You Can Never Leave
By Marie Myers
I had practically flown down the stairs nearly tripping and falling down several flights. Falling down once and scraping my knee. I felt blood trickling down my leg. But I ignored it, knowing all too well that I had greeted my terror-filled bloodshot eyes. I burst out of the door looking around frantically, my heart was beating loudly in my ears, and I dared not make a sound or at least one that I could help, as I ran down the hallway searching for an exit. Other than the scraping of my feet. I ran and ran and ran…all the while hearing the sound of insects from above…crawling through the ventilation shafts. Hundreds and thousands of legs moving in unison. Somehow crunching and squishing at the same time. I ran, but there was never anything but rooms. Room after room after room with strange noises coming from within. Every once in a while I passed another running or walking down the hallway…muttering to themselves…completely incoherent.
I turned around and ran in the other direction after what seemed like hours, and it was the same thing. Hundreds and thousands of hospital rooms, various wheezing, beeping, moaning, screaming, sobbing, snapping, dripping sounds emanating from every single one of them. In one room I had seen a man who was wrapping a long tube around his neck over and over again and in another there was a woman futilely trying to push her intestines back into her pelvic cavity. I stopped looking at the various forms that were illuminated momentarily by the flickering of the lights after seeing a doctor who mercilessly flayed a young boy whose screams rose above all the others. I don’t know how long I had been running when I finally collapsed in the hallway. There was trail of my own blood both to the right and the left of me smudged with my own footprints. The walls around me seemed to be bleeding, too. Or was that some kind of black liquid? Were there bodies rotting in the walls?
Somehow I had been running in circles and the thoughts that entered my mind no longer seemed like my own. I could feel that a puddle was forming beneath me. But I was staring at nothing, ignoring the perspiration that covered my face, my body, the blood that trickled from my leg and down on the ground. A soft pitter-patter of blood drops was somehow comforting compared to all the rest.
Wherever I was, it wasn’t good. That fact had finally dawned on me. At one point I had gone into another room where a woman ripped at the skin surrounding an open wound in her neck. I had looked out the window and seen nothing but darkness. Pure darkness and nothing else. There was nothing out there.