Page 4 of Bound By Thorns
Eli on the other hand was more my twin. He was the baby of our brotherhood, even though he was a few months older than me.
Eli and his shy mouth. God, he was too quiet sometimes. Never shared his story with us. I still didn’t know what his beginnings were.
I, on the other hand, had shared almost everything with Bastian and Eli in the past three years we’d been with the Tuckers. I was the trailer park kid, but instead of living with a deadbeat dad or a stripper mother, I lived with an old man until I turned six. He named me Logan, but I didn’t even know his name. He never really cared for me, but he did provide foodonce a day. I was more his pet dog, than a kid wishing for shelter.
When I showed up muddied and starving at a grocery store one day, the police were called and I was reluctantly thrown in the foster system. After going through nine foster homes and living on the streets for two years, I was finally assigned the Tuckers at the ripe age of eleven. This is where I met Bastian and Eli. Clifford Tucker was a mean old bastard. He would beat Bastian up every chance he got. I think he was racist. Bastian’s dark skin color never bothered me, or even Eli. We just assumed that’s how he was and continued with our friendship.
I grabbed the keys tucked and hidden behind the mailbox and opened the lock.
“Eli!” I shouted again as I entered the house, hoping this time I was louder and Eli would answer.
Then I heard heavy breathing coming from our room. Like someone was running haggard, full speed.
“You in there, Eli?” I cautiously walked towards the closed door. The hair on my neck rose with unanticipated terror.
The door creaked as I swung it open.
Bastian was the one breathing heavily, sweat dripping down from his forehead to his nose. A bead of sweat dropped and landed on Eli’s chest. He was lying down flat, his eyes wide open yet unseeing. Bastian was pressing both his hands on Eli’s chest, giving him CPR.
I knew this wasn’t a dream. I pinched myself to make sure of it. Then Bastian looked at me. His red-rimmed eyes filled with terror mirrored mine. His gaze inadvertently dropped to somewhere near Eli’s feet and I followed it.
A bottle of tiny white pills lay there, open and toppled. And in that moment, I knew what was happening. But I couldn’t move. My legs refused to acknowledge the urgency. I just helplessly watched Eli lose the fight with death. Eventually, after maybethirty minutes, Bastian tired himself out and stopped. His head hung low and he started wailing.
Bastian was supposed to be a sea of calm, yet here he was, howling, screaming, and crying over a dead body that once was Eli, our brother.
???
I snapped awake, another haunting vision of Eli dissolving as reality settled in. He was there again in my dreams, wedged between our bunk beds, his eyes bulging, bloodshot from the drugs coursing through his veins.
You couldn’t have stopped it, Logan. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know.
I didn’t know, that was true. Yet, Sebastian fucking Blackthorn did. He knew all along. He didn’t intervene; he didn’t save Eli. He just watched as he slipped away.
I shook my head fiercely, trying to dispel the guilt and anger brewing inside me, but the motion only ignited a sharp pain that speared from my temples down to my neck. My ears rang with a persistent echo, blurring my thoughts.
Was I still in that fucking torture chamber? Or was I back in my cell?
My unfocused eyes finally locked on the blurry ragged floor beneath me. A floor I recognized.
Cell, it is.
I dragged myself to the front of the cell and grabbed the tiny bottle of water they usually left for me. Today’s torture was apparently over. I guess they couldn’t find more space on my back to play tic tac toe with their knives. It was when they waterboarded me that I lost my consciousness.
Fucking Garret Tyson.
After the explosion at Warehouse 67, I was left scarred, a charred shadow of my former self. Pink, raw burn scars sprawledfrom the left side of my neck, across my chest, and down my arm. My tattoos sure as hell were ruined. Another casualty of that blast was the RLM device, which I was nearly certain had been damaged in the explosion. Yet, when my squad didn’t come for me—two weeks with no sign of rescue—I realized they must think I was dead.
In some twisted way, I preferred they believe that lie. The thought of them attempting a rescue and being dragged into this hellish place, wherever the fuck it was, was unbearable.
Clang!
Clang!
A slow rhythmic sound of a plate being rammed into the cell’s metal bars sounded, elevating my throbbing headache to a point where I was dangerously close to passing out again.
Clang!
Clang!
