Alters

Prologue

  Tiny and soft footsteps are barely heard as five small figures crept around in the dark. It was late at night and five children are silently trying to get to the kitchen, in search of food.

  The oldest among them, the boy that has the number one on his shirt led the four younger children where the adults are keeping the food in the kitchen. And once they got into the pantry, they grabbed as many bread and biscuits their little hands can carry.

  Looking around, they silently left the kitchen and crept back towards the quarters where the other children sleeps. When they went inside, around ten children got up from the bed and approached them. They distributed the food they gathered and shared them with the other children; keeping just a piece of bread for each one of them. 

  A set of twins, a boy, and a girl with numbers fifty and fifty-one on their shirts sat on the corner of the room as they eat. The boy with the number one on his shirt sat beside the girl, while the boy with the number seventy and one hundred one sat with them as well. 

  The numbers on their shirt correspond to the number they got when they first got into that building. There were originally around two hundred children brought in, but now there are only fifteen of them as every other day, children will go missing from their beds.

   After they ate, all the children went back to sleep. But not too long after they all went to bed, the door of their quarters opened and four men wearing white lab gowns came in. And those four men grabbed four sleeping children and carried them out.

  Once they are gone, the five children sat upon their beds all looking at the door. The little girl went to hug her twin brother, while the other three boys got out of bed and silently went out of their quarters. The three of them thread the empty dark corridors to go to the place where they know the children were taken.

  The three boys went through the vent that led to what looked like an operating room. From where they are, they can see the four children that were taken earlier being subjected to an operation. They saw how the people in medical gowns took the children’s internal organs.

  The boy with number one on his shirt clenches his fist, feeling the fury in him bubble up because of what they are witnessing. He was about to push forward but stopped when the door on the operating room opened two men entered dragging the twins.

  The three boys hiding in the vents had their eyes widened when they saw them. The little girl was crying as her brother held her.

“Boss, found these two walking around.” One of the men said.

  Then a man in suit supervising the operation turned towards the twins.

“The twins?” the man in a suit asked and the men nodded.

  Then the man they referred to as boss turned towards a woman in a laboratory coat.

“How was their response to the serum?” 

“They received it well. No manifestation of any rejection, but the girl’s body is a bit weak. Her heart isn’t as strong as her brother’s.” The woman answered.

  The boy with number one on his shirt turned towards the two boys with him and told them to go. As the two boys did what he told them, his head whipped towards the direction of the operating room as the little girl started screaming.

 “Harvest her other organs.” 

  As the men tried to separate the twins, something unexpected happened. The lights in the room started to flicker and the men holding them froze. The boss and the woman in a lab coat had their eyes widened when they saw the twins’ eyes turn darker. And then the men unfroze and did the unthinkable, they pulled out their guns and shot themselves.

  Screams from the medical staff in the room were heard and they started running away one by one. The boss and the woman both looked in awe, triumphant rather with what they witnessed.

“The serum worked on them. It worked even better.” The boss said with a crazy look on his face.

  When the twins turned towards him, his eyes almost bulge out of their sockets as his legs suddenly snapped in two. The woman screamed and called in for backup. When additional guards came, armed with guns, the boy in the vent hissed and jumped out of the vent.

  His eyes were also dark and in one flick of his wrist, the guards flew towards the wall.

“Go!” The boys screamed at the twins.

  With one last glare at the boss who passed out on the floor, they run out of the room. The boy with number one on his shirt turned towards the woman in a lab coat who was looking at him with the same crazy look and grin.

“My son, my precious creation.” The woman mumbled.

“I am not your son.” The boy sneered and then his eyes grew darker and the whole room shook as the things around floated, the light bulbs exploded.

  As the room grew dark, the boy runs out of the room, and the woman called for another backup.

  Meanwhile, outside the building where they are being held, the two boys are waiting. The five of them planned to escape the place and now is the time, but something happened and they feared that they wouldn’t be able to leave. When they heard shots fired, both of them felt scared. What can they do, they are just children, no older than ten. And when they saw the twins running through the door and guards are after them the two boys felt scared but they wanted to do something.

  And as the two boys froze, their eyes turned dark and had that evil glint on them. One of the boys looked around and his eyes fell on the burning torches around. In one snap of his fingers, the flame on those torches flew towards the guards. As they scream and burn to the ground, the twins are reunited with the two boys.

   They heard another series of gunshots and then they saw a figure leaped from the window; it was the boy, eldest among them. He landed on his feet and then he turned back towards the building and smirked before he jogged towards the other children.

  As they are reunited, they dashed out of the place but not before the boy snap his fingers, setting the place on fire. From a distance, the five children stopped running and turned around to watch the building burn to the ground, and the other children, and adults came out running to save themselves.