Journal of a Tortured

SOUL

Written By: Kain

Episode 3:  Three Men, a Body, and a Sausage Hut

The year is New Beginning 35.  Thirty-five years after the death of the Dominion, the survivors of the now defunct army of the Dominion, classified as "The Renegades", are reduced to scavenging for food and supplies while the world has been plunged into a state of darkness.  A new Dark Age is upon humanity.  With the death of the Dominion, people have been thrown into a state of madness.  Everyone fears for their lives and the lives of their loved ones.  The only hope left to the people of Earth is the militia group known as "The Resistance".  Though hope seems to have lost its place among some.  Three teenagers, Damien, Kylie, and Cheese, are on a mission to find and obliterate the Renegades.  Fate has dealt them all cruel hands.  Kylie lost her family to a savage attack by the Renegades.  Cheese is constantly hounded by the Renegades for his baloney recipe.  Damien lost his family in a Renegade Raid and now shows signs of multi-personalities.  We join our youthful team in the town of Duschtenheim.

Damien looks around for a hotel while Kylie goes in search for people that could help them find the Renegades.  Secretly, she wanders in search of Drake Kellem, a master of splitting personalities.  She would have Damien show up to talk to him about the Renegades.  While there, there is a chance she can have Drake examine him.  She has to make sure that Damien is the one that is examined.  When Damien called himself Shadow, he was obnoxious, but when he called himself Kain, he was scary.  Damien would have to be the one to be examined.  The other two were too strange and horrible to be let out.

Cheesy Boy wanders around looking for a pizza stand.  He comes to a place called Kongo’s Rib Factory.  He decides that this is a great place to find pizza.  Upon being escorted out of the restaurant for demanding pizza, Cheese follows a trail of pizza toppings to a clothing store.  He walks in and is immediately told to leave.  Cheese demands to know why and the clerk says, "You aren’t wearing any pants!  We don’t serve people without pants."

"You have to serve me!  Your sign says ‘No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service’.  It doesn’t say anything about pants!"  Admitting defeat, the clerk shows Cheese to the changing rooms.  One hour later, Cheese comes out in an Elvis wig, sunglasses, a burlap shirt, and parachute pants.  Cheesy Boy struts down the street until he sees Kylie talking to a man that looks like a doctor.  Cheesy Boy tries to sneak up on them to eaves drop, but Kylie sees him walking cartoon-like down the empty road.

Damien has signed into the hotel and is now looking for Kylie and Cheesy Boy.  He stops at a mirror hanging in a doorway.  He stares into the mirror for a long while.  He looks much older than he should.  He has lived long for one so young.  He is fifteen years old and yet has the wear of a man much older than he.  He took a closer look into the mirror.  All of a sudden, a darkened face appeared in the mirror, one almost exactly like his face, but with a paler skin and blood red eyes.  He jumped back startled.  Could he have imagined that?  He must have.  Damien thinks to himself, I must get some rest and see a doctor.  A tap on his shoulder makes him spin around in bewilderment.  Kylie jump back from Damien’s swinging arm.  Damien blurted out, "I need to see a doctor, now."  Kylie stood there in shock.  Damien wanted to see a doctor.  This was the chance she needed.

At Dr. Drake Kellem’s office, Damien sat on the cold, steel bench.  His thoughts were of his conversation with Dr. Kellem.  "I can’t have multiple personalities.  Ah, it explains so much, but why would I never know it?"  At that moment, Dr. Kellem walked through the door.

"Damien, I want to have your mind scanned.  It will take only five minutes, but after that, I’ll have to keep you here for observation."  Damien nodded and closed his eyes.  Dr. Kellem led him to the scanning room and placed him in the machine.  Kylie stood outside the room, watching everything.  Fear grips her stomach and her body is shaking beyond control.  Tears fall from her eyes.  She doesn’t know why she’s crying, but whatever the reason, it scares her.  Damien lies in the cold machine.  He starts to think aloud.  "Why is everything made of steel here?"  He suddenly sees Kylie in the window.  "Dear God, don’t make me leave Kylie.  I don’t thin she could stand losing another friend."

Dr. Kellem looks over the data streams on the monitor over and over again.  "He definitely has about three or four personalities.  I think I can split three of them up.  Any more will simply have to fade away."  The maximum amount of personalities that can be split up is three.  Any other personalities die off.  That is the price of this kind of surgery.

Cheesy Boy waits in the waiting room while drinking a Dr Pepper.  He doesn’t know exactly why he’s here or what’s going on in the other room, but he knows that he loves Dr Pepper.  He is also watching the nurse with the really small skirt, clean up the floor.  Cheese is pretty happy right now.

Cheers can be heard all over the town of Duschtenheim.  The Resistance is marching down the main road.  At the head of this parade is the man known as Guerin.  He waves to the public while carrying a familiar looking ten-year old girl on his shoulders.  Alicia waves to the people as well.  The militia soldiers all have huge smiles on their faces.  They are all happy to have such loving fans.  It’s as if they were a popular rock group.  Hearing the noise and commotion, Kylie runs out to the street to see what the screaming and cheering is all about.  She sees Guerin marching along with Alicia on his shoulders.  She runs over to him.  "Why is the Resistance here?"

"We’re just coming to see old friends.  I have many soldiers from Duschtenheim you know."

"I thought that maybe the Renegades were headed here or something like that."

"No, nothing serious like that."

"That’s good.  I have a friend in the doctor’s right now.  I don’t know what’s wrong with him."  Guerin looked at her strangely for a second, after she just blurted the sentence out.

"That’s too bad.  If you need someone to talk to while she’s in the hospital, I’m here."

"Actually, the friend in the hospital is a ‘he’, his name is Damien."

"Damien, huh?  That’s a strange name."  Kylie laughed a little on the inside.  She had said that very same thing to Damien when she first met him.  "Where do you and Damien live?"

"Damien and I are nomads.  We travel around with a boy named Cheese."

"Cheese?  The very same Cheese that is famous for his Baloney?"

"Yeah."

"Cool, so where are your families?"

"Damien’s family was slaughtered by the Renegades almost a year ago.  He watched them burn from far away.  My family was killed three months later."

"That’s horrible!  Wait, did you say that Damien’s family was killed almost a year ago?"  Kylie nodded and asked why.  "I think Damien and I have met before."  Kylie looked puzzled as Guerin pushed past some of his soldiers to get to Dr. Kellem’s clinic, the only clinic in town.  He took six steps and stopped.  "I don’t want to intrude, so why don’t you tell me how he’s doing later?"

"Okay, I’ll let you know."  With that, Guerin left and Kylie went back to the clinic.

Dr. Kellem sat at his desk and pondered.  As Kylie came in, he sat up straight and began to speak.  "I’m going to separate the three personalities that you noticed in Damien.  It will take some time but it will work.  Damien will once again be himself."  Kylie gave the go ahead and thanked the doctor for his help.  Kylie left to go find Guerin and tell him of the condition that Damien is in.  Cheese is still drinking Dr Pepper and watching the nurse.

Dr. Kellem sits Damien in a bucket seat inside a plastic dome.  There are two more bucket seats in the dome.  Damien can’t understand what’s happening.  Before he can guess, the dome begins to spin and white energy is pumped into it.  He can feel the energy tearing through his mind.  He begins to lose consciousness.  He comes to just as the dome slows to a halt.  He looks to his left at the bucket seat and is startled by his findings.  A small ten-year old boy is sitting next to him.  He looks much like Damien, but he has brown eyes and a massive grin.  Damien realizes that this must be one of his separate personalities.  The treatment worked.  He is free of them.  Them.  Fear strikes him like a bolt of lightning hitting a rock.  He slowly turns to his right.  He sees a teenaged boy.  It is his duplicate.  The boy has some alterations though.  He has pale skin that is almost white and eyes that are a red so thick, it looks like bright blood.  The image from the mirror comes back.  He begins to stutter ashe says the one name that comes to his mind at the sight of this new incarnation of himself, "Kain."  The boy nods his head only once.  He gets up and tears open the dome’s door.

Kylie finally finds Guerin the Hotel D’Arminar.  She walks up to him as he is eating a thick, juicy steak with all the trimmings.  He looks up at her and smiles a big, bright smile.  "How’s your friend?"

"He’s in...surgery."  Guerin’s smile fades.  They have a long talk over dinner about Damien’s condition.  After a while the subject changed to the Renegades.  Kylie asked many questions about where the Renegades were last spotted.  Guerin answered as much as he could, but he still couldn’t answer a majority of the questions.  Kylie finally gives up and asks Guerin how long the Resistance will be staying in Duschtenheim.  "As long as we can without forfeiting anything to the Renegades."  Guerin’s answer didn’t make her feel at ease.  She went back to eating her salad and drinking her Diet Coke.

Dr. Kellem runs into the separation room and rants and yells about how this separation was a complete success.  Kain smiles at the good doctor and thrusts his left hand out.  Kellem falls to the floor in a heap of his own blood.  As his limp body slides off of Kain’s arm, Kain grabs a lab coat and wipes his arm off.  Shocked and horrified, Damien runs to Kellem’s side.  There is no way that the doctor can be revived.  Two-thirds of his heart was torn from his chest.  Kain is gone when Damien looks up.  "I have to find him.  I can’t let him kill again."

Alicia roams around Duschtenheim, looking for someone to play with.  There aren’t many kids her age in the town.  There are some kids that are younger and many that are older, but none her age.  She walks straight into an alley that she found to take her back to the hotel she is staying in.  All of a sudden, a boy jumps out in front of her.  "HELLO!"

"W-w-who are you?"

"My name is Shadoooow!"

"Shadu?"

"No, SHADOW!"

"Shadow?  I knew someone named Shadow.  He saved me from some big, mean bully.  Do you know him?"

"Probably not."  The boy seems to be very rambunctious and full of energy.  He is always smiling.  He looks to be about Alicia’s age and so they run off and play together.  Alicia finds Shadow to be a very fun person.  "You know, you’re cool, for a boy."

"Uh...thanks?"

"Let’s be best friends forever."

"Sure, whatever."  And so, the two children run off and play until they are too far away for any one to find them.  No one really knows they are gone, considering that no one knows that Shadow exists and no one cares where Alicia is.  Shadow and Alicia would spend a great majority of their lives together.  Alicia would spend the rest of hers with Shadow.

Cheese struts down the street wearing his new duds.  He is still looking for a pizza place.  He searches and searches but finds nothing.  He then looks to his right and sees a sausage hut.  "Yeah, Sausage Hut!"  He runs inside and orders every form of sausage they have.  He gets yellow sausage, Italian sausage, roman sausage, hot sausage, sweet sausage, and a type that he isn’t sure is really even sausage at all.  Upon feasting on the sausage, he decides to become a sausage chef.  He steps into the kitchen and, with everyone whispering to each other, begins to make sausage.

A white car pulls into town.  Gramp’s Dandruff flies through the roads.  He stops on a dime...mainly because it can’t go over it.  Biosoldier steps out of the car.  He scans the surrounding area full of people swearing at him to move his car off the bike path.  Biosoldier walks in the direction he thinks he will find Damien.  He doesn’t have a reason to go that way, he just does.  Wandering around, Biosoldier trips, falls into a well, and starts cursing to all hell.  When people come to see if he’s all right, he screams at them to help him up.  Eventually, he gets out of the well, but not until I find a reason for him to do something.

Back at the sausage hut, Cheesy Boy is being named the head chef of all the sausage in the hut.  Unfortunately, this is the last day of the Sausage Hut being open.  It closes in twenty minutes and becomes a Starbucks.  For now, Cheese can revel in his masterful cooking of sausage and baloney.  He is also making two yen an hour for his work.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t start getting paid today.

Guerin walks with Kylie down the street.  They talk of what to do about Damien’s "others".  Just as the conversation starts going, a guard from the frontlines appears.  "Sir, the Renegades have moved.  They’re ready to cross through Himstead.  If they go through, they’ll have a perfect place to fight.  We probably won’t even see them coming."  Guerin thought about this.  He couldn’t care less if they got that ground.  It’s worthless.  He has to put his attention on the crisis concerning the bunkers that promise safety from the disaster.  It’s true that the loss of natural resources is killing people, but the shelters will do nothing to stop that.  They’re only letting rich people in too.  That would have to stop.  The Resistance will focus on that now.  After relaying his thoughts to the soldier, Guerin starts asking Kylie what she thinks he should do about the shelters.  Before she can answer, a familiar fifteen year-old boy pops out of nowhere.  "I may be of assistance.  You may call me Kain."

Kylie, frightened, stares at Kain for a long moment.  Guerin decides that Kain may be a good person to have on his side.  With a handshake, a deal is set.  Kain will help overthrow the bureaucrats and give people the ability to save themselves from the loss of resources.  Kain may have some ulterior motives, so Guerin has decided to keep his best agent at Kain’s side at all times.  When the agent mysteriously falls off of a cliff, Guerin sends a boy of Kain’s age:  Transmetal.