Chapter 1 - Insanity

Narrated by Rosanne, a patient in the asylum.

I wake up to complete darkness, as I do every morning.  The lights have been out for weeks, but the guards refuse to do anything, as usual.  They love to see us suffer.

I crawl out from the space under my bed and creep to the tiny square window on the door of my cell.  A dim flicker of a candle catches my attention.  Is that...Morris' cell?

"No!  Morris!"  I cry, clutching my throat to ease the pain of the rasping.  "Morris!"  I scream, my eyes watering from the pain of speaking.  Not the candle...anything but the candle!

I step back from my door, then charge at it with as much force as I can.  I need to wake up the others.  They need to know.

I back up and ram the door again and again until I hear a response from the cell next to me.  Cell 58 - Daphne...that's what the guards call her anyway.  I hear a muffled, agonized scream from her cell.  "MORRIS!"  She cries, slamming herself against her door.

The saltiness of my tears stings against the scarring on my throat.  I try to scream, but it's too painful.  "Morris..."  I rasp, falling to my knees and putting my head in my hands.

Ten minutes later, the building is shaking.  All 494 of the prisoners on floor 4 are slamming against their doors in protest.  I rapidly inhale and exhale, trying to calm the pain in my throat and the horror in my mind.

"YOU B******S!"
"BRING MORRIS BACK!"

"DON'T YOU DARE KILL HIM!"
"GOD WILL HAVE HIS VENGEANCE!"

Despite their cries, the candle remains, flickering in response to the floor shaking.  My hands are shaking like leaves as I picture where Morris is now...battered and bleeding, left for dead in The Chamber...yet another part of the family murdered...and it's all our fault.

The guards know how much we value one another.  We've all been horribly modified by the 'experiments', yet we are all a family.  So...every few months, when we're "getting unruly" or "forgetting who's boss", they take one of us and...we never see them again.

Morris was like a brother to me.  Before the uprising, we were all held in a large open space, allowed to socialize and meet our new inmates.  When I was first brought in last year, he looked after me.  "Who would send a child to a place like this..."  He asked me every day.  I replied only with a shrug, before leaning against his shoulder and thinking of home.  

I'm 13 years old now.  Within the space of a year, I've witnessed an uprising against the guards, which resulted in us being separated and put into individual cells, 4 deaths of close friends, been the subject of a horrific experiment involving my throat being cut several times and stitched back, hence my difficulty in speaking, and I've experienced the pain of knowing my real family thinks I'm dead.

But the others keep me strong.  Sometimes, when we've been good, the guards let us out into the big space again, where we can talk to each other.  Whenever that happens, they remind each other, and me, that God is watching over us, and that He will have his vengeance on the guards who treat us so badly.

I have faith in my God.  He does good things to good people, and bad things to bad people.  Morris promised me that when we die, we will all go to heaven, and the guards will suffer in hell for what they did to us.

I hope Morris was right.