Obscure (Borderlines Book One)

I think I died and no one remembered to tell me.

I am dead and this, this most certainly is hell. This 'institution', with it's crumbling walls, cracked tiled floors, half-destroyed medical wings and heavy stench of death. This place, with its ghost-faced nurses who only appear every few hours to force multi-colored pills down my throat and serve me a grey substance they claim is food.

This is hell and I am here for all eternity.

There are others here but they are dead as well. Their skin might go flush upon the notice of unwanted stares and their hearts might skip a beat when the entry doors wing open but these are just ruses; there is no real trace of life inside of them. They are hollowed-out shells of who they used to be; shuffling the halls aimlessly until someone ushers them in a different direction.

Not everyone here is ready to admit that they are no longer among the living; they cling to the last sliver of light that dares to remain inside of them. They claw and scratch at whatever they can get their hands on, desperate to fight against the impending acceptance of their afterlife. They scream, cursing a deity I have long accepted never existed. They carve into their own ski, screeching as the nurses come to clean up their blood because, with its disappearance, goes the reminder that flowing blood generally means live.

The dead can still bleed but, still, they do what they need to feel alive.

The guards might be the only living human being in this place but they are certainly not human. They move too quickly, speak too softly and stand so still that they could be mistaken for statues. They keep their faces shrouded in dark mask, large guns hanging over their shoulders as they stand post at the heavy metal doors because there is absolutely no escaping hell.

At night, once everyone has been rounded up and given their nightly medication, they trap us in our rooms. If ever there was a hope of using that time to escape, it is quickly squashed as four thick locks slide into place.

I refer to is as a 'room' but, in reality, it is no bigger than a closet. All they truly did was shove a cot into the corner, slap a window on the wall and refer to it as 'proper sleeping quarters'.

Who knew they had bedrooms in hell?

I can hear everything in this place and, sometimes, I think about asking the other dead if they can hear it too. C

Can they hear the rush of water as is speeds through the pipes? Can they hear the sound of the rind rushing through the trees? Can they hear the hum of the electrical system in the wires? Can they hear the frantic heartbeats of every around them?

Can they feel it all as well?

I am too afraid to ask, for fear they might so 'no'.

Who knew you could feel so lonely in hell?

Life, if that's what you can even call it, is different when the sun goes down. There are no real rules when the locks are secured and, to pass the time, the halls come alive with stores of what is rumored to be going on outside of these walls.

They tell stores of a uprising like no other.

They all begin the same, these stores. They start during a time when natural disasters plagued every corner of the work. Hurricanes, floods, and fires wrecked havoc wherever they could. A time when entire cities were shaken off the map by the sheer force of the earthquakes raging beneath them.

They say that's when the angels began to fall; their massive bodies hitting the ground at such great speeds that everything around them shook. Supposedly, by the time the last one fell, the world had gone silent; leading everyone to believe that they had been sent to save them.

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

The angels they speak of are nothing like the ones in the old books that can be found laying around the common room of this institution. Those books are misleading. Those books boast of glorious creatures with white wins, shining halos, and cherub-like faces.

No, theses are not those creatures. The whispers speak of malicious creatures with fiery-red eyes, chiseled bodies, super-speed and an unrelenting need to kill any human who dares to enter their path.

These stories tell of how quickly our numbs dwindled under their reign, dropping the population from over seven billion to under three thousand by the end of the first year.

Now I saw 'the whispers', 'they say' and 'these stories' because, as it has been told, all of this went down six years before I was born. Well, six years before I was born if the date I have been given is actually my birthday.

It could all be one well-thought-out story brought to lift by the slow decline of a dead person's brain.

I do often catch myself wondering if these stories hold any truth or if there is something else going on outside of these walls.

I suffer from amnesia, or at least that is what I was told. There could be a whole chunk of my brain missing and I would be none the wise unless someone told me otherwise.

The first real memory I have, the one that I cling to, is of waking up in a hospital covered in wires and tubes. The heart monitor next to my bed went crazy and, within, seconds, the room was full of white coat wearing professionals who stared at me in utter shock.

The doctor who came forth to speak informed me that I was going to be considered a 'medical miracle', but I am sure he would be willing to take that back if you were to ask him again.

He also informed me that I had been involved in a car accident, found only a few feet away from a destroyed vehicle. I had been half-dead and covered in blood.

I was told that in the condition in which I had arrived I shouldn't have lasted the night, let along the medically induced coma I had spent the prior three months in. I had surpassed all of their expectations, waking to find myself covered in a series of oddly shaped bruises, but no longer suffering from the life-threatening injuries that once put me at risk.

A book of questions later it became clear to them that I would be of zero help when it came to discovering how I had ended up on the side of the road because, as luck would have it, I couldn't remember a thing prior to waking up. My brain was a clean slate, wiped clear of anything that might have scarred it in the past.

They stopped asking questions after awhile and chose to focus more on gossiping in the halls with each other about some rumor that centered around 'growing numbers', but I was never able to catch more than a few snippets of what they were saying.

According to the doctor who stopped by to monitor me, I only had one item on me when I arrived: an old identification card. It had been weathered with age but it provided them with enough information to give them my name and date of birth.

Once again, I am going strictly off the information that has been provided to me because I was never shown the ID or my medical records.

The quickness in which I healed should have been a hint to the staff that there was more to me than meets the eye. I mean, who heals six times faster than the average person? What kind of person can be ejected from a vehicle to be bounced several feet down the road, damage almost all of their organs and bones and then wake up three months later looking like almost nothing ever happened?

Me, that's who.

I guess they were just so relieved to see someone surviving for a change that they didn't think to question how or why it happened.

I bet they regret that now.

I don't remember the events leading up to it but I will never forget the look in the nurse's eyes the first time electricity sprang to life on my skin. She wasn't given a spare second to even cry out before the bolts latched onto her, her eyes rolling into the back of her skull before she hit the ground with a sickening thud.

That is the last thing I remember of the hospital and, I'll be damned if I am wrong, but I am fairly certain that they killed me for what I did to her because, when I reopened my eyes, I was in this place.

I was in hell.

Now you might think I am being unnecessarily dramatic, but you would be wrong. If anything, I am not being dramatic enough.

This place is literally hell.

Every morning I am ripped from my bed by some protective suit wearing guard, drug down a series of long hallways, and then experimented on until the hours and days become nothing but I blur. It has been three years since I arrived in hell and, damn near every day, they have found a new way to punish me.

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

Only I have never felt the relief of death that she did.

I have been hooked to a generator and driven to the point of exhaustion, all just so some woman could see how long I could be used to power certain types of machinery. Like a human battery.

As of lately they have begun to focus on my healing. They have been testing to see how much damage I can withstand and how long it takes me to come back from that damage.

I tie another knot in my bedsheet, tugging at it to test the strength. I am unsure how much I weight now, being that mirrors, scales and pretty much everything else have been banned from hell, but I need to be certain this thing will hold.

I don't need it tearing before I run out of oxygen.

Someone in one of the rooms down the hall lets out another ear-splitting scream and I jump, my eyes jerking towards the small window in the room. There is no sign of light out there but that does not mean that dawn isn't approaching. It doesn't mean that they won't be coming for me soon.

Sometimes they begin my day before the sun rises and I don't need my plan to go to shambles because I got lost in my own thoughts for a few hours.

After days of consideration, I have decided to kill myself. Or at least I have decided to try.

The thought has been dancing around my mind for quite some time now, my brain wondering if I can die twice, and I have decided it is worth testing. I would rather see if I can come back from oxygen deprivation rather than spend another day in this place.

The walls around me being to tremble, small bits on concrete falling to the ground as I skitter back into the closest corner. The wall to my left explodes, raining large chunks of debris onto my skin.

I close my eyes, breathing heavily as footsteps draw near.

Is this real or am I have another episode? Hallucinations are a long term side effect of being trapped in hell and, sometimes, I don't know what is real and what is not.

The footsteps stop and I open my eyes, glancing up at the shadow looming over me. I eye the large weapon strapped to their back and let out a sigh of relief.

Their ocean blue eyes meet mine and my heart skips exactly two and a half beats. I grin, thankful for the lovely creature that has come to end my pain.