Olivia -
The agonising screams woke me up. Panic and terror momentarily paralysed me as the memories of rape and brutal beatings overwhelmed me. I tried to move my arms, but a sharp pain shot through my body. One of my eyes was too swollen to shut, so I had to make do with one eye. Peering in the dark, I saw one of those monstrous shapes moving.
I shivered in a cold cell and pulled myself into a sitting position on the damp earthen floor.
I was locked in a nightmare, and there was no escape. Fear has been my constant companion in the last week. In the murky darkness of the prison, I craned my neck to hear the dull slap of flesh against flesh and the shrieks that echoed. They were doing it again.
The smell of blood and death overlaid the dank smell of decay. The shrieks had now been reduced to a whimper. I wished to die; it was preferable to the monster I had turned into. I had become a monster, just like them.
I was on my way home from my waitressing job when two men grabbed me and hauled me to a waiting van. I was petrified.
I did not know what kind of creatures my abductors were, but I found out soon. They were shapeshifting monsters incapable of being reasoned with, much less pity. All of them were pure evil as they laughed and revealed the pain inflicted on their victims. Their eyes glittered with insanity when their prey screamed and begged for mercy.
I remembered clearly the first time I came upon their leader.
He was hideously grotesque! Although the hooded robe he was wearing cast a shadow over his face, his eyes burned red in the deep pits of his eye sockets. He radiated an almost tangible air of evil.
I had screamed in horror when he stepped close and roughly grabbed my face. I knew instantly that he wasn't human. I wasn't a believer in the supernatural, but after that encounter, I was.
I was raped practically from the moment I was abducted in the van. They passed me around and took turns violating and beating me. Pleading and crying did not move them.
After my abuse, they dumped me in this cell. That was when I noticed. I shared this prison with other women who had been taken like me. I witnessed others being violated, raped, and beaten. What's more, each woman was subjected daily to their leader's experimentation. They would be taken to his makeshift lab and strapped to a table. He would then inject them with some strange concoction that left them writhing in agony. Fire coursed through their bodies as they shuddered and shook in excruciating pain.
When it was my turn, seeing his face up close was beyond frightening. Sharp, yellowed teeth filled his mouth, and his veins stood and crisscrossed his bulging forehead. His brows were ridged, and his nose was strangely misshapen.
Strangely, after looking closely at me for several moments, he sniffed my neck from left to right, then abruptly pushed me away.
In a grating voice, he said
"The usual tests," he said. He didn't look at me again. Turning, he walked away. That's when I noticed that, although he stood on two feet, his limbs were strangely bent. His body was tall, bony, and bushy. He was also hunched with a hump leading his back. He looked insane. He was evil personified.
My turn on the table was utter agony. I prayed for death as my flesh seemed to burn from the inside out. Blisters appeared and burst all over my body. I felt my bones crack and move as I screamed in vain for mercy and oblivion.
Shaking myself back to the present, I listened as everything became eerily quiet. I mused at my dire predicament. If I wanted to live, I needed to get away from here; that much was clear to me.
Last night, the nightmare became more vivid when I saw them rape one of the girls from the other cell to death. The girl looked so pitiful and frail. Her emaciated body flopped like a rag doll between two of their captors as they violated her simultaneously, one drilling her front while the other hammered her mercilessly in her back. Her lifeless eyes stared vacantly in space. Spending themselves inside her, they got tired of not getting any reaction from her. They lifted her between them by her arms; one pulled back her head by her hair and slapped her face repeatedly.
Getting no reaction, one of them spat on the ground and said, "This one's as good as dead. I might as well get rid of her."
He grabbed her face and kissed her brutally, then slit her throat cleanly. The woman's blood spurted everywhere, and her head lolled back, barely attached, as they dropped her body. The gruesome scene sent shockwaves through the air. The lifeless body lay motionless on the ground, a haunting reminder of the brutality that had just unfolded.
At first, I did not see what they used to kill her, but when the man turned, she saw that his hand no longer resembled that of a human. It was now tipped with sharp-looking claws that dripped blood that shone black in the dim light. Horrified, I blinked to see if I was just imagining things. But no, they were all monsters! They tipped their heads and howled evilly, then rolled in her blood like animals! I closed her eyes and covered her ears as the scraping and wet sound of tearing flesh reached my cell.
I refused to end like that. I would never give my captors that satisfaction. I'd escape or die trying. Likewise, I would not remain a victim or fodder for their amusement. Closing my eyes, I bid my time, praying to God to give me a chance.
Once I found my chance, I would take it. I had to escape.