by P. Craig
Another thought was every bit as unpleasant, though. Taking their clothes was something he didn’t really want to do—he figured there was a high probability of vomiting at the sight of more blood and gore up close—but it was something that he knew he would have to do in order to have any chance of survival in the unknown world waiting for him outside. He’d never blend in while wearing nothing but a gown.
Taking a deep breath, the man opened his eyes and set to work removing the clothes from the dead man next to him. The boots came off easily enough—the dead man’s cold feet slid out with little resistance—and the trousers slipped off without difficulty too, but the thick branch rammed through the man’s saturated shirt proved too much of an obstacle to overcome; the sight of intestines poking out was simply too much to bear.
The man decided to make do with what he had and quickly pulled on the bloodstained trousers and the cold boots; the morbidity of what he was doing made him shiver while he tied up the laces. He tucked his gown into his trousers as best he could, though he felt a chill on his spine where the back of the gown didn’t quite cover his skin. It’ll have to do.
Anxious to get going, the man pulled on the door handle; it swung open quickly, slipping from his grasp, and clattered against a nearby tree stump. Using the open door as a step, the man left the ambulance—the only place he had ever known—and made his way down onto the forest floor.
There was a chill in the air. Rubbing his arms with his hands, the man walked a short distance away from the wreck and then stopped to look back. In his mind, he tried to form a clear picture of what had happened, but it wasn't easy. The ambulance looked even more twisted and battered from the outside—trees and rocks had punched huge holes in the bodywork; the front tyres had been torn to shreds and the left rear, as far as the man could tell, had been ripped away completely. The wrecked vehicle was standing almost vertically on its nose, skewered through the hood by thick branches, with a steep slope supporting its underside—a long, steep slope that had been scarred by the seemingly tortuous path carved out by the ambulance’s high speed, tumbling descent.
The man shook his head, bewildered. Frankly, his survival seemed even more unlikely in light of the widespread destruction that the crash had caused; it was yet another reminder that he shouldn’t linger and abuse his good fortune.
The man turned his gaze away from the wreck and studied his new surroundings. Which way?
There was no obvious path to safety and long-term freedom. Other than the steep slope on one side, all else looked the same—thick row upon row of trees in every direction as far as he could see, with darkness ultimately engulfing everything in the background. He had a feeling that there was probably a road at the top of the slope, figuring that the ambulance must have fallen from somewhere, but where there was a road, there was likely to be people—people who would be looking for the ambulance; people who would be looking for him, in particular.
No, not that way. I need to go deeper into the forest.
The man moved quickly through the trees, his boots pounding on the hard forest floor. He ran for a long time, his mind focussed solely on putting some distance between him and his former prison, but then, as his lungs began to burn in the cool air, a shortness of breath forced him to stop and rest for a moment.
As he did so, he cast a look back the way he had come. The darkness he had seen in the distance when looking around moments earlier had now swooped round and obscured all trace of what he had left behind; the slope and the wreck were both firmly out of sight. The man doubted he could even find his way back, not that he had any desire to return to that awful place—especially as the way ahead wasn’t quite so dark now.
In the distance, a light was shining through the gaps between the trees, silhouetting the trunks. It was a radiant glow, one suggesting warmth and comfort, and it was sorely tempting.
The man was in no condition to resist; his legs felt dead and heavy, and his head was beginning to throb uncomfortably—frankly, he needed little enticement to walk towards the light. In his mind, quietly, there was a faint doubt about what he might find there, about who he might find there. But he kept walking, forcing himself on and ignoring the doubts. Just stupid paranoia.
The light became stronger, growing in brilliance, and soon it was forcing the man to shield his eyes with his hands, though that measure did little to ease the sudden throbbing in his head.
Maybe it’s not just paranoia.
The nagging doubt resurfaced, bringing with it a barrage of other fears and misgivings; it was like something deep inside was telling him this—the light, his escape, his conclusions, everything—was all wrong.
His pace slowed, his feet almost refusing to move on.
Something’s not right. Something is definitely not right.
Seven
March 21, 12.13 p.m.
Sweating, his pulse racing, his heart pounding, the man awoke and immediately screamed with rage at the demons in his head that were goading him, telling him lies. He wanted to claw at his face with his fingers, to squeeze the demons out of his head with his hands, but he couldn’t do anything; somehow, someone had fastened his arms tightly to his sides with thick leather straps. Raging, the man lifted his head from the pillow and let rip with another scream, a piercing cry from deep down inside his gut, a roar in defiance against the voices in his mind, the demons that had deprived him of his liberty.
A white door opened not far from the foot of his bed; a slender hand reached round and grasped the edge, followed a second later by a face—a woman’s face—which peered into the room.
The man fell silent, watching the woman expectantly as she hovered by the door, her eyes observing him with curiosity in return.
“That’s not going to do you any good, you know,” she said, breaking the silence. “You can shout and bawl as much as you like, but you’re not going back until you’ve proved you are able to control yourself again.”
Her words made some kind of sense to the man, but she didn’t really understand what was happening to him, what the demons were putting him through. None of them had understood; their reactions when he had tried to explain before said everything for what they truly thought.
“And I’m not going to keep coming every time you decide to scream for attention, if that’s your game,” she said, shaking her head. “Just remember—there are cameras in this room, so we do know whether or not you are in genuine distress.” She gave the man a stern look. “The doctor will be round to see you later, so if you want to help yourself, I suggest you keep quiet, complete your period of isolation with good grace, and try to behave yourself when you have visitors. Understood?”
The man responded with silence and lowered his head to the pillow.
The woman lingered by the door for another couple of minutes. The man sensed she was still watching him closely, perhaps waiting for a more definite answer. But silence was all that he was going to give her—silence being exactly what she had demanded.
The door clicked quietly back into its frame. The man figured the woman had finally realised he wasn’t going to give her any kind of acknowledgement. Not that she would have expected any, he supposed, such was the nature of their relationship.
He lifted his head from the pillow for a second time and stared at the closed door, listening as the woman turned the key from the other side, locking it shut. The door’s whiteness really irritated him, especially when the sunlight shone in through the window high above his head and reflected off the glossy surface, glaring back into his eyes.
The walls irritated him too but in a different way—their whiteness was muted somewhat by their texture and composition, a thick layer of padding on top of what would otherwise have been brick walls.
They didn’t think he could hurt himself in a room like this—padded, white and empty apart from a bed. Except he could—he had—anything and everything able to inflict pain or some kind of damage if struck hard enough. If struck in exactly the right way.
Even now, he could still see his dried blood streaked across the wall directly opposite; no amount of cleaning was ever going to remove that mess completely. They could trap him, isolate him, but they could never make him go quietly.
The man tried to pull his hands from the thick straps binding them to his side; his body strained every sinew as he fought for even the slightest margin of give that he could use to slip free. Grunting with effort, he bit down hard on his lip by accident; blood quickly filled his mouth before flowing down his face and onto his gown. The man didn’t care; his face had become so used to the flow of his own blood, it was reassuring in a way to feel its warmth on his skin. Besides, he liked the taste.
Determined, he pulled even harder on the straps, his wrists burning as they rubbed hard against the leather; such was the effort, he thought his arms might pop out of their sockets at any moment.
The sound of someone outside unlocking the door filtered through the white noise in his head to his conscious thoughts.
The man froze instantly, startled. As the door opened, he closed his eyes, trusting his sense of hearing to tell him who was coming, and rested his arms at his side, trying to make it look like he hadn’t been doing anything at all.
The heavy, laboured breathing; the sharp, repetitive sniffing; the plodding footfalls—they told the man everything he needed to know.
“I see you’ve been busy since I last saw you.”
The speaker’s monotone voice confirmed the man’s suspicions. It belonged to his doctor, a cretin whose presence the man had no desire to acknowledge.
“Nurse Bouchet tells me that you’ve been screaming all manners of profanity again.”
The man ignored the remark; his face remained impassive—as impassive as he could muster considering the blood all around his mouth and chin.
“So it’s the silent treatment for me this morning, is it? Very well. I hope, then, that this heralds the beginning of a new epoch in our relationship, and that your prior indiscretions will become relics of a bygone and forgotten age.”
It was a bombastic remark that would have ordinarily provoked an angry response, yet the man resisted the temptation this time. Part of him was mindful that another outburst would mean the removal of the few privileges he had left to him; the other part was mindful that the words in his head would almost certainly muddle and refuse to flow willingly if he tried to vocalise them. Like before.
A creak and a sudden dip around his lower half told the man that the doctor had sat down at the foot of the bed.
“You must realise—no, you must understand—that what we are trying to do is for your own well-being. Your rehabilitation will be a slow, gradual process, and what you are experiencing now is nothing but a small rut on the road to your full recovery. As I told you when you awoke from the coma, the surgery you underwent was difficult and fraught with danger. A major operation such as that... well, it can often have unexpected complications and unforeseen side effects. You need to remember to be patient—if you will excuse the pun—and to listen to and follow the advice from both the nurses and myself.” The doctor sighed quietly. “I know it may seem like we are working against you, somehow punishing you for things that are beyond your full control, but I can assure you that we are doing everything within our power to ensure that you live a full and productive life.”
The man remained silent. The doctor’s words sounded hollow to him, full of half-truths and outright lies, and conflicted with everything he had learned for himself since he had woken from the coma. If it was indeed a coma. He knew they were all punishing him; his incarceration in this room proved that fact beyond all doubt, the leather binding him to the bed only adding to the weight of evidence. But the doctor was the worst of them all—his patronising words served only to further undermine the man’s already fragile confidence; his lies brutalised the man’s already tortured soul, confusing a mind that was already highly confused. The man would give anything, take any punishment or face any hardship, for one more shot at strangling the life out of the fat cretin.
“I don’t really want to keep you in here for much longer,” the doctor said wearily. “This is a place of healing and caring; it’s not well suited to the incarceration of its patients. Having to confine you like this... well, it goes against the grain of everything we do. If you will only try to see things from our perspective, then I will gladly approve your return to the general ward.”
The man was almost amused by the little speech—the doctor had clearly spent time honing it and rehearsing its delivery—but he knew that the promises were essentially meaningless.
“Given time—and, of course, your full co-operation with our rehabilitation programme—I’m sure we will allow you to have some visitors from the outside world. And there are people, people close to you, who want to see you again. Although I know that you don’t yet know who these people are, there will come a time when seeing them will be important to you. Everyone needs something to look forward to, to keep us going during the dark times in our lives; these people, as yet lost and unknown to you, will ultimately be the ones who help you through your difficulties.”
The man shifted uneasily on the bed while he listened to the doctor; once again, the idiot’s lifeless, monotone delivery had very nearly bored him to death. Even though the doctor had finished his monologue, the man knew he was still at risk of exposure to further pompous rhetoric. In his experience, the long pauses between each outpouring of gibberish often offered false hope that his tormentor had truly finished, that the torture was over, but nine times out of ten, more nonsense always seemed to follow. In his mind’s eye, the man could picture the doctor’s jowly red face as it beamed with pride at the skill with which the cretin had delivered his trademark fake sincerity and righteous diatribe. One more chance, just one, and I’ll never have to see his ugly mug again.
“Well, I will leave you to ponder over that for a little while, I think. I shall instruct Nurse Bouchet to come back shortly to clean you up and see to that little cut on your lip—a bite mark, I assume. If all goes well, lunch will follow soon after. I’m sure you must be hungry by now, yes?”
Despite himself, the man snorted with amusement; those words were the only true ones the fool had uttered since entering the room.
“Yes, well, I shall perhaps see you again while I’m doing my rounds this evening. I hope that we will enjoy more of a conversation next time.”
The bed rose slightly and the floor creaked in complaint as the doctor stood up. The man opened his eyes just in time to see the back of the idiot’s head as he opened the door and shuffled outside.
The man listened carefully, waiting to hear the click that told him the doctor had locked the door again, wondering if the cretin would come back sooner than he had suggested. He imagined the fool standing on the other side of the door—his fat face proudly swelling out of his fat neck; his fat stomach spilling over his belt; his fat mouth working overtime while spouting some pompous nonsense in the direction of the nearby nurses. The man imagined the nurses fawning and giggling in reply, their sycophantic gushing further fuelling the doctor’s inflated ego, making him feel even more godlike than he already believed himself to be. Yet the man knew that wasn’t the sole reason why the devil was standing there; he knew the doctor was more likely just loitering and waiting for the man to drop his guard, relax, and then... back the fool would come, springing into action like a maniacal jack-in-the-box, ready to continue the torture.
Several minutes passed slowly.
And then several more.
The man soon tired of waiting for the doctor to return. It seemed that the cretin wasn’t coming back; the fat despot had been playing with him, pretending that he would reappear when, on this occasion, he hadn’t intended to do anything of the sort. The man knew it was exactly the kind of trick he should have expected from the doctor. The swine always seemed to take every opportunity that came his way to toy with his patients—especially me, thought the man—whether it be by t
he application of some cruel physical punishment without prior warning or just cause, or whether it be by more subtle means designed to inflict mental anguish. How I’d love the chance to repay the doctor in kind.
The man pulled hard against the straps binding him to the bed, the respite afforded by the doctor’s intrusion giving him ample time to recover sufficient strength to try again. Looking down, he watched as the veins in his left arm stood on end while he struggled to wrench himself free from his bonds; his wrist quickly became red and raw as it rubbed back and forth against the unforgiving leather. The man knew it should have hurt, that he should have experienced some sort of pain, but he felt nothing—only a dim sensation of warmth at best.
With his mind occupied elsewhere, his body attuned only to the act of escape, the man failed to hear the door unlocking for a third time; he was still straining away with everything he had when the nurse walked back into the room.
“You’re wasting your time trying to get out of those restraints.”
Suddenly realising he had been caught red-handed, the man pulled even harder on the bonds, desperate to break free to silence the nurse before she turned and reported him to the doctor.
“Now, if you stop that nonsense, I will clean you up and get you ready for your lunch. How about that?”
The man struggled even harder as she closed the door behind her—he strained his arms to the point of breaking; he bucked his head up and down, teeth clenched together, almost frothing at the mouth. Bleeding lips curling into a fearsome snarl, he stared at the nurse with wild eyes full of malevolent intent. All he needed was one free hand and then he knew he could silence her with a simple, brutal squeeze of the neck
“Are you going to hold still, or are we going to have to do this the undignified way?” she asked, looking down on him with a calm smile on her face while she carefully pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “I think it would be best if you calmed down, don’t you?”