I Am Phantom (Novella): Subject Number One Read Online Free PDF Page B

shattered like glass when Lucius hit it.
    Lucius stood there in the dark, panting as the
last of the splinters fell to the floor. He didn’t hear footsteps in the hall
outside. Nobody was coming to check to see if he was okay. And for the first
time since he’d been in this nightmare, he was okay with that.
    He turned his hand over. He wiggled his fingers
to see if any of them were broken. His pinky finger was bent at an odd angle where
it had run into the solid wood.
    As he watched, it bent back into place on its
own and immediately stopped hurting. Lucius gawked. Ryans’ voice came from the
back of his mind.
    My first bullet…it just healed
over it.
    That would be the healing factor.
    Shards of wood were scattered across the floor,
tinkling when Lucius shuffled them out of the way.
    He was strong now. Extremely strong.
Almost…super human strong.
    And then his stomach lurched and Lucius
collapsed as a convulsion ripped through it. Darkness took him in seconds.
    *                                                           *                                                           *
    This time Lucius woke up to the voices.
    Soft and loud, male, female, smooth, rough,
playful, deadly. They screamed at him from the corners of the room, shouted
from the quiet center of his mind, begging, pleading, demanding, threatening.
    “Stop!” Lucius screamed. The voices swelled in
him. “I said stop!” He slammed against the metal bars of the cage to make them stop. Again. Again. But still they laughed at him.
Chuckled. Crooned. Promised.
    Lucius stopped banging his head. For a moment
there was only the steady drip , drip of the blood coming from the gash in his skull, before
it closed up. The voices had promised him something. Promised him what?
    Power. Power and revenge. And all he had to do
was listen to them.
    Still clutching his head, Lucius turned to look
at the wooden branches he’d busted. He remembered the strength he’d used to
bust it into splinters. More power than that. More power than any man. And all
of it for him.
    Yes , the voices
crooned.
    His project. His body. His world. It had been
taken. Stolen.
    Yes, the voices
agreed.
    They would help him stop it. Stop all of them.
Forever.
    His hands began to shake. He stuffed them
beneath his armpits and clamped down, trying to make them stop.
    Two men were at the doorway. Lucius hadn’t heard
them approach. That wasn’t surprising considering the voices had started
shouting at him again. Some of them were awfully insistent.
    One of the men shined his flashlight on Lucius’
face.
    “He going crazy?” one man asked.
    “Looks like it,” the man with the light said.
    “Geez…where’d all that wood come from?” the
other one said. “You think he—”
    “That ape did it.”
    “You sure? I could have sworn the cage was
clean—”
    “Yeah, I’m sure. What, you think some wimp scientist
could do that?”
    “Eh…I don’t know. Should we tell Carlyle? I
don’t want to be here if he gets those crazy powers like that monkey.”
    “He won’t. And Carlyle’s gone, remember? Flew
out an hour ago.”
    The flashlight beam dropped to the floor. “This
one’s a dead man. Those other two locked in the office’ll be soon too.”
    “I’d like a chance with the pretty one, first.”
    “Well, let’s make her useful before we make her
bleed. See if she’ll help our men with finding where everything is. Get the
scientists set up at their stations.”
    “Right.” One of them hurried off.
    The voices cried for Lucius to follow. They were
curious to kill. Curious to know how it would feel. Would the men twitch when
they died? Would they bleed a lot?
    His hands had stopped shaking, but his fingers
itched to find out. He’d always had a curious mind. He was, above all, a
scientist.
    The last man spat at Lucius’ feet and closed the
door. The darkness