Part Nine - Ben There, Done That
BEN
It was damned stuffy and very hot. I was uncomfortable. Okay, more than uncomfortable. My broken leg hurt like a bitch and I was extremely pissed off.
It had been a long time since I'd allowed anyone to manhandle me. Manticore had their ways but it was to be expected, I suppose. Before my encounter last year with Max and our fight in the woods, I had spent years torturing innocent people. I knew it was wrong. But back then, I was confused. I'd had so many questions and no answers to ease the pain of uncertainty.
I wondered what it was that made Max, Alec and the others want to stay on the outside. I'd found it frightening and overwhelming, somewhere someone like me could get lost and never be found again. When Zack had us split up after the escape, I'd never felt so scared in my entire life. I'd been surrounded for as long as I remembered, by people who cared about me, by a CO who was always in control. I was never a leader, always a follower. And being separated from my unit was the worst thing I ever knew.
I never established relationships of any kind while on the outside. I never had any friends. A loner, I kept to the shadows, watching and listening. And the voices in my head screamed at me. The memories overtook me. And finally, the dreams, my loneliness and despair pushed me over the edge.
I'd taken to "killing" myself through others. I captured innocent men, men of God, agents of the Blue Lady, and burned my own barcode onto them. I set them free in large, sprawling rustic areas with a knife and a gun with which to defend themselves. I gave them a head start and then hunted them, caught them and killed them. I tried so hard to kill myself, over and over again. Funny though, I never actually thought of suicide.
When Max came after me, what I saw in her eyes made me want to curl up and die. My favorite little sister, the one person I always felt closest to aside from Zack, looked at me with a mixture of such sadness, disgust and hurt. I felt like I had betrayed her. The Blue Lady didn't measure as high up on the scale as Max. That awareness made me think about what I was doing. But I was so caught up in the game that I pushed the thoughts away.
She followed me into the woods. I was seconds away from killing my victim when she attacked. Damn that girl, she certainly knew how to fight! But when I had her pinned against that tree, she took me by surprise. She kicked out at my knee and snapped the bone. It was over. I couldn't get away and they were closing in on us.
I didn't want to go back to Manticore. From all my memories and the nightmares I'd had over the years, I knew they would put me in the "Bad Place" with the Nomalies. I had come to realize they wouldn't actually feed me to them like I'd thought when I was younger, but to be left alone with monsters in the basement scared the shit out of me. So I told Max to be kind; kill me rather than send me back. And she did.
Manticore found my body, for all intents and purposes dead, after Max left me. They put Humpty Dumpty back together again and when I had healed, they threw me in Psy-Ops. They spent months fucking with my mind, trying to fix the crossed wires in my brain. But I'd separated myself into different people over the years to help me deal with what life threw my way and they were never fully able to put me right in the head.
Easygoing Ben was happy. He came out to play whenever life was good, or whenever he thought good thoughts. A rare occurrence indeed. Indifferent Ben popped up when he needed to ignore certain situations, annoying people or distasteful things in general. And Crazy Ben? He developed over time, after years of being cut off. He came out when things finally got too hard for me to handle, when I realized that everything I'd trusted and known was gone and that no one was there to lead me in the right direction. I was lost and all alone, and Crazy Ben was the persona I adopted when the guilt and fear became too much to accept.
When Manticore reindoctrinated me, my delusional psyche was put to rest. Manticore had given me new hope. Structure and security that I had craved for so long. I no longer questioned things. I was a soldier, a good soldier. So when I was sent to bring 494, my little brother Alec, home, I didn't even think twice. A good soldier never questions orders. And why should I? Given that my brother was one of the finest ever produced by Manticore, bringing him back to the fold made perfect sense.
All these thoughts were going through my mind as we sped down the highway. I had a mission to fulfil and I was getting restless. I wondered how long I would be stuck in the boot of the car. I was getting angrier by the second and when my temper flared out of control bad things were bound to happen…
TBC
Part Ten
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