Battered, Not Broken
He stared at the flickering images that played on the screen. Ink blots of insects and surgical wounds. If he remembered correctly, bugs were signs of a decent mental health. Surgical wounds—? What did those mean?
Gaze dropping, he contemplated the stain of red on his clothes. His bloodied hand pressed at his abdomen, bruised black from all the falls he had taken. His entire body had been put through the wringer — concussion, fractures, amputations without anesthesia, some thing crowding his head.
For a moment, he wondered if this was what pregnant women felt like — with something settled inside them.
—No, their experience was nothing like this.
It felt like some worm was wriggling under his skin. It traced over his muscles and bones, prodding at the edges of his mind. If he had to make an analogy, he was better off referencing Alien.
Would it kill him one day? Would he end up like Billy: a vegetable, aged beyond his years, shoved full of tubes? Would Murkoff, or whoever held hands with them, come for him and want to experiment on him like the rest of this place? A shudder ran along his spine.
—No.
He had let that guy — only now he realized he was the one who sent him that email — go. That was the right decision. It was okay to let him escape. Murkoff would get theirs. But the rest the people here? It wouldn't be right to let them leave. He couldn't do it. Not when they were all victims like him, mutilated and trashed like last week's rotten leftovers.
—Killing them would be an act of kindness.