Hello everyone! Hope you're all doing well! I feel that I should go ahead and warn you all that there's a lot of talk of needles and blood in this chapter so if you're squeamish you might want to read through your fingers. Also I want to talk about Reeper because he's awful and by far one of the creepiest characters I've ever worked with. In my mind he looks like a cross between a Wendigo and a Skeksis from The Dark Crystal. Basically he's just a whole lotta wrong in a gross package. Anyway, I hope you all hate him as much as I do! :D
Peter comes awake with a jolt.
It takes him several long, confusing seconds to remember where he is (no idea) and what had happened (still no idea). He stares up at the impossibly bright light above his head, squinting and blinking painfully as it drills into his eyes. Judging by the cold metal table at his back and the somewhat familiar setup of the room, he's guessing he's in the same place. Where said place is, however, remains a mystery.
He tries his arms and legs again and finds them still strapped down tightly to the table. His muscle response seems slower than it was earlier and the fuzziness in his head leads him to believe that it's a combined result of whatever was injected into him earlier. He'd nearly forgotten about it but the deep, dull throb in the side of his throat brings that memory back all too clearly.
"Oh, how delightful," a pitched and garbled voice declares from somewhere in the shadows of the room. "You're still alive."
Peter frowns and rolls his head to the side to see the hunched figure of the person (thing?) he'd encountered earlier. It shambles further into the room, dipping in and out of glaring lights and deep shadows. "I was beginning to fear you may not be. It's been so long since I've worked with humans, I was not sure if I had overestimated the dosage or not."
Peter groans and shakes his head a little. "Still kicking, unfortunately." He tests the straps at his wrists again and finds them still held fast. "Mind telling me why I'm strapped to this table?"
The creature chuckles and it's an ugly, rotting sound like water bubbling through a graveyard. "I couldn't very well leave you unrestrained; you would try to escape."
"Fair point," Peter grumbles, turning his head further to the side to track the movement of his captor around the room. He doesn't want to let him out of his sight but it's proving to be a difficult task especially since he's pretty much immobile at this point. "So who are you?"
There's a sound that's half laugh and half snort and all terrible. "Dear me, where are my manners? You may call me Reeper."
"Reeper?" Peter repeats, rotating his left wrist as much as he can to test the resistance of the straps. They're painfully tight and don't provide as much wiggle room as he'd hoped. "That a family name? You know, like part of the Jeepers Creepers clan? You might want to consider changing your name, dude, it gives off creepy connotations."
"You're much more irritating than you were before," Reeper (seriously? Alright, sure, fine) remarks with a hint of annoyance.
"I get that a lot," Peter shoots back, slumping back against the table and taking a deep breath to clear the spinning in his head. Whatever this person/creature/thing had injected him with earlier was still making him dizzy. "Look man, you wanna tell me you want with me? Why I'm here?"
Reeper gives him another flooded graveyard chuckle. "Why, you're here to be harvested, my young friend!"
What the hell? Peter shakes his head as the words filter through his drug-addled brain like molasses dripping through a funnel. "Uh, pass, thanks."
Reeper ignores him and slips into another swath of shadows. "You see, my friend, you are more valuable than you could possibly imagine. Everything about you, from your skin all the way down to your bones, is an immensely precious commodity. You will be worth billions, possibly trillions, of units by the time I am done with you."
The implication that he doesn't need Peter whole but in parts is more than a little disconcerting and Peter struggles against the table again. He needs to get out of here and find a way to contact his friends but to do that he needs to get off this table first.
"Well hey," he says, voice straining just a little as he pulls against the straps. "You seem like a pretty reasonable...thing. How about you let me off this table and we can work out a deal as far which parts of me are the most valuable. There are a couple I'd like to keep if it's all the same."
His captor says nothing but there's a soft swish that sounds like the shake of his head. "I'm afraid I cannot do that," he tells him without the barest hint of remorse in his voice. "You see, it is better for you to remain immobile during the process, otherwise your body could be damaged and that would decrease your overall value."
"Wouldn't want that," Peter mutters, still struggling fruitlessly against the straps. One of them slices into the skin at his wrist, not deep enough to bleed but deep enough to burn. He grits his teeth against the pain and pulls again.
There's a clatter of sound off to his left and he whips his head to the side to see Reeper's hunched figure stooped over something in the corner. "Relax, my friend, there is no need to be alarmed. I have done this many times and I can assure you the process is mostly painless."
"That's not reassuring."
Again, his captor ignores him. "I must take my time with you, valuable as you are, so I am afraid it may take several days for the harvest to be complete. Humans are such fragile creatures," the words fade off in a disappointed lament. "Ah, but it is wise to learn from one's mistakes rather than repeat them."
A large, metal cart rolls into view next to the table, its surface covered in a dirty brown cloth that's littered with several very shiny, very sharp instruments. Peter feels a wave a nausea roll through him at the sight.
"Oh, dear me, do not concern yourself with those quite yet," Reeper tells him with a gurgling chuckle, reaching out to pat one of Peter's restrained arms soothingly. It's the exact opposite of reassuring. "Those are for much later. I will need you desiccated before those tools will be put to use."
Peter doesn't know if he should feel relieved by that statement or terrified. He swallows thickly and stares up at the ceiling. "So, uh, what happens first?" he asks, not really wanting to know the answer but hoping to stall whatever the first step in this so-called "harvest" is for as long as possible.
"How curious you are," his captor remarks but it's clear from the horrifying glee in his voice that he's delighted to discuss his plans for Peter's slow, drawn out demise. "First you will be exsanguinated; I have found through much trial and error that the removal of blood and bodily fluids allows for a much cleaner collection afterwards."
He fidgets with something on the lower portion of the cart, gathering more supplies and equipment for the process. "Once you have been completely drained," he continues from somewhere below the table's edge. "I will harvest your skin and superficial organs before moving on the remove your fascia and muscle tissue. I will then collect your internal organs, separated by size and weight, of course, and the final step will be to break down your skeletal structure. It should take five, possibly six days to complete."
"Well that sounds...awful," Peter says for lack of anything better as he pulls against the straps once more. They never give and they never loosen but he never stops struggling.
"Oh, it will be," Reeper tells him and Peter can practically hear the small, solemn nod in the shadows. "But you will be dead so it won't matter. The draining process should provide a relatively painlessly death but it will take the longest." He pops up again on the other side of the table like a horrible jack-in-the-box. "In order for me to collect the maximum volume of blood from your body, I will need to drain you slowly. The longer your heart beats," he says, reaching out and tapping one hideously discolored finger to the center of Peter's chest. "The longer it will take. And I plan on drawing it out for as long as possible."
Peter flinches involuntarily at the sight of the gnarled, bony finger jabbing him in the chest. The skin, if it could be called that, it a mottle mix of brown and green and looks very close to being putrefied. If the rest the creature's body looks like that…well, Peter is suddenly glad he's been hidden in the shadows this whole time.
"So why blood?" he blurts suddenly, desperate for some kind of distraction or diversion or literally anything that might buy him more time. "What's so special about that? You plan on using it as an aphrodisiac?" That thought by itself is disgusting, let alone the mental image of Reeper using it for such purposes, but Peter is stalling as long as he possibly can.
"Among other things," Reeper says with a flippant tone that makes it clear he has much bigger and greater things planned for Peter's sundry organs and fluids. "Human blood is an exceptionally rare material in these parts of the universe and can be used for many wonderful and terrible things. Why, a single vial of human blood, when collected from the right patron, can fetch upwards of one hundred thousand units. And your blood, my young friend," his voice lowers and hitches a little in an uncomfortable mixture of greed and reverence. "Your blood will fetch a very hefty price."
Reeper shudders along the side of the table in what could almost be considered a skip but looks a bit more like a convulsion. "Human blood is rare and valuable enough but to then discover you are also the offspring of a Celestial?"
Another deep, festering chuckle rumbles in his throat and the bony, putrefied hand strokes Peter's hair delicately. Peter resists the urge to flinch back. "You are a marvelous treasure indeed. The immense power Celestial blood can hold, the sheer magnitude of what could be done with it...you are going to make me very rich indeed."
Peter does flinch this time because this is all becoming waayy too much. "All right, look man, I didn't want to have to pull this card but you forced my hand. I'm part of an intergalactic team that has ties to some very high and powerful agencies. If you kill me or harvest me or whatever it is you're planning to do, they're gonna come after you and you're not going to like it when they find you."
His captor laughs then, a loud, shrieking sound that's much more jarring and haunting that his grim chuckle. It's the sound of spilled blood and slaughter houses and innocent men being led to the gallows. The laughter is by far the most terrifying thing about the thing holding him captive; at least that's what Peter thinks until he actually sees him.
There's a shuffle of movement and suddenly Reeper is no longer in the shadows, he's standing in the blinding white light in all his ghoulish glory. He's a horrifying hodgepodge of parts and pieces, stitched together crudely in a careless, offhanded way. His body is a mixture of skin and scales and sinew, patched together like a living quilt. None of his limbs match and the digits on one hand (paw?) are completely different from the other. The fingers that had touched him earlier look like they're heading straight for a disastrous case of gangrene and the fingers on the other hand are not fingers at all but long, sharp claws that look like they're composed of bone and steel.
His face is the worst. The eyes are too wide and manic and the lack of eyelids make them look like they're going to tumble out of their sockets at any moment. One is bright yellow and slit down the middle like a lizard's and the other is an inky, pitch black that reflects the light around the room like a marble. The lower half of his jaw is sharp and jutting forward past the upper mandible, the skin peeled back and exposing gleaming white bone. The upper part of his jaw does not completely meet the lower portion but it's all pointed and narrow and it gives him the appearance of wolf crossed with a large deer. He's a terrifying mixture of Frankenstein's monster and the Island of Dr. Moreau and Peter feels his breath seize in his throat.
"Oh, my dear friend," the gruesome creature chides with a death rattle chuckle. "I do not fear your friends or the agencies they work for or any threat you might make towards me." He reached out and snags one of Peter's arms with the bone-claw hand and rolls it to the side so the joint is laid open and bare. "I make my living as a harvester and trader and have never encountered an agency I feared."
Before Peter can react, Reeper plunges a long, gleaming needle into the the large vein in his arm and hot, thick blood begins shooting through the tube connected to it. Peter bites back a curse at the painful pinch and struggles to pull away as the creature sidles around to the other side of the table.
"With the amount of money you will make me," he continues, grabbing Peter's other arm and piercing it with a second equally long needle. "I am willing to take my chances against your friends and agencies."
The tubes connected to each needle lead to a large collection bag on the floor beneath the table and Peter has hazy, distant memories of going with his mother to the doctor's office when she had to get blood drawn. It was nothing like this, the amount was minimal compared to the volume being drawn from his veins now. For the first time since he regained consciousness he stops struggling against the straps holding him down, knowing the movement will just increase the amount of blood draining out of him. He clenches his teeth tightly, painfully aware of the needles piercing the veins of each arm.
"I would suggest you lay still for a while, this process does tend to cause dizziness," Reeper tells him, poking at each bag gently like he's seeing a container of liquid gold instead of human blood. "It's alright if you lose consciousness as well; I do not plan on draining you completely today. This will take a while." He stands then and makes his way toward the door, leaving Peter to slowly bleed out on the table.
Thanks for reading guys! More to come soon! :D
