Variance - Book 1, Issue #8

Savannah, Georgia
Day 21 of The Rise

   
   The room was listless and dark.  Captain Blake could hear the gentle hum of a fluorescent light above him.  

   Why is it dark, he thought? 

   And then he remembered: his eyes.  

   He felt his hands were numb, the way they are so many mornings, as he fumbled for the bandages over his eyes.  He patted the gauze and felt a soft stinging in his eyes.  He wondered whether it was safe to remove them.  How long had it been since the operation?  His mind tried tallying off the days, but he got lost along the way.  His concept of time was lost, but, hopefully, his sight had not met the same fate.

   “Hello?” Captain Blake called.  

   Hmmmmmm, said the fluorescent light.  

   “Hello?” he called again, this time a little more urgently.

   Hmmmmmm, responded the fluorescent light again.

   Captain Blake’s tongue was dry and parched.  He licked his cracked lips and felt a brief tinge of pain sear the outside of his mouth.  His throat was so arid he suspected he must have been bedridden for days, maybe even weeks.  He tried to swallow, but only the uninvited rush of hot, stale air clung to his larynx.

   “Can anybody hear me?” he called.

   He knew he was in a hospital, so shouldn’t there be traffic in the halls, or a nurse to check on him, or, at the very least, an occasional whir of an ambulance siren?  But there was only his breathing and that torturous fluorescent light.

   Captain Blake reached up and carefully removed the first layer of bandage, but no light came.

   How much god damn gauze did they wrap me up in? he thought, a bit annoyed.

   He discarded the first layer of gauze then pulled another away.  Then another.  And, finally, there it was: a soft hue of white streaming through the remaining bandages.  The excitement swelled up in his heart and he pulled with greater urgency.  He clenched his eyes shut, wanting to savor the first time he saw the world—at least the first time in twenty years.  The gauze around his head loosened.  The time was close.  

   Captain Blake felt the bandages give.  The smell of dried blood passed by his nose as the gauze fell.  He snapped open his eyes and was met by a ray of brilliant white.  But then the white morphed into flashing colors, bombarding his psyche like a violent lava lamp.  The flashing colors quickly subsided and he was nestled in a blanket of black.  Though, this was no ordinary blanket.  This one left him lonely and helpless.  

   “Hello?” his voice cracked.  “Is anybody there?”

   Hmmmmm, the fluorescent light replied mockingly.

   His heart sank.  Was nobody coming for him?  Was he left to die blind and dumb?

   But the darkness began to dissipate.  The thick black transformed into a subtle grey.  Ten more seconds and the grey became a mundane yellow.  The yellow expanded, then contracted.  And then, all at once, he could see.  He could see that listless room he was in.  He could see the dull wallpaper peeling from the walls.  He could see the window in the corner, and the streak of yellow along the horizon, the morning sun returning to its post.  And it was positively brilliant.

   “Well ain’t that gorgeous?” he murmured.  “Ain’t that gorgeous indeed?”

* * *

   By the time Captain Blake sat up in bed the sun was already hanging proudly in the sky.  His sight had completely returned, apart from a slight blur in his peripherals.  He swung his legs around the side of the bed and pushed up off the mattress.  His bones creaked, but he managed to straighten his back and stand upright.  

   “Helen?” he called, hoping his wife would return his query.

   His last memory of Helen was faint and dream-like.  He remembered her holding his hand as he was wheeled into surgery.  She hung over him like this wandering angel and told him she’d be there when he got out.

   “Helen?” Captain Blake called again, working his way toward the door.  But, still, there was no answer.

   He felt along the side of the bed, blindly reaching for the nurse’s button.  He stopped and laughed heartily.  He could see for Christ’s sake!  The need to feel around a room, carefully maneuvering along sidewalks, searching for hand railings, none of it was necessary anymore.

   There, at the edge of the bed, hung a fantastically vivid red remote.  Captain Blake snatched it up and pressed the round, white button.  Above his bed, a small red light began to blink.

   He waited.  

   Nobody came.

   “What’n the hell’s goin’ on?” he muttered.

   Only silence responded.

   Captain Blake pushed aside the thin blue curtain separating the two beds and made his way to the door.  When he pushed on it, though, the thing barely budged.  It felt as if somebody had welded it shut.

   “God damn it,” he cursed.  He slammed against the door again, but it had little effect.  Perspiration was seeping through his hospital gown making him feel sour and old. 

   Captain Blake went back to his hospital bed and wheeled it around so it faced the door.  After a few deep breaths and silent Hail Mary’s, he produced a running start and crashed into the door.  The hinges gave as screws ripped from the wall, wood particles dissipating into the air.  On the other side of the door, three hospital beds, stacked one on top of the other, crashed to the floor.  The ringing of metal on tile rippled through the empty hallway.

   Captain Blake climbed over the hospital beds to find a hallway cloaked in black, save for two flickering fluorescent lights at its far end.  There were no doctors, no nurses, no patients, there was only Captain Blake.  The floors were littered with empty prescription bottles, blank script pads, bedpans, bed sheets, and blood.  Deep, dark brown patches of dried blood smeared across the floor in zig-zagging patterns.  But, as far as Captain Blake could tell, there wasn’t a single corpse in sight.  There were no limbs, no organs, no heads; absolutely zero sign of death, apart from the faint smell of decay.

   Captain Blake looked around.  Where the hell was everybody?  This was, after all, a hospital, was it not?  And who, for that matter, had barricaded him in his room?  And more importantly: why?

   At the end of the hall, Captain Blake could see the red outline of the Exit sign hanging from the ceiling.  The letters were a hazy blur, but it was unmistakable.

   He started for it with lumbering steps.  The first three steps were of no significance, but the fourth made him yearn for blindness.  Along the east corridor, stretching for several yards, were the bodies; dozens and dozens of them.  Fifty or so, Captain Blake guessed, though the severed limbs and pools of blood made it difficult to be sure.  Nurses, doctors, patients, visitors, stacked on top of one another just as the hospital beds had been.  They were young, old, black, white, their killer working without discrimination or remorse.  Captain Blake had a strong stomach, he always had had, but the sight before him churned his insides like fresh butter.   

   “Christ.”  The word hung in the air, but Christ provided little support.

   Boom!  The exit at the far end of the hall slammed shut.  Captain Blake looked up, but saw nothing through the darkness.

   “Is somebody there?” he asked.  His voice cracked, having not done so since the age of thirteen.         But there he stood, a sixty-two year old man, stripped down to his skivvies, ready to shit himself.

   “Hello?” he asked the darkness. 

   And then the footsteps came.  Slow at first, as if the thing at the end of the hall was playing its own game of red light/green light.

   “Who’s there?” 

   The footsteps stopped.  

   Captain Blake squinted through the black and saw the outline of a shadow standing under the Exit sign.  He could hear its quick, rasping breaths.

   “Please, I need your help.  These people…they’re dead…”

   Breathing.

   “…Say something, god damn it!”

   But the thing said nothing.  There were only the short, feverish breaths.

   Captain Blake reached over the counter into the nurse’s station and caught hold of a stainless-steel letter opener.  It had an orange rubber handle with a smooth, rounded tip. 

   “Stay away from me!  I’ve got a…” Captain Blake considered the object, “…knife!”

   More breathing and then the thing at the end of the hall started toward him.  The sound of its feet skipped across the tile at a tremendous rate.  Captain Blake had never heard anything move so fast.  It sounded more like a puma than a person.  There was a flash of the thing’s face as it passed under the first fluorescent light, but Captain Blake only remembered the eyes, maniacal and deranged.  

   He gripped the letter opener with white knuckles.

   The thing passed under the second fluorescent.  The eyes.  Those wild, demented eyes appeared again and, this time, Captain Blake noticed random, jagged streaks of blood running up and down the thing’s face—the face of a human.  Or so it seemed.  The thing appeared to be a man, no more than thirty years old, dressed in tattered slacks and a stained polo.  But its face was not that of a civilized man.  Its face was soulless and possessed.

   “Stay back!” Captain Blake threatened again.

   The thing leapt, arms outstretched, ready to strike, ready to pull arms from sockets and eyes from cavities.  It wailed and howled and struck Captain Blake in the sternum.  They stumbled backward.  The letter opener nearly slipped from his hand, but he managed to hold tight.  They landed on tile with a thud, the thing thrashing with wild ferocity.

   He brought the letter opener up in one swift motion, jabbing it into the thing’s jugular.  Blood exploded from its neck.  He twisted the orange rubber handle and pulled down on the opener.  The thing’s throat opened up, swaying back and forth like a mud flap on a big rig.  Blood sprayed on Captain Blake in a shower of red.  The thing gurgled a final breath before falling over into a motionless heap.

   Captain Blake sat up and spotted a drinking fountain just down the hall.  He got to his feet, legs wobbling, and wandered over to it.  He splashed a handful of water on his face and blood ran down the drain in a river of pink. 

   A psychopath had snapped and killed nearly fifty people, Captain Blake thought as he headed toward the exit.  

   But the logic of that theory didn’t sit well with him.  He hadn’t witnessed a horror like that since his days in the jungle of Khe Sanh.  But this was beyond the reason of war.  

   This was something else entirely.