Contritum - Act One

The silence was broken by the drops of water that landed on the thin carpet. Moans and corroding springs were screaming out from the windows of the locked doors. Eror lifted herself up to her feet, standing in one place until the floor stopped moving from beneath her. She strained to find the steel door, smiling the second she found it again.

“I missed you.” She held an innocent smile on her face and charged for the door in rage.

The door stood unharmed as she battled against it and threw herself against the body of the door and started hacking away at the handle with her sharpened fingernails. Still it stood unharmed, leaving her bloody and broken in the center of the room as she stopped to catch her breath.

A light walked closer to the door, shining through the cracks of the frame. She brought her eye to the crack of the door, attempting to see something outside, anything. Something other than the darkness that surrounded her. An intense need to see the summer sky filled her with absolute fury; she was trapped in here. It had been days. No, weeks. They had thrown another one in here weeks ago.

She glanced at the corpse to her left, the flesh looking sickly and half-consummated. Bite marks trailed up the corpse’s leg, leading up to its groin. One would assume, in life, the corpse would have been a whore from the markings on her body. The flesh didn’t have a single maggot in it, resulting in slight confusion for Eror. Not even the sound of a lone buzzing fly came in to feast upon the cold layers of oozing flesh.

The door towered above Eror; an obstacle in her way, a distasteful slab of cold, grey metal. It began to rattle from the outside and she stared, waiting for it to open. If she was worthy, she would have prayed for a miracle. The door went silent, and the light faded away as the distance became greater.

Eror, let out a moan, scratching out the door. She needed out. She needed it now. If she didn’t have it, her internal organs would explode from the heat. She was good at over exaggerating. Even now, the corpse was decaying. The heat came about three weeks ago and hadn’t left. The air was full of the stench of rotting corpses. Perspiration dripped from her face to the floor. The dripping sound was familiar, secure. She rose her head, reveling in it, closing her eyes. She opened them and saw her answer, the vents.

She looked around the room for something to stand on. The bed was in the corner of the room, from where she had been dragging it around in circles. She pulled the bed directly underneath the vent as if she were able to jump high enough to reach it. She attempted to jump from the bed, but her fingers only grazed the vent. She needed another foothold or a foot. She jumped onto the ground, her toes shivering from the impact. The pain of hitting something hard surged through her feet, but she shrugged it off.

In the corner of the room rested a plain chair, simply used for sitting on. It was nothing to look at, but it was useful. Eror put a single foot on it and tested to see if it would hold, and it would. It was firm and sturdy. Eror placed the chair on the bed, and climbed the ever-growing tower, reaching towards the vents. Her fingers easily slid through the holes. Eror felt a blast of heat as if her blood was boiling in her hands, but she once more shrugged it off. The pain didn’t mean much compared to getting out. The vent’s cover easily came off when Eror tugged on it, and she threw it to the side. A wet sound come from the corpse, and Eror glanced over. The corpse now had a vent in its head, embedded deeply.

“Oops.” Eror muttered, over and over, under her breath. She grabbed onto both sides of the vent, intending to pull herself up. The burning started once more. She dragged herself up and wiggled into the vent. She was now halfway in, and her feet were left to dangle out of the vent. She kicked them, attempting to get her entire body inside. She felt herself slipping, and the pain was setting itself further into her flesh. She reached forwards, digging her nails into the metal of the vent, and pulled herself up through it.

Freedom awaited beyond a sea of pain.