A powerful hand clamped down on his shoulder. For a moment, the world froze into black and white. Everything he had been feeling, the strain, the horror, intensified tenfold. He couldn't seem to scream, he just froze up. Then, the world was moving again, and he found the will to turn around.
Franklin looked worried about him. "Hey buddy, are you ok? You’re inventing new levels of paleness over there."
Rich felt sick. "I'm ok. I just need to catch my breath."
"So go catch it. We need to finish this movie, pal."
Rich got two steps toward the theater before he blacked out.
****
"Don't worry, I'm a nurse."
The voice was unfamiliar to Richard. A tall, brown-haired woman was checking his pulse.
"What happened?" He said groggily.
"You fainted, man!! What a pansy!"
Leave it to Franklin to provide soothing words of encouragement. The nurse was more helpful. "If I had to guess, I'd say panic attack. You should be checked out at the hospital."
"Oh, come on! I don't need to go to the hospital."
"We've already called an ambulance. Just lay there and be still for now. They're just going to check you out."
Once they got Rich to the hospital, the staff insisted on him sitting in a wheel chair. The whole thing was so stupid; he didn't even feel ill anymore. The hospital was a dump, and he felt like he was going to catch something just from sitting in the waiting room. He did have decent company, though.
"This place is creepy." Liz was looking at this older nurse who kept rushing in and out of the same room. She held Rich's hand, which was nice.
"That's what I was thinking. You're not the one sitting in the rusty wheelchair." Of course the wheelchair wasn't really rusty, but Rich was sure it was pretty close.
"I get spooked by most hospitals, but this one takes the cake. I'm never going in here, just let me die." Alice had a way of taking extreme views of things."
Something occurred to Rich. "Hey, I thought you guys grew up in this town? You must have stayed here before. Did it used to be nicer or something?"
"Never been sick," Liz said quickly.
Rich gave her a funny look. "You've never been sick? Right."
"Never been that sick, like, hospitalized sick," Alice said.
Rich couldn't believe it. "So, you never had your tonsils out, or the measles, or a bad flu..."
Liz looked away from him and stopped holding his hand. "Can we talk about something else?"
"Richard Spoller?" An impatient male nurse read his name off of a clipboard like he was reading out of a phonebook. Rich raised his hand. Liz and Alice were told they had to stay in the waiting room while he was wheeled out of sight.
The inside of the hospital looked worse than the outside. It was like some custodian had spent all his time on the waiting room and took the rest of the night off. It wasn't that it looked unsanitary, it was just...old. Cracking, yellow walls. Peeling wallpaper. Sick people as far as the eye could see. Rich was wheeled in next to an older gentleman who looked pretty bad off. A nurse pulled the curtain between them shut. "Rest here, I'll be right back with the doctor."
The doctor was an unassuming, dark-haired gentleman. He asked Rich some questions about whether he had ever had spells of passing out before, if he had seizures, if he used drugs, etc. All of which were a “no.” "We're going to keep you overnight for observation, just to make sure everything is ok."
"Isn't that a little extreme? I probably just got dehydrated or something."
"We just want to make sure everything is ok."
A different nurse came in as the doctor left. "I'll be taking some blood. Try to relax." Rich didn't even ask if it was necessary at this point; they were just going to do what they wanted. His mom was allowed to visit before it was too late in the evening. Pretty soon, he was asked if he wanted anything to help him sleep. The last thing he wanted to do was stay or sleep in this place, but it didn't look like he had much of a choice. At some point, he drifted off to sleep.
There was a light. Not an overly bright light to force him back to the waking world. It was just enough to disrupt the darkness hanging behind his eyes, disturbing his dreams. His dreams were disturbing enough. At the moment, he was lost in a vast, swirling twilight filled with otherworldly shapes. His friends and family were in pain, and he was powerless to prevent it.
Something was moving in his guts.
Rich's eyes popped open. He felt that something had moved past the door. Then something else odd occurred to him. All the lights were gone, as if the power was off. "Hello?"
He could hear things moving...moving out in the darkness. But no voices… The smell...
"Um...nurse? Is something wrong?"
"nNNNNnOooOLItTlebOyYyy."
A familiar feeling rushed into him, a feeling that forced him from the bed. He neatly plucked the IV from his arm and slid out the door. He felt awkward in the simple hospital gown, but some instinct was guiding him through the darkness.
He caught sight of his nurse. She was busy crawling toward him on all fours, with bloody eyes and graying skin. "HAAAAAAA!!!"
The inhuman screams of some baby-thing echoed through the twisted halls. The hospital didn't seem like a hospital anymore. It was transformed into some hellish trap Rich would have to escape from.
Rich could barely see outside. A thick, supernatural fog blocked out almost everything. A small feeling of relief surged through him as he reached the exit door, and panic flooded back just as quickly when he realized it was locked.
"No, no, no, no..."
He tried the next door. Locked. He wildly looked around for some way to escape as one of the dead nurses came charging into the hall. "HEAAAA!!"
The half-rotted thing was holding up two scalpels, and charged him. He screamed and threw a chair at it. The chair leg connected with the creature’s face. Its head snapped back with a sharp crack, and it collapsed.
Now he ran. Part of him was scared that he would slip, run into a wall, or that those things would catch up. The other part of him pushed himself until his legs burned. His instincts guided him through the unfamiliar twists and turns, out one of the emergency exit doors into the chilly night air.
"A phone, I need to find a phone." Seemed like an easy enough task, now that he was out in the open. "Probably should have tried to grab my things before taking off, but that nurse...what the heck is going on?"
Rich tried to head for Main Street, but he just couldn't get his bearings. The fog kept thickening around him, and he kept ending up back at the hospital. He was growing increasingly panicked as the inhuman screams from the hospital echoed out into the town. He could hear them coming, coming to drag him back to the white room where all his nightmares would come true.
"Hey Rich, this way, buddy. It's me, Stan the clone!"
It was Stan, motioning for Rich to follow him down one of the alleys around the hospital. He just didn't look quite right, though. "Stan? How are you out this late man?"
"No, I'm not your Stan. I'm Stan from the second iteration, the really cool one. Follow me!!" He ran into the darkness.
This was all impossible. He'd left Stan at the movie theater. Stan's folks were even stricter than Rich's mom. He knew for a fact that Stan would be a prisoner of his Xbox by now. Now there were two Stan's? "No way I'm following that freak."
On the other side of the dark, fog-covered road, Rich could just barely make out the outline of a small car. A bloodied doctor stumbled out of the hospital, "Time for your cheeeeck uuuuup hehehehe!"
"Sorry, gotta go!" Amazingly, the car was unlocked with the keys still in it. Rich pinched himself. No dream this time, this was happening. He fired up the engine, and set off down the main road toward the highway.
"Ok, ok, got to get out of here. I'd better drive to...to...and then I'll call...someone...crap." The fog was clearing, but Rich realized he didn't know any other town names, he didn't know what road he was on, and couldn't remember anyone h
e was supposed to call.
BAM!! The front tire was almost swallowed by a pot hole. The road was in really bad shape, and the starless, moonless night didn't make it any easier to get his bearings. "CRAP!!!"
A little girl stepped out onto the road. Rich swerved at the last minute and hit a tree,
******
Rich's head hurt.
For a moment, he thought he was waking up in his room at home, but then the cold hit him. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. He appeared to be in a concrete room with no windows. No door either, he could see right into the hall. A few people walked past, uninterested.
"Hey! Hello? Where am I?" Luckily, somehow, he had a plain set of clothes. Walking around in a hospital gown would have been really awkward at this point. He walked out into a long hallway, which led to some sort of vast cafeteria. It was filled with young people his age, and in the same plain grey uniform, all eating something which looked like low budget ham (He hoped it was ham). Finally, he spotted a familiar face. Alice was sitting at table six.
He sat next to her. "Man, I'm glad I spotted you. How'd we get here? What is this?"
She turned to face him. Only her left side had been visible to him when he'd entered the room. It was Alice all right, but Alice with an eye patch. "Commander, I'm not in the mood for games. I'm going on thirty hours without sleep, and we're not even prepped for the next op yet. You should probably get to central command."
Rich took the time to blink. "Central what? Damn, Alice, I didn't know you'd go all Nick Fury on me for a hospital prank. Who did I tick off that bad for you guys to keep me going this long? Is Franklin back there?"
She stopped eating. "How could you even joke about Franklin? Get your head on straight, and quick. We've got a job to do."
Rich stood up and raised his hand. All the people eating at talking in the cafeteria hushed and looked at him in anticipation.
"Soldiers of the resistance...yo!! Waz up!!!"
Alice gave him a really weird look. He spotted Liz toward the back of the room, in the same plain grey uniform. "Men, and women, and women. We are embarking on an epic journey of stupidity for the future of humanity. It doesn't really matter what anyone has to say today, just remember, all your bases belong to us. I'm going to go now. Heck, I may even get to go on a real date! May the force be with you..."
The room was dead silent. Eye patch Alice pulled him back into his chair. "What are you doing?!"
"Hey, I have not yet begun the stupidity yet. Someone better come clean about what's going on. This morning, I was at the movies with my friends. Then, a haunted hospital. Then, I woke up here, which is just the tip of the iceberg on the level of weirdness I've been going through this month. Start talking."
"Rich, that was five years ago."
"What?"
She was serious. This was actually happening. He'd woken up from passing out at the movies and being hospitalized to become the leader of the human...teen...resistance...thing.
Rich retreated into the rack room, his head was spinning. He'd been pulled out of everything he knew into random worlds of madness.
Alice followed him into the room, and pulled her shirt off. "Come on, wake up. We've got to talk."
"Ah...Alice..."
"Oh, come on Rich. They're just boobs. You'll live."
"I know. It's just weird..."
"We've changed together a million times. Space is at a minimum down here. We're on combat alert all the time now."
Rich still found himself looking at the door. His feet. Alice. The wall. Alice...
"Um, why don't you tell me more about future land here?"
"I still don't believe you can't remember." She was finished dressing. "Everything is gone. It's gone, Rich. At first we thought maybe it was just the town, or the state. The army would, could, come, or we could make contact with someone. It never happened. Someone would have come by now."
She put her hand on his cheek. "Did you conveniently forget about us too?"
"Us? You mean..." Rich could tell she was hurt, but only for half a second. She covered it. She had become a hard person over time. "Never mind, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter. You want to hear about future world? We are completely surrounded by horrific things that want to kill us. Day in, day out, we huddle in this bunker complex, fighting off attacks and struggling to survive."
Rich didn't like where this was going. "So, there's no hope of rescue? No escape?"
"You initiated an escape plan. Last year. And it was a good one, too. We lost half our people and just barely made it back here alive. Now, there are more than twice those things outside the complex, and we're running out of supplies. I..."
She was almost crying now. Rich didn't really know what to say. "Alice..."
"There's nothing else you can do. Without you leading us, Rich, we'd all be dead. I hope you get your head right soon." She left the room, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
*****
Another guy ran into the cafeteria. "WORMS!! WWOOOORRMMS!!!" Everyone scattered like ants. There were a few screams. Liz pulled two TDI Vectors off the wall. Alice jumped onto a Browning M2 platform which lowered into the room.
Rich couldn't believe it. "WHOA! What's a worm?"
Something came stumbling into the room. It vaguely looked like a man, but the body was swollen. You could barely see his arms and legs, and the only details in the face were two tiny, black eyes. The thing made some type of weird chirping sound, jumped on all fours, and slithered toward them.
Liz fired two long bursts at it. The worm-thing exploded all over the room.
"AAAAAA!!" Rich was under one of the tables. "WHAT THE HECK?"
Liz reloaded. "Alice told you. This is no joke. They overran the town, killed everyone. What's wrong with you anyway?"
Fifty more of the worm things came slithering into the room. Everyone was firing, more soldiers ran into the room to join the fight. Someone threw Rich a gun, and he dropped it. "I don't know how to use this?!?"
"Are you kidding me? Fight!" One of the creatures slithered up over the table and swallowed his head. It started violently throwing his body back and forth, as some sort of acid was eating through the table. Rich ran.
In the background, the screaming started. Liz turned to yell something at him as a huge horn ripped through her chest. A giant worm dropped onto the platform Alice was on. He couldn't see what happened to her. Within a few minutes, everyone was dead or missing, and he was alone.
He crept through the dark halls, toward the only light he could spot. Weird, rustling sounds which made his skin crawl echoed in the halls behind him. Stan stepped into the hall in front of him, dressed in a nice suit. "Well, there goes primary group two. Took them long enough..." He stepped into the light. Rich followed. "Come on! I can't do this anymore. What does this all mean?"
The source of the light was an elevator. Stan motioned for him to step in. "Come on, then. You want to know the truth? Here we go."
"How do I know this is real? That I can trust you?"
"None of this is real. At all. And don't ever trust anyone, especially me."
Rich still hesitated. Stan hit some buttons on a console. "Well, come on then. They're getting ready to clear this level out."
Behind Rich, everything was on fire. He jumped into the clean, white interior of the elevator just as the doors closed. Stan grinned. "Having fun?"
"No, I'm not having fun! This has been the worst few months of my life! I must be insane. You promised me answers. I'm here to collect. Plain and simple."
"Trust me, friend, there is nothing plain or simple about the whole thing. What I'm about to show you is the whole truth, for once. Accept it, and try not to freak out too bad."
As the elevator gained altitude, Rich could see that the sides of it were transparent. He could see outside. The valley stretched off into the distance, seemingly without end. It was filled with lush vegetation. He didn't see any people, but there were some clusters of what looked like huts.
Trails of smoke. What looked like some ruined buildings scattered about. The sky was the brightest blue, and the sun rained light over everything. From what Rich could see, they were in some type of gigantic citadel jutting out of a mountain. Stan seemed to be soaking the view in as well. "Welcome, my friend. Welcome to the Freehold."
"The what?"
"Rich, your life hasn't been going crazy for months, or even a few years that you've forgotten. More like a hundred and sixty."
"What?"
"A hundred and sixty seven years. The Freehold’s been here for far longer, but you are by far our greatest test run."
"I'm...I'm seventeen."
"Yeah...about that..."
A knife shot right into his neck as the elevator doors opened. Laser pointers targeted Rich's chest as soldiers in full combat gear swarmed down the clean white hall toward him. Stan was dead. "Geez, guys! He was just about to explain the whole thing."
Chapter 5
White room. Coffee. Newspaper. Guys in black and white suits. The only difference was Rich could actually read the headline, "The Dead Walk, 2014." Out the window, he had a pretty good view of the valley he had seen earlier. Agent Branson had a seat at the table. "This must all seem very confusing to you, Richard."
"This is actually the least confused I've felt in a while. This is all real, isn't it?"
"If by ‘real’ you mean not a simulation, not a planted memory, then yes. Real is a relative term nowadays."
"Why did you kill Stan?"
"The director broke protocol. It's ok. His next clone should be waking up about now."
"Am...am I some kind of clone?"
Branson sort of half smiled to himself, and slumped into the chair. He picked up the cup of coffee and took a sip. "I'm going to tell you a story."
"A story?"
"Yep. Genesis, chapter one: Our version. About five hundred years ago, in 2014, a very nasty virus called Mers Con X spread to every major city around the globe, infecting most of the population. Within a month, almost everyone was either dead or their brains had been turned to mush. They were walking around, half dead, killing the 1% who had managed to survive."
An Infinite Sorrow Page 6
