Page 202 of Brainwashed

It must be.

It looks just like him.

That’s that guy, isn’t it??

The serial killer…

That’s him!

The Carver!

He’s heading toward the park!

The voices were so loud, they were echoing off the inside of my skull as I jogged across the street, to the entrance of Cobble Hill Park.

And then they startedchasingme.

At a distance, of course. No one was outright coming up to me, but they were definitely following me, and it was obvious. I was being chased through town like Frankenstein’s monster. The people of New York City, wielding pitchforks.

They werepissed.

My heart was surging inside my chest, blood rushing in my ears while I picked up running, shivering from head to toe with desperate fright. I tried my hardest to lose them, but when I came to the exit of the park, I was met with a wall of police officers and FBI agents.

I stopped.

I gulped.

People were shouting all around me, noise as loud as thunder, pure chaos from all angles. My heart went still.

Guns aimed, the lasers from their scopes pointed at my chest and my face.

I lifted my hands slowly.

And that was it. The day Idied.

Iwish I was dead.

The wordachedoesn’t even cut it anymore. My whole body is straight-upthrobbing.

My wrists have long since gone numb, raw and bleeding from being cuffed to a drainpipe, which just so happens to be the exact height off the ground as me with my arms up over my head, plus a few miserable inches. And those inches are what have my toes just barely able to touch the ground. Meaning the handcuffs around my wrists are basically supporting my body weight, digging into my flesh the entire time I’ve been trussed up like this, which by my estimation has been at least forty-eight hours.

I’m not sure, though. I passed out for a while there.

They’ve had me like this since Manuel Blanco told me that Lem left me… So not only is my body in physical agony, but also my heart has packed up and moved out.

It’s funny… In so many things I do, I find myself lacking emotion. The way people aresupposedto feel about things, I don’t. So you’d think that would make having my heart smashed to bits a walk in the park, being that I’m supposed to be a cold, unfeeling reptile person.

But on the contrary… The pain of falling in love with someone like Dr. Love, someone so elusive and difficult to pry affection from, is a million times more excruciating than my bloody wrists. Or my aching back and legs, my sore jaw from the ball-gag in my mouth… My stomach that’s eating itself from starvation and dehydration.

Losing Lem is so much fuckingworse,than all of it.

Especially because all I’ve had is time to think. I’ve been tied up here in this dank, dingy room that reeks of mold, crusted blood, and stale ocean water, blindfolded and gagged, and the only thing I can see behind my tired eyes is his face.

The way his pupils blow out when he realizes he’s turned on by something as filthy and depraved as sucking cum out of my dick, like it’s a straw in his vanilla milkshake, or smearing our blood together on my naked flesh like the paint of two stark-raving mad artists. The way his perfectly plush lips part and shiver out his breaths when he’s up to his nuts in me. How he’ll link our fingers together, and whisper growly commands in my ear.

How he always gazes deep into my eyes, never wavering in that intense contact, as if he’s trying to read the data stored up in my mind with his robot powers.

But mostly, I just can’t stop fucking thinking about how my feelings for him are epicallydifferentfrom what I’ve felt for anyone else. He’s not like Cameron, or Emmanuel, or any of the others. He’s so spectacularly, tragicallyalivein my world, when the rest of them are dead memories, chopped up and discarded remnants left only for the slideshow of The Carver.