Editor’s Note: This is a wonderfully creepy story that may be scary for some younger readers.
As the pair approached the field, they sighed in relief. “Ugh,” Olivia sighed. “I wish I could use one of the self-driving robots. I can’t believe that your mom is forcing us to walk home.”
“I know,” Emily replied. “I wish that she allowed us to ride.”
Olivia didn’t reply. She was thinking about her parents, who had died in a fire 3 years ago. She remembered her mom’s caring smile and her dad’s gruff but tender voice. She missed them so much. She wished that Emily had not gotten cyborg implants. It separated them in a way because cyborgs tended to always stick to other cyborgs. Their friendship was growing tense.
Suddenly, she felt apprehension creeping up her spine, like the claws of a cat.
“Does something… feel weird?”
“Yeah, I dunno, I feel… uneasy.”
Then, the smell struck them. It was a horrendous stench. It smelled like spoiled milk mixed with rotten meat.
“What is that?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know,” Emily replied.
“Should we check it out?”
“Yeah!”
“What if it’s dangerous?”
“Come on, don’t be a wimp. Race you!”
“Fine!”
As the girls charged through the underbrush, Olivia couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something was about to go horribly wrong. As the pair reached where the smell originated from, however, they realized that they had made the worst mistake of their lives.
It was a body and a rotting one. It had been beaten to a pulp and had multiple seemingly recent stab wounds on its chest.
Olivia gasped. “Who could do such a thing?”
“I could,” a deep voice that sounded like scraping nails on a chalkboard said.
Too late, Olivia felt eyes burning on her back. She turned around slowly.
There was a man with cyborg legs and a cyborg eye. He was tall and had icy blue eyes. He was wearing a long black coat and a hat, yet the girls could clearly see a psychopathic smile on his scar-riddled face.
“Hello girls,” the man said. “I’ve been waiting for you. You are going home, correct?”
The girls shakily nodded.
The man tutted. “Oh well. I guess we will take… an alternative route.”
He lunged at Olivia, and everything went black.
***
They woke up chained to plastic walls in what seemed like a sort of dungeon. Their captor was in front of them, wearing what seemed like a 1600s plague doctor suit.
“I apologize for bringing you here like that. I just needed some… subjects for my experiments.”
Olivia tried to scream, but she was gagged. For the first time, she noticed a horrifying sight. There was a dastardly display of several different metal… tools. They all looked incredibly painful.
Their captor went on. “I have some tools for these experiments, as you have probably noticed. Those will be used if you misbehave. You may call me Doctor Anubis.”
He ungagged them both, and immediately they both tried to scream.
“Ahhhh, nice try. I’ve put an implant in your throats that prohibits you from screaming. Don’t worry, you can still talk.”
Emily immediately spoke. “How dare you do this, you sick, demented, demon! Do you know who I am?”
“Why yes I do, little lady,” Doctor Anubis said. “I simply do not care.”
“Wha-what?” Emily sputtered.
“Well, you see, it’s not about who has the most riches or power. It’s about who makes the best… subjects.” With that, he turned and dug a sharp, straight tool straight into Olivia’s stomach. She gasped and passed out.
***
Groggily, she raised her head and looked down. Nothing seemed to be wrong, but her chest had crisscrossing scars across it.
“I have been working on this for ten years, since 2040, and I have never had results like this before.” The man pulled out a high-tech tablet. He showed her grisly images of his “failed experiments.”
“You’re horrible! Why would you torture innocent people?” Olivia said.
“For the experiment. I have told you this before. Next time you ask, I will beat you.”
“Y-yes sir,” Olivia whimpered.
“Good. Now for you, Emily. Let’s see your… potential.”
“Nooo! Please! I’ll give you money! Have mercy!” Emily pleaded.
“There is no mercy.”
With that, Doctor Anubis plunged his tool into Emily’s stomach. He sliced around horribly, digging around her intestines for what seemed like hours. Finally, he seemed satisfied. He sent a robot over, and within a few minutes, Emily was awake. She looked up groggily, then noticed the scars on her stomach.
“How dare you do this to me!” she yelled. “I will have your skin when we get out of this!”
“The problem with that,” Doctor Anubis said, “is that you won’t get out.”
There was a long, tense silence.
“I have a question,” Olivia said. “What is this ‘experiment?’”
“Good question. I am trying to link people’s consciousness together with an interface which I control.” Doctor Anubis said. “That way I can force people to give me their money and property, and as a bonus, I will have unlimited subjects.”
The girls sat there in silence.
“Well, that was a successful day! Sleep now!”
He turned off the lights and walked out of the room.
“That guy is a psychopath,” Emily said. “We need a way to escape.”
“But how?” Olivia replied.
“We wait until we can get one of his tools, cut our chains, then stab him.”
“I don’t want to go through another minute of that torture!”
“You have to.”
Olivia thought for a while. Why is this man so horrible? She wished that there was a better way to get out of this situation, but she couldn’t see another way out besides Emily’s way. Maybe, if she did die, she would be able to see her parents again. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep.
The next day, Doctor Anubis probed their brains, apparently trying to connect them. He continued probing them for the next few days until he seemed satisfied. He only fed them disgusting mush, and never untied them. However, one day, Doctor Anubis seemed to get cocky. He left his tools in reach of Emily and walked off. After she had waited a few minutes to make sure that the doctor was gone, she grabbed the tools and sliced herself free. She immediately went over to Olivia and cut her free as well, using her cyborg arm.
“We need to go!” Emily hissed. They snuck forward, and Emily picked the lock of the door with one of Anubis’s tools. As they emerged for the first time from their room, they realized that they had made a massive mistake.
“You fools!” Doctor Anubis’s voice boomed. “You thought you could escape me! Fine. You will provide some nice field testing for my project. Project Intuitio, activate!”
All of a sudden, Olivia felt a massive pain in her cranium, like a rabid gerbil was trying to escape from her skull. She looked over at Emily, and it seemed that she was dealing with the pain as well. She had also dropped Anubis’s tool. Olivia tried to scream, but the implant blocked her.
Doctor Anubis walked towards them. “I see the project is working. Good. Any second you will be connected to my interface, and you will be my slaves.”
All of a sudden, Olivia felt a sudden urge to go to the Doctor’s side and obey his every command. She gritted her teeth in order to try and resist the Doctor’s commands. It took all of her willpower to resist, but she was able to do it. She looked over at Emily, and it seemed that she was able to resist Doctor Anubis’s commands more easily, due to her half-cyborg body.
“Fine. I suppose I will just kill you. Murderbots, kill this scum!”
Instantly, 3 robots popped out of the walls. Large spears and swords popped out of the robots, and they moved threateningly towards the pair.
“We need to go!” Olivia shouted. She looked towards the only open exit, a door that was slightly ajar. “We need to get through that,” Olivia hissed
“Ok. How do we do that?” Emily replied.
“We run.” They both took off at a full sprint, rushing towards the door, but they were intercepted at the door by a murder-bot.
“Run! I’ll hold it off!” Emily sprung into action, delivering a quick roundhouse kick to the robot’s face with her cyborg foot. The robot seemed unfazed and delivered a punch into Emily’s gut. Emily grunted and looked over at Olivia, who was standing there, frozen.
“Run!” she croaked out.
Olivia seemed to unfreeze and sprinted out the door. She could hear a murder-bot sprinting behind her. She looked back as she ran, just in time to see the murder-bot skewer Olivia in the chest with its spear. Emily was gone. Olivia sprinted out an unlocked door, right into the same field where they were abducted. Stricken with grief, glad to feel the sunlight on her face, the feeling of grass under her feet, and the sound of chirping of birds one last time as the murder-bot caught up to her and stabbed her in the back. She collapsed, full of grief and sorrow, as everything slowly went black.