Authors: Mikael Aizen
The first thing they did was starve him.
The second thing they did was stab a needle in him, filled with clear fluid that burned as it went in and up his arm.
"What are you doing to me!" Kyle screamed, struggling.
But the two men in white suits and white masks walked out of the perfectly clean white room without saying anything, glancing back only to make sure Kyle didn't try to follow.
Then Kyle was alone, with a huge mirror to stare at.
A mirror that became a screen with an image of another boy, also dressed in a white gown who looked just as confused and scared.
A different image, of Kyle, appeared on the screen.
His image stood on the opposite side of the other boy, facing the same way as he.
Kyle moved his hand and the image moved just the same and when he turned his body, the image of himself turned too.
A big yellow word, "Fight!" appeared on the screen like a video game.
Kyle and the other boy just stared at each other.
Kyle shook his head and his image did too.
He wouldn't fight the other boy, he wouldn't do what they wanted him to do.
The other boy gave him a blank look, just as confused and then...he screamed.
The other boy's image bent in half and held his body, and his image flew to the side like it was being hit.
Kyle heard the start of a cry through the wall and almost simultaneously a scream, loud and clear, blasted out like it came from Kyle's room.
The image of the other boy was bleeding, his face swelling red and purple, his arms up in front of him over his head.
He was mumbling something, Kyle couldn't understand, it sounded like crying and blubbering.
Unintelligible.
Then the other boy's head jerked up with a loud crack.
His image collapsed to the floor.
Kyle approached cautiously.
Uncertainly.
His image copying him.
This couldn't be real.
"Are you OK?" Kyle voiced.
If he could hear the other boy, maybe the other boy could hear him.
The image disappeared.
Moments later, Kyle's door opened and a shape fell through, the door slammed shut behind it.
The boy, the real boy, lay bloody and twisted on the white polished floor.
Kyle ran to him.
Stopping before the boy, memories of Jeff, of the run over, of the broken body made him hesitate, but Kyle had to try.
He rolled the body over, the mangled face made him gag but Kyle took the other boy's wrist and felt--nothing.
He got on the right spot and pushed on the chest of the other boy, up and down, not looking down at the boy's face.
Not looking at Jeff, because right now, the back of Jeff's head was staring at him.
And once again, it was Kyle's fault.
Kyle felt himself crying, hard.
The tears kept coming out so that he couldn't see.
But he could feel, and he could feel that the boy's skin was getting colder and colder and even with Kyle pushing on the other boy's chest, nothing was happening.
The boy was dead.
Just like Jeff had been.
Kyle fell back, afraid of the body.
He ran to the opposite side of the room and held his head.
He heard the sound of the door open but Kyle kept his head down and refused to look, refused to see if there was another body that was going to fall through the door or men that would grab him and stick a needle in him.
Kyle wanted Del, his mother, he wanted to be in her arms and he wanted to hold her and to realize this was fake.
He wanted to see that he hadn't been kidnapped and that nothing this horrible could be happening.
He wanted to stop crying.
He didn't know how long he huddled in his corner, but when Kyle finally looked up, the body was gone.
The bloody puddle and the streaks to the doorway were there, but no body.
And the mirror was just a mirror.
It took a while, but doubt settled in and Kyle had to know.
He crawled forward on hands and knees, to the bloody pool, and touched it.
Smelled it.
He even, after staring at his fingertip and watching it dry into a brown crisp--tasted it.
It was real.
Salty and real.
Kyle put his head in his elbows and squeezed his eyes shut again.
It had to be fake.
Somehow.
They could fake a lot of things, this had to be one of them.
A light flashed the edges of his lids, and he looked up.
Immediately, he wished he hadn't.
The mirror was a screen again, and Kyle backed away from it.
He saw the other boy.
This boy didn't look very confused.
He had red hair and light brown freckles.
He seemed angry.
His image charged Kyle, fists striking out.
Kyle's image reacted like it was being hit.
On the face first, then in the stomach.
The head again and the ribs.
On the back.
Kyle's image fell to the ground, not moving on the floor.
Blood coming from his face.
The red-haired boy's image backed up.
There wasn't any look on his face except caution.
He was crouching, staring at Kyle's body like at any second it would jump up and attack him.
But Kyle didn't move.
He held the opposite wall.
The screen went back to being a mirror.
Men came in through the door.
Kyle ran from them, but they caught him, and punched him in the face, the stomach, the head again and his ribs.
Hard on the back so that Kyle heard a crack and thought that he'd broken something.
He fell to the ground and lay there, his face bleeding and dripping on the polished white floor.
The men left.
And not much later, the mirror became a screen.
Kyle willed himself to stand up.
He was crying again and he tasted tears through his teeth as he came upright.
All he wanted to do was lay down because he hurt so much.
The other boy came at him and Kyle tried blocking and only blocking.
The other boy didn't seem to care that Kyle wasn't fighting back.
After the fight, men came again and hit Kyle wherever he'd been hit on-screen.
Kyle kept blocking in the next and next fight.
Refusing to hit back.
Even if he was in so much pain and he couldn't move, he wouldn't fight back.
He couldn't.
But it didn't stop the tears that kept coming out.
The next body came through the door.
The men in white would make him fight.
Or they'd kill more.
A part of Kyle wondered that if he continued resisting, maybe they would kill him.
Then he wouldn't have to fight or hurt anyone because he'd be dead.
But Kyle could already see that this whole thing was all about him and not the other boys.
It was the other boys who got killed when Kyle made a mistake and the men in white were slowly making Kyle do worse and worse things.
He could see that, already.
And Kyle hated it because he couldn't do anything about it.
If he didn't do what the men in white wanted, they'd kill the other boys.
And anything was better than killing another boy, wasn't it?
Kyle thought about Jeff.
How that had been an accident.
And now, the men in white were
making
Kyle kill--two dead because he hadn't fought according to their rules.
The men in white, whoever they were, never stopped or let him rest.
Every hour the pain in his body and, Kyle admitted, the pain in his heart was fading.
The fights kept going and he learned that the only way for the other boy not to die was to hit the other boy's image a few times.
Hard enough so that they'd believe he really was fighting.
It was the only way.
Once, he accidentally won a fight and instead of a body--food and water came through the door.
More food than they'd been giving him added together.
Kyle ate because he was hungry.
Every few hours, or what Kyle thought were hours, they came and grabbed him and held him and injected him with the clear burning fluid.
He always fought, but he was too small to stop them.
A few times he tried to escape through the door, but as soon as he moved, they kicked him hard enough to throw him back and left as they usually did.
Then it got easier, easy enough that Kyle went a whole day without crying.
He fought, and he ate.
The day he stopped crying his image on the screen didn't appear again.
Instead, a real boy was brought in, tied to a chair.
It was one of the boy's that Kyle had fought before.
The one with the red hair.
The screen flashed yellow again, "Fight!"
Kyle didn't know what to do.
The men in white stood to the corners of the room with their arms crossed.
"What do you want from me?" Kyle asked quietly.
He'd asked what they wanted before.
If they would stop.
If they would let him go.
They never answered, never showed any sign of even hearing Kyle.
This was the first time they did.
One of the men
pointed
at the boy tied to the chair.
"You want me to fight him?
He's in a chair.
How can I fight him?"
It was the only answer he got.
Until Kyle spoke again.
"I won't hit him.
Not for real."
One of the men pulled something from his pocket, they looked like scissors.
He put it to the tied up boy's little finger and cut the finger off.
The other boy screamed, the sound was more real than anything Kyle had ever heard.
The red-haired boy's eyes bulged and sweat poured down his face, and he babbled at Kyle with noises that weren't language.
"Stop!" Kyle screamed.
"Why are you doing this?"
The screen flashed that horrible word again.
They wanted him to fight?
He'd fight.
Kyle yelled and charged the man with the scissors and hit him hard in the gut.
To Kyle's surprise, the man gasped and bent in half.
Kyle hit him again across the head, and the man started to fall to the side.
Kyle saw his mask pull away a bit, and saw a ring through the man's lip.
The
BOY'S
lip.
It was one of the boys who'd kidnapped him at the school.
Before the boy hit the ground, the other man(boy?) in white got his arms around Kyle, holding him.
More people in white rushed into the room and one of them put a needle into Kyle.
This time it didn't burn.
This time, things got really quiet in his ears and he stopped seeing anything and then--he stopped thinking.
When he woke up, the red-haired boy's corpse was lying in the corner.
Kyle screamed and cried.
It wasn't fair and right now, he hated them.
He hated the boys that had put him here.
He
wanted
to kill those boys.
Especially the boy with the ring through his lip.
Chapter 15
We the public have the right to know who is a murderer and who is not.
We the public have a right to know when we are under threat and danger.
We the public have a right to know who has The Code and who does not.
We demand that our rights be defended.
-Community Right's Council Petition 2020
Kyle could tell the skinny, snarling boy across from him had been here a while.
Not as long as Kyle, most the boys hadn't.
They'd moved him from the white rooms into a different place that looked like a forest with deep, dark pits in the ground.
The kids all looked like this one, eventually.
Their scratched up skin and sunken eyes got red and crazy when they were desperate.
When they had lost for long enough.
Even when Kyle had been winning and eating between each fight, he still got skinnier and skinnier.
Weaker and weaker.