CYRUS
I came to in a room.
No, it wasn’t a room, it was a cell. A cell room.
I tried to sit up and ended up cursing like a bitch when I found out that I couldn’t. The pain was enough to remind me of all that had happened. The humans. The attack.
Oh fuck.
I passed out during the fight. Which meant that they had taken me captive.
I tried to sit up again, gritting my teeth against the unbearable pain as I did. At least I made progress this time.
Resting my back against the wall in the small room, I started to take in where I was. It wasn’t as bad as I assumed it was going to be and I knew that was not a good sign.
For one, the room-cell- was quite small, but it wasn’t dirty. It had a bed on one side of it, a small window and there wasn’t a single dirt on the floor. Which was why I kept accidentally calling it a room instead of a cell. There was a single bright bulb on the ceiling at the middle of the room that kept it bright and seeing as the light from the bulb was what kept the room bright, I could tell that it was still late.
The fact that the cell I was being held prisoner in was in top condition, as it didn’t look like the usual cells where I was held for torture, proved that these people were specific about me. And that wasn’t good. At all.
Thick iron bars separated me from my freedom. I almost laughed when I saw them. These assholes had placed me in a room and they hadn’t even thought to chain my hands or my legs. To make matters worse, the gate was made of iron bars. Were those supposed to keep me from breaking out?
Then again, they were humans. What had I expected from them?
I pushed myself up to my feet, and walked over to the iron bars. Every step I took was hell, the bullets digging into my body continually. It was the opposite that was happening actually, because my body was pushing out all the bullets that had entered.
It was a unique feature of immortals. Whether it was poison or bullets, the immortal body managed to push it out. Poison was usually the worst because there were different grades of poison. The usual process was for the body to sweat out the poison until there was none left in the system. Sometimes, when the poison was too strong and the body didn’t have the energy to fight them out completely, the immortal could die in such case. But it was rarely.
With bullets, however, no matter how much they were, as long as they didn’t completely damage any vital organs in the body, the bullets were definitely going to come out. It was the only reason I had attacked the humans even when they kept firing at me. Although one careful shot could have done serious harm.
I looked down at my chest, at the numerous holes on them. A few were starting to heal and about three had completely closed up already. The skin was still red and itchy but after a while, they would go back to their usual colour. Certain perks came with being an immortal. I became an immortal eight years ago, so I was used to them already.
I walked over to the bars, gripped them in my hands and pulled them in opposite directions.
… And they didn’t bend.
What the actual fuck?
I tried again, adding more force, but the bars didn’t bend. There wasn’t even a single dent on them. How was that possible?
Before today, I thought that there were no bars made that I couldn’t bend, but apparently, I was wrong.
I stared at them in wonder then down at my hands. Maybe I just couldn’t budge them because I was still healing? Maybe I still didn’t have all my strength back.
That had to be why.
“Don’t bother. I think these steels are made with something else.” A voice called from beside me. “And if I couldn’t do it, then there’s no way you can.”
I turned, searching for where the voice had come from and I was surprised to see that the cell wasn’t completely separated from the next room with cement. The wall ended about ten inches away from the entrance of the room. The ten inches between the wall and the room, were made with floor to ceiling iron bars that allowed me see into the next room.
The voice had come from a guy who was leaning on the far side of the room, directly facing me. He had his knees drawn up and his hands hung across his knees, his face carefully blank as he watched me. Bored even.
“I’ve seen several people try to break out, me included, and it’s never successful. You can’t. Give up already.”
Everything he said was alarming. I should be focusing on what he was telling me. I should have been wondering why I couldn’t bend the bars and I should have asked him what he meant when he said, ‘if I couldn’t do it’. But the only thing I could focus on, was the man’s face.
“Rhys?”
He was much more thinner than I remembered him. His bones seemed to be poking out of his ashen skin, his Adam’s apple seeming out of place on his neck. He was wearing frayed dirty jeans that were four sizes bigger than he was, and a shirt that hung off his gaunt frame.
Could it really be him?
His eyes snapped to my face, and his face scrunched up as he tried to figure out who I was.
Did he lose his memory along with everything else he had lost?
Or maybe this wasn’t him anyway.
“Cyrus?”
Fuck. It was him.
But how could it be? How was it even possible?
Rhys was dead. He died in battle-a battle that we had both fought in. He was my best friend. We fought all our battles together, went hunting together with Marcus, basically did almost everything together.
It was the same way we had gone to battle, hoping to fight and conquer as we usually did, but that day, everything had gone differently than planned. An insider had given information of our plans, strategy and where we were going to camp, to the other side and they had attacked when we had been least prepared. At night.
Everywhere had been rife with chaos, nobody knew where the other went as we all tried to damage control, fight to the extent of our abilities.
We ended up losing that fight. It was one of the greatest loses I ever sustained, as I had not only lost the battle, but my best friend too.
I thought he was dead. Everyone thought he was dead.
No way this ghost of a man I was seeing was actually him. Rhys was dead. This couldn’t be him.
“Brother? Is it really you?” The words were filled with emotion.
That word, ‘brother’, uttered with so much emotion, was what convinced me that it was actually Rhys sitting in front of me. My best friend wasn’t dead. He hadn’t died that night. He was alive.
“Rhys?” I called his name again, at loss for a better thing to say. There were so many questions I should be asking him right now. So many things to say, but suddenly, I could only focus on the fact that he was actually standing in front of me. “H-how?”
He jumped up from the ground, walking over to the bars that separated us warily. I walked over to the bars too and we met halfway.
“How is it that you’re alive?”
He shrugged, his Adam’s apple bobbing on a swallow, his eyes taking in my full form. “I didn’t die.”
I nodded. “I can see that now. But how?”
He leaned on the bar. “I know you thought I did. I know everybody thinks that, but I didn’t die. Hell, even I don’t know what happened to me. All I knew is, I was fighting and then I was not. And when I woke up, I was in this glitzy cell.”
“What’s the deal with it anyway? Why does it look like a room?”
“Hell if I know. A gilded cage.” He chuckled drily.
I couldn’t even laugh. Nothing was funny right now.
Rhys wasn’t dead. My best friend wasn’t dead.
“What happened to you?” I found myself asking again.
I didn’t even know what I was asking. He already told me that he had been fighting and then he blacked out and woke up here and that was almost the same thing that had happened to me. What I meant was, why did he look the way he looked? Like a shell of the man he used to be.
“Have they been torturing you?”
“Torture is a mild word for it. But I can’t complain, right? At least I don’t have to shit where I lay my head.”
Pain, clear as day, filled my best friend’s green eyes and it looked like he was reliving all what he had been going through.
I found myself imagining what he had been going through? What exactly had they done to him? From the way his bones were sticking out of his skin, I knew that they had dealt with him alot.
“What about you?” He asked me, “How did you get here?”