Obscure (Borderlines Book One)

September 15th, 2023

I think I died, and no one has had the courtesy to tell me.

I've died, and this place was most certainly Hell. This so-called 'institution', with its crumbling grey-green brick wall, cracked black-and-white tiled floors, half-destroyed medical wings, and heavy stench of decay, is Hell.

This place, with its ghost-faced nurses who only appear to force-feed me small white pills and a grey substance they claim is food, is where I had been sent as punishment for whatever misdeeds I committed while I was alive.

This place was surely Hell, and I was doomed here for all eternity.

There are others here with me, but they are dead as well. Their skin might go flush when they notice the lingering eyes of others upon them, skitter into corners when the entry doors open, or mumble to themselves while shuffling aimlessly through the halls, but it was all part of the facade.

In truth, they are hollowed-out shells of who and what they used to be, floating about until they were ushered in a different direction.

Not everyone here was willing to accept that they no longer reside in the world of the living, choosing to cling to their last remains of humanity. They clawed, scratched, and bit whatever they could, desperate to prove to themselves that there is still some fight left in them. They carved into their own skin, screeching like beasts when the nurses came to stitch up their wounds and wash away the blood, because doing so rid them of the reminder that to bleed is to live.

The dead did what they could to satisfy the urges telling them to find signs of life within themselves.

The guardians of Hell are the only living beings in this place, but they are certainly not human. They moved too quickly, spoke too softly, and stood so still that they could easily be mistaken for statues. They kept their faces shrouded in dark masks that covered them from their noses to their necks, with large guns hanging over their broad shoulders as they stood post at the heavy metal doors that led back to the land of the living.

There was no escaping hell.

At night, once we'd been rounded up and given our medication, they locked us in our rooms. If there was any hope during the daylight of escaping, it was quashed when the door slammed closed, and three large locks slid into place.

I referred to the place where I sleep as a 'room', but it was barely bigger than most closets. There was a beaten-down cot shoved into the corner, two dull beige wool blankets tossed haphazardly atop the lumpy mattress, and a too-small window behind it.

That was it. That was my room.

I couldn't complain much because, while it might have been Hell, at least there was a bed.

I could hear everything in that place, and I often wondered if the others could hear it too.

Could they hear the rush of the water as it raced through the pipes below? Could they hear the leaves rustle on the forest floor when the wind blew? Could they hear the rapid beats of the hearts of everyone inside the institution? Could they hear the hum of electricity inside the wires?

Buzz.

Buzz.

Buzz.

Did they play that melody just for me? Or did the electricity sing to the others?

Could they feel it the way that I could?

I was too afraid to ask, because what if they didn't?

Who knew you could feel lonely in Hell?

The atmosphere changed when the sun went down, and the lights were dimmed. Once we were abandoned for the night, there were no longer any rules. There was no one around to tell us to 'keep it down' or shove a gun in our faces until we were silent. So, to pass the time, the halls would come alive with the whisperings of what others believed they had seen before they died.

You couldn't believe a word that they said, because the dead were often confused and careless liars, but it still made the night go by faster.

My favorite of the stories always began the same way: during a time when natural disasters had just finished plaguing every corner of the world. During a time when hurricanes, floods, and fire wreaked havoc wherever they could.

These stories began during a time when entire cities were shaken off the map by the sheer force of the earthquakes below.

The tales whisper of when the angels began to fall to Earth, their large bodies hitting the ground with such force that everything around them shook, and that, by the time the last one fell, the world had gone eerily silent.

They say that, from the moment they fell, they hated humans.

The angels they speak of are nothing like the ones I remembered reading about in the books that often found their way into Hell. Those books were meant to mislead; to fool one into thinking the angels were glorious creatures with white wings, shining halos, brilliant smiles, and cherub-like faces.

Those were not the creatures that were said to plague the licing.

No, the creatures that were supposed to have descended were large men with vicious red eyes, muscular bodies, inhuman-like senses, and an unrelenting urge to kill any human they saw.

They'd hunted the living like sport and, by the end of the first year on Earth, they had dwindled the population from over seven million to under five hundred thousand.

The living never recovered from it.

I was never sure if the stories held any truth because, as it was told, it all occurred before I was born. Well, if the date I had been given was truly my birthday.

I suffered from amnesia, or at least that was what I had been told. Half of my brain could have been missing, and I would have been none the wiser.

The first memory I had, the one I clung to when what was real and what was all in my head began to blur, was of waking up in a hospital covered in a series of tubes and wires. I remembered the way the bedsheets had smelled slightly off, as if they hadn't been washed in some time, and the smell of bleach lingered in the air. I remembered the way the monitors next to the bed had gone haywire, and then the room had filled with white-coat-wearing professionals who stared at me in disbelief.

The first of them to step forward, a dark-haired man with a bad tie, blue glasses, and a name tag that read 'Dr. Nadir', told me that I would someday be written down as a 'medical miracle', but I am sure he would take that back if you asked him again.

He was the same man who informed me that my body had been found by a passerby on the side of the road, feet away from a destroyed vehicle, half-dead and covered in blood.

Nadir had told me that, in the condition in which I had arrived, I shouldn't have made it through the night, let alone the medically induced coma I had spent the previous three months in.

I shouldn't have been able to bring myself out of the coma they were keeping me in at all.

I had surpassed all expectations, waking to find myself only covered in odd-shaped bruises, but no longer with any life-threatening injuries.

They'd had so many questions, but after what felt like hours, they realized that I was useless in giving them answers. I had no memory of how I had ended up on the side of the road because, as fate would have it, I had no memories before opening my eyes that day.

My brain was a clean slate, wiped clear of anything that might have marred it in the past.

Something inside of me had felt relieved at that.

Once they realized I was useless, the nurses in the hall resumed their gossiping about a rumor they had heard about 'growing numbers', 'taking back the land', and a group of men who would save us all.

The hospital was only able to provide me with two things: my name and date of birth, which were apparently the only things the passerby had supposedly gotten from me.

The quickness with which I healed should have been the first hint that there was more to me than meets the eye. I mean, whose body healed the kind of injuries that I had arrived with in only half the expected time? What kind of person could be thrown from a vehicle, bounce off the pavement, break most of their bones, damage a majority of their internal organs, and wake up three months later asking for food because they were hungry?

Me, apparently.

I guessed they were just so relieved to see someone beating the odds that they didn't dare ask why or how it happened.

I'm betting they regret that now.

I didn't remember the events leading up to it, but I never forgot the look in the nurse's eyes the first time electricity sprang to life across my arms and hands. She hadn't had a second to cry out before the bolts had latched on to her, and her compassionate green eyes went rolling into the back of her head, and her body hit the ground with a sickening thud.

Someone must have knocked me out or something because, right as her chest slowed, everything went black.

It was the last memory of the hospital that I had, and I'll be damned if I am wrong, but I was certain someone must have killed me for what I did to her because, when I came to, I was in Hell.

I had woken up in Hell.

I remained in Hell.

I would never leave Hell.

Some might have accused me of being dramatic, and I would have retorted by telling them that I wasn't being dramatic.

That place was quite literally Hell.

Every morning I was ripped from my bed by some protective suit-wearing asshole, dragged by my arms through a series of long hallways, and experimented on until hours bled into day, and I no longer knew how long it had been since it all began.

I was there for three full years, and every single day of them, they found a new way to punish me.

I'd been pumped full of adrenaline before being tossed into a large tank of frigid water and observed closely as it triggered my electricity. I was watched as my bolts turned against me, giving me an all too realistic example of how that nurse had felt.

I had been hooked to a generator, thick wires burning into my skin to create a connection, and kept away by unknown drugs to see how long I could be used as a human battery.

They had more recently discovered my healing abilities and began experimenting with how much damage I could sustain and how long it would take my body to recover from it.

The same woman monitored every experiment, scribbling in her notepad as I was left screaming.

I tied another knot in my bedsheet and tugged it to test its strength. I wasn't sure how much I weighed, or even how I looked because there were no mirrors allowed in Hell, but I wanted to make sure it would hold.

I didn't want it to snap before I ran out of oxygen.

Someone in a room down the hall had let out an ear-splitting scream, and I'd jumped, my eyes jerking towards the small window in the room that was covered in thick bars. There was no sign the sun had begun to rise, but that didn't mean dawn wasn't approaching. The weather in Hell didn't match the way it should have. Sometimes the sun would shine for days, and then there were weeks where the sun didn't even both to show its face.

They'd be coming for me soon.

Sometimes they would arrive before the day began, and I couldn't risk my plan going to shambles because I had gotten distracted with my own thoughts.

After a few days of close consideration, I had decided to kill myself.

The idea had been waltzing around my head for weeks, and the only thing that had stopped me was the question of whether I could die twice. In the end, it was a theory I'd planned on testing because I would have rather had to come back from oxygen deprivation than spend another day in the testing rooms.

The walls around me began shaking, with bits of cement falling to the ground, and I'd backed myself into a corner. The wall to the left of me crumbled in on itself, and I brought my knees to my chest and closed my eyes tightly.

I'd tried controlling my breathing as footsteps began to draw near.

Was it real? Or was it another episode? Had my brain finally folded in on itself so reality and imagination were now one?

Hallucinations were a long-term side effect of living in Hell, and I'd frequently suffered from them.

The footsteps halted, and I could feel the weight of someone watching me. My eyes had opened slowly, and I found a man dressed in grey and black camouflage staring down at me with the most quizzical look on his face.

He'd had a large semi-automatic in one hand, and a small gun strapped to his thigh. His eyes were so blue, like the sky on the clearest days I could see, and it made my heart skip exactly three beats.

I'd grinned, pleased to welcome the lovely creature that had come to end my suffering.