hours trying to force a supervillian named the Slug into a holding tank. Chris had discovered that the Slug was not just a colorful nickname but instead was an apt description of the man's personal appearance and abilities. Chris then had to spend the remainder of the time cleaning up a trail of slime left behind by the Slug. When the desk sergant asked if he could cover for him, he leapt at the chance. Bad moods, however, sometimes are as hard to get rid of as a smelly slime is to get off of one's uniform.

When Britney Green walked up to his desk, all of Chris Gillman's tension melted away.

"I need to file a missing persons report. My boyfriend's missing." Chris' heart sank.

"Yes, ma'am. Has the person been missing for forty-eight hours?"

"No, but," she looked at her watch, "it's been forty-five and I'm just about to go out of my mind. Can't you just start looking now?"

"I'm afraid not."