From The Heart by Kristina Ortiz - HTML preview

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126

 

 

 

couldn‘t hear them, and when they attacked him, taking him out of his bed by force and gagging him, he couldn‘t do anything to defend himself. Opal had used the power of his mind to render Carlos helpless. Now, Carlos was asleep on his way to his next destination because they used a potent somniferous to subdue him. Several hours later, at four o‘clock in the morning, the guys arrived at an abandoned cabin. They needed all the strength that they had to pull Carlos out of the car. Carlos was six feet, seven inches tall, and weighed 280 pounds in pure muscle. He didn‘t seem to be this heavy precisely because of his height, and Carlos hadn‘t stopped growing. Within the next few months, he would become a few inches taller and then stop growing. They opened the door to the cabin and threw him on the floor. What they were planning to do was simple, but very harmful. They doused him and the whole cabin with gasoline they‘d bought at a gas station only a few hours before, and then Dustin lit the match. They ran away from the scene seconds before the flames engulfed the entire cabin and sped away in Dustin‘s van.

 

Carlos woke up, but not completely. He knew he was somewhat awake because he felt the fire eating at his skin. Still unable to do anything to help himself, he started to scream for help, but for the next few minutes, it felt like he was so far away from civilization and inhabited areas that no one could hear his cries. The somniferous was so powerful that it would take Carlos hours to be fully alert and start moving, so he was like a caged animal at the moment. Just when it seemed that there was no hope for him and he‘d be permanently incapacitated, the flames stopped. He didn‘t know how because there were no fire trucks, no firemen, no water, no rain. He knew that someone came in to help him, someone like him, but his eyes were so severely marred by the fire that he couldn‘t see his savior. He was Dr. Sergio Snyder. Sergio did not only hear a fellow Emadorian screaming for help, but he also came here literally in the blink of an eye to stop the fire before it did poor Carlos any more damage. Carlos had third-degree burns in over ninety percent of his body, and no doctor besides Sergio would be able to help Carlos get back to the condition he was before. Sergio and his team could perform several procedures, including slight genetic enhancement to make Carlos‘ body heal a little faster than it would on its own, but they needed to hurry up. The quicker they took care of this, the faster Carlos would be completely healthy again.

 

The next thing that Carlos knew, he was in the General hospital, minutes from being operated on. He opened his eyes and noticed that he could see and that they were the only part of his body that no longer hurt. He got the chance to say a few words before being anesthetized. “Hey, I can see!” he said, with what remained of his voice. “I can see! Someone gave me my eyes back!”

 

“Yes,” said Lindsay, the nurse, “that‘s right, your eyes are once again as beautiful and healthy as they were before you were kidnapped and set on fire, Carlos, but I need you to calm down and do something for me, ok?”

 

Carlos remained quiet.

 

“That‘s good. Good boy. That‘s it. Now, what I need you to do for me is,” she said as she applied the anesthesia, “to count backwards from one to ten for me. Don‘t worry about being loud enough. You can whisper it and I‘ll hear you, understand? You don‘t have to do any more damage to your voice.”

 

Just ten seconds later, as soon as he made it to the number one, Carlos blacked out. Minutes later, the operations started. The doctors worked on repairing the internal organs

 

first, and that‘s where the genetic enhancement came in. Several hours later, it was as if Carlos‘ body hadn‘t been set on fire at all, at least when it came to his insides. Twenty percent of his skin