Taken Without Virtue

The taste of it was metallic, almost. He trembled from a loud banging in his ear as the sound echoed violently, his eardrum creating a thrumming sensation within his brain. His friends outside were lifeless, with barely a twitch to signify they were still alive.

With the press of a button, the man outside the little window sent the thrumming back through his body, and he crawled into the corner of the room, shaking. Afraid, and consumed by pain, the foam dripping from his mouth. 

He could see out of the corner of his eye the glass that separated the others. His sorrow was there throbbing underneath his skin but his current state of mind could focus only on the electricity lighting his cells on fire.

This happened all because of that night. 

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Marcus’ best friend Sammy as usual was there beside him, smiling while chugging a chocolate milkshake. Her boyfriend, Luke, always the health nut, tried to swallow his salad while trying not to laugh hysterically. 

The sight before him was a little upsetting, but he hid it behind a smile to light up a room. The woman who had been their waitress that night stood before them choking on a sob. Her shirt, so red it resembled cartoon blood, with the logo of the chicken joint stitched near the collar wouldn’t typically turn any heads despite the garish color. Except in this instance, it was soaked and dripping with liquid, falling into a growing puddle on the shiny plastic floor. His friends around him wouldn’t stop chuckling and Marcus’ smile fought to remain glued. 

Eventually Sammy pinched their other companion, Caesar, to finally stop his mischief. He let go of his control with a smirk, letting the cup that had been hovering in the air clatter to the ground, and the woman’s frozen mask of terror now broken into tears streaming down a reddening face. She ran from their table, nearly slipping on the sticky Coke beneath her, while sobbing loudly and drawing several stares to their table. 

No one dared come up to them. Most of the others around them had a no Virtues. Even if they were an older Virtue, they wouldn’t stop them. Marcus being one of the few who had been given these gifts through birth, not surgery. Whatever would they do? Without a Virtue or two, you couldn’t stop those who were lucky enough to bear them. 

Marcus couldn’t stop his face from looking down at his chicken wings in shame, and he picked at a bone, it’s meat already pried off mercilessly, hands greasy again with fat. Sammy sighed loudly, and Marcus looked up to meet her piercing blue gaze, “I think we should get out of here guys. Thanks to you, Caesar, we’re definitely banned.” 

Caesar shrugged, his hulking shoulder muscles flexing with the action, “Who cares? She’s a Virtueless, they’re gonna be our slaves one day anyway.” 

Sammy scoffed, “If you really believe that, you’re deluded. There’s no way there’ll be more of us than them. We’re so rare they have to create us now.”

Luke jumped in, “Yeah, Marcus is the only one of us who was born with it.” He motioned toward him.

Caesar rolled his eyes, “And look where that got him. He’s probably the least powerful of all of us.”

Marcus bristled, but didn’t comment. He was used to these types of things, and yet it still stung. His father should’ve made it easier to handle, desensitizing him on the daily with emotional abuse and tyrades about how he would never make it in the real world. 

Sammy’s eyes suddenly glowed a blinding blue and Caesar's eyes widened with pain and he began to spasm uncontrollably. 

“S-Stop you’re going to rip m-me apart!” Caesar screamed. 

Marcus shouted, “Stop Sammy, he’s not worth it!” 

Sammy sighed and her eyes stopped glowing. Above Caesar’s shaven head a tendril of blue oozed out, a shrill scream fading away amongst the noises of the restaurant, “I just wanted him to apologize for once in his damn life.”

Luke snorted, “Yeah right, he’s Caesar, the famous telekinetic. Woohoo, he basically rules the world, why would he ever apologize to you?”

Caesar was breathing heavily but managed between heaving breaths, “What he said.”

Before Marcus could comment, a heavyset man began making his way to their table. He was wearing the same colors as the other employees, but Marcus soon deduced it was the manager, as the nametag stipulated. 

“Sorry folks, ya’ll are going to have to leave. You’ve made a disturbance in my restaurant and Virtue or no, I can’t have that.” He said, in a gravelly voice that in no way contradicted the dark circles under his eyes and acne-prone forehead. 

They left the fast food place, while Caesar shouted obscenities and the employees gestured likewise in return. He escaped before a close call with a man who wielded some sort of weapon hidden beneath his coat. They now walked together, huddled beneath thick jackets to protect against  the frosty chill air of the February evening around them. The glow above the street-lights flickering with LEDs that had now replaced the standard lightbulb nearly everywhere in the US, likely the world at this rate. The sound of the monorail was a low hum beneath the sounds of beeping from cars and a distant radio blasting a commercial for the newest VR set. 

Luke played with the snow motioning in jerky motions with his fingers, the snow danced about around them, performing plays and movie scenes. Bella kissed Edward for the first time, the snow sparkling beneath lights above, lighting the frost ablaze. Mufasa fell to his death from the cliff, trying to claw his way to Simba one last time. Aliens exploded from guns and fell into a heap of snow. Cars burst into icy fireworks to the concrete below. 

The theatrics continued until a dark van came dashing towards them. They all jumped, backpacks thrown askew into the snow in surprise as it squealed loudly on it’s wheels making a sharp turn around so that the trunk faced them. Without warning, a group of people in dark clothes ran at them with small cloths. Pressing prickly wool against Marcus’s face, his eyes and nose stinging, the world went dark.

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His eyes opened to a much brighter LED than the average streetlight, and he blinked at the aching pain pounding in his skull. His neck throbbed as he strained to look to the right of him, his arm muscles constricting beneath his flesh, veins swelling. He had heard a scraping noise, and now saw what it had been. A person stood, slouching over something currently blocked with his form, outfitted in a translucent coat, reaching his ankles, made of a similar waterproof material to curtains. A hood was attached and beneath it was a strap that appeared to be a medical mask over their face. 

Beside him was a tray upon a wheeled table, which yielded an array of nightmarish medical equipment, knives and bonesaws, scalpels and syringes. Fear ran hot through his veins and he tried to fidget or move, or even scream but his body wouldn’t obey him. The person’s arm raised into the air and was brought down with great force, and with a squirt not unlike that of ketchup from a tightly sealed bottle, blood gushed. Caesar choked on his scream, coughing loudly.

The figure, or man he now realized, turned with shock apparent on his features, the scalpel in his hand bloody as was the front of his coat clasped with almost comically large white buttons. 

He took an empty syringe and walked over to a large cabinet which contained crowded shelves of little glass bottles. Caesar could neither see nor care what those bottles contained. He only cared about when the man approached him with a syringe now full of that strange neon green liquid, and how when he tried to squish the man’s head with his mind it remained intact, and how the needle got closer and closer and closer, until he felt it pierce the gooey flesh of his eyeball.

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She couldn’t move and her eyes flickered down to her stomach, torn open and intestines exposed to the world. Her mouth twitched in a drug infused grin at the grim irony at the fact that her mom wouldn’t even let her wear a bikini at the beach and now here she was without her skin suit on. She glanced at the sight beside her, a limp tan muscled arm with the tell-tale tattoo that Caesar has on his shoulder. A gray wolf head with a skeletal body stretching all the way down to his wrist. A man blocked the rest of his body, walking toward her. 

Her Virtue had always bothered her. An unfortunate thing about being able to read minds was that you didn’t always want to. She had learned to control it, but now it felt as if she was back in 1st grade, forced to hear the girls call her fat in their heads. 

Damn. She’s awake too. I must put her out, the Virtue hasn’t been extracted. 

She fought to open her mouth, to cry out for help. Help that she doubted would come judging by the equipment around them, these people seemed quite capable. The man, scientist, doctor, whatever this horrible person could be, pressed the scalpel into the side of her head. Hot blood ran down the side of her face and she tasted its metallic flavor, relishing in one last sense before her ultimate demise. Her eyes glared into the man’s face as he kneeled before her, “I’m sorry.”

He put down the scalpel to grab some sort of syringe and pressed a substance into Sammy’s arm vein, stark blue against her pale nearly translucent skin. 

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His hands twitched in muscle memory, conjuring ice and snow was a part of habit now. His eyes opened to a blurry dim room, metal shining under blinding bulbs. There was a man muttering to himself, pacing, the outline of large misshapen lumps wrapped in what appeared to be a sort of tarp. There was a door to his right, but the world around him moved slow like molasses dripping from a spoon, and Luke couldn’t move a muscle. The man noticed his movement and approached him, and panicking Luke tried to move, tried to shout, but yet again the pull of something dragged his consciousness down; as if his Virtue was brought again to life, the snow falling from its cohesion into oblivion.

The man kneeled in close and Luke could see his brown eyes narrowing and in the reflection of his plastic mask, revealed by the lamp directly above currently positioned over Luke’s body, he saw his face. Head scalped, the bloody muscle tissue revealed. His throat ached with a scream that never left his mouth.

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Marcus woke in a panic, pain searing in distant memory across his nerves, body aching. The room that surrounded him was now covered in a soft cushiony material, a mattress walled room. The floor beneath was carpet, and there was a glass window that stretched the length of the wall on the right side. He climbed over to it, a sob scratching out of his chest at the sight of his friend’s broken bodies on metal operating tables. He wondered why they were taken, and to what purpose? He saw movement from a few of them, and gasped a sigh of relief that they were alive. 

He heard a door squeak on its hinges and turned to see a tall man in a plastic translucent lab coat enter the room. He held some sort of tool in his hand, a button that gleamed ominously under his hovering thumb. 

“Hello there Marcus.” He said, his voice comically happy for the situation.

“Who are you and why did you do this to us?” Marcus said, fighting to keep his voice from betraying his fear. 

“I haven’t done anything to you, I’m simply getting back what belongs to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

The man chuckled, and pressed the button. Marcus felt electricity sparking through his body, and shuddered violently falling onto the floor with uncontrollable spasms. 

“S-S-Stop. P-Please.” Marcus begged, looking up at him as tears streamed down his contorted face.

The man’s mouth didn’t move from its frozen grin and he let go of the button, “Let it out Marcus. Haven’t you had enough of people telling you that you weren’t enough? That your Virtue wasn’t even worth noting? That you were weak? That you are a disappointment to your-” his voice was broken off, as he was pacing the entryway, waving his hands for emphasis. 

Marcus’s sobs had become silent, and something left him that he couldn’t exactly describe. The soul? The spirit? The consciousness? All he knew was that he had left himself, and now watched his body morph and become misshapen, shed its skin and invert itself to become something so gruesome he had to look away. But he couldn’t help himself as he watched as it threw out a bloody flesh torn arm with bone shards for claws, to slit the man’s throat.