Knives

Part of a 100-stories meme for /x/. June 2010

The game was an easy one-- you had to find something with which to protect yourself, and then still be alive when time ran out. Well, easy in explanation, sure. But when I was there, boy, wasn't nothing easy about it. Lots of people got killed in there, and nobody was the wiser. Hell, I even had to cut some men up myself, back then. Hell of a good deal of "therapy" that was.

You'd wake up in a haze, likely from the heavy dose of whatever they pumped into your veins, in one of the rooms with the door locked. I never woke up in the same one twice, but it was always a room in east block 3 that I'd get. Some people would say they got the same room once or twice, but I never did. The room you got probably still had the results of the last therapy session that happened in it laying about, so you had to hope you didn't step in it or anything. You just waited for the door to open, the intercom to announce the time limit.

I hid a lot, ran away a lot, but you can't run forever from the things they would send after you. I got to know east block 3 pretty well, though, so I could usually get to the kitchen area, pick up one of the big knives that were hanging on the magnet bar over the stove. I tried a broken broom handle once, but you don't have a chance unless you can draw blood. These things were really unstable in the head, you know? Some people said they were ghouls come back from the dead by way of some science-magic marriage, others said they weren't ever human to begin with. All I knew was that sometimes I recognized them, the leathery faces drawn tightly back into a permanent toothy grin and the eyes wild and bloodshot.

They moved pretty fast a lot of the time, and they'd spot you from down a hallway or wherever, and just like that they'd be all over you, biting and tearing and scratching and kicking. Doc once said that they represented the bad parts of the human mind, and that by killing them you're symbolically killing those parts and making yourself better, but that was a load of shit. I'd seen movies before I got "admitted," I connected two and two to figure out just what was up with these previous patients. That's what they were, you know, patients that disappeared for some reason or another some three weeks before. You could tell which ones had been worked on the longest; they were the ones with the brittlest skin, the least blood in them. Their eyes were shriveled up, but somehow they still saw. And when they saw, boy did they see.

I don't know how long I was in that place, but we never found a way out. Honestly I'm surprised there even was a way out at all, let alone a way in. When the SWAT team or whatever finally burst in, though, I thought, "Hot damn, finally a way out of this hell-hole." But then, of course, having seen and done what we'd all seen and done, we obviously could not be let back out into the real world, now could we, doc?