He was abandoned long before he could even remember being held. Left in a rusted crib behind in a collapsing hospital that no longer treated patients. The building that had once been a sanctuary, disintegrated over the years, it became something else. Something more sinister. Something that only operated at night.
The staff called it “The Program.”
Children who had no families, no records, no one searching for them were brought there. They weren’t given names.
Only numbers.
The boy from then on he was only known as “Subject 42.” From the moment he could walk, they studied him. At first it was simple things—sleep deprivation, isolation, hunger tests. The doctors wanted to see how long a child could survive without comfort. Most of the children around him broke quickly; S-42 didn’t.
He watched them instead. His silence disturbed the researchers. When they hurt him, he didn’t cry. When they locked him in darkness for days, he sat calmly in the corner like he was waiting for something. So the experiments escalated quickly. They tested pain threshholds. They cut into his skin to observe how quickly it would heal. They would stop his breathing to study how long his brain could survive without oxygen. They drained blood from him and replaced it with strange, awful smelling compounds that burned through his veins.
Sometimes his heart stopped, and sometimes he would die.
But every time they revived him, the doctors asked him the same exact question, “What did you feel?”
At first he would say nothing.
Later he would answer them honestly, “Just quiet.”
That answer fascinated them so they pushed him harder. More chemicals. More surgeries. More controlled deaths followed by violent resuscitations. Over the years, the boy experienced death dozens of times, each one a few seconds longer than the last.
But something inside him changed.
Each time he returned, the world felt less and less correct. It started to just feel wrong.
Too loud. Too warm. Too alive.
He began to prefer the moments when his heart stopped, because those were the only moments where nothing hurt him.
When he was sixteen, the program began its final experiment. The researchers had captured something months earlier during a raid on an old crypt beneath a ruined cathedral.
A creature that wasn’t human.
They kept it sedated, chained inside a reinforced chamber in the basement. Their goal was simple, find out what made it immortal.
And they needed a test subject, S-42.
They drained the vampire’s blood and injected it into the boy’s veins in small doses over several weeks. Most subjects would have died instantly.
But he had been broken and rebuilt so many times his body simply adapted.
The transformation began slowly, his temperature dropped, pulse weakened. His eyes stopped reacting to light. But the doctors didn’t realize something else was happening. The thing in the chamber could smell the boy’s blood. And the boy could feel the creature. For the first time in his life, he felt a presence that understood death the way he did. The night of the final experiment, they placed him in the chamber with the restrained creature. The plan was simple, observe what happened when the altered boy was exposed to the source.
The moment the door sealed, something inside S-42 snapped. Years of pain. Years of dying. Years of being dragged back to life against his will. He walked toward the chained creature slowly. The creature looked at him with something like recognition. Neither of them were supposed to exist. The boy did something the scientists didn’t expect. He bit the creature first.
The blood was ancient and starving. His body, already filled with diluted traces of it, reacted violently. The transformation completed in seconds. When the alarms started, it was already too late. The cameras recorded only fragments. Doors being ripped open. Screams cut short. Blood flooding the hallways. The boy didn’t just kill the researchers. He dragged their bodies into the operating rooms where they had cut him open for years. One by one he placed them on the tables. Like patients waiting for surgery, the way they had done it to him so many times before.
When authorities finally raided the facility days later, they found the entire building silent.
Every body had been arranged neatly in the testing rooms.
Except one.
In the deepest chamber, the chained creature had been drained completely dry.
Carved into the wall above, were two words written in dried blood.
MORTUARY LIVES.